Falcon and the Winter Soldier (Spoilers Thread)

[bizaro86]

Originally Posted by Pizza

Can we rename the thread "Captain America and the Winter Soldier"?

Yeah, I'm not going to do that. The first post and spoilers in the thread title are fair warning, just scrolling through the forum shouldn't have a spoiler.

Although that was pretty aggressively foreshadowed, so it isn't a huge surprise.

[DownInFlames]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

Yeah, I'm probably not going to do that.

Good thinking. Putting a spoiler in the thread title wouldn't go over well.

[undercoverbrother]

Yeah I don't know.

I would have liked them to dig more into Bucky's struggles and recovery.

The show start off strong and had some excellent scenes, but IMO the quality of the episodes/story got worse as it progressed.

Also the Capt. Falcon costume is silly looking.

[codynw]

I really liked most of this series. Zemo is one of my favourite MCU characters at this point. Walker was great. Sam and Bucky were awesome.. but the Flagsmashers just kinda fell flat for me. And Sharon needed more screen time.

[Coach]

Hm. I really enjoyed the finale. Felt like a mini movie, and seemed less re-edited than the rest of the show. I liked the speech. And Sam’s new found conviction in accepting the role.

I agree Agent Carter is a weird one. I also don’t like follow up scenes that explain a previous scene (ie, Carter being welcomed back to the Government only to turn and evil smile. And then the next scene “we’re about to have access too...” like yeah, we know).

Didn’t mind the Cap Falcon suit. A little jarring bright at first but I dig it eventually. Not sure why you’d leave your head exposed when you have an unbeeakable armour covering the rest of your body, but... yeah.

I dunno my biggest gripe of the series was with Carly. She just didn’t feel like someone a revolution would be following. I feel like they were trying to make her seem like she was getting way in over her head (which she was), but the uncertainty she was constantly showing in front of her followers seemed like something that would result in no followers/mutiny. And also when did they all become Karate experts? I mean I get they could throw a punch or two before, but this one seemed like they were actually keeping up with elite trained super soldiers.

Anyways I guess that seems like a lot of gripes but they’re nit picky. I enjoyed it overall. Probably more than Wandavision just cuz I felt like that one didn’t get as weird as I wanted and ended pretty meh. I like how this ended.

[Yamer]

Originally Posted by codynw

I really liked most of this series. Zemo is one of my favourite MCU characters at this point. Walker was great. Sam and Bucky were awesome.. but the Flagsmashers just kinda fell flat for me. And Sharon needed more screen time.

This was the only glaring weak spot of the show: poor villain. This has been an issue for the MCU in the past, but they were so inconsequential outside of the fight scenes that I wondered why they were there.

Seriously, I don't even really understand what they were fighting for...the whole movement was confusing. I couldn't sympathize in the slightest because I really never got their motivation. The world forgot people who weren't blipped? How? And how to the point that you would be willing to murder innocent people?

[pseudoreality]

Originally Posted by Yamer

This was the only glaring weak spot of the show: poor villain. This has been an issue for the MCU in the past, but they were so inconsequential outside of the fight scenes that I wondered why they were there.

Seriously, I don't even really understand what they were fighting for...the whole movement was confusing. I couldn't sympathize in the slightest because I really never got their motivation. The world forgot people who weren't blipped? How? And how to the point that you would be willing to murder innocent people?

Yeah, I'm with you on that. I was hoping for a bait and switch with the villain, but that never happened. We needed some truly evil super soldier out there that posed a major threat. Maybe have her group split or something. I think the virus rewrite might have affected the plot a little too much.

[Oling_Roachinen]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

I would have liked them to dig more into Bucky's struggles and recovery.

Did you miss the part where he stood outside the window of bar and creepily watched the man who’s son he murdered?

It had uplifting music so all his struggles are gone, duh!

I agree with you, that was a letdown that should have had more focus if they wanted to “solve” it by the end of the season.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Yamer

This was the only glaring weak spot of the show: poor villain. This has been an issue for the MCU in the past, but they were so inconsequential outside of the fight scenes that I wondered why they were there.

Seriously, I don't even really understand what they were fighting for...the whole movement was confusing. I couldn't sympathize in the slightest because I really never got their motivation. The world forgot people who weren't blipped? How? And how to the point that you would be willing to murder innocent people?

I wish they had spent more time on her.

What is happening is that during the blip was wealthy nations were desperate for population and had available room at let immigrants come into their countries. Now that everyone has returned they are rounding up all of the immigrants into camps and kicking them back into their old countries.

So all of the unblipped immigrants removed from their homes at gun point and allowed to starve in GRC camps. So the flag smashers were fighting for them. I think the motivation is there. They just needed to explore it more.

[bizaro86]

Originally Posted by GGG

They just needed to explore it more.

Yeah. The biggest thing here is they didn't have enough time for how much stuff they covered.

They probably needed more background on the camps/carli.

And a longer arc for Bucky working through his demons.

And more background on walker and his history.

Anyway, I really enjoyed it, but I think they probably could have had another whole episode or two and it would have felt like a richer story.

[codynw]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

And more background on walker and his history.

