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The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is a politically-loaded story about power, who wields it, and who has the right to wield it. The six-episode season exists in the shadow of Steve Rogers’ Captain America (Chris Evans), whose specter helps shape the in-world parameters for these questions of symbolic and physical might.At its center, The Falcon/Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) journeys towards taking up the Captain America mantle as a Black man in the public eye. However, his struggles to reconcile Black American-ness with American anti-blackness, and to reconcile actions with ideals, feel nominal at best.
The show’s supporting characters are all meant to reflect its heroes in some way, especially Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), a Black Super-Soldier hidden from history, and Karli Morgenthau (Erin Kellyman), leader of revolutionary group the Flag Smashers, who the series’ plot and themes revolve around. Morgenthau is the most frequent subject of conversation for the other characters, who all end up in debates over the Super Soldier Serum and the dynamic between political end goals and the actions used to achieve them.
This, in theory, leads Wilson and company to reassess their own outlooks and methods when it comes to the world’s refugees. But between Wilson’s half-baked politics, and the way Morgenthau and the Flag Smashers are framed, the result is a show that buckles under its own weight by the time it reaches its scattered finale. Ultimately, it’s uncertain of what it wants to say.
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Sam Wilson and the Flag Smashers
When watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, it’s impossible, and perhaps even inadvisable, to separate characters from the politics they represent. After all, it’s a show about people draped in the colours of the American flag, and the differing domestic and international relationships to that idea. But what is The Falcon actually fighting for?
The third episode, “Power Broker,” introduces the thorny element of Morgenthau being an unapologetic killer after she murders a group of already incapacitated guards for the Global Repatriation Council (the GRC). A few of her fellow Flag Smashers give her disapproving looks throughout the series, but none of them go as far as opposing her. It’s another example of Marvel imbuing its villains with noble end goals (in this case, feeding and re-housing displaced peoples), only to paint their methods as too extreme. This was also the case in Black Panther, where Killmonger’s fight for global Black liberation — even if he was wrapping his need for familial vengeance in the language of that fight — opened the Black Panther’s eyes to the plight of Black people in other nations. It’s also the closest Marvel has come to any of its heroes actually working for the betterment its villains claim to care about.
Take, for instance, The Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming, a blue collar villain who rails against class inequality after being put out of business by billionaire Tony Stark, or Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, whose methods are indisputably genocidal, but who makes a salient point about people dying of hunger. These also happen to be two of the issues at the heart of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The Avengers are right to stop Thanos’ genocide, just as Spider-Man is right to stop The Vulture from selling weapons, but the MCU never seeks to portray what these heroes would actually do to solve the world’s existing problems. Their dramatic function is to thwart threats to the status quo, rather than to improve it.
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This function can vary from morally rancid to simply value neutral, depending on what you want out of superheroes. These are largely fantasy plots after all, about alien invasions and magic apocalypses, but this framing becomes especially questionably in a show like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, wherein the debate about how best to improve the status quo is central to the story. When Morgenthau’s murders come to light, Wilson empathizes with her plight but derides her methods, which feels especially strange since Wilson himself isn’t opposed to killing to achieve his objectives. (And of course, Wilson’s fellow Avengers have been known to kill as well, from Steve Rogers to Tony Stark to Thor and beyond.)
Wilson often appeals to other characters to understand where Morgenthau is coming from. In the finale, he does so to a group of world leaders on the GRC, while draped in a winged, updated version of the Captain America costume. He successfully convinces the leaders not to vote to send millions of refugees back to their countries of origin — but nothing else actually seems to change or improve for these displaced millions, who still live in camps, whose resources the GRC still controls, and for whom Morgenthau was fighting to provide food and vaccines. Wilson certainly isn’t taking active steps towards improving those conditions, so his objective in this regard feels no different than if he’d sent out a few strongly worded tweets. Little has actually changed for the character beyond his costume.
