Sharon Carter and Helmut Zemo join The Falcon And The Winter Soldier in its weakest episode yet
TV Reviews Sharon Carter
Good storytelling involves using tropes, and one trope I always appreciate in action movies is you can always tell when a plan is going to work. Plans fail when you see characters discuss them beforehand, but they come through when you’re just thrown into the scene.
The best part of “Power Broker,” the third episode of The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, is when that trope is deliciously skewered. Bucky describes to Sam a “hypothetical” about how they could break Zemo out of his maximum security prison, right before Zemo walks out the door. It’s too bad the prison breakout plot is one of the most boring I’ve seen—Avatar: The Last Airbender’s “Boulder” episode was more interesting. But then, I guess that’s not what this episode’s about.
What is this episode about, exactly? On its face, “Power Broker” seems to be about gathering intel on the super-soldier serum and the Flag-Smashers, and even expanding Sam and Bucky’s universe of associates. But it seems most interested in playing into action movie tropes more than anything else, and you know what? It fails. The whole episode, I was just thinking of the times I’ve seen better versions of each of these scenes.
The scene in the club makes me think of the far better casino scene in Black Panther. Heck, even those scenes in Tenet where the main character’s pretending to be someone else have a better handle on the particular balance of irony and suspense. Perhaps it’s the strange direction, where it’s hard to tell where people are in a scene at any time. Or maybe it’s the editing—the way the snake cocktail scene was cut together made me feel like they were trying to get a laugh out of the audience, but the joke fell flat for me. Maybe because I like snakes, or perhaps because a snake gut cocktail doesn’t even seem cool, just gross? Now, if they were using venom, that would be hard-core in a funny way. What might actually undermine the whole enterprise is the fact that we get very little context or humor for the character Sam is supposed to play, or even how exactly Zemo is so well connected to Madripoor. After he breaks out of prison, he’s conveniently very rich because he was royalty in Sokovia.
Zemo always seemed like he was presented as a cipher, a boon in Captain America: Civil War, but beyond that, his characterization felt somewhat rote and boring to me. (Zemo? More like ZERO, am I right?) It’s not necessarily the fault of Daniel Brühl, but I have to say that my image of him in the MCU has always been clouded by Inglorious Basterds. He played that Nazi hero creep a little too well, which I think speaks to his acting skills. But I guess I also have to give credit to Quentin Tarantino for how he directed Brühl in those scenes, because I get the sense that he was given a lot less for his character in this episode.
Zemo’s most interesting scenes are also in the beginning, because of how he alternately aligns with Sam and Bucky. As someone who was obsessed with breaking up the Avengers using their own flaws against them, you see small parts of that emotional intelligence pop out in this episode. Bucky watches him fearfully yet seems drawn to Zemo’s power over him. (Wow, he really is the MCU character that needs the most therapy.) Meanwhile, when Bucky and Sam bicker over how Bucky’s been holding on to Steve’s notebook, Zemo wins over Sam when he says the “Trouble Man” soundtrack says much about the African American experience. Sam, shocked, says, “He’s out of line, but he’s right.” Once again, I am aligned with Sam and his thought process. How dare Bucky say he “just likes ’40s music.” Open yourself up, man! I guess he is pretty different from Steve—he can go on dates (and dating apps apparently set to “both men and women”) but he can’t enjoy the music of the modern era? Come on, man. Also, as I’m sure we can all agree (and please do chime in in the comments), when share some of your favorite media with someone, you need to offer a lot more than “I liked it.” Sam suffers with us, my friends.
But okay, does Zemo have Black friends? He also dismisses Sam’s frustration with his disguise, saying, “Only an American would think a well-dressed Black man looks like a pimp.” I…WHAT? Does Zemo listen to Solange? Unfortunately, that aspect of his personality falls to the wayside as [sigh] they try to make a deal with Selby, a British woman who has the intel they need. I’m sorry, this scene just read as “James Bond references without the verve and humor” to me. After Selby is murdered, Sharon’s reintroduction to our characters even feels like a failure of writing. In fact, this whole episode has some strange characterization.
I feel like that’s the biggest problem with “Power Broker.” Even little moments, like Walker yelling to the café owner in Germany “Do you know who I am?” while Karli kills several people with a car bomb with a real blasé attitude, feel extremely out of sync with last week’s episode.
Finally, the worst aspect of the episode is how it leaves the best part of the show in the lurch. Sam and Bucky barely speak to each other or check in with their plans. Sam does ask Bucky several times if he’s okay, but Bucky does not seem to even know how to reply. And when Bucky asks him, Sam tells him he is overwhelmed by the people that have been caught in the crossfire—Sharon and Isaiah, especially. And while he does take back his decision to give up the shield, he feels more that he should’ve destroyed it.
Stray observations
- I’m pretty sure, thanks to Sam’s call with Sarah, that this and the past two episodes all pass the Blackdel test, the Black version of the Bechdel test. (They also just pass the “DuVernay test.”)
- Even the club scene is disappointing. They leave the next day acting like they partied hard, but Sam and Bucky just stood around awkwardly! Zemo does a little dance, but I just do not see why they couldn’t go all out and gift us with the MCU equivalent of this scene from Parks And Recreation.
- The scene with Nagel reminded me of this scene from The Man from UNCLE, except, of course, the latter was better. Nagel seemed to be channeling Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor from Batman V. Superman: Dawn Of Justice.
- I did love Sharon’s fight scenes—her use of knife throwing in gunfights mirrors Steve at his best. Bucky was also in fine form when returning as the Winter Soldier.
- I half-expected Zemo to leave them in the lurch. I really expected him to be putting Sam on with that snake cocktail, or even have poisoned the food he so kindly serves Sam and Bucky. WHO is this guy?
- When they hang out with Sharon in her amazing apartment (I believe?), Bucky says, “She’s kind of awful now,” lying to himself because he knows he won’t ever be this cool in his life, not even if he’s alive for another 100 years.
- Sam’s awkward phone call also just falls flat as a device for humor? Suspense? I was more trying to puzzle out why he brought his phone at all, much less why he couldn’t put it on Airplane Mode.
- I wonder if Sharon killed Selby. I figure she’s not working for the Power Broker, but I’m curious where her loyalties lie now.
463 Comments
It’s obvious that Bucky, Sam, and Zemo were gonna get found out. They stick out way too much in Madripoor. The only true way to be inconspicuous there is to either do what Wolverine does when he needs to lay low and just wear an eyepatch and call yourself “Patch”. Or just do what the Hulk does and manifest an alternate personality that results in your skin color changing from green to grey, call yourself “Joe Fixit”, and than get a job working as an enforcer for the mafia…
This series isn’t captivating me. I like a lot of the folks involved but the whole thing seems like reheated leftovers.
There’s two things that I really want to see happen with the show right now that I’m like 99% sure will actually not end up happening.1: Zemo has no evil plan. He’s ruthless and violent because, well, that’s who he is, but he is 100% genuine in his motives and efforts here (well, beyond the trolling). His motive was revenge against the Avengers for Sokovia and not wanting any more Super Soldier types that are so good at destorying things.Oh, sure, he’s a rich asshole who loves to troll Bucky and Sam, but no evil scheme beyond “not returning to jail”, maybe a side goal of “staying rich because being wealthy is fucking awesome”.2: Karli steps away from the slippery slope stuff, doesn’t go full villain, maybe remains a revolutionary-type anti-hero, maybe goes full hero, but either way just clearly being more on the side of the angels.Not because I hate seeing evil characters, of course. But just… I want the MCU to really embrace its differences from the source material. I don’t know Zeemo or Karl Morgenthau from the comics, and frankly I kinda don’t care about them. But I want to see the MCU go “…I mean, yeah, what Zeemo did was really fucking evil, but it was targeted and not malicious, why would he have an evil plan here and now? And hey, wouldn’t it make sense for a show about the in-universe mythology of Captain America to have an antagonist that has a point about how sucky nationalism is, even if their idea of ‘ending world hunger’ is ‘giving everyone food’?”I just like that kind of moral complexity and characterization, where there’s a lot more antagonists than actual villains. Because… yeah, Karli pointlessly killing a bunch of people because “its the only language they understand” just made me groan. Its just such a fucking cliche, and feels like a reshoot done because the writers realized they’d made her have too much of a point and being too sympathetic. They’re murdering terrorists now, no need for any of that pesky moral complexity!
Yeah the only thing I feel like could make that last bit with Karli less annoying is if they lean in to the whole “the serum fucks with your personality” that was a key feature of Erskine’s original serum. Not sure if they will though.
Totally with you on Zemo, it’d be great if there wasn’t some big reveal at the end that he’s been orchestrating things. I know he’s Zemo and that’s what he does, but I’d really like to give him a chance to build up to that Machiavellian mastermind from the comics. But sadly, it really seems like he’s got his own background plan, hopefully its something better than “he’s the real Power Broker all along.”
I don’t think the Red Skull type serum Green Goblin power anger gas personality hand waving can explain Karli’s actions if the guy with her, presumably another serum recipient, was giving her big WTF energy. She’s what Wanda and Pietro would’ve been if they were on board with terrorism.
I mean the serum didn’t affect everyone the same, it just amplified personality traits, so the other guy wouldn’t have those traits amplified if he didn’t have them. But I still feel like they’ve kind of dropped that thread from the serum so they won’t go that route and we’ll be left with a very hamfisted attempt at making her a badguy even though she’s got a very good point.
Well, it’s also not the same serum. It’s possible that Nagel’s formula doesn’t alter the personality any more than it alters the physical appearance.Honestly, the whole Flag-Smasher dialog in this episode is clunky. I gather we’re meant to infer Not All Flag-Smashers!, but murder seems like the sort of thing they’d have talked about, if not before one of their members sent out to die as a distraction, then certainly after. Plus the unnecessarily raised questions about why they needed so many cars and when she found the time to build a bomb without anybody noticing. It would’ve been so much more straightforward had she just punched a hole in the GRC guy who talked back.
They had him reading “The Prince” in his cell. You don’t just leave that gun on the wall and not expect a small Russian space pilot not to shoot you.
Navigator. The space pilot was Japanese.
Well played.
I honestly almost threw my screen on the wall when Karli blew up that building, especially afterr the episode spent so much resources on showing her side. Of course it didn’t help that at no point could I understand why that UN organization was holding back supplies, but that is another thing altogether.It’s just, it was so stupid. It was an escalation from what had been shown of the organization prior to it and made any kind of hesitation for the character impossible going forward. When you blow up a building filled with tied up captives, what exactly is even left on the path to the dark side?
I honestly think there’s a non-zero chance they go that route with Zemo; they didn’t really hint toward anything suspicious about him yet. Agreed that I hope that both of your ideas come to pass, I’m really tired of revolutionary characters getting written off as only being villains with stupid scenes like the one of Karli blowing up the building.
In re: Zemo – what people don’t remember about Civil War, or maybe people found unclear, is that Zemo attempted his plot to destroy the Avengers without killing anyone.That whole thing with the bombing to set-up Bucky, which led to him murdering the psychologist, just so he could be put in a jail cell with Bucky? That was only because the Hydra guy wouldn’t give him the information on the Mission Report he wanted, so he could get to Siberia and both kill the Russian super soldiers and destroy Steve and Tony.Without that, he only would have killed the super soldiers (more or less okay in that world). He literally tried to kill as few people as possible and was genuinely remorseful to T’Challa about his father, and only did so because “Hail Hydra” guy wouldn’t give up the goods.
Yup, I love that detail.
Aye, good point.Of course, Zemo has no issue with murdering people. He wants to succeed with his goals, and he’ll use whatever force is needed to do it. What he’s not is a complete sadist, the kind of, well, comic book villain that Comic!Zemo could be because, well, comic books. And he could absolutely have future, evil schemes that would go up against our heroes. But it doesn’t have to be every time…
I cant believe how people are forgetting Zemo is a totally evil psychopath just because he was amusing in one episode and hes helping the guys, for now. You cant trust that fucker for one second, guaranteed we’re gonna see his real plan at some point and hes totally going to fuck them in the worst way, in the worst moment possible.
Oh, he’s absolutely an evil psychopath.But that doesn’t mean he has an evil plan for this specific situation. He’s more of a goal-oriented evil bastard, what matters are what he’s trying to achieve, and he’ll do whatever he must to achieve them. My point is that his presence in the show doesn’t have to have anything to do with him having an evil plan.He wants to be free, and he wants to be wealthy and powerful. He’s those things right now, assuming that he can give the slip to Wakanda. If helping stop the Flagsmashers and Fake-Cap achieves those goals, why would he need a separate evil plan?
In the last half of this episode, I honestly had to pause every few moments as I just kept incredulously burst in to laughter how stupid everything was. Like you could genuinely take almost every major scene from this episode and run it as an action movie parody.Let’s the lab scene, for example. Sharon somehow tracks down the exact location of the Power Breaker’s most secret lab where they managed to succeed cracking the super-soldier serum. Except the only security feature is to know to push the fake looking back wall at which point you are able to walk in to the lab completely except for the one dude who can make the serum in question. And before anyone asks, of course there are no notes, why would there be? So anyway after he spills everything instantly to the heroes, while enemies have suddenly flooded the area above (?), and also tells them how Karli stole all the 20 vials of serum. Why was there only 20 vials? Who knows. Why haven’t they made more? Who cares.Anyhow, at this point the only reasonable motivated action happens where Zemo shoots the scientist to prevent further serum development. Only apparently the goons somehow realize that this happened as one of them shoots a missile into the lab seemingly housing all the work related to this top important work. Although telepathy seems to be a bigger thing as Karli just knew that the scientist was also dead.This episode was mind-numbingly stupid and often felt like there was someone giving the ‘move it on’ signal on the background.
Late addition, but I forgot one of the crown jewels of this episode. The reason our heroic (?) trio is able to track down Karli is that she called the scientist involved with the criminal boss to ask if he could help this very specific person. Like what the actual hell was that?
I think what we were supposed to learn (through a very crappy conversation with Karli at the end of the episode) was that Karli and some of the other Smashers worked for the Broker because they had nowhere else to go when they were displaced after the Blip ended so I guess maybe she was supposed to know the doctor? That’s going to be the only way I can understand how she stole the serum in the first place was that she had been working/living there and knew the guy. Though I also thought it was weird that the doctor knew exactly who stole his 20 vials and didn’t seem terribly upset about it. I wonder if we’re going to learn that he willingly dosed Karli and her crew (without the Broker’s permission) because he wanted to test things. That could also mean that the whole scenario with Sam Bucky and Zemo was orchestrated to find him and execute him. After all, if the doctor was actually working for the Broker, the “King” of Mardipoor, he’d have a real setup wouldn’t he? Not a secret cargo container.
I don’t know if any of that will actually end up being true. That’s just how I would have written it.
No, I understood they had worked for the Broker, but what I could not comprehend is that after stealing those vials Karli decided to call someone working for the Broker, who did not seem to care that much for her, in order to ask for help and provide information that could easily be used to track her down.As for the willingly dosing, if you remember in that Karli discussion she said that now that the scientist was dead, again how the hell did she know that, the Broker would need the doses they stole. Which somehow meant they were safe? Again, why did nothing in this episode make sense? Anyhow, I don’t think that discussion fit with the idea that the scientist wasn’t working for the Broker.
You’re right its a lot of stuff that might not get explained. In other action properties I guess I would overlook it, but I just expect more from the MCU. There’s still time to explain it all, but the way they present it all just doesn’t fill me with confidence that they will have answers to all those questions.
With any luck this episode will feel a lot better when the whole thing is done and we’re not left with the feeling that we’re going to be left hanging on so many of these things.
The thing is I don’t genuinely expect that much from action properties and can handle coincidences. My expectations for MCU stuff is also generally not as high as you as they go for cheap solutions all the time and that is fine.It was just that this episode was somehow aggressively dumb. Like it was one scene that asked me to let things slide, I might chuckle about it, but wouldn’t have any issues moving on. Here, though, it was like every dumb scene led to a new dumb scene. It made it impossible, for me, to ignore and roll with it as it became just so hilariously overwhelming.What doesn’t help was that a lot of it was unnecessary. I mean, take Karla calling the scientiest. If it had instead been just the scientist saying that Karla used to talk about this woman who inspired her all the time, it would be so easier to shrug off.
Did they say that Karli stole the serum and then took it? Maybe they were test subjects for the serum and they “stole” it by running away?
A lot of the stuff in Mardipoor is only going to make sense if Sharon either is the Power Broker or works for them in some fashion and is trying to clean house now that Sam, Bucky and the US government are on to the whole “new Super Soldier serum.” Killing off Selby who knew names, getting Sam, Bucky and Zemo immediately in contact with the reclusive doctor knowing Zemo would kill him, arranging for enough bounty hunters to track Sam and Bucky that they’d be sure to blow up the lab (provided Zemo didn’t himself)It would also make more sense if Zemo knows Sharon is but Sharon doesn’t know he knows, because the second he saw Sharon come in to the container was when he decided to shoot the doctor who might have given her away.
With Sharon’s whole speech on the hypocrisy of superheroes I could see her being the kind of person who becomes nihilistic enough during the blip to become the Power Broker.
I hadn’t thought of that option and it would salvage some of the insanity, but that sequence utterly insane. I mean there’s so much other stuff what happened there and it was all so damn clumsy.Actually, now that I think of it, if this was the idea, then I’m actually more angry as it could have been really cool, but the way it was exectued was so stupid.
Oh it still was a very poorly executed episode. I feel like it needed to be two different episodes stretched out so things weren’t so chaotic and didn’t look like it was all relying on complete coincidence. Some of it was so jarring because they have so many scenes of such well directed action, that when a big mess like that comes along it stands out more.
Yeah, this episode was a weird mix of hand-wave-y explanations (I’m not as offended by the wealthy Zemo reveal [I mean… he is Baron Zemo]) and exposition dumps (although Nagel describing his version of the serum was genuinely upsetting) and the big action set piece was really messy, which was the biggest disappointment for me. The way some of the shots were framed made it difficult to tell who was doing what and a lot of the action scenes were shot in a jarring way that was disorienting in a way that did not feel intentional. My concern after last week was that episodes 3 & 4 are going to have to do a lot of plot heavy-lifting in a way that is going to drag and it seems like I was correct, which is what it is, I guess.
