Maybe Marvel is going for the “Game of Thrones” approach, or arguably the one of a lot of prestige TV: the penultimate episode is full of all the good stuff, and the finale is often a kind of denouement. Sure, both “WandaVision” and “The Falcon And The Winter Soldier” tried to have it both ways— a big action-packed finale with a lot of tying up loose ends, letting storylines end, and then, of course, teasing the future of the MCU.
*Spoilers ahead: do not read unless you’ve seen the final episode of ‘Falcon & The Winter Solider’*
The sixth and final episode, “One World, One People,” is on some levels satisfying, emotionally resonant, and predictable. “The Falcon & The Winter Soldier,” from the jump, is a show about identity and legacy: two men grappling with their place in the world after the man who helped anchor their universe and give them a place in it—Steve Rogers, aka Captain America—was gone. With Cap out of the picture, both Sam Wilson, aka Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and Bucky, aka The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), were lost and directionless, unsure who to be without Cap giving them character equilibrium. Both of them were his friends, partners, and sidekicks but were uneasy with the way his absence elevated them.
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Bucky wrestled with his past Winter Soldier sins and felt super protective of the shield—the last piece of legacy that tied him to his real existence in the 1940s. Sam almost immediately rejected the shield—upsetting Bucky in the process—and couldn’t face the burden of living up to the man Steve Rogers was and all he represented. Cap was a legend, and Sam is just a man, in his own estimation.
So, essentially, “The Falcon & The Winter” is a story (legacy and identity) and a plot (the Flag-Smasher tale) and the real issue of the finale is, the true story ended in the previous episode, “The Truth” (arguably the best ep since the pilot). ‘TF&WS’ at its most basic, is the emotional journey of Sam Wilson putting aside the uncertainty, the self-doubt, the baggage and accepting the shield, and becoming Captain America. While that physically didn’t happen until the finale, “One World, One People,” he essentially came to that conclusion, warts and all, at the end of the last episode.
So, “One World, One People?” A bit of fait accompli. As you guessed—again, not very hard to discern—Sam becomes Captain America, much of it thanks to Wakandan tech, the favor that Bucky asked of Ayo (Florence Kasumba), the second-in-command of the Dora Milaje. So that means a new costume and new wings with the colors of the stars and stripes (though mostly white and blue). Is he Black Falcon like a spectator asks? Black Captain America? Nah, he’s just Captain America, but with wings.
And fisticuffs ensue, and Sam, with the help of Bucky and John Walker (Wyatt Russell), who still has the temerity to show up despite being disgraced, defeat the Flag-Smashers as you’d expect them to. Sure, some of the action is exciting—what the Wakandan tech does to improve the wings and bring back Redwing is impressive—but in many ways, its anti-climactic noise that comes to a foreseeable conclusion: the good guys win, the bad guys don’t. And perhaps more importantly, how they win and lose—the way in all superhero stories make themselves distinct and some better than others— isn’t all that interesting.
That said, there are some noteworthy elements to the show, and perhaps the most interesting is a bit of a non-starter that the show had seemingly given up on, or at least didn’t make it a huge point to solve: the identity of the Power Broker. In a surprise move, the Power Broker is Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp). There’s already been online chatter that Marvel did Carter dirty by turning her into a bad guy. Still, I think that’s only true from the perspective of seeing her as a hero and not as a complicated person who believes the U.S. government did her dirty in the first place. Sure, Carter knew the choice she made in “Captain America: Civil War” to help Steve Rogers and betray the government, but knowing the consequences of exile and ostracization and living and experiencing them for five years is another story. Embittered, struggling to survive, and living on the margins in Madripoor, Carter clearly took all the shortcuts she could in a post-Blip world that clearly felt chaotic and no longer made sense.