In the season finale, Wilson mentions the stares and hatred he feels as a Black man sporting the stars and stripes — something that isn’t dramatized. In a purely symbolic sense, the show understands (and captures, with aplomb) the inherent power of America itself being represented by a Black person, at a time when the American system of power and justice continues to feel at odds with Black people. It works as an abstract idea against our real-world backdrop, and Wilson’s arrival in the finale looks, for lack of more polished phrasing, pretty goddamn cool. But it also only works when divorced from the show’s larger musings about Blackness and Black history. When taken as a whole, the series’ questions surrounding a Black Captain America, and what he comes to represent, feel dramatically unsatisfying, if not entirely unearned.
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The Black Falcon
“The legacy of that shield is complicated,” says Wilson, though he never struggles with its complications, beyond alluding to them in a few lines of dialogue. He never weighs what it would mean for him to carry a symbol that, to many including Isaiah Bradley, represents pain and torment, while the narrative places the onus of actually struggling with this contrast entirely on Bradley’s shoulders. Because in the context of the show, Wilson’s ascendancy into the role of Captain America is preordained, and his initial refusal is a mere logistical outcome of delaying that decision until the plot calls for it.
The series’ first two episodes introduce a few structural problems for Wilson. He and his sister Sarah (Adepero Oduye) can’t get a loan in their hometown of New Orleans — a seeming reference to the real-world redlining of loans and resources along racial lines — and when he and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) visit Baltimore, they’re stopped by white police officers, who assume Wilson is an aggressor. And yet, the show does not make the narrative connection between such racial hurdles and Wilson refusing Captain America’s shield, a decision he appears to have made before the series begins. There are vague allusions to his reasoning in retrospect, like when he mentions doing “what [he] thought was right,” or when Barnes acknowledges that neither he nor Rogers understood what it means for a Black man to hold the shield. But Wilson’s actual reasons for this refusal are not connected back to his experiences as a Black man living in America.
This leads to a key problem for the way Wilson’s story plays out as well as the characters he crosses paths with, who supposedly impact his outlook. Barnes brings Wilson to Baltimore to meet Bradley — a character from the seminal comic Truth: Red, White & Black — where it’s revealed that after World War II, the U.S. government ran Super Soldier experiments on Black soldiers without their knowledge, and Bradley was not only the sole survivor, but spent 30 years behind bars so his story wouldn’t get out.
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It’s a loaded invocation of real American history, mirroring the stories of both the Tuskegee Study, which involved U.S. health agencies running secret syphilis experiments on hundreds of Black men for 40 years and denying them treatment, and of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose genetic material became the basis of decades of published cancer research without the knowledge or consent of Lacks or her family. Bradley, having been the U.S. military’s guinea pig when Rogers had previously been its poster child (before going on ice), is understandably disillusioned with the idea of a Black man taking up Rogers’ mantle. He says as much to Wilson, who later mentions Bradley’s plight to his sister Sarah. However, the extent of their conversation is Sarah advising Wilson not to let Bradley, or anybody, tell him who to be.
Wilson’s conversation with Bradley in the fifth episode is a mere expansion on details he already learned in the second — that Bradley had been tortured for decades and kept a secret — so, as written, his Baltimore detour in Episode 5 functions as little more than wheel-spinning. When Wilson eventually opens the Wakandans’ gift of a red, white and blue wing-suit, it isn’t after an episode’s worth of wrestling with his convictions, but after downtime from doing so.
As a member of the U.S. Air Force, and as a Black American, Wilson eventually tells Bradley: “We built this country. Bled for it. I’m not gonna let anybody tell me I can’t fight for it.” This dilemma has been expressed by many Black soldiers throughout U.S. history, who often returned home from war only to face discrimination, but this statement isn’t part of Wilson’s decision-making process. Rather, it’s a postscript in the final episode, after he’s already taken on the mantle and won the day. It’s a line of dialogue that, like so many others in the series, simply alludes to real-world Black struggles, rather than depicting them. Wilson’s dilemma is never about what it means to “fight for [his country]” because he functions as an agent of the State throughout all six episodes, without anyone questioning his right to do so. When the police in Baltimore finally recognize Wilson, they immediately apologize; Black soldiers in the U.S. are not always given this consideration, even when they’re in uniform.