Other option I forgot to mention that could still explain some of what happened beyond just “random chance” is that Sharon was using her fugitive status as cover and is working as a deep cover SHIELD agent trying to infiltrate the Broker. Given the way the show has been written, I wouldn’t be surprised if we get that as our twist so Sharon can have more layers but still be a good guy.
Again, still bad execution if this was the case lol.
I made some similar inferences watching the second half of the episode. When Sharon gets it in the car at the end, she tells the person driving, “We’ve got a problem. Well, two problems” or something to that effect, before saying, “Let’s go.” I got the feeling that Sharon has been calling the shots (or making the shots, in the case of killing Selby) from the beginning. One other thing: the actor playing Sharon’s driver looked familiar, like we’ve seen her elsewhere in the MCU. Gonna try to weed through IMDB for clues.
Glad I’m not the only one expecting Sharon to be tied to (or herself) the Broker.General audiences will be waiting for Zemo to ultimately betray Sam/Bucky and for Sharon to come around.He won’t, she won’t. In fact, I could see the reveal being built around a scene where Zemo is about to do something betrayaly and potentially making us think he’s the Broker before Sharon takes him down and is the big bad Broker.Would fit with Agatha and Cataract as Phase 4 baddies being tied to past trauma/sins.
I really hope something along those lines is the case because I think it would be a huge impact on most of the audience. The rest of my family aren’t comic nerds or genre fans, so when I talk to them about this stuff (and they’re huge in to these shows, more than I ever expected) it gives me a much better picture about what most people are expecting. My sister and brother-in-law already talked to me today asking for background info on Zemo because they only remembered him from Civil War and had no idea he was a comics villain. They both seemed to already be expecting him to secretly be the Power Broker who’s been running it all from prison. They were big fans of Agents of SHIELD too, so they also think Sharon is being an undercover SHIELD agent and thats why she’s hiding stuff from Sam and Bucky.
That absolutely could be where this is going, but it will be a bit of a letdown if so because its very predictable.
“Predictable” doesn’t mean bad. A good story that leaves clues for you to figure out isn’t a bad thing.At this point it feels like the show has set up Sharon, Zemo, and Walker as potential “final bads.” Now the audience will be left wondering who’s on which side going forward.
If Sharon was the Power Broker, she certainly wouldn’t have let herself almost get killed by the bounty hunters. (And no, it wasn’t a performance to fool the boys; they were inside & couldn’t see anything she was doing.)
If she was the Broker or an agent for them (which I’m not 100% sold on, I just think it would make sense if they did that twist) its not like the random bounty hunters would know who she was. I’m not sure she was almost killed, she seemed to be more than a match for any of them. But you’re right, if they do go with her being or working for the Broker as a twist they’ll need to come up with some good explanations. I suppose we technically don’t see that its the Broker that put out the bounty, but I have a hard time imagining who else would have a phone number of all zeros that can text out to every person on the island within seconds when there’s a bounty.
This is where the ‘Sharon is the Power Broker’ thing also becomes very difficult for me. Let’s be honest, the show can still do the twist as this is a really dumb show, but now it wouldn’t feel as cool for me because it really cheated in making it feel impossible due to this.
It could just be a way of concealing her being it, but the Power Broker was consistently referred to as “he” in the show so I was assuming it’s a male.
I wouldn’t be shocked if Sharon is the Power Broker. It would tie together some of the contrivances. Though, that doesn’t excuse Sam and Bucky from not being able to see how ridiculously convenient so many of the said contrivances were.
I mean I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, there’s clearly at least more going on with Sharon than meets the eye. She could’ve been the one tipping them off for all we know at this point.
Shut up, shut up, shut up!!! I enjoyed this episode, but if you keep pointing out obvious incongruities, missteps, and plot holes, I’ll feel bad about my taste!
Or… Not? At least you’re not nitpicking nerdtron.
I rly enjoyed it too but now that I see it all written out like this I agree that it didn’t totally make sense xD Whatever lol I don’t usually watch superhero stories to think (altho it is a nice bonus when it does make me do that)
Meh. I loved this episode. They can point out plot holes and I’m still going to annoyingly love it
I feel the same way hahahaha! I realize it wasn’t prestige TV but I found it to be probably the most entertaining of the three episodes. Lots of stuff happened and it happened quickly enough that it made sense and was fun to watch if you don’t think too much!
I didn’t think it was as bad as people here are saying. It was still light years ahead of even a middling episode of Daredevil or the best Iron Fist had to offer. And I was enjoying watching Sharon go on a murder-fest while Sam, Bucky, and Zemo were interrogating the scientist.
In fairness to this episode, Erskine apparently kept no notes whatsoever on his original super serum, so I guess that’s just what you have to do if you want to create super beings. Just wing it and never write down what you’re doing.
Hydra isn’t known for its’ employee retention program. Keeping a few secrets might keep you valuable.
Erskine was working for the US and still kept no records.
Erskine didn’t keep notes because he knew better than to trust anyone else with the formula. Nagel didn’t keep notes because I don’t know why.On the flip side of that trope:
—Hydra probably did write down their Winter Soldier formula, but it was flawed, as was the version General Ross used on Blonsky later.
—Maya Hansen wrote down the Extremis formula, but (a) it was unstable & incomplete, and (b) it was used for evil (twice over, if you include its use in AoS’s Centipede serum).
—Speaking of AoS, Raina & Debbie totally wrote down the Centipede serum formula, but the facilities where they did their research were all gradually destroyed onscreen, and both of them were eventually killed off.
—And Cal Zabo wrote down the Hyde formula, but it was so hilariously unsafe to the user that nobody wanted to replicate it (at least not without heavy modifications).
Please don’t talk about AoS. No one cares. Including every subsequent writer working for Marvel. It’s a total dead-end and utterly irrelevant to the franchise.
I’ll let Luke cover that for me:
Too hard to keep track, which part of the thread does this refer to?Doesn’t really matter, though, since I’m 100% across the board.
Nagel watched Breaking Bad. He knows if you’re hired to develop a formula writing it down immediately renders you expendable.
But also, Abraham Erskine was a Jewish scientist working in Nazi Germany (before escaping). Not keeping notes is both life insurance for him and a way to make sure things don’t fall into the wrong hands.
He was working for THE AMERICANS. Not talking about Germany, talking about SSR, Steve Rogers, USA, USA! You know, in the actual movie, not the flashbacks.
I don’t think that mattered to Erskine. You think Erskine didn’t want total control of the super serum once Germany’s government started to misuse it? Did you think Erskine wasn’t smart enough to figure out that America’s government could end up misusing it as well?
For the third time, I’m talking about when Erskine was WORKING FOR AMERICA IN AMERICA.
And for the second time, I don’t think that mattered to Erskine. You think Erskine didn’t want total control of the super serum once Germany’s government started to misuse it? Did you think Erskine wasn’t smart enough to figure out that America’s government could end up misusing it as well?
I’ve made some pretty spectacular Thai curries in my day but did ever write down what went into them? Did I fuck! Winging it is just how some of us genius mavericks roll, baby!
BAM!
The line I had to rewind 3 times was, “a lot of trouble over a hunk of metal.”Um, what hunk of metal? Wait, you meant the shield? Everything you were doing has absolutely fuck all to do with the shield.
Oh, another terrible line:“Once, you had to come to Germany to stop a mad icon.” “Yeah, we don’t need any more Red Skulls!”Wait, you meant Red Skull? Not, you know, Hitler???
In the MCU, Red Skull supplanted Hitler by the end of First Avenger.
That is a complete and utter misread of what happens in the movie.
Well, he tried to supplant Hitler, but Cap brought down his plane before the Berlin bomb could be launched.
Cap still took out their deep science division, and also existed.I imagine WWII went quite differently once the Allies rolled in with the stolen Hydra tech.
Thank you. I had both of these reactions. It was very weird.
He was talking about super soldiers that became high up. Not regular people.
Wait, it’s a terrible line because they were actually referencing a villain both Bucky and Steve had direct experience with and spent the entire war trying to take down, as opposed to some other guy?
Yes. Because Hitler.
K.
Um, what hunk of metal? Wait, you meant the shield? Everything you were doing has absolutely fuck all to do with the shield.The shield and the super soldier program may as well be synonymous, since the first successful super soldier was Steve Rogers.
No.
The exchange for context:
Sam: “And Nagel referring to the American test subject like Isaiah wasn’t even a real person. Just makes me wonder how many people have to get steamrolled to make way for this hunk of metal.”
Bucky: “Well, it depends who you ask. That hunk of metal saved a lot of lives.”
So we know the shield is a symbol of being Captain America, the mantle given a physical form. If you talk about the title, you’re talking about the shield, and vice versa. It practically signifies the position, with it either having been bequeathed like from Steve to Sam, or more specifically in the context of this conversation, given to a candidate by the government (Howard/Peggy to Steve, gov’t to John Walker).
The same government who tested on Isaiah and scores of others back in the day, the same that bankrolled Nagel to crack the serum in the present; both in the aim to slap the shield on the prized candidate and authentically call them their next Captain America.
The serum and the shield aren’t as inextricably linked to the heroes or we the viewer who have seen Steve’s character arc play out, but to the government in context here? I posit Yes, or alternatively, “yaaas”.
Because Bucky and Captain America didn’t fight Hitler in the MCU. They fought HYDRA, which was independantly run by the Red Skull. Remember, RS killed Hitler’s men and declared himself loyal to no one in The First Avenger.It was basically a super sciences war under the cover of WW2. A secret war, if you will.
Or David Hasselhoff?
All the hand-wringing over the shield and trying to get it back, as if it were some kind of panacea to all their problems, feels off to me. I never thought there was only one vibranium Captain America shield. Thanos hacked one to pieces, was that not the true shield? Or did he end up with the true shield from a different timeline? I always assumed there was more than one, or that if something happened to the one, another one could be made. They’ve got friends in Wakanda, if they need a shield so bad, why don’t they just have one made?
Totally agree. It’s pretty ridiculous. Get over it already.
THANK YOU THE RED SKULL INSTEAD OF HITLER THING MELTED MY DAMN BRAIN
The goons had nothing to do with the serum. They were the bounty hunters.
Although telepathy seems to be a bigger thing as Karli just knew that the scientist was also dead.She’s originally from Madripoor and basically help runs a global terrorist network, I don’t think it’s a huge leap in logic that she’s been informed along whatever information channels they utilise, especially info concerning Nagel since he’s the one she stole from.
I was thinking the same thing. I didn’t find that part contrived.
It’s easy to ignore those kinds of plot holes if the thing is stylish or propulsive enough, but this episode wasn’t. I kind of handwaved it away but, yeah, it’s the kind of thing where they easily could have done a little work here and there to avoid those kinds of distracting questions. Why was this legion of bounty hunters able to track Sharon et. al. to this location? How would any of them even have any idea where they were headed? All you need is:in the scene where Sharon first encounters Bucky/Sam/Zemo, as they’re walking away to head to her place in High Town, a quick insert shot (three seconds at most) of a suspicious-looking character spying on them from the shadows.when they leave to go to the docks the next morning, the same character is lurking outside the building, and quietly talks into a phone for a moment, then follows them on a moped or something. Another 3-5 second shot.
That’s literally all it takes to plant in the minds of the audience “uh oh, someone is following the heroes.” Then when a bunch of goons show up, we don’t question why.
I made a similar point elsewhere in the discussion. I legitimately don’t expect MCU shows to stand up to some kind of detailed scrutiny as the movies themselves often took really easy ways out. As long as it is stylish and action is good, I usually shrug stuff like this away.But here it felt like there was this compounding stupidity, like every scene was dumb in a different way and there was so many completely unnecessary insane spots. Take the bar scene, it would have been so easy to just have that everyone only knew Smiling Tiger by reputation, but they had to go for a really bad joke that required everything to once again be dumb. It was just so relentless here and, as you pointed out, there wasn’t that stylishness or good action to even distract from it.
It also occurred to me that Sam’s presence in Madripoor (especially at the bar) accomplished nothing. He could have hung back while Bucky and Zemo went to talk to Selby, and then they wouldn’t have had the problem with him and his phone. (And yeah, Sam shouldn’t be so dumb as to leave his phone on, or even have his real phone with him in that situation.) (Of course, it’s also dumb that they were immediately super suspicious of him just because he received a phone call. Like, don’t international criminals frequently get phone calls?)I suppose it’s possible that Sam would have refused to let Zemo out of his sight, even with Bucky there, and so he insisted on tagging along, so then even though he doesn’t really do anything useful in the Low Town scenes, there’s a reason he’s there, but I don’t think I remember them establishing that specifically, although I guess it’s a reasonable assumption. But there’s tons of randos hanging around in the bar; why does Sam need to be undercover as a well-known criminal, rather than just as one of Zemo’s henchmen? Put him in a wig and a nondescript outfit.
Except the only security feature is to know to push the fake looking
back wall at which point you are able to walk in to the lab completely
You know, if you either can’t afford the time or money to create something more elaborate, there are worse ways to deal with that fact than lampshading it….
except for the one dude who can make the serum in question. And before anyone asks, of course there are no notes, why would there be?
Again, hang a lampshade on it! “Why are there no notes?!?!? What’s wrong with you supersoldier scientists?”
My big take was that Sharon was really, really murdery.
he can go on dates (and dating apps apparently set to “both men and women”) but he can’t enjoy the music of the modern era? Well, for one, I’m pretty confident that guys who liked the D were a thing that existed in the 1940s, and for two, I don’t think musical preference and sexual orientation are 1:1 comparable.
they weren’t comparing his possible orientation to liking 40’s music, they were comparing what Bucky and Steve would do. Steve wouldn’t go on dates but he liked modern era music, opposite of bucky. the “both men and women thing” is just to get clicks on a separate article.
Well, pointedly, we don’t know Steve wouldn’t go on dates. We’re not shown that he had any downtime between CA:WS and Infinity War. Dude had five long years after the snap, and presumably at some point between whenever he found out Sharon was gone and time travel became an option, Cap fucked (and it wasn’t good enough to stick around for).
But given that Sam and Bucky, both canonically (although generations apart) veterans of the US Armed Forces, end up disagreeing about a tactical cue in order to need Zemo to save them once they get out of the lab, it really feels like Bucky only doesn’t like Marvin Gay because it gave the opening for Zemo to be the cringy ally.If not, writers, let Sam like more than one artist/album! Not all unfrozen supersoldiers have the same tastes!
Eh, it was more that I was confused at his comfort level. He’s super comfortable about being queer and meeting new people, but new music feels like too hard to try? I also think Sam probably felt hurt and frustrated because it’s something he likes that Bucky seems disinterested in. Also personally it feels like Bucky is not working to understand Sam enough, just saying.
You can be bisexual and be stubborn with specific and quirky taste in music.
HAHAHA ok as a bisexual with an unhealthy obsession with disco and EDM, I have to agree
Sure, but that tracks. Apparently, you can’t be bisexual AND into Glenn Miller.
Yeah I mean being open minded/comfortable with your sexuality (at least when it comes to online dating/hook up apps which isn’t always the same thing) but being closed minded to types of music you don’t like are not mutually exclusive.
Is it a coincidence that it’s called ‘swing’ music?
NO!
What’s wrong with disco and electronica?
I think that Bucky clings to that period of music because it reminds him of when he was last truly himself. When Steve changed, he changed for the better, as it were. Bucky, however, was changed for the worse, into a killing machine for the enemy. And even though he’s no longer that, he’s still tortured by what was done to him and what he did to others. With Steve gone, that music is all he’s got left tying him to the man he used to be. Whilst Sam might feel that Bucky isn’t working hard enough to understand him, maybe it cuts both ways?That’s how i read the whole situation anyway.
I’m not surprised at all that Bucky’s a little more old-timey. Personally I want to see an episode open with him complaining to Sam about the Designated Hitter rule.
He’s a good midwestern boy.I’d be willing to accept a five minute rant on why the NHL realigned to “central” and “west” when they had perfectly acceptable names that MEANT something and who the hell thought hockey in Las Vegas was a good idea?
Bucky? He’s from Brooklyn, just like Steve!
I blame wikipedia.“James Buchanan Barnes was born in Shelbyville, Indiana in 1925″
Wha – ? But he was Steve Rogers’s boyhood pal in Brooklyn, NY!
I’m sure there’s a retcon somewhere that has Bucky born in Indiana, having to move to Brooklyn as a boy because…his parents died so he’s living with relatives there, or The Great Depression resulted in Barnes, Sr. losing the family farm/business so they moved there to find work, or — something, and he and Steve became friends because they were fellow outcasts.
I can’t keep track of who’s alive and who’s dead in comics at this point….
I’m 100% going off Wiki articles, but I *think* the MCU version is Bucky being born in Indiana as an Army brat, moving with his family as service families are wont to do, then meeting the future Cap’n at 13.Maybe. I wasn’t a reader of Marvel at the time any of this was happening. Heck, some of it I may not have been alive at all.
Actually, that works – there’s Fort Hamilton in Bay Ridge so there’s been an Army base in Brooklyn from the 1830s to now. That would also explain why Bucky was originally the more “military” one in the movies…PS: Despite having lived in New York City for 27 years, and remembering how we always embarked and disembarked from Germany in NYC, I had to Google “Army Base in Brooklyn, NY?” to be reminded of Fort Hamilton!
Rock and roll was a big break from swing; it’s hard for some people to love Elvis and Sinatra. Maybe Bucky’s just more on the jazz tip. He was out before teenagers were a thing.
Old man doesn’t like new music. Shocking.
Have you tried introducing new music to people? It’s like pulling teeth and hardly anybody ever pulls through into acquiring new tastes.
Exactly. I’m not sure that it has anything to do with who you’re attracted to when horny and scrolling through a dating app…
As apparently Bucky remembers everything from being the Winter Soldier, maybe the problem isn’t that he doesn’t like or appreciate modern music, it’s just that when he last listened to “Trouble Man” he was assassinating people around the globe. 1940s music reminds him when he was Howling Commando, bringing the fight to Hydra with his best bud Steve. Everything else up to the 2010s reminds him of all the people he’s murdered as a Hydra tool.Edit: GK99 beat me to it first!
If he’s trying hard in other areas, I imagine new music would seem like an effort he doesn’t need to make. Indeed, it might feel like it would take energy he lacks.
I think a version of this is said later, but his music from 1944 to 2014 would have been stuff he heard on the radio while going somewhere to kill people.
