The 5 Biggest Problems With ‘The Falcon And The Winter Soldier’

From preachy politics to sloppy storytelling, here are the nits I'd like to pick.

I have complicated feelings about The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Disney’s second big live-action MCU streaming show on Disney+.

The show had its moments. There was some very funny bickering between Sam (Anthony Mackie) and Bucky (Sebastian Stan). There were some great action scenes that were every bit as exciting and action-packed as any big MCU movie.

And yet . . . when all was said and done the series as a whole felt like an incoherent mess that was far too eager to tell audiences what to think and feel than to just tell a compelling story.

Weirdly, by the end of the first season I found myself enjoying the unhinged John Walker (Wyatt Russell) and vigilante anti-hero (anti-villain?) Baron Zemo (Daniel Brühl) more than the main characters.

I do think that there were some bright spots in the series, and that overall it got better as the story developed, but when the final credits rolled I was left disappointed and more than a little annoyed that a show with so much potential (and budget) could get so many things wrong.

To be fair, I was also disappointed by WandaVision’s finale, but I still vastly preferred that show to Falcon and the Winter Soldier in just about every way.

Here are the 5 Biggest Problems with Disney’s latest MCU live-action series.

1. Preachy politics that are too on-the-nose.

“There will never be a black Captain America.”

This is overarching premise of The Falcon And The Winter Soldier and the heart of the conflict between Sam Wilson and John Walker who becomes Captain America when Sam inexplicably returns the shield that Steve Rogers gave him at the end of Avengers: Endgame.

Racial politics are littered throughout the show, often in ways that are at once preachy and puzzling. Before I stopped recapping the show, I wrote about the episode where Bucky takes Sam to meet Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) a Super Soldier the US government used during Vietnam to track down the Winter Soldier. He was badly mistreated by the government following his service and is justifiably unwilling to help.

When they leave, the two start arguing in the street and moments later cops pull up and start harassing Sam (somehow not recognizing the famous Avenger).

I wrote at the time that it felt heavy-handed and too on-the-nose. It followed the absurd bank scene in the first episode in which Sam is turned down for a loan because he was vanished in the Snappening and has no income record for five years. But Sam is friends with powerful—and rich—people like Tony Stark’s widow, Pepper Potts. He’s also clearly working on high-level missions that must pay some sort of fee—surely he’s not working for the richest, most powerful government in the world for free. (Also banks would be dying to loan money to all these newcomers in need of money. It would be hugely lucrative. And if they weren’t, legislation would surely be passed to make it so).

The heavy-handed politics just keep coming, unfortunately. The idea that Sam was passed over for the job of Captain America and it was given to a white dude—who is clearly the World’s Greatest Monster for taking said job—permeates the show. By the end, when Sam just decides to take the mantle of Captain America for himself, it’s not just the right man for the job stepping up, it’s driven home over and over again that he’s black and that this is somehow (because the show tells us, mainly) a Very Big Deal. This despite the numerous black superheroes that nobody has a problem with. If you’d just left the discussion of race out of the equation entirely, nobody would bat an eye. We were already expecting Sam to become Captain America after Endgame, and nobody cared one way or another.

After Sam beats the Flag Smashers and saves the GRC members with his super suit, he lays into the senators and global representatives telling them to check their privilege and “do better.”

It’s almost a good speech until you think about the particulars. The GRC has been working for six months on an impossible task. Half the world’s population disappeared for five years and then suddenly reappeared. In the meantime, people just sort of divided the spoils. The GRC has been tasked with figuring out what to do with all the newly reappeared people, long-term squatters, governments and civil society in complete disarray. It was hard enough to figure out what to do when everyone vanished; piecing the world back together now is a monumental task and not everyone is going to be happy. That’s the hard truth of actually governing, actually leading people: You can’t make everybody happy. That doesn’t mean you coddle violent extremists who blow up innocents.

Sam flying in with his fancy new Captain America suit chastising a bunch of people who very nearly died moments earlier to “do better” and shame them for referring to the Flag Smashers as “terrorists” isn’t actually that awesome, cheering onlookers notwithstanding. It might feel awesome in a very generic, platitudinous way, but it’s not. It’s empty.

Sam is a soldier. His job is to stop bad guys. He hasn’t spent a day in the shoes of these world leaders, bickering and wheeling and dealing in an often fruitless attempt to figure out how to make the world whole again. The fact that he’s touting Karli Morgenthau’s politics at this point is just . . . weird. Karli (Erin Kellyman) is a terrorist and a murderer and her idealism is based on lies.

Which brings us to . . .

2. The Flag Smashers are ridiculous.

Look, maybe it’s unfair to include Kellyman’s other role in this post, but it is kind of funny how similar Enfys Nest and Karly are. Nest is Kellyman’s pirate character in Solo: A Star Wars Story. She’s the leader of the Cloud-Chasers and a famed resistance fighter / pirate. The Cloud-Chasers also wear masks:

It’s just amusing. I’ll move along now.