Until the moment Wilson mentions this dichotomy to Bradley, in the season’s closing moments, his psychology isn’t that of a character embroiled in the conflict of what it means to be hated by a country he loves, or what it means to inflict, on his country’s behalf, the same brutality his country inflicts on others — because he’s too busy speaking in platitudes about Karli Morgenthau.
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And therein lies an even bigger problem with the show’s approach to Blackness. After its initial few examples of real-world structural racism, from Wilson’s inability to get a loan to his encounter with the police, the show then turns him into a mouthpiece for ideas and perspectives that haven’t been confidently illustrated by the writers in the show’s already half-baked invocations of Black struggle.
The Moderate Captain America
Sam Wilson was the first mainstream African American comic superhero, a Harlem social worker created in 1969 by Stan Lee and Gene Colan to reflect the Civil Rights movement. To have this character now embody a perspective that applauds revolutionary goals in theory, but opposes revolution itself on the grounds of method — without taking positive steps himself, beyond the largely symbolic donning of the Captain America name — runs offensively counter to not only his origins, but to the very themes of anti-racism The Falcon and the Winter Soldier half-heartedly invokes.
Ironically, the show aligns Wilson’s outlook with that of structural white supremacy, whose responses to both historical Black revolution and Black liberation movements today have prioritized the decrying of methodology over the struggle itself. By robbing Wilson of all the aforementioned dilemmas, and by having him declare to Morgenthau, “I agree with your fight, I just can’t get with the way you’re fighting it,” the show turns his character from a depiction of real external Black struggle, and real internal Black conflict, into a political abstraction, aligned less with Black liberation and more with what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as “the white moderate.”
In his 1963 letter from a Birmingham jail, King wrote: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.’”
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This alignment may not be intentional — the show certainly has a clear-eyed view of the horrors of Black history, as represented by Bradley, and there’s obviously a big difference between what King was imploring people to do and what Morgenthau did. However, the show’s invocations of modern ideas of liberation and oppression become completely muddled, once filtered through its specific plot. The result can’t help but feel politically apologetic.
The show’s plot concerns the refugees displaced after “the blip,” the in-world name for the return of billions of people in Avengers: Endgame after five years of non-existence. It’s a sci-fi conceit, but the show uses it to draw real-world parallels, like when Wilson alludes to nations finally welcoming the previously un-welcome across their borders during that five-year interim.
The show certainly has a keen awareness of real-world problems, but the way it expresses ideas about oppression feels hesitant at best. For instance, in the first episode, when Wilson says “Trust me, every time something gets better for one group, it gets worse for another,” there’s no real sense of what his ideology on these social mechanics actually is. Why do things get better? Why do they get worse? Most vitally, whose actions result in this betterment or worsening, and what is his own role in this dynamic?
There is perhaps no more bizarre an example of this hesitancy to fully express the characters’ ideologies than in the fourth episode with the conversation about “supremacy.” Baron Zemo (Daniel Brühl), who seeks to wipe out Super Soldiers, has a clear idea of what he means when he uses the word: He’s referring to physical strength and the way it can be recklessly used to enact ideology, even at the cost of people’s lives (like his family’s). He openly compares this “supremacy” to the Nazis, making a clear and unambiguous comparison to white supremacy. Later in the episode, Wilson relays this “supremacist” concern to Morgenthau, but the context shifts, both because of the optics of who’s involved in the scene, and because of how it simply discards Zemo’s original meaning.
To have Sam Wilson, a Black man, and Karli Morgenthau, a bi-racial Black woman, discuss whether or not Morgenthau is “a supremacist” without further specifics leaves a lingering, rotten taste. Zemo, though he invokes Nazism, has a character-centric reason for using the term, a blinkered, vengeful bitterness that aligns with his actions, in the face of what he perceives as “supremacy.” But for Sam Wilson to make this suggestion, and for Morgenthau to respond and call corporations et al. “the real supremacists” in response, suggests an obfuscation of what supremacy they’re actually discussing, and what ideology the show actually has in mind here — which is to say, none. Or rather, none that can be quantified beyond a vague both-sides-ism.