I mean, he could have heard “Love is a Battlefield” in 1985 in the cab on his way to assassinate some leader and frame Libyan terrorists for it. He could have heard “Layla” while on his way to kill Anwar Sadat or even “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” while waiting for JFK’s motorcade to come around the corner…
Tends to turn a guy off that music. I personally don’t like Lionel Ritchie’s “Truly” because a girl in 7th grade broke up with me on the dance floor and that’s been decades, so I can relate.
I’m only in my forties and I can’t be arsed with 90% of what’s in the pop charts these days. The weird thing is that with the possible exception of dubstep (itself over a decade old now) there hasn’t even been that much in the way of progression in music in the last 25 years so I should be all over the good quality artists of today. Alas, I’m not. It’s all absolute drivel and these work-shy layabouts should get proper jobs. I imagine 100 year old Bucky – whose fond teenage memories of fingering someone behind the dancehall were probably soundtracked to ‘The Charleston’ or some shit- would absolutely hate modern tunes. Even the good stuff!
Have you never met a “rap dad” who believes that good music stopped being made some time around 1997? Some people are stuck on the music they grew up with, and refuse to listen to new stuff. It’s not really that odd.
This reviewer sometimes has the weirdest gripes.
This reviewer sometimes has the weirdest gripes.Yeah, they’re just a bit… odd?There’s a fair bit to criticise this episode/show for (plot progress seems slow, yet also massively overstuffed?) but some of the gripes here are particularly strange and/or strained.It’s not just “this isn’t the show I wanted it to be” it’s “why isn’t this show doing [thing that doesn’t make sense or it never promised]?”
This reviewer does the same thing a reviewer on io9 does all the time. They don’t review the show they’re watching on its own merits. They review the show in light of their own personal expectations of what the show should be.
And jeez enough already with the comparisons to every single thing the reviewer’s ever watched.
No kidding. Reading this review I was like did we watch the same episode?
Absolutely delighted that you called this out.
I mean the other read (and one I feel is more likely, unfortunately for those that are looking for Bucky to represent an under represented group) is he doesn’t know that some of the people on the app are dudes. Like, I’m not sure he’s just blasé about being bi, I think he might be a little out of his depth (assassins don’t really have to have dating app experience, he wasn’t a spy so much as a clean up crew, and this dude’s from the 40’s and not hip.) Everybody is seeing this as an indicator of something that may not be there, and I think it’s more likely that this was a bit of a throwaway joke about Bucky not knowing what he was looking at. Note: I wouldn’t have a problem at all if it was supposed to indicate Bucky’s interest in men, except that it, like with most of the other characters so far in this series, seems like it’s a little too ephemeral of a characterization. Like I get what’s going on with Sam, I get what’s going on with Bucky on the surface, and I think I get Captain “I haven’t yet proven it, but I’m probably just as much of a smug asshole as you think I am.”, but the Flag Smashers, and the whole world situation, and some of what’s underneath the motivations of the characters seem so barely sketched out, and unnecessarily so, that I find it annoying. Some character exposition would actually be useful at this point.
My two great Uncle’s who were together 65 years met during WWII
Or…it could be a winking reference to Sebastian Stan’s own sexuality, or rumors of it.
This was the best episode so far!
I actually enjoyed this episode more than the last two. I didn’t quite care there wasn’t some intricate and elaborate prison break thing and was kinda glad they just brushed past it quickly to go do things instead.
The prison break scene worked for me. Zemo is an experienced field intel guy — Bucky knows this and realizes the slightest distraction is enough for a guy like Zemo to make an attempt, given the opportunity. It makes me wonder why he didn’t escape during the chaos caused by the snap, unless he was also snapped, or the snap took a greater ratio of prisoners to guards.
Yeah, I agree about all the plot holes, but I found this episode to still be a ton of fun, and Sharon is great.
I liked it, but it did lack for a lot of the character moments of the last two. And I worry that adding more characters like Sharon and Zemo is going to take away from the joy that is any and all Bucky-Sam interaction.
Zemo is going to wind up being the master villain. Without him you got nothing, noone gives a shit about the super antifa/communist/anarchist guys, or whatever the f*ck they are.
So yeah, this week’s episode I would give a either a solid B or a kind B+. I’m not trying to be purposefully contrarian to Sulagna – we’re just on opposing wavelengths. Hopefully we’ll sync up before the show ends. I do agree that the show in eps 2 & 3 has been swinging wildly between “Yay!” scenes and “Fart Noise” scenes. A ton of Tropes, sure, but I like this week’s bunch of overloaded tropes more than last week’s several. For example: I didn’t much care for last week’s truck chase, while this week’s shipping container shoot-out was kinda fun. Every assassin on the island wants to kill them now – hey! It’s a 10 minute John Wick sequence. Zemo prison break – fine. Club scene – mmm – I’m okay with it. I’m willing to forgive the fuzzy motivations of Zemo and Sharon because they are being set up for future reveals. Who is the Power Broker?! At this point I don’t care – at least the whole overarching plot is starting to make a little more sense. Didn’t mind the mad-scientist info dump. What I really did like was the set up to Madripoor. Is this a city from the comics? That Our Gang had a nice long walk across the bridge to the city was a great way to introduce this new setting. I liked the 90 year old butler. Zemo is a slightly more dick-ish Batman!Calling it now: next week’s trope is a Jason Bourne-style tiny-car chase through narrow old European streets. “Scare the old lady with the laundry basket!” type stuff.
Madripoor is in the comics, I remember seeing it in the Uncanny X-Men. Similar to how it’s portrayed in the series a lawless city that doesn’t extradite criminals.
I also think this episode was probably a solid B. I also think the premiere was in the A-/B+ range. I’m just perplexed by these reviews, specifically the article titles. The title of this review is insane to me, mostly because of the way it is worded. “…weakest episode yet” implies that the other episodes have also been weak. Which they, by this reviewer’s own admissions, have not been. I realize this is a bit of a pedantic complaint, but (1) it feels deliberately misleading; and (2) it’s so easy to fix (i.e. “Sharon Carter and Helmut Zemo join The Falcon and the Winter Soldier in a weak episode”). There’s just something about the title for this episode’s review (and the premiere, honestly) that puts me – and I imagine some others – in a headspace that makes it difficult to take the reviewer’s genuine thoughts seriously, especially when combined with some of the weirdest takes and/or confusion I have seen in the reviews on this site.
You have my axe
One the issues I am having with the show at this point is that it feels like it wants to say meaningful things, which is a good thing, but it never commits to really saying anything. It might change, but so far it is a weird one. Like the fact that they never go into detail about how Isiah became a Supersoldier, which is actually pretty big story in the comics, but the characters behave like that was told.Another example is that for some reason they made the question of who should be Captain America a global adventure story. Which in itself could again be clever as it could be used to discuss USA’s global rolle, and by the way the new Captain America actually is a pretty good character for that. Except three episodes in, every single foreigner is either a meaningless or a villain. I guess the Wakanda character is a change, but even that doesn’t feel like addressing that need. Or, to put another shortly, the show deciding to humanize Karli just before having her blow up a building full of people despite it seemingly not fitting at all with the group’s previous MO. Or even explaining why that organization was hoarding those supplies in the first place.I could go on, but so far to me there is a constant between with what the show wants to say and what it is saying.
I’m actually impressed with the expanding nature of all the characters and motivations. I think they’re doing a nice job of commenting on pretty hefty issues when the main priority is a superhero buddy comedy action adventure. Plus we’ve only just got to the halfway mark, if this were just one film I’d probably agree
“One the issues I am having with the show at this point is that it feels
like it wants to say meaningful things, which is a good thing, but it
never commits to really saying anything.”In that sense, it’s perfectly following in the footsteps of its predecessors, Captain America 2 and 3, which pretended to be about “issues”, but absolutely were not in any remotely meaningful way.
Absolutely fair point, although to my defense it used to drive me nuts with those films as well. Especially after they got so much praise about tackling such big issues.In retrospect, and this sounds a lot harsher than perhaps intended, both of those films remind me of West Wing. Well made and acted, but never trul interested in challenging the protagonist as they were considered to be clearly in the right.
The West Wing had many episodes where the protagonists had their perspectives changed or disproven.
“We play with live ammo around here.”There’s even a Sam-Ainsley plotline built around her changing his mind on something and she freaks out when she realizes how quickly it moves up the chain.
yeah, like every marvel movie, big suprise.
Which I don’t care about. Perfectly fine having superhero entertainment be nothing but escapist fun.But when a show/movie takes itself more seriously than the text actually allows and pretends it actually has something to say when it doesn’t, it’s annoying.
To continue a little bit roughly on the subject, what annoys me is that it currently feels like if a superhero movie/show even acknowledges weighty issues, they should be patted on the back on just for doing it. Actually looking at how they discuss it is the secondary, especially the first round of reviews.I’ll give a non-controversial example in Iron Man 2. When it first came out, it’s easy to forget now that it actually got pretty solid critical response and I read so many think pieces on how it is tackling such big issues.
I know its not over, but right now, it seems like people expect a lot more from this show than it will deliver, except for dumb fun action.
It’s implied that Karli has gone off the deep end after seeing her mother or mother figure dying in the refugee camp. That’s what pushes her over the edge to blow up the building. Whether that works or not is up to personal taste but I don’t think it comes out of nowhere. She’s her best friend brutally shot by Power Brokers people, events are escalating and her mom dying she’s holding the GRC personally responsible for.I like that there are multiple agendas and they’re all coming to a head. I get the complaints but I’m holding judgment until the series is over and things come together. It was a fun, heavy action episode so I enjoyed it
This show is already incredibly overstuffed, and I’m not looking forward to them throwing yet another element into the mix with Ayo. I wouldn’t mind her getting an actual character that’s more than “the one Dora Milaje who was in Civil War,” but this series doesn’t seem like the place for that.I have no interest in The Power Broker, especially now that they seem to be setting it up as a reveal of some character we already know. The John Walker parts of the show are the strongest to me, and there was almost none of that this episode.
I really enjoyed the dynamic between all 4 of them this episode!Zemo really surprised me with how cultured he was. He’s out of line, but he’s right! And that little dance? Yes. Makes me almost forget he killed so many people for revenge.And Sharon was great to see. “Wow, she’s kind of awful now.” Awfully good at killing and throwing parties! Hope she sticks around for the series.So yeah, not as many deep character moments as in the other 2, but still I had a great time. Can’t wait for next week’s Smiling Tiger and the White Wolf.
I wonder if Sharon killed Selby. I figure she’s not working for the Power Broker, but I’m curious where her loyalties lie now.Wait what? I thought it was obvious that Sharon killed Selby — just as Selby ordered Sam, Bucky and Zemo killed — to protect them.
Same.
Yeah it was a chaotic scene, but after the “guardian angel” reveal I thought it was pretty clear, too. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she was the Broker or someone working for him. Killing Selby protected them, silenced someone who was naming names, the bounty on their heads meant they had to rely on Sharon for safety, if the doctor was someone who needed to be found or silenced (possibly just trying to find out how Karli got the serum) using Sam, Bucky and Zemo would be a perfect cover.
The Broker could be doing the same thing Walker is doing, just relying on Sam and Bucky to track down the Flag Smashers because its easier to just track Sam and Bucky.
I think it’s definitely tilting toward Sharon being The Broker. For the most part (except for Zemo in the bar, maybe), they’ve avoided gendering the character, just saying “Broker” without using pronouns.
Yep. There’s even that graffiti that reads “The Power Broker is watching you” that the camera conveniently lingers on as Sam, Bucky, and Zemo enter Selby’s bar. The “guardian angel” comment was a little on the nose, maybe, but it all adds up.
I thought I wasn’t going to theorize about this show but I love that theory.
It would be a weird turn for Sharon to be the Power Broker, but they really did go out of their way this ep to point out how betrayed she felt. Plus, the whole deal with Sam getting her a pardon seems like they’re going to set up a scenario where she does get the full blanket pardon and is free, only for the reveal after that that she’s the Power Broker.
As a former member of SHIELD and the CIA, I imagine all kinds of people wanted Sharon dead after she was branded an enemy of the state. That’s enough to make anyone bitter. I hadn’t thought about the effect of the blanket pardon, but that’s a good theory.
I mean she’s either working for the Broker, is the Broker, or is still working for Shield/Sword/Fury’s secret club.
Yeah I’m pretty much 50/50 on those options right now. If there’s a surprise 3rd option I hope its done well. I love a good twist, but its only good if there’s still a way to look back and see how it makes sense.
Sad that since she got her part stolen by Black Widow in Winter Soldier we don’t have that much characterization of Sharon to make a better guess on what kind of long term motives she might have.
Agreed. I also thought they made it pretty clear that Sharon was the power broker.
I thought so too, but I rewatched it and it’s unclear.When Sharon shows up, she asks them why they’re there and Sam says “Someone recreated the super-soldier serum and Zemo had a lead.” Her response is “Well that explains why you guys are here – and why Selby’s dead.”Why would she say them being there explains why Selby’s dead if she’s the one who killed her?
I really hope this isn’t some dumb “Sharon is The Power Broker” twist.
I went back to rewatch the sequence. Some stuff doesn’t make sense.Selby says “Who’s Sam? Kill them!” and is instantly shot through the chest (from a window outside) and killed. We don’t see the person who fired the shot.Sam, Bucky, and Zemo take out the remaining guards. Zemo says “Now we have new problem.” Cut to a text message of someone offering money for whoever killed Selby. Who would have sent that message? Nobody aside from SBZ and Selby’s killer would even know Selby was dead for at least a couple of minutes, much less decide to immediately send out a bounty. What’s more, the bounty doesn’t even say who Selby’s killers are. SBZ didn’t put a bounty on themselves, and there’s no reason to think Sharon would do so either, whether or not she’s Selby’s killer.A few moments later, after people start shooting at SBZ (even though it’s unclear how all these people would even know that they’re who the bounty is on), someone in a hoodie uses a sniper rifle from an upper window to take out the people attacking SBZ. SBZ apparently stand around in the alley long enough for the sniper to run all the way downstairs and approach them out of the fog. Sharon pulls down the hood (pretty strongly implying she’s the alley sniper; and the fact that she’s the alley sniper implies that she’s the Selby sniper), and threatens them with a gun. Sam says there’s more serum and that Zemo had a lead, and Sharon says, “Well that explains why you guys are here, and why Selby’s dead.” But if she’s the one who shot Selby, then that’s a really weird way to phrase it.If Sharon DID kill Selby, then presumably it was because she knew SBZ were in Madripoor, and was following them to protect them, even though it’s unclear how she could possibly know they were even in Madripoor, much less who they were there to see or why. It’s also unclear how she knew right then was the right time to shoot Selby. If she could hear what was going on (maybe because she had bugged Selby’s office), she already would have known they were after the serum.
Given that Sharon seems to be primarily working as a black market art dealer, it’s unclear how she would have the time or inclination to bug random mid-level criminals and monitor them at all times to see if some superheroes had shown up.
My thought — in line with your last two points — is that Sharon was following them and shot Selby to protect them. I don’t know that she would have needed to bug the room as much as there’s just “comic book tech” that she could have been listening in (For a real world example: http://argoasecurity.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=263, or for a MCU example the bug that Steve put on the window of the bridge of the Lumurian Star to listen to Batroc in the beginning of The Winter Soldier).What could either complicate or amplify this theory — depending on your point of view — is the parallel theory that Sharon Carter is the Power Broker. Edit: Your point about Sharon’s first line to the group, though, is a really good point that I didn’t remember.
The introduction of Madripoor itself — a longtime port of illicit trade in the comics and frequent hangout for Wolverine — was handled oddly. Not because of the absence of Logan, mind you, but because here we’re taken to an island in Asia and I don’t think we saw one actual Asian character even in the party at Chez Sharon.
There should be Asian characters, but certain islands are extremely mixed due to a long trading history. A city like say Jakarta would be incredibly blended. It’s a primarily Muslim population with East and South Asian backgrounds along with European.
Except the vast majority of the people in Jakarta, while Muslim, are Javanese, Betawi, or Sundanese. Which are Asian ethnicities…
That there wasn’t a single Asian in Madripoor was so dang glaring. Even more so for a show so otherwise preoccupied by race.
K
-I’m wondering how many inmates escaped from jail during the blip because they got blipped and came back. -You’d think they would put Zemo in a much more high-security prison after proving that he’s clever enough to dismantle the Avengers. -They tried too hard to give Zemo the quips in this episode. I wanted to throw my phone at the screen and yell NO MORE QUIPS. -Strange how Steve was in love with Peggy, then made out with her granddaughter Sharon, then ended up back with Peggy. Is this some Woody Allen stuff here?
Her niece, not granddaughter
They kinda dropped the ball with Nagel with him being just an amoral scientist who figured out the super-soldier serum from Isaiah’s blood.
In the comics he was the lead scientist in charge of the whole operation where they experimented on the 300+ black soldiers which led to Isaiah getting augmented.
Also, you have to figure there was something defective about Bradley’s version of the serum (and in turn, the version derived from it that was developed for the Flag Smashers) or else the government would have just used it liberally instead of just covering it up. (have it be not as powerful, or make it cause long term damage to the bodymental capacity)
We all know eventually Walker is going to take it and things are not going to end well.
This was one of the frustrating parts of the show as they told us Isiah was a super-soldier and that the new serum was derived from his blood samples, but did not bother yet at all to explain how he became a super-soldier? Or why he was now living in a house with a grandkid? Yet they also felt like people just got the reasons.
They only insinuated it was Isaiah. My guess it’s not actually him.
Maybe it will turn him into the 100 percent asshole he is in the comics.
FYI, Smiling Tiger was an actual character from the comics (unrelated to the Falcon) that was even a part of Zemo’s Thunderbolts for a short time.
Just because this episode was so stupid, that Smiling Tiger stuff was insane. I get having Sam pretend to be someone else, but then it was clear that everyone in the bar knew Smiling Tiger, to the degree that the bartender knew a very bizarre drink that Tiger liked to drink, yet no one could tell that it wasn’t him. Like Sam didn’t look that much like the guy in the photo.
He should have at least been wearing the same sunglasses!
And we’ve seen that Sam’s face is known around the world. At least give him a disguise of some sort. Hell, Logan always just wore a patch when in Madripoor and that somehow worked.
