The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

Krog Street tunnel, it's in a suburb of Atlanta, by the Edgewood area. It was used for a scene in the 4th episode of the series.

I recognized it right away watching the episode, I drive through or by it a couple times a week.

That's the bit I've really enjoyed, the show is basically National Lampoon's Super-Riggs and Flying Murtaugh's World Vacation, and them not getting wise to Zemo is part of the fun.

Sam's a little too straight, and Bucky is a bundle of physical and psychological traumas. Sam may have done counselling, but, just like Bucky, he frequently solves issues with force as an early option.

They can't deal with a Zemo on his terms, not wired that way. Normally I'd expect by the end of the series they'd deal with him on their terms, and win, but given these series' are part of bigger plan I'm more expecting them to get shafted in some way and Zemo free.

I love how they did the improved MCU Zemo justice. In Civil War, he won -- yes, he was imprisoned, but he didn't really care about that. He achieved all he wanted, and was able to do so because he understands our heroes' weaknesses on a deep psychological level.

I’m actually having a great time watching the show. Bucky and Sam carry the show well and even the new side characters are interesting to watch. They are packing a lot of plot and characterization in six episodes.

It’s hard to compare this to WandaVision because they are entirely different shows. This one is definitely dealing with more real world issues and is not as fantastical/mysterious.

For example the shot of the bloodied shield at the end of the last episode... it’s showing everyone that this new Cap is most definitely not Steve Rogers but it’s also possibly working as a symbol of the United States own bloody history.

John Walker may be a more ‘real’ Captain America. Them talking about the actions they took in Afghanistan was illuminating.

The situations they are addressing and the sides they are fighting are certainly not as black-and-white as Steve Rogers fighting the Red Skull or stopping multiple alien invasions. This show doesn’t have any pure villains... just a lot of people with competing agendas and philosophies who all think they have it right.

Karli has a point, even if she is misguided or going too far. Zemo also has a good point and one could see him as heroic for doing whatever it takes to stop the creation of more super soldiers.

Even John Walker is understandable. He has an impossible task of being the new Captain America and we’ve seen that pressure building up over these few episodes.

Bucky and Sam are trying to do what they think is right even though they are nowhere as superheroic as the likes of Thor and Steve Rogers nor do they have the wealth and intelligence of Iron Man.

Me just casually waiting for the next episode tomorrow morning:

Loved the last ep, great character arc moments with both Sam and Bucky, and love seeing Sam struggle with the mantle of Cap but finally come to terms with it. Bucky coming to help with the boat was a great scene.

The ending with Zemo was a little anticlimactic but very appropriate, and at the end of the day he did as much as anyone to thwart the Flag Smashers, including the destruction of most of the remaining serum.

Overall I'm really enjoying this show. Isaiah and Sam was an inspired idea, and really harkens back to the Tuskogee experiments of that time frame, underscoring why the black experience in America is so different and what that means to Sam.

The Isiah and Sam scene was fantastic, as was Bucky's apologies.

Whilst I want the series to reach its climax, I also kind of don't want it to end, and I'd love to see a full series of Sam as Cap.

I also like how there's no real evil there, even Zemo isn't a tache-twiddler, and it would've been so easy to write Walker as a white supremicist type to set up the conflict.

This was also the first ep with a stinger wasn't it?

My earlier complaints may have been valid, but I'm liking it more now. Wish they were going to do a second season.

Naturally the next (last?) episode is going to be Cap (Sam) vs. Cap (JW).

My strong hunch is that

Well!

For this to be a Disney show, they certainly aren’t pulling any punches. With the killing of a Flag Smasher in broad daylight and bystanders filming it with their phones, I can’t help but think of the George Floyd incident in Minnesota last year. The dismissal of John Walker... it all tracks and makes me think about the push to hold police accountable for killings in the community.

This show is certainly picking up. It got a little rough for a minute but I’m glad I stuck with it.

And is it just me or is Bucky about to fuck Sam’s sister? He’s checking her out like “Girl!! I’ll show you why the Wakandan women call me the White Wolf!”

Honestly I think I prefer this show over WandaVision. And I really liked WandaVision. Again... hard to compare. Both very good but for very different reasons.