I was hopeful that the Flag Smashers would be antagonists along the lines of the villains we encounter in The Legend of Korra. Instead, they are a bunch of ridiculous, murderous bastards with a crappy cause, whose only moral compass appears to be “we don’t want to give back all of our ill-gotten gains.”

Karli and her terrorist pals are angry that the GRC is trying to relocate people in order to make way for the newly returned billions who disappeared after Thanos’s last minute victory in Infinity War. While I do sympathize to some degree, I have to question what these people think the alternative should be. They talk a lot about fighting “for the people” but it strikes me that they should addendum that with “for half the people.” This is . . . not particularly noble or practical. They certainly never provide an alternative plan that they believe the GRC should employ.

Karli paints an idealized version of the world post-Snappening, but things clearly weren’t great in the intervening five years. In Avengers: Endgame Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) reappears to find the world much-changed and not in a good way. His old street is littered with trash. The world is going through a state of deep depression. Things suck. Even the remaining Avengers are downtrodden and deflated.

The world might have been all roses and sunshine for Karli, but for the vast majority of people—who lost loved ones, whose lives were torn apart—it was anything but. And even if some pricks who steal the super serum and become super soldiers believe these things, why should Sam sympathize with them? There’s nothing redeeming about Karli. She kills on a whim. She’s a thief and a maniac. Her cause is anything but just. The GRC may not be perfect, but it’s more than a little silly to think they’re just not considering the plight of the people during all this. That’s their entire job. They have to consider the rights and needs of those who remained against those who reappeared and that, Sam, is not an easy balancing act. “Do better” is neither helpful nor appropriate.

All of this serves to distract from the rest of the story. Indeed, it distracts from the relevant politics. There is, beneath all the preachiness, an interesting discussion to be had about the rights of the vanished and the issues facing the soon-to-be-displaced. There are power dynamics to explore. Just . . . not like this. And we need a far more compelling villain than the Flag Smashers to pit our heroes against.

3. Show don’t tell.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s creators had under six hours to tell this story, but that’s still a lot longer than any Marvel movie. Even Avengers: Endgame was just 3 hours, 2 minutes. This means that, despite being rather short for a television series, it’s still plenty of time to tell a full story.

The problem here is that the show constantly gets bogged down in exposition and filler. Where is the cool flashback to Vietnam where Isaiah is hunting the Winter Soldier through the jungle? Why must we be told again and again why the Wilsons’ boat is so important? Why can’t we see for ourselves?

Over and over again we find ourselves in scenes filled with mind-numbing exposition. How was the Super Serum finally perfected? Let’s have this random scientist guy patiently explain it. And on and on time and time again.

For an action show, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is awfully chatty. Many missed opportunities lay in its wake.

4. It’s so . . . sloppy

This was an ongoing complaint I had throughout the show. Perhaps the best example of sloppy directing and production is the scene where Bucky and Sam first find the Flag Smashers. They’re loading heavy pallets onto trucks, revealing to our heroes just how strong they are.

When Bucky and Sam discover that there’s a hostage on one of the trucks, they quickly follow and Bucky climbs into the truck to investigate. The problem here is that it’s the lead truck. The driver of the second truck would absolutely see Bucky who, to my knowledge, is not wearing an Invisibility Cloak.

And Bucky, PTSD or no, would be perfectly aware of this. And yet he just hops on there without a care in the world and in he goes. Even assuming the driver of the second truck was instructed to not sound an alarm, it makes no sense that Bucky would take this risk. It’s sloppy.

Speaking of which, why do the Flag Smashers put on masks after their opponents have already seen their faces? Wouldn’t those masks make fighting more difficult? I’m sure it’s so they can have stuntmen handle all the fights, but it comes off as a little goofy in the fiction.

Also: why did Sam return Captain America’s shield in the first place? This feels like a pretty big plot hole. He’s so upset when they (whoever “they” are) choose a new Cap, but if he was worried about that why did he hand over the shield? Steve gave you the shield! Bucky is justifiably upset by all of this, but it just doesn’t make sense to begin with.

I’ve also talked about the weird “couples therapy” session that Bucky’s therapist forces Sam to take part in. Why? Why would she do that? Why would she even have an inkling that the two of them weren’t getting along? It makes no sense.

Okay, one more example: I’m sure that the Wakandan special forces are indeed very badass. I’m sure that three Dora Milaje would make a formidable force to be reckoned with by any reasonable standard. But Bucky has superhuman strength and a Vibranium arm not to mention decades of combat experience. Both Sam and John Walker were also highly trained, highly effective fighters as well. Walker has a Vibranium shield. Granted, Walker hadn’t gone super soldier yet, but it’s a little more than preposterous that they’d get so roundly beaten here.

5. John Walker got the shaft (narratively)

John Walker is painted as the show’s biggest jerk but I don’t buy it. He’s served his country for longer than Steve Rogers did before becoming Captain America. He has a bunch of medals to prove it. He only starts acting like a jerk after multiple attempts to work with Bucky and Sam, both of whom treat him like crap out of spite. Neither gives him a chance or welcomes him or helps point him in the right direction.