Yea I totally understand what the Flagsmashers were about, and I liked parts of their story, but it just felt like it could have been done better. Although there are rumours that there was supposed to be more episodes but they were cut because of the pandemic, so maybe not totally Marvel's fault there.


And there's no way we're done with Walker. Or Bucky. Or Zemo.

[CaptainCrunch]

This season was really all about Bucky and Sam actually fighting the wrong enemy in the end. They were pretty much on the wrong side of things, no matter how pretty Sam's speech was at the end.



Carli wasn't a true villian she was a radicalized by circumstances naive over romanticzed teenager.



The real villain at the end of the day, the one who's been manipulating everything from the start, isn't the GRC, the United States of America, the real villain wasn't even Zemo, though he was pulling a lot of strings. It was Sharon, who's the heighten expression of capitalism, revenge and the short sided stupid decision making of politicians.



And she's getting away with it all because frankly the hero's refuse to do anything but be stereotypical hero's.

[#-3]

Originally Posted by Yamer

This was the only glaring weak spot of the show: poor villain. This has been an issue for the MCU in the past, but they were so inconsequential outside of the fight scenes that I wondered why they were there.

Seriously, I don't even really understand what they were fighting for...the whole movement was confusing. I couldn't sympathize in the slightest because I really never got their motivation. The world forgot people who weren't blipped? How? And how to the point that you would be willing to murder innocent people?

The motivation behind the villains was great, I really like that yet again the heroes have overreached, and started a chain of events that created their own demons, If there hadn't been an unblip and Thanos hadn't been defeated, then peoples new homes wouldn't be ripped away from them. The heroes brought back people who had been displaced, thereby displacing those who had remained, this is pretty much text move Marvel, a formula that works. A lot remains to be seen about Sharon, but even she seems to fit this formula, the heroes used her as a weapons broker with good intentions, then left her to fend for herself as a fugitive, lo and behold she reappears as a weapons broker causing problems for them.

The problem was that it was entirely through exposition that we understood their motivation. Number one rule of film is don't tell me, show me. We needed to see people being ripped away from their homes before we saw the Flag Smashers, we needed to see them attacking unsympathetic characters, and hurting innocents collaterally, we needed a better picture of mass migrations that happened during the blip to fill in labour holes, and more warning about the GRCs plans to forcibly undo those migrations.

Overall good show, good story, great production value, great cast.

Weak presentation of good villains, and excessive exposition, especially in the last episode.

[Itse]

BTW;

It's Karli Morgenthau, with a K.

Benefits of watching with the subtitles on

[Itse]

As for the Flag Smashers, I would have honestly preferred if the MCU mostly just didn't go there at all when it comes to the Blip. I don't think it's a good idea exploring it, because it will inevitably be kind of a mess, and it's just too big, and now that they've started to take it seriously, it's going to hang over the whole MCU for years as an issue that's mostly going to endlessly complicate things without really adding much.

The real world already has refugees, and those issues are already pretty frickin' complicated, but in a completely different way than the Blip refugees are, because the root causes of the Blip refugee crisis has essentially nothing at all to do with actual refugee situations.

It's just bizarre and complicated, but I don't really see it adding an element that the MCU needed.

I mean, what exactly were the Flag Smashers fighting for? What is "the way things were" to them? There's so much political nuance and information missing from that storyline that I found it impossible to empathize with them, even though I really liked Karli as a character. The Flag Smashers just didn't look or feel in any way like an actual radical political group. They're a fictional stand in for a real issue... but not a real issue that actually exists in that form. Just like the Blip refugees don't really function as a stand in of the actual real world refugees.

Of course many of these problems go back to one damned line which I thought was a bad idea to begin with: that "five years later"... It worked for that movie, but I remember that the moment I saw that in the theaters I was thinking "oh boy this could cause a lot of problems for future movies"...

Even in Far From Home, it was apparent the blip thing just added weird details that didn't really add anything.

I get why they didn't want to just completely undo the whole Blip in the Endgame, but I think current MCU writers are kind of cursing that decision, and at least for this show, I don't think it worked, at all.

It would have been better to just not go there to begin with. Just pretend the Blip didn't happen, it's fiction, you can do that and I don't think people would really care.

I really hope "exploring the post-Blip world" isn't going to be a big thing in the next phase. Unless they just plan to multiverse that whole problem away.

[CaptainCrunch]

Wonder if somehow Sharon is linked to Leviathon

[Yamer]

I'm guessing Sharon Carter is working to re-form SHIELD. The phone call was probably to Nick Fury.

[Looch City]

I kinda irked me that Sam was pleading not to call Karli a terrorist...I mean she literally blew up a building with people inside it...what the #### else do you call that?

[Strange Brew]

Finished it this weekend and definitely enjoyed it. Like some on here, I never really felt the Flag Smashers motivation was consistently emphasized of fleshed out so the stakes didn’t seem all that high. And I’d just as soon they didn’t lean into the blip so much. It’s just too complex a topic for these stories IMO and it just feels like a convenient device to be used when needed.

But the action, characters, costumes and little surprises were everything I was hoping for. Just very entertaining.

[Wastedyouth]

The scene in the Captain America museum with Sam and Isaiah had me legit get misty eyed.

What the hell is happening to me in my old age???

I am the least sentimental person I know!