Damn, that makes it look like Clark Kent is going overboard on his disguise.
I was scratching my head about this too- Bartender knows this guy’s favorite drink, yet also doesn’t recognize this guy… Huh? Was this supposed to be some sort of commentary on how some people think all black folks look alike? But Zemo had that pointed comment about pimps just a second ago, so I don’t know what was going on with the meaning of any of this. (If there was any meaning at all. Sometimes a gag is just a swing and a miss)Maybe they were going by Hitman disguise logic
The bartender was black too, though.
Yea, which made it even weirder. I guess I can chalk it up to the club being dark and the bartender seeing hundreds of faces a night. But he still seemed so specific about this one guy, to not recognize him while trying to see if he could recognize him was bizarre. Let’s just say it was Agatha’s Pietro effect again
This episode truly was a mess. There was some awkward info dumps that I couldn’t fully comprehend until I rewatched several scenes until it made sense.I heard the name Madani and I immediately thought they were referencing the Nutflex Punisher character, only to unceremoniously kill her off offscreen. But no, it’s not CIA Agent Dinah Madani, the name is Donya Madani, which to be fair, sounds a lot like it could be Dinah. Here’s what happened.Donya Madani was a refugee. Karli Morgenthau visited her at a GRC resettlement camp in Riga, Latvia to give a tearful goodbye to her comatose body. When Team Hot Bois interrogates Dr. Nagel, he tells them that Karli called asking to help Donya, who was dying of tuberculosis from a resettlement camp. She apparently died offscreen since the previous scene.I’m not expecting too much, but it does feel like it could be a way to introduce Agent Madani to this side of the MCU. The actress who played Donya does look a bit like Amber Rose Reva. Not that she was an amazing character that I care about, but it is noteworthy. The real implication is that Frank Castle (and everyone else from the other TV shows) might show up at some point. I’d rather that not happen and we just stick with Sam, Bucky, Sharon, Zemo, Walker, and Karli and stay with those characters instead of spreading them all too thin.
Avatar: The Last Airbender’s “Boulder” Wait, what episode are you referring to? Season three’s “The Boiling Rock,” or the episode from season one, “Imprisoned?” Or are you talking about this dude? Either way, are you trying to say that those episodes were boring?
Agree with the criticism of this episode, and I’ll add one more major one: in what world does Bucky Barnes break Zemo out of jail? And in what world would Sam go along with it? And this is their Plan A?!? Insert Simpsons meme: “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”
Also, Jesus, Sharon Carter went from FBI agent to high-level fence for stolen artwork awfully easily! How does one even make that career jump? Was she actually Hydra all along back in her SHIELD days?
In a show that is clearly all about asking “who is going to carry on the legacy of Steve Rogers?” the good guys all seem very okay doing lots of things Steve would NEVER do. Like, say, free a murderer from prison. And then allow him to commit a murder right in front of you. And then hop into his ride and drive off with him two minutes later.Karli blowing up a building full of people was similarly disappointing, but at least she’s supposed to be an antagonist. At this rate, when Walker inevitably shows up to stop Sam and Bucky, I’m going to be hard pressed to determine why he’s the wrong one.
I still can’t figure out how they communicated that jail break plan? As apparently they were being monitered due to Zemo starting to ask about the book thing, and that was enough?By the way, one of the things that mystifies in the show so far is that while I like the actor, everyones attitude to Zemo seems to be ‘Look at that scamp’. It is such a baffling tone, especially since I was excited by the way they introduced him at the end of last episode.
I don’t think its that weird that they don’t have a strong hatred towards Zemo, who didn’t really do that much directly in Civil war to anybody except Bucky, who is ambivalent about all of his relationship. It also seemed in this episode that Bucky was a bit excited (maybe the wrong word) to spend time with someone who knows all about his past and HYDRA, because Sam is a bit oblivious to all of that. I don’t know if that’s an accurate read on his character though.
Sam noticed how readily Bucky slid back in to his Winter Soldier persona.Hell, they make a point of demonstrating how Zemo can’t use the code words to control Bucky anymore…yet he’s doing that anyway by the end of the episode.Because that’s Zemo’s “power.” He’s smart and manipulative.
Indeed. Merely from what we’ve seen on screen, Zemo has killed, at minimum, nine people in cold blood. Likely many, many more than that from the bomb in Vienna, not to mention his time as the leader of what Black Widow called a “covert kill squad,” implying he’s A-OK with war crimes too.
But hey, look at him dancing all goofy in that club! What a card that Zemo is!
Part of the issue is that they went all in on de-Nazifying Zemo, that he’s basically a blank slate for all intents and purposes. He doesn’t even have the daddy issues comic Zemo has, since they explicitly stated his father died with his wife/kids as opposed to having him be one of Bucky’s kills or someone Cap killed shortly after being defrosted.
At this point, they might as well make Zemo the new Black Panther since at least that will make more sense than creating a new character from scratch, or bringing Killmonger back for the role.
Steve did hang out with Tony, who did directly destroy an entire country with no repercussions in either the reality of the world or with his reality fan base. And let a child participate in superheroic combat abroad (a detail that is wholly gone from the MCU).Also while I personally love Bucky (sad bi energy?) I do kind of get that just because he’s Steve’s friend and wasn’t doing things of his own volition doesn’t mean he doesn’t need help.Actually while I get that Tony might not have provided income for any of the Avengers beyond housing, I’m a little surprised that Steve would have let Sharon go everything alone. (It’s a weird choice to have ever kissed her but in any case she’s still related to Peggy?)
>>>>”And let a child participate in superheroic combat abroad (a detail that is wholly gone from the MCU).”Dude,….Spider-Man/Peter Parker as a high-school teenager with super-powers fighting villains (and super-villains) has been a staple of his character ever since his creation in the comics.If you never had a problem with that notion or idea in the comics, then the MCU seems like a pretty weird place to get all up in your britches about it, and to suddenly draw a line.Also, in case you weren’t aware, he was also a teenager in the (first) Raimi Spider-man and Garfield movies as well (although being played by 20-something year olds, in both cases).Why would they ever need to revisit this detail that’s been consistent throughout all his representations in all media he’s been in?
I think it’s fair enough the character does that independently but in a word where there aren’t as many minors putting themselves in peril then they need to lay the ground rules a little better. Why would he give the minor all these murder drones upon his death (I forget if they established when the will would have been written)?Also my point was just that it seems like Steve was more morally flexible— even though it feels like he had lines he wouldn’t cross, he clearly didn’t hold his company to the same standard. (His closest in-narrative friends/companions being a former assassin, another former assassin, Sam, and Tony?)
“Spider-Man/Peter Parker as a high-school teenager with super-powers fighting villains (and super-villains) has been a staple of his character ever since his creation in the comics.”In the comics, yes. But in the MCU, when Tony first met him in Civil War, Peter had only been fighting non-powered street thugs. He had no experience fighting anyone with powers.Also, Tony literally kidnaps a teenager and transports him not just across state lines, but to another country. All without his guardian’s permission (Aunt May did give Tony permission to take Peter on a “field trip” but she never would’ve given permission for him to take him out of the country, let alone put him in a situation where his life was in danger).And let’s not forget that Tony literally turns Peter into a child soldier here. He takes him to a foreign country and has him fight in a battle he has nothing to do with, against super-powers foes, putting his life in danger.Marvel has been upfront saying that Civil War was already written when they found out they could use Spider-Man so they had to shoehorn him into the existing plot. But Tony kidnapping a teenager and taking him to Germany to fight (half of) the Avengers is a huge misstep.
Oh no, you are NOT comparing Tony to Zemo. GTFO of here with that bullshit.
I think in terms of overall damage to the world, what Tony did greatly exceeds anything Zemo did. Zemo killed a bunch of evil super soldiers (and a benevolent king, in addition to a bunch of civilians) because his family died. (Setting aside the fact they sort of don’t matter and he’s apparently retroactively a baron.) Tony had a bad nightmare and then his actions directly lead to the destruction of not only a city but an entire country. (Yeah he tried to eliminate the red from his ledger but it just seems like for all the magic of his tech we don’t actually see all that much purely positive outcomes with his pivot from arms dealing since the MCU still wanted to be vaguely adjacent to our own world.)I just think it’s a little weird that because of RDJ his character gets a free pass in that universe, when I see a lot of opinions wanting harsher consequences for heroes and villains that have done relatively less and some degree of either good accomplished or reduced culpability.
youre out of your mind. Why are so many people bending over backwards to be apologists for Zemo? He’s a piece of shit. Hes an old fashioned black & white villain. The End. Iron Man is a fuckin hero who saved the universe. And by the way, whatever bad things you think tony did in the past? IT WAS ALL LEGAL. HE SOLD ARMS TO THE GOVERNMENT.
I’m less invested in this than you so I didn’t mean to sound super glib— but it’s just with comics I feel like people give weird passes to some heroes because of years of affection (Stark) but others tend to be ostracized— like Cyclops killing Xavier one of those times or for cheating on his wife with the original love of his life who happened to look exactly(?) like his wife in the first place. Yeah in the MCU Stark saved the world and universe a couple of times, but so much of his story is about atoning for past mistakes— including those of his father who was also generally a protagonist— but the new stories are following up on the negative ramifications and bringing them up. They’re also dwelling on some of those failings way afterward but haven’t laid clear groundwork about the hows or whys. Also I assume they’re just trying to do character rehab on the Zemo character so it’s more viable for him to do some Thunderbolts or Dark Avengers thing in the future— like how Loki got to a place where he could headline a show despite nominally coming straight out of the first Avengers.
i’m not even that invested, to me its just common sense. Its obvious. The bad things Tony’s done are far outweighed by the good things. Its not even by a small margin, its by like 10,000 to 1. Any comparison of him to Zemo is absurd, both in their motivations and their results.
I took issue with the idea that while Tony meant well most of the time, a lot of his wounds were somewhat self-inflicted. While most literally the bomb that he could only recognize once it directly impacted him and changed his ways— pretty much all of Ultron and the temporarily evil twins were his fault. I get that narratively it’s not super engaging to flesh out the minutia of how his clean energy might deal with carbon emissions or following more of his charitable MIT grants saving the world or whatever set the MCU further apart from our own world— but it’s only lately that we’ve seen more fallout from his choices. Like Sokovia no longer existing or outsourcing AI to recognize global security threats or whatever Ultron and the army of Iron Men suits were originally meant to resolve— a sort of more ominous big brother vibe the Winter Soldier movies argued against. (I also don’t really understand nor remember why it feels like there have been numerous movies that ended with Stark retiring and/or blowing up a bunch of drone suits then changing his mind by the next set of movies? The character just seemed deeply hypocritical for learning from a bunch of mistakes he made but not giving his peers the same latitude or opportunity off the hook that he could take advantage of.Then there’s also every chance I don’t really remember the original gist of Zemo in the movies. I thought he’d only ever shown up in Civil War to murder a bunch of ex-Hydra people (and UN civilians) since super powered entities didn’t respect national borders and got innocent civilians and countries destroyed? (I vaguely got the sense that him being a rich vengeful Batman in the TV show was a bit of a retcon but don’t remember. I didn’t think he was especially meant to be black ops prior to his family all dying and I thought he was supposed to be more of a smart everyman or like a more vengeful version of the Viola Davis character.)
1. Zemo was with Hydra. trefore, automatically evil.2. Again, the fallout doesnt matter. Nothing will overshadow stark saving the universe. Nothing.
I didn’t really read Avengers as a kid so I knew nothing about the guy really, nor the fact he was Nazi adjacent— but in the movies Zemo was never Hydra. I guess the premise in the movies is that he took his training in the Sokovian special forces and just managed to hunt down the former Hydra forces and use their resources for his big petty revenge plan? (I forget if they ever explained how Hydra infiltrated Russia too.) I also was never clear on how Sokovian politics were supposed to make sense— since Zemo would have been presumably from the forces in more power while civilians like the Maximoff twins were meant to be the underclass that would get sucked into the terrorist/rebellion front Hydra handled?
“The Avengers are broke or homeless” storyline doesn’t really make any sense. Sam saved the world with a couple of wizards, a billionaire, the royal family of the most advanced nation on Earth, and a god, an activity that made him internationally famous. Even if every single one of those people and their friends and heirs somehow forgot about him, his GoFundMe would be record-setting. The fact that eveybody’s cleared and taken care of except for Sharon isn’t really in character for any of the heroes, let alone Cap.
The logical next step would have been for Sharon to be on the run with Steve, Sam and the other Avengers after Civil War. But I guess that had to go by the wayside, since Steve ended up going back in time to marry her aunt? Them shacking up in the present for an extended length of time would have made things even more weird than they already were.
Sharon’s been MIA for 5 years, and with her SHIELD knowledge being a criminal is probably pretty easy – and I’d say she’s likely the Power Broker as well.
Its not that weird. Sam is the only actual white hat, good guy. Winter Soldiers an ex-psycho/spy/assasin. Sharon worked for Shield, Zemo’s a villain. Sam’s the only one even close to anything like Steve, which is why he gave him the shield in the first place. Also, Walker’s an asshole, its obvious.
Even a morally compromised Bucky Barnes would be a goddamn moron to trust the guy who framed him for a deadly bombing, then reactivated his Hydra brainwashing, and whose entire goal in life is killing super-soldiers like him. And before anyone says “they don’t trust Zemo,” doing things like getting on someone’s private plane or following all of his instructions in a life-or-death situation certainly seem like trust to me.
Also, Walker has yet to free an unrepentant mass murderer and likely war criminal from prison. Being an asshole isn’t great, but it’s still better than being an accomplice to murder?
seriously, i cant believe how many fans forgot “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” and went straight to “but is he a villain REALLY?”, just because his character is entertaining and showed a few likable traits. Yes, he definitely is the villain, without a doubt.
Winter Soldiers an ex-psycho/spy/assasin.Involuntarily a spy and assassin.
I feel like the writers decided to take the easy way out with the Flag Smashers and make them drift into stupid evil. Maybe COVID delays and reshoots/rewrites are responsible, but still…sheesh.
It would have been so much more interesting for them to still be right in their motivations but with their actions all skirting the line, i.e. stopping at killing people (especially innocent people). Then Sam and Bucky could find themselves having to help out the Flag Smashers to protect them from the Power Broker and to stop the SS-Juice from getting loose. This would then put them at odds with Walker. Everyone (except maybe the Power Broker) justified in their motivations with conflicting goals would be far more compelling than what we were given.They could of even made the SS-Juice temporary so the Power Broker is more of a drug dealer keeping people hooked and we could get a cool Walker taking the serum and going full asshole while in withdraw (and could even have the government in cohoots with PB to keep Walker juiced). Then he becomes even more tragic as he is good guy trying to live up to an impossible legacy forced to take drugs to keep up with expectations.
I think the Flag Smashers can still remain sympathetic but Karli won’t. Remember, blowing up that building while people were still inside was not their idea, it was hers. I imagine we’ll have the good Flag Smashers joining up with Sam and Bucky to stop her.
I feel like the writers decided to take the easy way out with the Flag Smashers and make them drift into stupid evil. Uh? I’m confused, wasn’t it established this episode that they stole medicine and food from the governmental agency and redistribute it to poor people and especially kids? It doesn’t seem like unambiguously evil to me. stopping at killing people (especially innocent people).Those weren’t “innocent” people in that building, per se, those were operatives from the (possibly corrupt) program that’s hoarding food and medicine instead of giving it to those in need (the writers made a point to establish it through that awkward piece of dialogue about “six months’ worth of supplies sitting in your building”). And the car-bomb appears to have been Karli’s initiative. The other guy was appalled by it, so that has not been their M.O. so far.Also, Bucky and Sam are killing a lot of people as well, if we’re being honest. Then Sam and Bucky could find themselves having to help out the Flag Smashers (…) at odds with Walker. I think this is still exactly where the story is going, one way or the other.
You say “so easily” for Sharon, but it’s been like 10 years, maybe more, in-universe since we’ve seen her.
7 years. 2 on the run and 5 since the blip.
I find it hard to believe that a former SHIELD and FBI agent, one who gave every indication of being a passionate law enforcement professional, and who had a close relationship with Peggy Carter, would want to become a professional criminal.
I also find it hard to believe that her criminal contacts couldn’t find out who she was, and thus immediately not trust her because she spent her entire life working in law enforcement.
Sharon is also on the run from her government and persona non grata. Again it’s been 10 years. She’s been left behind and she’s obviously bitter. I’m sure she’s also not the first decorated as agent turned bad to show up in the criminal underworld.
Aunt Peggy stole her man! That’s some serious Jerry Springer shit. I can totally see her going off the rails after that
Sharon Carter, FBI? You sure? She was a SHIELD operative, and not a low level paper pusher either. She certainly has a lot of connections around the world. Also, there was at least 8-10 years gap of storyline when we last seeing her into action. Plus the whole “Blip” turned the world into disarray for the entire 5 years. Clearly she wasn’t the one got “dusted”, in return she has a lot of time being on the run in the world of chaos to amass her resources and settling in comfortably in Madripoor.
My bad, it was the CIA she joined after SHIELD collapsed, not the FBI.
I still think it’s a pretty absurd turn for a character whose only characterization has been “she fights for what she believes is right and has a lot of integrity” to do a complete moral 180 offscreen. It’s possible, I guess. It just flies in the face of what we know about her. Integrity and justice were so memorable to her because her aunt Peggy instilled those things in her, as she related at Peggy’s funeral, in a moment that was so moving that it helped inspire Steve to defy the entire world in order to stand by his friend.
So if that person is gonna break bad, I feel like it deserves more than a handwave and two seconds of griping about superheroes while she enjoys booze in her swanky penthouse atop her museum full of stolen art in the middle of Crimetown.
I tell you what’s criminal – charging/paying millions of dollars for a piece of flimsy canvas covered in glorified doodles! The money used to pay for that poncy shit was probably made from heinous income streams such as child labour, environmental exploitation or Ed Sheeran tours. Sharon is a hero for robbing those 1% scumbags and I hope she took a shit on their carpet while she was at it!