So, yes, Carter is the Power Broker, the one who bankrolled the super-soldier serum and got it back in production and the one who was after The Flag-Smashers—they worked for her at one point, it’s revealed, but then clearly stole it and then went off on their own cause. So as seen in “The Truth,” Carter worked as a double agent, hiring Batroc The Leaper (Georges St-Pierre) to infiltrate the Flag-Smashers and pretend he’s on their side, only as a means of killing the group that betrayed her.
So, the finale is something of a Mexican stand-off: the good guys (Sam, Bucky, Walker), the bad guys (the Flag-Smashers), and the bad guys behind the curtain (Carter and Batroc). Far from perfect, but it’s not like you knew it was Agatha (I mean, Carter) all along, unlike Marvel’s previous show.
Ultimately, the Flag-Smashers are ended, and Sam, Bucky, and Walker are never privy to Carter’s real identity. She gets a full pardon from the government and is now set up in a position of real power, agency, and supremacy. She’s no longer that “person in the chair” character helping the good guys achieve their goals with information and is being set up to be a powerful, Hydra-esque double agent in the MCU who’s working within the government but has her own nefarious agenda to make money as an arms dealer. Who was she on the phone with, saying the super solider serum program would have to rest for a beat, but there’s still arms to be exploited and money to be made? I would not be surprised if she shows up in something like “Armor Wars” along with someone like Justin Hammer [Sam Rockwell] from “Iron Man 2.”
Other loose-ends that came to some kind of conclusion. Well, Walker’s definitely not Captain America anymore, but the U.S. government also doesn’t seem to have any major issue with him fighting the Flag Smashing terrorists. Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Contessa Valentine Allegra de Fontaine character shows up again. While she hasn’t revealed her new plan, she’s not unlike Sharon Carter and clearly pulling strings and bankrolling Walker. She gives him a new costume and a new name, the one we all know from the comics: U.S. Agent (“I’m back!” he says victoriously, and rather delusionally, to his wife). There are clearly more plans for both of them in the future, and all signs point to some kind of team like The Thunderbolts—bad guys or morally ambiguous heroes who might be more akin to Black Ops mercenaries ordered to go on missions that are guided by a more shadowy clan then the government (which could easily tie into Sharon Carter’s Power Broker as well).
Bucky’s story mostly gets a backseat to Sam’s, but his journey was about being free from the Winter Solider curse which arguably happens along the way (and the Wakanda flashback in episode five helps cement this idea). Still, as I’ve argued on social media for a long time—his is the more emotionally harrowing story, one of a man manipulated into being an assassin— so he got the heft of the middle episodes. Sam’s story of accepting the shield really is sewn through the show but got the bigger spotlight in the bookends of the show. It is ultimately more of Sam’s story—he becomes Captain America after all, and Bucky is still the Winter Soldier— and Marvel knows, in the end, Bucky can’t overshadow it more than he already does in the middle episodes.
As for that story, being Black in American and how difficult it would be for America to accept a Black Captain America? Well, in many ways, that story is just beginning (though yes, Sam has a couple of long monologues to that effect, some are effective and some too on the nose). The emotional struggle is moving, and the elements that wove in Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) are also poignant throughout. The way the finale doubles back on the story of Bradley and brings it to a conclusion is also interesting, if not a little simple and too satisfying. If there’s one mixed emotional element to the series, one beams at seeing Sam as Captain America and wearing that mantle well. He’s a man of real character and moral fiber, but some of the writing in those expository speeches also undermines the power of those sequences. Some things just need to be overly spelled out in the eyes of Marvel, I guess. In its minor defense, perhaps what the series does best for Sam Wilson is establishing him as a similar but ultimately different person than Steve Rogers. He’ll have to be America’s Captain on his own terms.
If anything, both “WandaVision” and “The Falcon & The Winter Soldier” have both exhibited that Marvel’s Disney+ series are largely great with the character complications, struggle, and emotional hardships, but the resolutions and plots? The latter isn’t very interesting, to be honest, and the former tends to clean up a little too nice and tidy, favoring conclusiveness over complication. [B]
All episodes of “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” are available now on Disney+.