It is interesting to see the player/flirty side of Bucky come out again because that’s how he was introduced in the first Captain America.

Compare how flirty he is with Sarah compared to how hesitant he was with the chick from episode 1. I think that shows that his true personality is starting to emerge again.

The Walker stuff is great. Interestingly he is being used and tossed aside by the government almost like Isaiah was. Although to a different degree of course.
The United States has a history of mistreating black people but it also has a history of casting aside its soldiers.

It is great to see this show referencing both issues. Isn’t it interesting how some of the same people who are all ‘support the troops’ are also ‘fuck homeless people’ even though many of them are veterans?

Anyway I am bummed this show is only getting six episodes but I really think this could come back for a second season. Lots of stuff going on which needs to be addressed. I don’t see any of the upcoming Marvel movies addressing these particular issues so eventually we have to come back to this stuff.

Elaine is playing some sort anti-Nick Fury I think. Recruiting powerful individuals for her own version of the Avengers. Kind of like Norman Osborn’s Dark Avengers.

Actually I do wonder why they call him that. It was never brought up in Infinity War. I mean other than the obvious reason that he is white. But why did they give him a code name? They could have just called him James or Bucky. Does giving him a name like White Wolf signify he has been accepted as a member of their tribe/culture... kind of like Dances With Wolves?

It seems like a very personal thing... only Shuri and Ayo have called him that and never around anyone else. When Ayo took off his arm she specifically called him James, maybe indicating her disappointment with him?

https://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/3334258/

I don't think spoiler tags are appropriate since this is just speculation. But in an abundance of caution...

Sam picked up on some vibing and threatened Bucky in a kidding, not kidding way. I'm sure that would make the temptation to go for Sarah all that much sweeter.

In a run of the Black Panther comics, there was a separate White Wolf character who was T'Challa's adopted brother (and who was white) who was called the White Wolf. He basically had a role of being even more paranoid and zealous about Wakanda than T'Challa was, with an undercurrent (and sometimes an overcurrent) of resentment toward T'Challa that as metely adopted he was ineligible to become Wakanda's king. So I think that the MCU writers were doing a homage to that character and not really thinking much more deeply than that.

In one of the after-credit scenes in Black Panther, there are a bunch of kids who were checking Bucky out and as they were leaving they called him White Wolf in Xhosa, according to closed captioning (I thought they called him White Wolf in English, but at least checking it out just now in Disney+ that version has it in non-English). So it could be that the kids named him that and it stuck, or the kids were aware of what the grown-ups had called him and adopted it, or that it played into some pre-existing part of Wakandan culture.

I think Bucky was totally eying Sam's sister.

The scene where Karli and Batroc meet up, totally not NYC. It's Woodruff Park in Atlanta, in Five Points. The buildings have had their signage digitally removed, the pan up where you the Chrysler building is CG. The buildings are on Peachtree St., to the left of Bartoc the ones to the right are CG's in.








View of Peachtree St, notice the buildings and facades match the shots above.



And Isiah's house, at least the outside of it is about a mile from Woodruff Park.

It's sort of cool, and sort of distracting that I recognize a good number of the locations being used for this show, along with several other shows or movies.

And in the scene after the above, I'm not sure one way or another, in Sam's apartment, it might actually be Anthony Mackie's apartment in Atlanta.

Given the obvious allegories to recent events, I kind of wish the writers had made John Walker a little more sympathetic to the viewers. Make us really like him and then have him make that terrible mistake and have to pay the price for it with Sam & Bucky bearing witness to it. This would've challenged us to get a broader perspective on things in the news today.

The way this show is taking on issues of blind hero worship and structural racism is impressive. I won't say that I like it more or less than WandaVision, but I have to say that I never expected so much from a Disney+ show.

You ever noticed that the good stuff that reflects real life in the MCU centers around Cap? I'm guessing that's purposeful and I love them for it.

I thought the Chrysler building looked off.

I'm not sure he is unsympathetic, it's just not as blatant.

In some regards he acts as a counterfactual to the first Cap movie, where instead of Steve Rogers the serum is given to someone more of the military's liking.

We see someone who entered the military, was broken down and rebuilt into a tool for it and damaged by his actions in the service.

What was done in Afghanistan has only been hinted at, but it comes across as dark, and the question is "would Steve Rogers have done that?" which is probably a "no."