When he finally actually snaps it’s after his best friend is killed. His reaction is hardly unjustified, even if it wasn’t the right thing to do. How are you going to act if your best friend is killed by a Super Soldier? If you had the power to exact revenge, would you just calmly handle yourself or would you go for the kill?

Later, Walker is discharged from his service and recruited as U.S. Agent, but it’s the time spent in-between these two events that has me scratching my head. Walker makes a totally pointless replacement shield that isn’t made out of Vibranium and then goes to join the fray. Here, instead of completely losing his mind and going full villain he just . . . sort of tags along and helps out. It’s a bizarre character arc.

By the end, he and Bucky and Sam are all best buddies and we’re all left scratching our heads.

So what are we to make of this? Is this a redemption story for Walker? Or is he now unwittingly working for Hydra? Both? Was his brutal killing of a suspect actually not a big deal after all? It’s like they never quite figured out how to handle Walker as a character. First he seems pretty heroic. Then, when he’s rebuffed by Bucky and Sam, he seems like a prick. Then we’re supposed to think he’s bad for taking the Super Serum, even though OG Captain America took the Super Serum and even though he’s up against Super Serum-taking Soldiers. Then he’s bad, then he’s ok, now he’s redeemed and all is forgiven, even though maybe he was never that bad to begin with.

Right. Got it. Makes perfect sense.

Bonus: Maybe we don’t need another Captain America

With some help from Wakanda suit-makers and a newfound resolve to be a hero—and a live broadcast replete with some truly heroic finger-wagging—Sam Wilson has ditched his role as the Falcon and is now Captain America with wings. Some people argue it should have been Bucky, and maybe that’s true.

At least Bucky has super strength. The Falcon is all about gadgets—more Iron Man than Cap. And sure, Sam is brave and honest and genuine just like Steve was. I’m sure he’d throw himself on a grenade just like Steve did in boot camp. But a gadget-based Captain America is just weird.

Then again, the Winter Soldier as Captain America would also be weird. A hot-head like John Walker doesn’t make a great fit, either.

Maybe we just don’t need a new Captain America. Maybe three Captain America movies is enough for a good long time. Maybe instead of deciding that John Walker just wasn’t right for the job but Sam is, this show could have come to a different conclusion. That Sam was right in the first place and the shield—and Cap himself—are retired for good. Or at least until they reboot everything.

Another foreseeable problem for the future of Captain America as MCU blockbuster is the question of whether or not Anthony Mackie has the star power to drive that home. Just like with the real Cap, Mackie has big shoes to fill and an audience that may not be quite as enthusiastic about MCU movies in this new phase of both the MCU and the movie theater business. We shall see.

I did think Sam’s entrance as Captain America was pretty cool and I think he’ll be fine in the role. I’m just not sure we need a new Cap to begin with.

(And I think it’s great we have a black Captain America. I think most people would agree. I do understand why this is a big deal especially to black Americans and I’m completely supportive of that. It’s how the message was sent, not the message itself, that irks me).

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Ultimately, while I still enjoyed many things about The Falcon and the Winter Soldier—the fun action scenes and humorous banter and its less savory characters—and while I was certainly caught up in some of the excitement of the Falcon’s new suit and transformation into Captain America, I find myself unsatisfied. It’s like the new Star Wars movies. Lots of hype, lots of feels, and then on closer inspection so many problems that should have been—and easily could have been—avoided.

After each episode I felt this way. I’d ride high on some of the big action and then crash when I started to think about how so little of it actually works. The Flag Smashers were a serious letdown, and the most interesting characters had perplexing ends. John Walker was fascinating right up until he wasn’t (despite a great performance from Wyatt Russell). Zemo was perhaps the highlight of the entire season, but I cannot for the life of me understand why the Wakandans didn’t take him to Wakanda. Why the Raft? Surely, after all this effort, they’d want to mete out justice themselves.

Many of the problems with Falcon and the Winter Soldier felt like avoidable ones that a bit more script TLC would have solved. The preachy stuff is another matter, and feels like an attempt to shoehorn the politics of the day into a story that could have tackled more universal themes and still delivered a political message about power and the powerless.

In the end, we’re right back where we started. Sam takes up the shield we all expected him to take up and gets a nice new Wakandan wingsuit for his troubles. Bucky has done more healing, crossing out all those names in his little book. But this is not particularly surprising, either. We knew he was doing the healing thing in Wakanda already.

(I admit, I was kind of hoping he’d go back to being the Winter Soldier. The one Winter Soldier scene we got was one of the best in the series).

I have high hopes for the next big Disney+ show despite my disappointment with this one. Loki comes out this June and its debut trailer is great. It looks weird. It looks almost as weird as WandaVision. Then I suppose we’ll get more straight-MCU with Hawkeye.

What did you think of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier?

A version of this post originally appeared at my Forbes blog.

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