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The specter of white supremacy clearly exists across the series, via the show’s subplots about Black struggle, and the many references to the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Rogers (the closest the MCU has come to acknowledging the inherent irony in America’s war against the Nazis being won by its own Aryan übermensch). However, that same consideration and contextualization of white supremacy isn’t applied to the show’s refugee dynamic, beyond Wilson’ briefly alluding to the people who were finally accepted across borders after billions were snapped out of existence and the world needed their help to rebuild, but are no longer welcome after “the blip.” Instead, the “supremacy” question is turned on Morgenthau, without either character in the scene completing the phrase, or gauging the relationship between white supremacy and refugeeism.
“Supremacy” without the “white” prefix, or any prefix, isn’t a reference to an actual ideology. Rather, it’s a shortcut to reflect real world political struggles as if they were some sort of Easter egg, akin to name dropping “Stark Industries” or some other Marvel mainstay. It leaves Wilson and Morgenthau in a strange, in-between place where their perspectives as Black characters, in a world of racial oppression, feel half-formed.
In fact, the “supremacy” chat isn’t even the only time the series makes such a haphazard real-world allusion. In the final episode, when John Walker (Wyatt Russell) confronts Morgenthau over the death of his friend Lemar Hoskins (Clé Bennett), the show’s other prominent African American soldier, Morgenthau claims that killing him was an accident, and that she doesn’t want to “hurt people that don’t matter.” In turn, Walker asks: “You don’t think Lemar’s life mattered?”
To place these words, so directly evocative of the Black Lives Matter movement, in the mouths of these specific characters suggests a fundamentally askew and borderline offensive approach to how the show contextualizes real-world Black oppression. It puts a bi-racial Black woman, who spends the show fighting against structural oppression and armed security forces, in the position of dismissing a Black life. It puts Walker, a white man and an armed and uniformed agent of the state — who, by his own admission, has done questionable things on behalf of the U.S. military in Afghanistan, and even murdered an unarmed man in public with only symbolic blowback — in the position of affirming that a Black life did, in fact, matter. It’s a completely sudden and ass-backward injection of a loaded political dimension, which the series was clearly not prepared to handle. Unfortunately, this is par for the course.
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The Legacy of the Shield
The show’s final episode falters on numerous fronts, including speeding through Walker’s redemption arc (thus also raising the question of who, in a show about soldiers vs. pro-refugee revolutionaries, is worthy of redemption in the first place). Although, where it falters most is in its framing of Sam Wilson’s eventual triumph after embracing the Captain America legacy, which has been an anchor of the MCU’s morality ever since Captain America: The First Avenger.
The 2011 film creates a Steve Rogers who’s pure of heart and who only wants to help people. However, the film divorces the central conflict from real-world ideologies; Nazi offshoot HYDRA and its leader the Red Skull seek global domination, but they’re unconcerned with Hitler’s philosophies. In the process, Captain America, as a symbol during World War II, only needs to oppose this abstract domination, but doesn’t need to overtly stand against white supremacy. (Similarly, HYDRA’s goal in Captain America: The Winter Soldier is fascist control divorced from real-world fascist dogma).
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier primes itself as a corrective, both by re-writing the MCU’s history to include forgotten Black Super Soldiers, and by depicting the racism faced by a character who eventually takes up the Captain America mantle. However, the mantle itself isn’t framed through this corrective lens, and the show remains uncertain of what it means to hold the shield despite the horrors committed in its name. With the world’s eyes on Wilson, he establishes his presence as the new Captain America not by fighting forces of oppression, like the GRC, but by trying to appeal to their better natures and walking away.
Like his predecessor, the new Captain America stands against. Through his actions, he stands against Algerian kidnappers, he stands against the Flag Smashers, and he stands against Karli Morgenthau killing to achieve her goals. But despite the show weaving real-world oppression into its fabric, and nominally delaying Sam Wilson picking up the shield, there’s little sense of what this new Captain America actually stands for, beyond standing in the way.
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