You can tell her CIA stints were very brief. Once she helped Steve went rogue and freed his mates from Superhuman Prison, she basically labelled as an enemy of the state by US. Govt. The only question I can agree on is why no one rehabilitated her status? They have the whole 5 years to do that, maybe even Steve should do it in the first place? Maybe since the world was in a 5 years sorrowful period, everyone forget about Sharon? Maybe the rehabilitation status only applied to the superhuman directly involved in the Endgame war? That’s why she grew disillusion, bitter, and nihilistic opinion on the whole govt politics and superhero things. As shown in that one scene of this show. Since she is still a wanted person, may as well going all in as a high roller crook in Madripoor. Doesn’t want all of her underworld’s connections gone wasted.
Also, Jesus, Sharon Carter went from FBI agent to high-level fence for stolen artwork awfully easily! How does one even make that career jump? Was she actually Hydra all along back in her SHIELD days?That’s if we take everything revealed about her here at face value, which I’m not (I don’t think she’s the Power Broke either, for what it’s worth.)
But even if we just went with what was revealed here, considering she became wanted by her own government after helping Steve and the rebelling ‘New’ Avengers, and then promptly forgotten about by them, and then spent the last 5 years surviving the blip in technically a sub-apocalyptic world – I’d probably be just as jaded tbh, if not more so.
It honestly feels very contrived that Steve would just abandon someone like Sharon following Civil War, especially after their romantic connection was established. He went as far as to break into the Raft to bust out Wanda and Sam, but he’d leave Sharon in the lurch?
I’d much prefer if she’s somehow undercover in the Madripoor underworld, considering her becoming a crook flies in the face of the speech she gave at Peggy’s funeral, but I guess we’ll see.
Yeah if I had to guess, she’s working undercover with being shitty at capes being her cover story.
The events of Civil War happened in 2016 in universe time it’s been 10 years. She’s a highly skilled spy who navigated the underworld her entire career. It wouldn’t be that hard to achieve in 10 years.
She’s a highly skilled spy who navigated the underworld her entire career. It wouldn’t be that hard to achieve in 10 years.Harder would be achieving it while still looking in her late 20s rather than her mid-40s. 🙂
10 years? I thought the “present” was 2023, which would make it 7 years.
I think Bucky is so focused on stopping these Super Soldiers because it is a bit of his legacy, the bad past he wants to get past. He’s been the one driving the hunt while Sam’s been trying to be more cautious. So, I can see him seeing Zemo as a necessary tool to get there… maybe if he waits a week, he can find another route, but he’s so focused, he sees this one path right now, he’s taking it right now. And Sam doesn’t know about it until Zemo is in the garage with them, done deal… he’s not convinced it’s a good idea, just that it’s what’s happening, and he better keep an eye on Zemo.
And Sharon Carter was a SHIELD agent. She was undercover to watch and protect Captain America. She’s not unskilled. When SHIELD was disbanded, the FBI was a job she could do, she wasn’t going in green.
And Walker is already being set up as the wrong one, punching that guy for not showing him respect and spitting at him… that’s not the behavior of Captain America.
A lot of shit went down in five years. They make it clear Sharon wasn’t blipped and if she was already on the lamb after Civil War I imagine the ensuing chaos didn’t make life any easier.Would also have set up someone with her connections and knowledge to make pretty decent headway in “the new world” and may even fit with the motives of the Flagsmashers if she preferred the Blippiverse to the aftermath of Endgame.
Also, Jesus, Sharon Carter went from FBI agent to high-level fence for stolen artwork awfully easily
Cause she’s working undercover, and her over-the-top bitterness and rejection of her “former” belief system should have been your first clue. She’s not the Power Broker or working for the Power Broker. She’s probably working for Shield.
Fingers crossed! Considering this same episode had Sam and Bucky palling around with someone who tried to destroy them and everything they stood for not too long ago, I took Sharon’s sudden new characterization as a similar choice.
For Sam and Bucky Zemo is a means to and end. For them he’s not the threat in this situation, because the three of them want the same thing. Also both Sam and Bucky have served in war and they’re well aware that war makes strange bedfellows. I mean Churchill and Roosevelt both got into bed with that genocidal megalomaniac Stalin in order to beat Hitler. It’s the old the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Also, Jesus, Sharon Carter went from FBI agent to high-level fence for stolen artwork awfully easily! How does one even make that career jump? Was she actually Hydra all along back in her SHIELD days? That did kind of bug me. It’s one thing that she would have had to stay off the grid and go somewhere with no extradition; fine. But you’d think she’d have found a better career choice, something where she’s still helping people and being on the right side of morality, even if she can’t do it in the same official capacity as before. This is the woman who gave us “No. You move.” (Okay, well, technically that was Peggy, but Sharon’s speech from Civil War clearly demonstrated Sharon’s adherence to that principle.)It would be plausible if she had started her underground career doing good things (A-Team style) but then had been pushed further and further into desperate straits over time. But you need to develop a character like that; just having them appear for the first time in five years as essentially a different person is much too abrupt. It’d take half an episode’s running time at a minimum to lay out a story like that.
Exactly! At this point, do I even want her to get her federal pardon? Is she a good person who’s fallen on hard times, or is she now an unrepentant crook who no longer values any of the things she once held dear?
Well, Walker will always still be on the wrong side as he is serving a nation and its agenda, unlike Steve.
This whole episode took the worst of CW (which is 95% of it) and cut it down and tried to jam it into this episode. Not only did they break him out of jail, but they managed to spend days traveling before being found. If the fire alarm was pulled, a high level prisoner would be checked on immediately. So within 5 min of Zemo pulling the alarm they would be on the run. Not only that but Wakanda would have giant flashing lights and alarms going off should Zemo escape, and would have him tracked down in hours if not an hour. Sharon’s fall makes no sense, it also makes Steve, and Sam look like massive assholes. They were on the run but decided to leave Sharon behind and forget about her????? like what!!. Her fall makes no sense for anything given how she was in TWS. Lets go to an island that is clearly Taiwan where there are no asian people??? Lets walk across a bridge and then get picked dup half way across???
Everything about this episodes was soooo painfully dumb.
I also didn’t love that Madripoor – a place that is inspired by all of the sleazy, dangerous parts of Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangkok combined – didn’t seem to have any Asians in its otherwise admirably multicultural population.
I assumed it was to avoid making it seem like Asians were shady, as opposed to this city being a shady place that happened to be in Asia. And as a friend pointed out to me, the current anti-Asian sentiment going around does not need any additional fuel.
Are there dangerous parts of Singapore? I only visited there as a kid and could vaguely blend in so long as I didn’t talk, but Crazy Rich Asians and Shirkers are essentially my only frame of reference for it, beyond gum and Sex and the City bans.I am curious about how international this series ultimately ends up being since I was aware of all those vague plans that kept getting scuttled/shuffled (like filming in Puerto Rico) but I don’t recall hearing what other arrangements they ended up making and where.
Everywhere has dangerous parts.
Yeah, but the dangerous parts of Singapore is like a kid zone anywhere else. I lived there. The only known rough spots were Orchard Tower at night, Geylang and Yishun. Even then I spend nights over those areas and still feeling safer than any other rough spots in Asia I have visited. Singapore is in the top 5 of the safest countries in the world for a reason.
So you didn’t like the fact Madripoor wasn’t predominantly occupied by Asians, despite acknowledging that it’d be problematic if it was? *scratches head*
Basically. I think it’s possible to thread a needle between “The City of Yellow Peril” and “The Only Major City in Asia Entirely Devoid of Asian People.”
yeah, the lack of Asians in what’s supposed to be an Asian city took me out of it a bit, but it made up for it with all that C Y B E R P U N K aesthetic (even if it felt like it was just on an antiseptic set). And has no one really mentioned they surely went for some Akira vibes while they drove into the city with those bikes surrounding them with the neon cityscape in the background? I was nerding out!
I tend to think Derek Kolstad is a deeply mediocre writer who manages to have one of his scripts turned into John Wick, which for some reason gave him huge Hollywood cred despite that movie resting entirely on the cast and action directing, so this episode falling flat compared to the first two is not a surprise to me. (Also, he totally just self-cannibalized the “hero does a no-no in the criminal underworld and now everyone is after them for a bounty” thing from the Wick sequels, which, lmao.)
Wow, the John Wick thing (but with much less hand to hand) was so blatant I’m not sure if it’s better or worse that he’s involved here.That Bob Odenkirk movie is the only other thing of his that’s out that I’ve even heard of so I don’t know if there are many other tropes associated with his work b
So, Sharon is the Power Broker, right? That’s the only way any part of her participation in this story makes sense.
That would actually make it make less sense, as it would mean she put herself in a potentially deadly fight with the bounty hunters.
Not to mention it makes Sharon the dumbest Power Broker ever – she had Super Soldier serum, one of the valuable substances in the world, and she had the means to make more of it in Nagel and the lab. If Sharon is the Power Broker, it means that she messaged the Flag Smashers that she’s going to kill them. So the Power Broker saves Sam / Bucky / Zemo from Selby’s enforcers….why? If she lets Selby kill them, her hands are clean, no one else from the government is going to connect the dots of the Super Soldier serum to her (Zemo was the only one that guessed), and that’s that. She still gets to make more Super Soldier serum as she wants, and she can have her men chase down and kill the Flag Smashers at her leisure without Sam or Walker interfering.If she just wants a pardon (sure? if she’s the Power Broker, what’s the point in a pardon?), then it would make sense to save Sam / Bucky / Zemo at first, and then throw them off of Nagel’s scent and his lab altogether. Why put at risk your most valuable human asset? Like you mention, why not call off the bounty hunters altogether? (With or without Sam knowing it.) Obviously Sharon is not just a stolen-art fence – why would she be hanging out incognito at Selby’s place – but it makes more sense for her to be someone else’s deep cover agent – Fury? SWORD? the CIA still? – then it does for Sharon to be the Power Broker. Otherwise, at the end of the episode, she scrambling to fix major problems she herself set in motion.
If she’s the Broker then she clearly isn’t having a lot of luck tracking the Smashers down. It’d be a lot easier to do the same thing Walker is doing and just track down Falcon, Sam and Zemo in order to find them. But, yes, if she is the Broker there would have to be some explanation for why she’d want Nagel dead, because she’d be an idiot to think he wouldn’t be after sending Zemo to him. This show is set for multiple seasons, so I’m hoping they don’t try to wrap up everything with the serum right away, so maybe there’s already other people working on it. Maybe Nagel wasn’t in the Broker’s good graces anymore, and needed to be tracked down. Seemed odd he was in a secret little lab with no security. But yeah, maybe she’s just an unactivated agent who is using the fugitive thing to infiltrate Mardipoor’s gangs on Fury’s orders. Honestly I’m fine with any of it, as long as we don’t get something like “Zemo was secretly the Broker” because that would just be too obvious.
Yeah, it was…kinda there. Didn’t really gel for me.
The whiplash going from reading the I09 review to this is something else. It’s like you aren’t watching the same show.
The fanboy centric pages like the one you mentioned or YouTube channels pandering to a similar demographic have become so insufferable in the last few years. I don’t think they dare to give negative reviews to anything Marvel or DC (unless there is overwhelming consensus). It’s not their fault entirely, there’s this new breed of fans who are toxic and organized and hit out against anything remotely critical of their property. Most of these pages and channels are in it for the money after all and naturally they don’t want to ruffle any feathers.
“Who is this guy?” speaking of Zemo?He’s a master of infiltration and psy-ops tactics who is mostly known in the comics for very efficiently and convincingly pretending to be a good guy. This is dead on for him, really, it just makes Bucky look desperate.
I liked it a lot, I thought it added some fun wrinkles (especially Zemo being an ally, for now) to what seemed like a pretty straightforward story. Loved Sharon’s Daredevil/John Wick moment too.
The show is trying to put waaaaay too many characters, each that have good story potential if they were more of a focus, into this series. It’s criminal to toss Isaiah and Nagel in there as asides. Sam and Bucky exploring that story alone could’ve been a series. Them dealing with Walker could be a series unto itself. As it is now, Walker, Zemo, Karli and the Flag Smashers, Sharon (who might be the Power Broker), are all too many characters to juggle while giving any of them their due. Which is making Sam and Bucky get short shrifted as characters at this point. Now we have Wakanda in the mix too? It’s getting to be too much. I don’t see how they can find time to focus on all these disparate threads enough to make any of them land in three episodes.
I kind of agree. Given the setup of the first two episodes, I’ll be really, really disappointed if the shows loses its focus from its two title characters.
It sounds like I enjoyed this episode a lot more than y’all. I like how Bruhl is playing Zemo. He’s being straightforward, but you also can see he’s calculating the angles. Plus, him as awkward older guy at the club in a black turtleneck was great. The cracks in nu-Cap are really starting to show, and Karli’s extremism is starting to get ramped up. One thing that doesn’t make sense to me is why the unsnapped are displaced. It seems the unsnapped people would have been in control of everything when the snapped returned, and the snapped folks would be the ones in camps and out on the streets.
Also, I was super happy to see Ayo pop-up at the end.
I was super happy to see that Ayo’s finally going to actually matter.
I think a bunch of her stuff got cut from Panther? But yes, especially after her scene stealing moment in Civil War.
I actually really liked Zemo. I hope he has no plan. I hope his whole plan is to continue to destroy super soldier serums (good idea) and troll Bucky (great idea) and acknowledge the cultural barriers Sam faces as a black man (best idea).
He’s a great personal antagonist for Bucky. In the same way that Walker is a great personal antagonist for Sam.
Its a little different. Walker hasnt really hurt Sam personally, or intentionally, except for his pride, maybe,
I’m not saying they’re one to one. But where it stands right now in terms of narrative structure, they’re occupying a similar space. As it is, if Sam had turned over the shield and nothing more happened, he could’ve rested on his laurels and not thought about it again. Having Walker take up the mantle (and be, well, not very good at it) ultimately forces him to act.
He’s Zemo. Of course he has a master plan. If you think he doesnt, thats like thinking when Hannibal Lechter is helping clarice or will graham, that he has no plan.
Zemo feels like a real wild card, and I, personally, am into it.
He was behind the scenes in a lot of ways for Civil War, so we ultimately never knew much about him beyond the fact that he was Hydra and lost his family in Sarkovia. So it’s interesting getting to see him have a bit more of a personality here.(Which is also, appropriately enough, roughly my same feelings about Bucky.)
Yea it makes me think that a lot of important people (presidents, kings, CEOs) were the ones who got snapped.
I feel like I’d be the only one who would enjoy a show just with Sam, Bucky, Zemo, and Sharon set in Madripoor, hustling, fencing art and kicking ass. Madripoor Nights
Don’t forget dancing awkwardly at the club, Zemo-style.
Make it the super powered version of “Silk Stockings” (am I the only person who remembers this show? I mentioned it to my wife and a couple of friends recently, and they had no idea what I was talking about. They also didn’t know about Lorenzo Lamas or Renegade, which made me think of how much of the 90s I wasted watching trash on Sony Entertainment Television).
USA!yes, I’m that old too…
I hope the show clarifies but I’m inferring that a lot of resources (jobs, real estate, material goods) might have become more easily available to the have-nots of the world with half the population vanishing. (Perhaps some governments had a land-rush-esque lottery to reassign vacant houses?) So when the blip-ees return and want their property/careers back, whoever’s taken over that job and been fixing up that house over the last 5 years is going to be pretty salty if they’re told they have to leave.
Right? Which is why I would figure that the blip-ees would be the displaced ones. They must have declared the blip-ees officially dead at some point and their property officially inherited or redistributed somehow. Otherwise it would be too hard for society to function during the blip with all the property rights in limbo.
I like Bruhl’s performance too, though I’m not so sure about the direction the TV show is taking his character. I get that in the comics Zemo is an aristocrat, and if you port that over it makes sense that being a Baron means having a great deal of wealth. But it undermines a lot of what I really liked about the character in Civil War, where he was, for the most part, just a regular guy who succeeded almost entirely by being cunning. It was a nice inversion of the MCU’s usual hero-villain relationship, but that dissolves when you make him a rich guy with endless resources at his disposal.
That phone call exists to remind us that Sam’s family has a boat, a boat I’m convinced will be destroyed before the series is over.
Chekov’s shrimp boat
F&WS episode 3 feels (to me) like the episode the producers were working on a year ago when studio quarantine/lockdown happened. The flow is disjointed as if the production had been interrupted and put on the shelf for several months before it could be completed. I’m guessing not every single member of the cast and crew was still available for pick-ups and ADR when production resumed.
The last episode of Wandavision felt this way as well.
I agree it was weakest episode so far. Everything rushed. There was no space between lines. If you told me it was written as two episodes, shrunk down to one with massive Walker and Tuberculosis woman parts cut out, id believe you.But it was the best looking episode. I liked the scenes of the city, the motorcycles flanking the car, the club. It looked like it borrowed from Kill Bill and John Wick and I was ok with that.
Glad it’s not just me. I watched this episode while I was very tired and kept drifting off, but, man, did it feel seriously poorly written. The dialogue in particular was pretty awful.Not sure what they’re going with with the Flag Smashers storyline. When they were first introduced, they were described with ominous portent as “a group that wants to do away with borders and barriers between people!” Um, so, they’re the good guys…?And Karli needs super serum in order to, um, help dispossessed refugees? How is that going to help, exactly?And do we really need to set up what appears to be a humanitarian organization doing what would clearly be massively important work as some kind of shadow villainous cabal?
Do Sam and Bucky have ANY kind of official standing in the government at this point? Why aren’t they just arrested on sight by “Captain America” and his crew.
I know that half the world disappearing and reappearing isn’t something you can just ignore in your larger universe. But part of me really wishes that they had.
It seems like most of the people who had “problems” with this episode are really having to reach far to find them. All the questions being asked about why is a character doing this and that…there are very obvious answers to. Only if you aren’t paying basic attention are you missing it. If it’s difficult to follow along with what is happening, and if, for whatever reason, it’s taking too much energy to, maybe it’d be easier to just choose not to watch.
Oh, so now we’re doing, “you weren’t smart enough to get it?” Lovely.
Fuck off.
Releasing a criminal mastermind and mass murderer from prison is incredibly stupid. It is proven to be stupid before the end of the episode when Zemo murders the only living lead they have to finding the Power Broker.
The entire reason they supposedly need Zemo is that he knows Hydra secrets. But he learned Hydra’s secrets by combing through the files publicly released by Black Widow when SHIELD fell. So literally anyone could find the information he has.
Is calling out the entire premise of the episode as contrived, and out of character for both the pragmatic Bucky and the morally upstanding Sam, considered reaching?
