I wanted to like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier; I really did. After all, it is the only show or movie Marvel has put out that really deals with the affects of the Blip, when Thanos made half the beings in the universe disappear with a snap of his fingers, and, five years later, Tony Stark brought them all back. Most of Marvel has dealt with the Blip as a temporary annoyance, a plot device to allow characters to jump ahead 5 years without having to explain what they’ve been up to. A few characters have had to briefly contend with personal issues that occurred while they were “away,” but that’s been about it. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier tackled the issue of the Blip head on, starting with the premise that if half the world’s population just randomly disappeared, it would cause lots and lots of economic and social chaos and disruption. And if the disappeared people all return 5 years later, expecting that homes, property, jobs, etc. were still theirs, that would create another mess.
This show not only acknowledges the messiness of all this, it actually takes the mess as its starting point. The double crisis created a lot of dislocated people, who have been shuffled off to refugee camps. Governments are dragging their feet figuring out what to do with these people. The refugees are getting upset. People take action. Someone launches a terror campaign to pressure governments into dealing with the crisis. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (and some other guys) are called on to deal with the terrorists.
If that all sounds a little vague, that is the first big problem with this series. Nothing in the background is terribly clear. Are the refugees people who blipped or people who did not? Why are they in refugee camps? And really, given how bad they are being treated, why are the terrorists (who are trying to help the refugees) the bad guys and the superheroes (who are protecting the governments who are ignoring the crisis) the good guys?
The second problem is our two heroes. They know each other. They, apparently, have a long and complicated history with each other. They have a complex love-hate, enemy/buddy relationship that the viewer is supposed to know well, despite the fact that they have only been secondary characters in the movies, and even less than that in the movies that have immediately preceded the show. I am doing good just to remember these guys, much less share in all the ins and outs of their history. But the whole show revolves around me having a stake in their complicated relationship, as if viewers will have not only seen all the movies featuring these two characters, but every episode of every show set in the Captain America section of the Marvel Universe: Agents of SHIELD, Agent Carter, and probably others that I don’t even know about. There is no effort to help the casual viewer connect with these characters.
And yet, there is even a third problem. It becomes quickly obvious that by the end of the show, Sam Wilson, The Falcon, will pick up Cap’s shield and assume the role of the new Captain America. And by “quickly obvious,” I mean half way through the first episode I could tell that is where the plot was going.
So, to sum up, we have a show in which I have no idea what is going on (other than to suspect that the villains are really the good guys), centering on characters that I don’t know and don’t really care about, in which the ending is incredibly obvious. Half way through the second episode, I asked myself why I was watching.
I didn’t have an answer.
So I stopped.
Alan Irvine's Story Stuff 