He's then handed the mantle of his hero, someone he couldn't match in reality, let alone the icon he's grown into. "Here's Cap's gear. The man who batted the Nazis. Battled Aliens. Saved the world. Repeatedly. Worthy of being an Asgardian God. Good luck with the role!"

That's a lot to handle.

Then, when faced with temptation he turns to his best friend who pretty much says "go for it", and after he does, that same friend is killed in front of him and he goes ballistic.

He could never succeed, and when he inevitably fails, he's just discarded.

His actions may be not be there to be sympathised, but the man himself? Yeah, he was given an impossible task, fucked up trying to achieve it, fucked over when failed and then shitcanned by those who handed him said impossible task.

I love this show. I know it's cheap, but I liked it. I like the complex motivations and the grey characters. I like how the heroes and villains make you pause and think. Marvel's Phase 4 is going to be a wild ride!

I absolutely hate the Sharon is the Power Broker twist because it doesn't make any sense. Why would she lead Sam/Bucky/Zemo to Nagel, her prize asset of the one guy who can make SSS? That is something that is worth billions, if not trillions. At the very least, she would have to know that them figuring out who and where Nagel was might cause him to stop making it or worse, end the monopoly on it. And given that Zemo's involved, it's absolutely predictable that there'd be an attempt to kill Nagel.

She could have just feigned ignorance, led them around in circles, or sent them into an ambush? Why didn't she send her own men after Karli in Latvia?

And we're getting Falcon-Cap the movie!

https://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/3336163/

I'm not often right about these things, but I was right (for once) about the Power Broker. Yay me, or something.

So. Something I’m sort of confused about.
What exactly is the big deal about the GRC anyway?
What were they doing that was so wrong that Karli Morgenthau was literally willing to kill innocent people over?
I would think that helping 3.5 billion people transfer back to their old lives would be a good thing.
I don’t understand any of the sympathy for the Flag Smashers. They seem like nothing but whacko terrorists with not even a shred of a reasonable gripe.
What am I missing?

The show did a really poor job of explaining this.

But my understanding from a combination of this show, WandaVision and fanwanking (heavy on the fanwanking):

After the Snap, there was a lot of chaos and upheaval as one might expect when half of all life on Earth vanished.

Eventually, though, things settled in a pattern where a lot of the old prejudices and borders ceased to have meaning and there was a new equilibrium where there was a new amount of global fairness. The distinctions between 1st World and 3rd world countries largely went away.

Then the Hulk reversed the Snap, and suddenly there were 7 billion people on the planet again, half of whom had not gone through the readjustment process the Snap caused, and who also had been dispossessed of resources because they were deemed to have died.

To deal with this, the Global Repatriation Council was created to help bring the people who had been snapped back into society.

From the perspective of Karli and the Flagsmashers, the GRC is tilting things way back in favor of the old world order and in favor of the returned people at the expense of the people who suffered through the Snap and who had forged a world where things were much more fair than they had been.

It wasn't just that they were helping 3.5 billion people transfer to their old lives. It was that (at least in the Flagsmashers' view) they were doing it in a way that was obviously going to disadvantage the other 3.5 billion people and restore a hierarchy where a small proportion of society reaps disproportionate benefits.

That makes more sense and gives Sam's speech at the end more weight.

They definitely did do a super-poor job explaining why the GRC was bad.

But even now, I still don't see what the GRC was doing as necessarily bad to the point that I can in any way sympathize with the Flag Smashers. They were just plain bad.

Really feel like the last two eps should have been all one, the opening half (or more) of this felt more like a third act climax of a longer show/movie and the rest was basically coda.

It was uneven but I'll say this - I appreciate the ambition of the overall story. Not specifically the Sam/Bucky stories but the whole "What happens after the snap/re-snap disruption. in too many action/comic book movies those world-changing events which HAVE to have severe fallout are just never dealt with again.

I hadn't really given that much analysis to Walker but not that you spell it out, dude becomes a metaphor for an unknown number of thousands of veterans of the Forever war that came home and became cops - or broken alcoholics or whatever. Put through the mill, molded into a cog in the machine, used up and spit out with nothing that puts back the part f their humanity they sacrificed.