The Flag smashers have been my biggest problem with the series so far. “One world, one people, no borders!” That’s…. Awesome? Inspiring? Everything I could ever dream of? Why would I root for the guys wrapped in a flag of a country known for multiple war crimes and senseless wars? The movies always managed to steer clear from that dilemma by having Cap villains being literal Nazis, hidden Nazis in the USA government, aliens, robots made by his friend and other heroes representing a terrible law, but the Flag smashers? Sign me up already
Heh. Yup.
Sam and Bucky aren’t exactly wrapping themselves up in the flag. They’re motivations for stopping the Flag Smashers is that they’re terrorists and they’re more interested on the supplier than the Flag Smashers. The American government aren’t exactly good guys in the MCU. The CIA are creating super soldiers.
Karli needs super serum in order to, um, help dispossessed refugees? How is that going to help, exactly?Well, we saw them in action. Just moving all those crates in so little time requires super-strength and super-resilience. A group of ordinary people wouldn’t be able to pull off that kind of heist. Also, they would have been arrested by Cap & co. by now, as per previous episodes. Do Sam and Bucky have ANY kind of official standing in the government at this point? Why aren’t they just arrested on sight by “Captain America” and his crew.That part was baffling. Cap released Bucky from custody only at the condition he worked for him, but then Bucky said “nope”, and Cap was just “Okay then. See you around”. I know that half the world disappearing and reappearing isn’t something you can just ignore in your larger universe. But part of me really wishes that they had.Ditto. I hope it won’t become a burden for the universe going forward. But I have the feeling it’ll come a time when it will be singled out as one of the major mistakes of the MCU.
I didn’t HATE this ep, but it certainly seemed like it was a completely different team of writers who wrote this one than the first two. Haven’t checked the credits but tonally it was just so different. It’s almost like the difference between the Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker. The things some people hated about the first two eps (basically it was Marvel’s Lethal Weapon with all the bantering) some people missed in this ep. Hard to find anyone who liked both ep 2 and 3 I think.
Agreed. It felt like it was written by the “B Team” or something. Just pretty inconsistent with the first two in terms of dialogue, plotting, etc.
Interestingly enough… just looked at the writer’s credits, and it’s the guy who wrote the John Wick movies. Which… actually sort of makes sense.
It’s very hard to parse that stuff in TV, though, as the show runner has so much control and the power to rewrite and edit completely without attribution.
Yeah this is still the big narrative problem- it looks so far like they’re doing the “this group has a legitimate grievance but they’re going too far” shit. Superhero stories tend to be about defending the status quo (I’d say by nature, but the original Superman comics were not about that shit), but maybe for once the revolutionaries can be the protagonists?
The episode was clunky compared to the others, but this review seems more concerned about focusing on what the episode wasn’t and not about what it was. Then goes on to praise Sharon’s and Bucky’s fights while saying the action failed? There wasn’t much more action than that.I felt it had a very John Wick vibe and so I wasn’t surprised afterwards I saw it was written by John Wicks creator. Those movies are ten times more stupid and yet mostly loved by audiences. I feel this show is trying to play up to action movies in general and thus the plot can go off to the side at times.
Sharon being the Powerbroker is an interesting thought, one I hadn’t considered, as I automatically assumed she was actually just acting as an off-the-book CIA asset.
She still could be a CIA/SHIELD/Whatever asset, but I kind of hope she’s the Broker just because it will be more interesting than something like Zemo being the Broker. Its still kind of messy, but I think it explains a bit about all the coincidences of this episode if she is the Broker or works for them and is trying to erase all the evidence of the serum they made now that its out of their hands and the US knows about it.
One clue that was making me lean towards her being the Broker more than others is that Zemo (who was definitely going to shoot Nagel anyways) had a brief surprised look on his face when he noticed Sharon was coming in to the lab and he chose that second to kill Nagel, someone who might have been able to ID her. If the Sharon is the Broker, she probably wants Karli and the Smashers too, and will do the same thing Walker is doing and just follow Sam and Bucky.
But if she was the power broker why would she have to bust her ass fighting all those guys in the shipyard? She couldve just stood there and did nothing and that takes care of Sam and Bucky and Zemo. And why would she tell them where the scientist really was? Unless she wanted her own most valuable employee dead for some bizarre, unknown reason.
So Bucky didn’t actually do anything to help Zemo escape, right? He could have done that literally at any time?And, given his staggering resources, just got on a plane and fucked off to anywhere.So, uh, why was he still in jail?
That or Bucky somehow decided to break him out before even talking to him and somehow got the keycard in to the cell?
There was a keycard? Okay, I must have missed that.
It certainly looked like that’s what was in the book as a bookmark. I might have to rewatch that sequence because there’s quite a bit about it that just doesn’t seem to fit. It could still be possible that Zemo had the card on his own and was ready to break out and just needed someone willing to trigger the lockdown by getting prisoners to fight.
That was definitely a key card in the book.
So Bucky didn’t actually do anything to help Zemo escape, right? He could have done that literally at any time?For Zemo to execute that plan himself, he would have to be the one passing the note, which would put him in the rec room when the fight broke out, which means all the guards would be swarming towards his location rather than away from it.
How on Earth did Bucky execute the note? Far easier for Zemo, who would undoubtedly have allies/contacts/people he could bribe in the prison population.
How did he execute the note? By writing it down on a piece of paper. You’re really overthinking this.
So Bucky wrote the note? Because Zemo can’t write a tiny note himself?
Which one of them wrote the note is the absolute least important detail in the entire plan. It genuinely does not matter which of them actually put pen to paper. I don’t know why you’re so hung up on this.
I’m not remotely hung up on who wrote the note. You said initially that Zemo couldn’t have executed the plan, since he needed to be far away when the note was discovered.Which means nothing. He still could have set the plan in motion without being there for delivery.Then I said “How did Bucky execute the note” and you said, “By writing it down on a piece of paper.” Which is NOT an answer to that question.
Then I said, sarcastically, “because Zemo couldn’t write it himself?”The one who put too much emphasis on the note’s origin was you. I said “how did bucky execute the note” meaning the plan. Who cares who wrote it, Bucky would have zero ability/access to get it into the prisoner to the note’s needed targets.
“He still could have set the plan in motion without being there for delivery.”
If he wanted to escape then, sure. Since he already won in Civil War, though, he didn’t really care about being in prison; he specifically wanted Bucky to break him out as one of his mental games because Bucky needed his help.“Which is NOT an answer to that question.”
Yes, it is an answer to how he executed the note. Did you actually mean to ask how he executed the plan?
“Bucky would have zero ability/access to get it into the prisoner”?
Did the guy eat it? Or did you mean Bucky would have no way to get it to the prisoner (which we saw happen onscreen, so clearly you’re wrong about him having “zero ability/access” to do it)?I didn’t pick up your sarcasm because the way you word your questions makes them sound like something completely different from what you actually mean.
What I couldn’t understand was how did Bucky get the note or know who to give it to? I mean did he stop to write down on the way out?The prison break was hilariously bad just starting from the things listed here.
Yeah, he just wrote it down, & Zemo’s instruction was probably “give it to whoever looks like they have the shortest temper.”
Bucky created the distraction for the guards that Zemo needed.
Question from the last episode, but what’s the reason Bucky hasn’t aged? I kind of thought he was unfrozen at some point later in time like Captain, but the last episode had the story of him fighting the other super soldier in the Korean War. I guess that he killed Tony’s parent puts him back farther in time too, I just didn’t think about it too much then.
While he’s the Winter Soldier (so, from like, 1945 to 2016 or something), he’s only unfrozen for missions and then immediately refrozen, and Black Widow attributed something like two dozen deaths to him (not sure on the number, but it wasn’t huge, so not that many missions) in Winter Soldier.
Also, the same answer to everything else about him and Steve Rogers, super-soldier serum
Yeah but the black soldier they were talking to was pumped full of the serum too and he’d clearly aged, which I think is probably what brought the question to my head in the first place.But I should have watched the 3rd episode before posing my question, as Nemo says something to him along the lines of “at least while you were imprisoned you weren’t conscious….” or something like that, so @NewEnglandBestEngland’s perfectly logical response looks to be right on (which I’m guessing if I was paying attention is info I should have already gleamed).
Man, usually I’m relatively in line with av club but the reviews for this have been way off base with how I’ve felt about it. This score for this ep is bananas to me
he can go on dates (and dating apps apparently set to “both men and women”) but he can’t enjoy the music of the modern era?
Most people imprint on the style of music they liked as teens. Also, you have to remember that Bucky was blipped. Steve had 5 more years to acquaint himself with modern American culture. Bucky’s timeline post Winter Soldier is something like this:De-Winter Soldierized>>>Monastery-like situation in Wakanda>>>Blipped>>>6 to 8 months post return from Blip.
Steve was much farther along even before the Blip. The lists we saw him making in TWS were probably 2 or more years post him coming out of the ice.
I’ve accepted the show’s not going to be great, but can at least be a dumb, fun ride with charming actors. Bring on the b-movie cliches!
The show really seems to want the audience to empathize with Karli Morgenthau. One thing I found interesting was, whenever she’s discussed by others, she’s referred to by her first name rather than her last.Hear me out:In most shows, the villain (or someone meant to be viewed unfavorably) is typically referred to by their last name. If the first name *is* used, it’s by another character who had a pre-existing relationship with the person-in-question. The first name usage is a verbal representation of tte emotional tie.But in this episode, both Walker and Zemo referred to her as “Karli”. Granted it could still be revealed that both/either knew her beforehand – but I doubt it. And as neither men (presumably) don’t know her, it’s an interesting verbal semantic tic.Which is why I suspect it’s an attempt by the show to have us view her less like a villain and more misguided and/or morally grey.Granted, I could be overthinking all of this and just talking out of my arse. 😉
I agree with all this, which was made the show’s decision to have Karli, whose name I keep writing wrong, commit mass murder of bound hostages at the end so staggering.
I also think it’s a reflection of the tendency to refer to women in high-profile positions by their first names and men by their last names. For examples, most male politicians are referred to either by their first and last name or just their last name (and often interchangeably). The same thing with actors/celebrities.
Why was Sam playing an African whatever-guy without an African accent? I would think that that would be the thing that would raise suspicions.
Just cause someone is African doesn’t mean they will have an “African” Accent, whatever that is, Africa is a continent and we have different accents here, not some generic african accent.
I’m an unapologetic MCU fan, and I liked Spidey 2 and loved WandaVision, but if this series wraps up with a post-cred scene revealing that someone was a Skrull all along, I’m gonna be chagrined.
This was my favorite episode coincidentally
So either Sharon or Zemo is the Broker, right?
“(and dating apps apparently set to “both men and women”)“So deleted tweets to freeze-frame gags? Is a deep beleaguered sigh deep and beleaguered enough for this?[…]And now I clicked the link: Can Twitter just burn and everyone just shut their seeing-Reed-Richards-in-burnt-toast mouths already, for the love of actual anything?
For an nation-state in the Indonesian archipelago, there was a definite lack of Indonesians there. Can you yellowface a fictional country? Not for lack of trying I guess…Also those motorbikes are native to Japan. I suppose a case could be made for a subculture making it popular there, but this episode used up all its credibility…credits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C5%8Ds%C5%8Dzoku
Sam should have silenced his phone. It going off in the middle of a mission only makes sense if he’s never done a covert op before. I’m with the review. After two awesome episodes, this was a clumsy entry. But I did appreciate Zemo finally being recognized as “Baron” (it always bugged me how he was presented in Civil War) and getting a mask. That was literally his defining feature. It would be like doing the Cobra Commander without a mask. Daniel Brühl shined this week. Here’s hoping he gets to do some sword-fighting soon.
I liked Bruhl even more after this ep. The guy is incapable of overplaying a character. Just putting on the mask, he stopped for a second and considered it. He gave it the same little look he gave it before packing it in his bag: “Here I go again after all this time.” Seven years, was it? It was like he was falling – very subtly – off the wagon.
Overlooking turning off his phone was definitely a dumb move, but my impression is that he was a soldier, not a spy.
I struggle to imagine that “turn off your phone during missions” is not standard OpSec training.
I assumed that she was the one to kill Selby, and I also think it’s pretty likely she’s the Power Broker.
This episode was an absolute mess. Lazy writing and TERRIBLE direction. With all the radical plot and character shifts that it forces down the audience’s throat, the whole goddamned episode grinds to a halt SO SAM AND BUCKY CAN WALK IN SLOW MOTION INTO SELBY’S LOFT???? Selby is a character that, by all rights, shouldn’t even exist!Seriously, what was the point of Selby?? Just replace her with SHARON! Boom, you discover that Sharon is the ‘fence’, it’s the big reveal that she’s turned criminal, and it spares us at least one agonizingly unnecessary scene.I was willing to suspend some disbelief that the heroes would team up with Zemo. But the fact that Sam and Bucky let Zemo operate unfettered even after he murders an unarmed scientist is beyond ridiculous.Goddamn, this show started with some really rich thematic ground to cover and it’s very quickly devolved into a completely incomprehensible thriller. I was struggling to register all the stupid infodumps getting tossed out throughout the entire Madripoor portion.
I thought this episode was quite fun and easily had the best fight scenes in the MCU since the Winter Soldier and added some levity after the last two episodes. I’ll say this was my favorite episode so far.
They were careful not to use any pronouns for Power Broker, meaning it has to be a woman, right? Is it Sharon?
I actually like this episode. The world-building was strong, and the details about Zemo were interesting (although I’m not sure they align with what we learned in Civil War). Very interested to learn more about Sharon’s role, and how Wakanda will fit into this.
No mention of Ayo? Like, at all? Damn.
The writing didn’t make much sense – I agree with that. I could see John Walker freeing Zemo in a misguided attempt to use him and be burned by it, I had a really hard time understanding why Sam and Bucky would do it (and give him free reign after) given their history with him.It’s especially strange given Sam and Bucky refused to work with Walker last week. In their book, is Walker worse than Zemo?But I personally found most everything about Madripoor fun. Zemo played off of Sam and Bucky well (even if it made no sense) and the action was pretty entertaining. And I did like Zemo revealing he was a baron and wearing his comic book costume too.
Zemo can give them intel that Walker doesn’t have. That’s why they’re working with him.
Madripoor was an interesting location since it has largely been associated with The X-Men. Looks like the integration is happening slowly.
* Yeah, I spent a lot of time wishing this episode had been a little bit better. If your plot is going to be this ludicrous and cliche (and I wish it wasn’t) then everything has to be over the top in an original way, as in a John Woo movie or Con Air. There wasn’t enough wildness to overcome the conventionality of the by the numbers action plot of the A arc.* Zemo’s escape, for example, was boring. We didn’t need umpteenth variation on the Silence of the Lamb interview scene. We didn’t need the umpteenth variation on the escape prison by blending in with the guards scenarios that was old when Tom Cruise did it better in M:I. Zemo is a brilliant strategist who fooled the Avengers, the entire world’s security apparatus and Hydra. Post- fall of Sokovia and Blip, he’s probably even a hero to some. He should be able to get out of prison without help from Bucky. And no, there wasn’t any logical reason to free him other than it would be cool to team him up with Sam and Bucky. There had to be a smarter way to do that. * This is just a personal preference, but I wish that Zemo wasn’t really royalty. I would rather that Zemo acquired the title and fortune from a Hydra agent who was no longer in the position to use either. That would have made the greeting by the old man servant — now clearly demonstrating that he doesn’t care which evil baron he serves as long as he has work— much funnier to me. One the aspects of the MCU’s Zemo that makes him interesting is his contempt for and manipulation of all forms of authority. Adopting a barony as a useful tool would be in keeping with that sentiment.
* I still think Daniel Bruhl made Zemo entertaining, but the script could have given him more help imo.* Madripoor looked pretty cool, not gonna lie.* Fun fact: In Falcon’s first origin story, it was revealed that Sam “Snap” Wilson was a pimp who learned the art of falconry for survival when a plane he was traveling on crash landed on a remote jungle island. Yeah, that got retconned.* Bucky’s fight in the club was ok, but couldn’t at least one of his assailants have some form of enhancement or exotic weapon? This is Madripoor after all, both would be normal there. Did a bunch of normal thugs actually believe they could take on a super soldier with a bionic arm barehanded?* Instead of Airplane Mode, phones in action movies should have an “I’m making an illegal arms deal” mode.* Emily VanCamp is a likable actor who I’ve liked in other roles, but I wasn’t drawn in by her performance. I couldn’t help thinking of other actors that I’ve seen deliver the tough, embittered, sarcastic and quippy agent turned mercenary/outlaw archetype more effectively. I’m sorry to say she felt link the weak link in this episode.* Was anyone else hoping Nagel had taken the super soldier serum? Would have been an interesting complication in the action set piece, and Zemo would have looked more impressive if he had taken down an enhanced Nagel by himself.* I don’t think Karli took deliberate murder lightly. I think its valid to say the escalation was abrupt, but its already established that the Flag Smashers enemies are trying to kill them and that the FS is willing to fight to death — they were trying to kill their foes in the truck battle. The move to assassination of defeated opponents was a shock, but Karli clearly sees this as a war. But I think the price of her choices were weighing on her when she talked about dreaming of becoming a teacher. She knew that wish is out of reach. And I think the actor playing Karli is doing a great job conveying her feelings.* Ayo! That’s all.
hmm.. The scientist guy.. Well, I thought he might last longer, but apparently not. Since this is the era of cloud storage, I wonder if the updated formula for the super soldier serum is out there, possibly.
I’m wondering if the Grand Director is out there and active at all. Certain folks may remember him.
Madripoor is a lot more multicultural than I was expecting, but I
suppose that is purposeful. Usually it is portrayed in the comics like
Hong Kong. I recognized the name of the Princess Bar, but no Jessan
Hoan/Tyger Tiger, O’Donnell, Archie Corrigan, Chief Tan? Maybe another day..
Obviously, no Patch.. (right?)
… I had forgotten about the Sarah subplot. I suppose the phone call
helped to remind some of us of that. I couldn’t tell who started
popping people at the nightclub as soon as Sam was outed? Was that
Sharon only? Did she have help?
…. so most of the world’s greatest art is at somebody’s underground nightclubs?
… I wonder what the revelation about Zemo’s escape and Bucky’s
connection is going to have an affect on his pardon status. We’ll see.
… despite what happened at the shipping docks, I’m doubtful that the entirety of the updated serum is truly lost.
And I suspect that Zemo’s betrayal will come before long. And I still
think he will eventually become Citizen V somehow, even though fans will
already know the gimmick.. And I think it will come out that his grandfather was a Nazi sympathizer and collaborator during the World War II era.I doubt that Zemo is dying, so I hope that the interaction with Ayo doesn’t end up with something embarrassing for Wakanda.Also, hopefully Wakandan scientists will give Sam an upgrade for his technology, so he can be an unofficial Agent of Wakanda.
I liked this one pretty well, but I kind of felt like I was watching a different show from the first two episodes. And it makes me wonder if the show wouldn’t have benefited from having more than just six episodes. Or if it’s going to be stuffing in more story material than it can handle. What made the first two episodes so great was that it gave a lot of space for its two leads, both separately, and then together; where they are post-blip, relating to each other, what their conflicts and needs are, and what their respective arcs will be.But then this took a sharp left turn into something pretty wildly different, and even Bucky and Sam kind of got lost in the weeds.I thought the most underused threadline was Bucky having to be The Winter Soldier again. Strolling into a bar, not really speaking, following orders, being passed around like a commodity. It seemed like it was going to turn into something really interesting…but then the phone call came, that lady got killed, and the show got distracted by other things.Also, they only have six episodes, which means that they can’t really afford to have even one week off from Sam’s own material (what’s going to get him to take up the shield) even for one week.All of which is to say, I got into this show for its two leads, and I’ll be mightily disappointed if that’s ultimately undercut by the need to feed the Marvel beast.
Feige seemed to imply that while there are no immediate plans for a WandaVision S2, that Marvel was indeed planning on this show getting multiple seasons. So, if it pans out that way, maybe some of this character development is getting parceled out at a deliberately slower pace.
Oh, I am so glad to hear that.Though are they going to change its name then at some point? To something like”‘Captain America and White Wolf”?(“Uncle Sam and the Bionic Staring Machine”?)
The Marvel beast ended up destroying Wandavision’s concept so I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen again.
Hmm, I don’t really agree with that. The end of the show was still pretty focused on completing the emotional journeys for its two title characters. While it failed in other areas, I took that to be more due to the Covid shutdown, rather than Marvel making specific demands.
I’m talking about it’s not ending (we’ll see Wanda again, but most likely never see any justice for the people in the town she tortured) and completely giving up on the tv concept when it could have had that involved in the finale in a million ways.
Even worse, the episode was boring. The Falcon and The Winter Soldier promised to be an action show. The action sequence with Carter was good but beyond that they did nothing that couldn’t have been done in half the time in a more narratively tight way. Drawing out a scene is different than drawing out the suspense.
Also, we could use maybe a few less players on the board. What are there, like 7 now? Sam&Bucky, Zemo, New Cap, Carter, The Power Broker, The Flag Smashers, and now Wakanda? They need to start unwinding this and setting clear alliances.
Zemo doing a Bruce Wayne impression saved the episode for me.
Nicholas Pryor is the only person who’s appeared in both The Falcon and the Snowman and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
Until reading your comment I had forgotten that The Falcon and the Snowman existed yet each time I went to say The Falcon and the Winter Soldier I’d instead (every feckin time) say The Falcon and the Winter Snowman and then have to correct myself. Now it’s clear to me why I was doing that. It was wrecking my head, so yeah thanks for sorting that one out for me.
I figure she’s not working for the Power Broker, but I’m curious where her loyalties lie now.Really? I figure she is the Power Broker.
I half-expected Zemo to leave them in the lurch. I really expected him
to be putting Sam on with that snake cocktail, or even have poisoned the
food he so kindly serves Sam and Bucky. WHO is this guy?
It’s nice to get villains who aren’t evil just because they’re evil. His motivation in Civil War was because nation was destroyed thanks to super powers being a thing, and his motivations so far seem to stem from that. He doesn’t want super soldiers, so he’s willing to work with Sam and Bucky and not try to kill them yet, then outright murder a scientist who is making a serum to make more super soldiers.Honestly, I think Zemo is one of the best villains in the MCU because he’s not comically evil and isn’t going to abandon Sam and Bucky just because he is a villain and that’s what villains do.I’ve been liking the Flag-Smashers too. Not only is their motivation clear – though their ultimate goal seems pretty impossible – up until Karli set off the bomb I was starting to root for them because they want to help people. (Also, kudos to this show and WandaVision for showing us the consequences of half the population reappearing after disappearing for five years, something Spider-Man: Far From Home brushed off way too easily.)
I really liked Zemo asking Sam and Bucky if they’d been to the Sokovia memorial. It’s a nice way to remind the audience that, whatever else he’s done, Zemo is a victim of the Avengers’ actions.
I’m fascinated by Nu-Zemo, but he’s decidedly a very different character from Civil War Zemo. Seems like a bit of an overcorrection after some fans were saying “That’s not Baron Zemo!”, but I dig it.
Sam being too stupid to turn his phone off in a meeting with criminal psychopaths really spoiled an already weak episode. Hate when a usually competent person does something idiotic just because the script says so
“Where are we?” asked Sam, five minutes into a conversation with Bucky about hypothetically letting Zemo out of jail.
I guess it never occurred to him to ask that question on the way there, huh? Or before they left? He just willingly followed Bucky to the mysterious warehouse, only deciding to ask that question when it was juuuust in time for a dramatic reveal.
Better question, why would a phone ringing be a sign of anything other than a phone ringing? Like do they not use phones? That part seemed forced. Or like hang it up/ignore it, only on tv shows are you forced to answer a ringing phone ffs.
I am in crazytown. I loved this episode. Loved Sharon. Loved Zemo. Loved the Wakandan twist at the end. What’s there not to like?
So this was the attempt to do a John Wick episode, right? I was getting strong JW-wannabe vibes from the entire Madripoor part, and especially from VanCamp’s fight.Seriously, if someone says “no, the Winter Soldier is the guy you get to kill the fucking boogeyman” in the next episode, I quit.
“I figure she’s not working for the Power Broker, but I’m curious where her loyalties lie now.”
Assuming she isn’t the Power Broker herself.
I disagreed last week, but this week the reviewer and I are on the same page. Except for the brief scene of Sharon kicking bounty hunter butt, I was bored by this episode. I actually started surfing the web in the middle of it, something that hasn’t happened while watching an MCU property for a while.
I’m enjoying the character work but the pacing of this show feels totally off – like it drags when it should be moving forward and speeds past things when it should let them breathe. All in all this feels like they had a 2, 2 1/2 hour movie and decided to artificially stretch it out into a miniseries and I don’t think it’s working. Contrast to Wandavision, which very much felt like it was conceived of and written as a TV show from the start.Also, with the Flag Smashers it’s kind of frustrating to see the MCU continue their tradition of having a sympathetic “villain” where you find yourself asking “wait, why are they the bad guy?” and then it turns out that the answer is that they’re a mass murderer, even though nothing about their otherwise entirely morally justified cause requires murder.
Sam’s call with Sarah does not pass the Blackdel test, they talked about him being humiliated by a white banker and the whole context was bank discrimination. So, no. Between this and last weeks writing about how the bank scene reflected pandemic fears, with like no mention of race, I’m seriously starting to think this author is not quite up to tackling a show that involves such a nuanced portrayal of Black life and systemic discrimination. Last week I found the io9 review & commenters to be much, much better in this respect, which honestly surprised me.
To be honest…I did not expect this show to have such a nuanced portrayal of Black life! Thank you for this feedback, I’d be open to more.
Ha! That’s really fair, well played.
Not saying you’re wrong, but you do know the director of this show is a black woman, right?
Daniel Brühlis is great in Goodbye Lenin. i really recommend that film.
Ooh, will do. Maybe I’ll try and watch it before the next episode. He’s so different here even compared to his previous stint in the MCU.
Rich people who go to prison, come out rich. You don’t just have your money taken off you. And if you needed to pay money or give up money there’s lots of resources to hide your money
Stop making sense and talking about the real world! Let me have my ~fantasy~ (but also, ugh, I know)
His back story didn’t support that he was rich before he went to prison … and if he was rich, how did he ever go to prison in the 1st place?It’s not that “he shouldn’t have come out of prison rich” … it’s that he was never portrayed as rich in the first place.
Zemo is a baron in the comics…in the movie it’s barely explored.
And he did say he was a Baron so there’s that. A Baron who likes to play military games.
The worst part of this episode for me was the way Sam and Bucky just let Zemo’s murder of Nagel slide. They forgot about it within five minutes. And yet we’re supposed to look at Walker punching a suspect and think that he’s somehow unworthy of Cap’s mantle? Sam needs to have a hard look at his moral compass if this series is going where we all think it is.
I agree with this! They killed SO MANY people this episode??
To be fair, MCU Cap didn’t really seem to have any qualms about killing people either (rewatch the movies, he kills quite a few dudes), so I’m not sure that’s a reasonable metric in this context to measure Sam’s “worthiness” by. If Walker isn’t ‘worthy’ of the shield for any reason, it’s because he comes off like a hyper-aggressive douchebro who trades on the title as a reason for respect, rather than the other way around.
Yeah, that’s true! I think the original commenter’s point is fair though.
Captain America kills about as many people as any Marvel hero, he isn’t Batman or Superman with a particular ethics code. As his own cover in the WWII era he fought and absolutely killed Nazis. Walker has no sense of hubris. It’s his downfall and the whole point of his vs. Rogers worldview.
Agreed on this one. But it wasn’t much of a surprise to me since I was confused that last episode got an A. I thought their banter felt childish and too much written for comic relief. And now that continues for basicialy every scene. They try to make it funny but it comes of a lazy writing.
Still. I haven’t lost hope completely.
“Only an American would think a well-dressed Black man looks like a pimp.”The actual quote is “a fashion-forward Black man”. It felt natural to me that an aristocratic German guy would be a fashionista (and of course a techno-rave/synth-pop/noise enthusiast. I was expecting their little music debate to segue into Kraftwerk and Einstürzende Neubauten).It didn’t even occur to me that this version of the character is supposed to be Sokovian, not German. Indeed, I thought “Before your people destroyed my country” was a reference to Germany, and that his mention of the current state of Sokovia was just another example of bad things the Americans did. It doesn’t help that Daniel Brühl is just using his German accent, and Helmut still is a German name.
It was surreal to me when he was talking about Sokovia being cannabilized by other countries…well, maybe that’s partly because one of their royalty decided to become a one man terrorist organization against the Avengers? I understand his pain at his country struggling, but he’s definitely part of the reason why….
A post-Soviet itty-bitty nation being swallowed up by its neighbors is the most believable political outcome to happen in the MCU. Remember when they said the UN was in Geneva and could agree on anything?
German aristocrats seem to have spilled all over Europe in the real world. Prince Phillip of England’s family were originally called the Battenburgs. I can buy that Zemo is a German Baron in Sokovia.
Well, it was an Empire, after all. Roman only in name. We might well imagine Sokovia was part of it in the MCU Earth (where some real country or other must surrender some territory to make room for it).Still, a person who descends from ancient German nobility does not maintain a German accent throughout the generations.
It’s also plausible that Sokovia is a former part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Zemo’s a Germanized member of the local aristocracy.
It’s pretty plausible that Zemo is a member of a Germanized aristocratic family and also a Sokovian nationalist. One of Finland’s national heroes, Carl Emil Mannerheim, was a member of Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority and always spoke Finnish with a distinct accent.
Sure, I guess. Though Finland and Sweden have a historical bond as part of Scandinavia. Sokovia has been represented as more akin to a former Soviet country (they use the Cyrillic alphabet, and the territory is canonically bordered by Slovakia and Czech Republic), but who knows.https://marvelcinematicuniverse.fandom.com/wiki/Sokovia
Well, there were lots of Germans sprinkled throughout the former Austrian Empire (including Czechia and Slovakia) and in much of the western former Soviet Union. Almost all of them fled or were expelled following World War II, but it’s possible that a) Sokovia didn’t expel its Germans, or b) Zemo’s family avoided expulsion somehow.
I thought this episode was fine. Some parts were great – like Sharon’s gunfight against multiple assassins, which was not just well staged but emphasized that she is not even slightly reluctant to blow someone away. (That bit where she grabbed a pistol, ducked behind a container and killed that guy the SECOND he was in view was, I thought, brilliant.) I liked the small glimpse we got of John Walker’s temper and – and probable future temperament. As for Bucky’s “I like 40s music”, that was not just funny, but (to me) a sad reminder of his situation. Cap was frozen for all those years, revived and willing to catch up on all of culture. Bucky was on ice and only thawed out when he was ordered to kill people, so when he thinks of music that makes him happy, it’s not going to be whatever he heard during his Winter Soldier missions. It’ll be the big band music he got to dance to, back when he was a regular guy.Anyway – some clunky stuff here I guess, but I think they’re getting clearer on what the Flag Smashers are aiming at and what they’re against. That Repatriation commercial was a reminder that literally HALF the population came back after 5 years – and that’s gonna disrupt nearly every plan to re-orient and support those blipped. I mean. I’m not a terrorist but I can see being pretty damn pissed off that those folks get so much attention….
“I did love Sharon’s fight scenes—her use of knife throwing in gunfights mirrors Steve at his best.”One little detail I liked about Sharon’s knife skills was when she pulled the knife outta the dude after stabbing him, she was still holding the knife in a “stabbing” grip, so she kinda forehanded the knife toward the other guy, which is why I’m assuming it only hit him in the shoulder. I just appreciate these little details in choreography.
How do they not rewatch that during editing and not say “ok we need to cut this whole ‘party’ scene”?
Agreed with most of the review, about this episode being a disappointment. But hey, if a person likes 40s music, it’s his preference. Not all growth need be forced.
I don’t think that Zemo does have black friends, and it does strike me as a very non-American line to have for what that’s worth.Anyway, goodness, I did not like this episode. It makes me wonder if they cut the episode count mid-filming, because everything was a sped up version of what I’d expect. Karli’s relationship and loss—that turns her to a more violent terrorist happens off screen. John Walkers frustration builds and cracks from basically offscreen. Sharon’s gets some limelight, but maybe because I don’t think she was much of one in the movies, she feels tonally off since she’s changed and I can’t really tell from what? (Also, Steve would’ve checked up on her and visited that memorial Zemo mentioned, no?) The action was good though, I don’t mind that. Plot instead of character development.My dander is most up over the way race is being handled though. I haven’t been impressed but I actually haven’t been disappointed previously. I like the first two episodes more or less, ham-handed and safe as they are about the topic. So this is a filler episode (of 6 total. Wow.) and it doesn’t tackle it all that directly, but I think how details and margins are handled show up the game, and I’m struck by two things: another white character haranguing Sam for an easy disagreeable but also easily understood decision to give up the shield, and Madripoor. In the Indonesia archipelago via Prague. Couldn’t snag one Asian actor for one of the speaking roles? Not that I saw any in the background. Nothing like a little mindless erasure to signal how little care is actually taken—except I have no doubt that Winter Soldier, WWII vet, helping a Japanese American man as his first thing in the show was not happenstance.
Sharon Carter is Peggy Carter’s daughter. Steve Rogers went back in time to be with Peggy.Is Sharon a super-soldier by inheritance? Will she be the next Captain America?
She is her niece
Dang.
And she made out with Uncle Steve in Civil War!
There’s a fundamental flaw in this review structure grading episodes. When they’re setting up the payoffs, and going slower and deeper it’s not going to be as big as all the flashy action sequences (though we got one at the end)… But they’re not meant to be stand alone episodes. We don’t know if it’s a weak episode until we get to the payoff.. but, people gotta churn clicks.
It’s hard to write a sound review based on “I feel” and non-factuality.It was clear where anyone was, physically speaking. Zemo got out of prison without a lot of dramatic attention or time because the episode wasn’t about Zemo getting out of prison. They just needed to get him out, so the man-hunt could commence.Zemo was a member of the Sokovian nobility, unscrupulous, and the country’s highest-ranking security overseer, running death-squads. So, of course he was rich. Bucky never looked to be drawn to Zemo. Bucky didn’t respond to the code-words at all, and was profoundly uncomfortable donning the WS role again. Bucky did not say he only likes ‘40s music; he said he liked Trouble Man, and they were in the middle of a man-hunt so, not a time for friendship-affirmation (especially since they had agreed to go their separate ways once this whole thing was over). Karli was not blase’. She warned everyone last episode that there was no turning-back (which implied she expected them to have to kill people), the Flag-Smashers already tried to kill Sam, Bucky, Lemar, and Walker on the tractor-trailers, and she was already grieving that dead woman. Walker has already shown that he’s feeling overwhelmed and defensive in spite of his belief that he’s earned the role, and he was humiliated (and almost killed) in his first go-up against the Flag-Smashers. So him yelling at that guy was in-character.There was no evidence that Bucky was jealous of Sharon. Sharon was awful, or had become. Bucky doesn’t reply to Sam’s questions if he’s okay because Bucky is not okay. “This scene is objectively poor because it’s different from this other movie I like a lot better” isn’t that compelling.
Wow, in your misenthropy you missed so much.
Sharon is clearly the Power Broker herself.
She knew where Selby was and killed them nonchalantly.
She has a sweet apartment filled with powerful artifacts.
She super-villain monologues for a bit about how super-heroes are terrible.
She knows exactly where the scientist who created the SSS is hiding.
She can kill anyone inside Madripoor during a fight.
She gets super upset at the evil scientist being killed.
She straight up says “We” have a problem when getting into the car.
Either she’s the big bad or just a red herring at this point.
Based on you and other comments, I think you’re about right!
Ohhh, I LIKE it.
She supposedly on the run but also has a supporting driver?It’s so clear she’s either the new Shield/spear or the power broker.
Nice one!Learn English Online with Native Speakers
It is possible to be bi and also have limited taste in music. I know people that listen to pretty much one style of music, while I listen to anything and everything… as long as it is pleasing to the ear and not too repetitive. But hell, if the beat is good enough, the lyrics can say the same word 30x in a row and I’ll enjoy it for a bit.
Sam’s cover was hollow and seemed to be entirely constructed for humor, but the jokes were weak as hell. Also, a covert operative who has been on the run from authorities in the past… doesn’t leave their phone off silent.
Karli’s motivation for the bombing was to set them apart from being labeled as simple thieves. Most of the grand things they’ve done have been hidden from the world at large, but they’ll get attention if they vaporize/burn a bunch of soldiers who were guarding hoarded supplies. Opening up the news to discuss: “why were they guarding so many supplies, and that was all the thieves stole, why would they steal supplies but to feed the starving?” The can of worms gets opened and they are given a more sympathetic lean in the hearts and minds of people also having a rough time post-blip.
Outside of those points, the episode was pretty bleh and I think the prison escape was to show Bucky as an intelligent Captain America-like strategist and not just a “boom, pow, bang” type of problem solver. Not really required, as they’ve really delved into his brain a bit. Wish they would do more of that with Sam and show resolution to some of his personal shit rather than just say “look, America sucks for POC!” Yeah, but don’t just start that thread and then kinda move far away from it. “Sam, the family business is going under, the bank won’t help, what can we do?” Sam’s reply seems to be “we? I’m going to travel the globe looking for bad guys. If one of them drops their wallet, I’ll send cash home, promise. Good luck!”
I know the man cares, but the abrupt phone call during cloak and dagger work is a nice reminder of him taking off to do other things. He’s well above a “minor celeb” and could get gigs/endorsements/speaking engagements that pay well. Not to mention monetizing footage of him flying and doing training.
Anyway… this was popcorn action and rather bland even so.
I completely agree with what you said about Sam. I feel like this episode really focused on Bucky to Sam’s detriment. The previous episodes felt much more balanced. I think someone said above the this episode’s writing felt like a completely different team, and I think your points highlight that.
And if he is really a “minor celeb,” then how the fuck can he go undercover? **headtilt**
Because its another subtle racial thread of “all POC look the same,” but you discovered it too early! They were saving the actual discussion of that thread for Season 12 and hope you just have a laugh at it now in a comedic context.
Seriously though, they play as fast and loose with this show as they did with WandaVision, but the latter is in some alternate reality/mindbend/magical setting versus the post-blip “normal.”
Hope they tie things together better. Would be nice if they explored some normal life stuff a bit more and had them start the episode on a mission, finish it in the first 10 min. of the episode and then ease into “this is their daily life and struggle, let’s explore that.” They could end on an action piece or heading into next week’s opening act.MacGuyver did that a lot with the “cold open” of going into him being in some jam, getting out of it, cutting to him at the houseboat and dealing with life stuff… gets a call and has to head off somewhere that is either dangerous outright or innocuous “take these troubled youth into the wilderness, nothing will go wrong, promise!” type stuff.
Yesss this really bothered me because previous episodes have included several scenes of Sam being recognised!It links up with something FilmCritHulk mentioned a few times in his reviews of WandaVision: the bothersome detail that the show characters seem to have a blow-by-blow understanding of what went down in the battles of Infinity War and Endgame though they weren’t there, and aren’t connected with people who might have filled them in. They talk about who did what with the familiarity of people who, well, watched those movies.Both points are part of something I feel these shows are failing at which is a shame because it’s just what could be really strong ground for them. I.e. telling the story of this stuff from a different angle. Exploring that which the films don’t have time to do anything but glance at; how the world relates back to the superhero world and the events that concern them.It’s like the show doesn’t want to commit to a singular idea of how the So I see the inconsistency over Sam’s recognisabilityas part of that, and particularly damning one here since supposedly his whole conflict has to do with whether he can be Captain America in a society that relates to him *in a specific way*. You can be vague with some details, but maybe not ones from the area that the whole arc rests on.
Did anyone else notice the x-men looking symbol on the building that Karli eventually blew up? Or, am I seeing things I wanna see?
I’m not sure about that, but the Princess Bar is Logan’s home away from home. Wonder if they’ll introduce Tyger Tyger. Also, Jessica Drew spent a lot of time in Madripoor
Just a foreign traffic or “no entry” symbol.
Plot holes and out-of-character shenanigans aside I still really liked this episode because of its lighting, fight choreography and it’s take on the actual (fictional) city of Madripoor.Admittedly I’m not much of a comics reader but in the ones I have read, the artists have tended to make out Madripoor just to be Singapore with a different name and a slightly more liberal attitude to chewing gum. The buildings tend to be drawn as they are in real-life, to the point where I remember reading one where the Marina Bay Sands hotel* was a setting for a few scenes.The MCU Madripoor seemed a lot more like it’s own entity. The skyline looked like they’d mixed Shanghai and Hong Kong with some leftover CGI from that Cyberpunk 2077 game. There were still shades of Singapore mind you. The pair of bridges they were walking along at the start is almost identical (albeit elongated) to a pair that’s used as part of the Singapore Grand Prix track. I have no idea why they were walking along it, mind you. Most Asian cities have really good public transportation – particularly from the airports. Cabs tend to be quite cheap too and it would have been sweaty and humid there. Even at that time of night. Definitely not an evening for walking long distances in a heavy fur-collared trench coat!*it’s that mad building that’s like 3 bendy skyscrapers with a giant canoe-shaped swimming pool sitting on top.
I agree. Madripoor was a really interesting location/atmosphere even if a lot about it didn’t make much sense. It was nice to see them go the stylized/Cyberpunk 2077 route as you say, since a lot of the MCU’s earthbound locations (other than Wakanda) tend to be fairly prosaic. I thought the fight choreography was really good as well, particularly the parts with Emily Van Der Kamp.
Sharon Carter was bouncing things off those shipping containers and into goons’ heads like she was Matt freakin’ Murdock.
The flow of the ‘caper’ narrative and all the stuff that seems off or retread might be attributable to alterations late in the game to excise an infection/vaccine storyline.
Oh, that’s a good point. This show is hitting home in some weird ways…
A lot of the weaknesses in WANDAVISION were apparently due to plot threads having been dropped either due to lack of actor unavailability thanks to COVID-19, or delays in effects being finished on times thanks to COVID-19. (Gee, I guess having the people who digitally erase all your wires and matte lines stuck at home with asymmetrical 25/5 Mbps “broadband” and a data cap courtesy of Comcast or some other Rapacious Big Telco Corporation isn’t such a hot idea after all!)I suspect FALCON & THE WINTER SOLDIER is suffering from similar problems….
Definitely the weakest episode. The one that felt the most Marvel-like yet was most definitely the weakest episode. We only got the most comic accurate Baron Zemo to date. Nevermind that we got to see Madripoor. Agent 13 kicking ass as well… nah it was definitely the worst episode.
Maybe it’s because we didn’t get a lot of characterization for Sharon in the movies and almost none of it outside the context of her connection to Steve, but something about the bits with her just fell flat to me. I think I liked the episode a bit more than the reviewer, but there’s just a lot that seems really out of left field with her. Like, if this had been a different character explained away with ‘somebody Sam during his time in the military,’ or something like that, it wouldn’t have made any difference.
Sharon sharon sharon sharon! Zemoooooo zemoo zemooo!
How Zemo Got His Barony Back
I wonder if it’s lost on Marvel that their current season is actually about preventing the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
“Good storytelling involves using tropes, and one trope I always appreciate in action movies is you can always tell when a plan is going to work”I think I completely disagree with this, and in fact, the lazy and derivative thing you describe is what I’ve always associated with bad writing and boring entertainment. Good storytelling involves using tropes?! It’s a good thing you instantly recognize action movie cliches?!
I feel like Zemo is that guy with a minor in social justice who doesn’t actually have any non-white friends so when he does meet a non-white person he tries to overcompensate and show that he “gets it” without realizing it’s really uncomfortable. Strong shades of that guy from the fancy party episode of Atlanta.
Oh my God you’re right
I don’t even think the characterization is that well thought out. I think it’s more that he’s an “evil European” who fought Captain America so naturally he likes cultural products which cast America and its racial issues in a negative light
That’s an interesting take because I just assumed Zemo was trolling Sam with those comments in the same way he was messing with Bucky about his amends list and dipping back into being The Winter Soldier again. My impression of Zemo in the episode was him getting under the heroes’ skin by saying/doing the right things to piss them off and mess with their head. I don’t feel he’s actually trying to earn their trust but rather toying with them for his own amusement and gain.
Zemo gives me Kurt vibes from Dear White People. He can talk the talk, but it’s in bad faith becauses he’s out to push his own agenda.
Avatar: The Last Airbender’s “Boulder” episode was more interestingYou mean “The Blind Bandit”? The episode where we met Toph and a character named The Boulder was in it? Or do you mean “Bitter Work”? The episode where Aang had to move a boulder and Zuko learned lighting bending?Either way, both of those are stellar episodes and not exactly the butt of a joke.
No, I meant “The Boiling Rock.” Dammit. In my defense, a boulder is also a rock!!!
But the boiling rock is AN EXCELLENT prison break! You can’t use it as a point of comparison!
I would’ve gone with “Imprisoned,” the season 1 episode where the Earthbending prisoners decide not to break out when the heroes dump a bunch of coal in front of them. At least, until they DO decide that they should break because… *shrug*
Well now we’re in a fight.
This episode used one of the tropes I hate the most: “the hero’s cell phone rings, loud and clear, at a crucial moment, when it’s the last thing the heroes need”. Most regular pple remember to turn off their phones/turn on airplane mode when they’re at the movies, a highly trained and experienced soldier wouldn’t remember to do the same during a mission?? At its best, the trope is unconvincing, at worst, it’s downright bs, like in this episode.
What did writers do before cell phones, when they needed a hero’s plan to go unexpectedly wrong?
I feel like it’s the kind of joke that shows up in a random episode of a detective show that is cancelled after one season? I definitely have my quibbles with how the MCU uses tropes, but this was surprisingly bad.
That was the only part I didn’t enjoy. It’s just so stupid for a character who we respect. The rest of it, the way they are very obviously going for big dumb action fun… I say, bring it on! A nice change after the “oh so clever but actually still fucking stupid Wandavision” (which I still enjoyed – I have a low bar 🙂 )I also rather enjoy the callbacks and so on. One of the MCU’s great strengths. The “you’re not going to move your chair are you?” bit from Civil War was class. Zemo showing up again gave me the chills.Sometimes I think you just have to choose entertainment that you like. Obviously the reviewer doesn’t get that luxury.
According to Mark Twain, step on a twig. (See: “Fennimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”, available to read at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/HNS/Indians/offense.html)
Tropes are omnipresent and recycled throughout all forms of storytelling. Complaining about them is kind of ironic because modern storytelling literally can’t exist without them
Yes, tropes are some very important bones of story-telling. But I don’t have to like all of them XD Recoginizing a trope is just that, a trope, is important, but it’s also important to recognize when it’s — or hasn’t — been employed well.
Yes, but you can use them well, or you can use them poorly.
The bad guy asks the hero, who is impersonating someone else, “how are your kids?” or something else like that. See the setup to the climax of Darkman.
My phone hasnt been turned off vibrate mode in at least 5 years if not longer. The only person I know who actually has it turned on for sound notifications is my dad.
Everyone has cell phones now, though, and its an important lifeline that Sam & Bucky would need if things with Zemo in Madripoor went south. I didn’t have an issue with the cell phone call. It reinforced Sam’s connection to “the real world” and how he wasn’t just a husk of a person traveling the world to punch aliens, wizards and robots in the face.If anything I wish they leaned even further into the bit and had Bucky’s phone go off as well with his psychiatrist calling him about his state-mandated evaluation that he was currently missing.
I assumed Sharon killed Selby and that she is the Power Broker.
worst part of this episode – and you alluded to it – is that Zemo is rich.They spent minutes (ok, literally only minutes) building out his back story. He’s a family man. His family lived outside the city. His kids were freaking out over seeing Avengers. His dad lived with his family. He was a mid-level grunt in the Solkovian Secret Service (“he ran a kill squad”). Not to mention, if he was “royalty rich” … how did that never come up in terms of keeping him out of prison in the 1st place?
THAT back story is not royalty. So, then suddenly he’s rich and connected in Madripor – which has it’s own giant background in the comics that obviously they didn’t have time to explore here, but it was weak and smacked of “we can’t think of another way to get this done”.
The connections in Mardripoor could at least be explained away by him developing them during his time either working black-ops in Sokovia or as connections he made during his long planning phase between AoU and Civil War since he had to track down a lot of Hydra agents and plan his complicated scheme. Its definitely not impossible for a person to be that level of rich and still serve in the military, especially in an Eastern European country. But you’re right that it really doesn’t fit the characterization that was given to us in Civil War. Even if the current Zemo doesn’t directly contradict lines from the movie, he really didn’t come across as this cultured, insanely wealthy aristocrat that we got now.
It’s so weird. These shows both require a close familiarity with the details of the MCU movies but also don’t feel an obligation to be consistent with even major aspects of those movies.And I’m not someone that objects to discontinuity in itself. I’m totally willing to go with some rebooting between iterations that happen because the writers have thought of something better to do an element since the last instalment.But in TFATS this doesn’t feel like we’re departing from consistency with previous canon to accommodate something new and interesting but because previous canon creates obstacles and challenges. But these obstacles and challenges are exactly the kind of thing it would be relevant to see out characters dealing with??Like having to break Zemo out of jail because they need his help is potentially a great beat for Bucky because it forces Bucky to deal directly with a person that embodies so much of his inner emotional and moral struggles. But all the aspects that would actually speak to that point are being ignored. There’s no friction narrativised here in Bucky having to deal with the person who has most recently been the one to strip his agency and force him to commit violent and immoral acts… Zemo’s previous preoccupation with destroying good-guy bonds isn’t raised… Zemo was really quite upset about his whole family dying last time we saw him, he’s over that now I guess?… and, as you say, he’s suddenly rich in a way that really doesn’t jibe with his resonance in Civil War…Like what’s the point of a specific character being here if you’re going to ignore all the ways in which they are particular and their history/dynamic with the heroes is particular?
For “royalty” I substituted “minor nobility” and it fit a lot better in my mind. He wasn’t a famous or notable person, just well-off and well connected. Nothing really contradicts him being a “family man”. The line in Civil War is “My father lived outside the city, I thought we would be safe there” – he sent his family to stay with his father outside the city, they didn’t live together usually. He could have been as wealthy as the plot here needs him to be, and still have suffered the tragedy that sets him down his path in that film.
So, just a quick PSA: The bisexual / music thing was a bit of a joke (apparently not a very funny one, thanks for the check, AV Club commenters!) but I love all the bisexuals sharing their opinions on music taste in the comments. Can you forgive an unfunny bisexual??
Someone on twitter mentioned an interesting point that for a place like Madripoor which is supposed to be set near Indonesia there isn’t a lot of Asians about.
The club scene was one of the most unnecessary budget splurges I’ve ever seen. “Hey, we’ve got a great set and a bunch of extras, let’s film this in spite of it bringing absolutely nothing to the table!”I mean, it’s the MCU, I bet they thought they’d get a Zemo Dancing GIF out of it and that justified spending a couple hundred thousand on that scene.
This show suffers from coming on the heels of Wandavision which had a very clear idea what style and tone it was aiming for, even when it moved out of sitcom pastiche. This has some good characters and interesting ideas but it’s way less sure of itself.That said more of Sharon please.
There are some weird edits and dropped/undeveloped plotlines in this episode. A few scenes had characters speak from off screen, that tends to happen when stuff is added later on. The vaccine plot seems to be dropped. It was also weird that they introduced and killed Karli’s mother so quickly. In fact, I’m wondering if the vaccine and Karli’s sick mother was supposed to be part of the same plot. The Flag Smashers stole vaccines for the refugees but Karli’s mother got sick from the disease before they could get the vaccine to her. Overall, it seemed like this might have originally been two episodes but they edited into one episode.
I’m very bummed by how bad this show is. I didn’t expect it to live up to WandaVision, but I thought it would be fun and cool. As opposed to, completely senseless.My wife read somewhere that each of the episodes so far have felt like pilots for different series. That’s apt, but understates the stupidity.I tried to make this series Friday night event viewing of the family. Fail. By episode 2 we were bantering during the episode (the most fun was during the face-to-face therapy stuff). By episode 3, my 11yo son – who is obsessively devoted to all stuff MCU – skipped out roughly a third of the way into the episode. Too weird / uninteresting / whatever for him. He went upstairs to his room, to do something less cringy.What a massive fail for Marvel Studios. Gah.Oh, here’s a Stupid Trope Note on the episode: if the scientist (the one Zemo killed; super soldier serum guy) was working FOR the power broker, and the power broker was the big boss in Madripoor – then why was his lab hidden in the container storage yard? Why wasn’t the lab in, I dunno, a palace or a govt compound or something?Makes no sense.
I may be alone here, But I just. Do. Not. Buy Emily Vancamp as this badass, amoral, underground player. Her being a SHIELD agent in Winter Soldier was already a stretch for me. Maybe its her face or her voice or that I cant disconnect her from Everwood, but I just feel she’s miscast in any role where she isn’t snapping her fingers at a country club waiter.
I mean c’mon! They dropped Madripoor in this episode!! Outside of Wolverine or X-Men comics, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that island referred to in the comics. Maybe in Daredevil or Elektra or even the Punisher? I about flipped my wig when they named dropped that island.
Did… did they just kill off Dinah Madani unceremoniously offscreen in a phone call?That is fucked up.
Edit: Nevermind, I didn’t realize he was referring to that lady shown earlier with Karli, who is very confusingly named Donya Madani.
What club scene?
You’re a terrible reviewer!
“Good storytelling involves using tropes” Are you serious?! Isn’t it that great stories subvert tropes and cliches?
And, what do you mean by this “The best part of “Power Broker,” the third episode of The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, is when that trope is deliciously skewered. Bucky describes to Sam a “hypothetical” about how they could break Zemo out of his maximum security prison, right before Zemo walks out the door.”
How was this trope skewered?
Nagle said that he didn’t have any super-soldier serum in his lab. But when his lab got destroyed, we saw Bucky pick Sam up off the floor, and there was a quick shot of some busted beakers with contents either spilled or evaporating into the air.Am I crazy or could this be how they give Sam super-powers? I got a “Flash origin issue” feeling, with a lab exploding and its contents spilling on Sam, possibly (eventually) giving him super-soldier powers.Yes, I’m watching this series months after it aired, and while I know how Sam ends up at the end of the series, I don’t know how he gets there so I don’t know if he has any powers at the end. But this really leaped out at me and I’m surprised there weren’t many comments here suggesting it in the real-time.