The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021) Review
5/10
A shield is donated to a museum and then handed to somebody else. A man who spent seventy years as a weapon is in court-ordered therapy. A stateless movement wants the borders that existed during the five years half the population was gone. The 5 is a split. The argument the series was built to have is good and it gets perhaps forty minutes across six episodes. The rest is a chase for super soldier serum that could belong to any action property.
I wanted to like this a lot more than I did.
Whenever Isaiah Bradley or the therapy mat shows up, I’m leaning forward, and whenever the serum chase comes back, I’m checking how much of the episode is left. That split is the 5. There’s a great show inside this one, and the studio kept burying it under helicopters.
What the show can’t decide is whether it’s about a symbol or about a plot, and it alternates between them until a speech at the end resolves a political question with rhetoric.
Isaiah Bradley Is the Series
Carl Lumbly plays a man who was given the serum, sent to fight, imprisoned for thirty years, experimented on throughout, and erased from the record. He appears in two scenes. In the first he throws Wilson out of his house. In the second he explains, without raising his voice, that no self-respecting Black man would ever put on that flag, and that they’ll never let a Black man be Captain America even if one somehow were.
That’s the argument the entire series exists to have, delivered by somebody with the standing to make it, and Lumbly plays it as exhaustion instead of as anger. That’s considerably harder and works better. Lumbly’s scene is the best thing in the series, and I’d put it up against anything in the films. He never raises his voice, and I believed every word he said.
The show’s honest achievement is that it doesn’t answer him. Wilson eventually takes the shield and the series doesn’t pretend that resolves what Bradley said, and the museum exhibit at the end is an acknowledgment instead of a rebuttal.
The material is drawn from a 2003 comic about a serum tested on Black soldiers, which itself draws on a documented history of medical experimentation. The series is careful with that and doesn’t invent an injustice. That’s why the scenes have the weight they do.
A supporting character with two scenes can carry a whole work if what he says can’t be answered. Position him so that the reader measures everything after his appearance against it.
The mistake would have been giving him more screen time. Bradley works because he’s a fact the protagonist keeps running into, not a subplot with its own arc, and expanding him would convert a judgment into a storyline. Don’t resolve what your best character says. If a story raises something that’s no clean answer, the real move is to let the protagonist act anyway and leave the objection standing.
John Walker Is the Good Idea
Wyatt Russell plays a decorated soldier who’s given the shield officially, is entirely qualified on paper, and isn’t the right man. The performance is precise about why. Walker has been told his whole career that he’s exceptional, has been placed in a role that requires something other than excellence, and is gradually discovering that he can’t do it. The moment the series is built around is a public execution in a square with the shield. It’s filmed without music, it’s over quickly, and the image of that object dripping is the most effective thing in the show. That shot of the shield dripping is where I sat up. It’s ugly and quick, with no music telling me how to feel, and I think it’s the bravest image the show produced.
What follows is the series’ best structural decision. He’s stripped of the title in a hearing and the scene is procedural, bureaucratic and humiliating, and Russell plays a man being told that his entire understanding of himself was administrative.
His partner Lemar is the device that makes the execution work, and the show spends about twelve minutes establishing him. A friend who has known Walker since school, who says plainly that the medals came from the worst day of both their lives, and who then dies in front of him. Everything Walker does afterward is legible because of those twelve minutes.
The Flag Smashers Are the Failure
A movement wanting a world without borders, formed by people who built lives during the five years and lost them when the population returned, is a strong premise.
The series raises it and then flinches. Karli is given real grievances and then made to kill civilians so that the protagonists can stop debating with her. That converts a political disagreement into a moral one and lets the story avoid the question it asked.
That escalation is the clearest tell in Phase 4, and it’s a cheap move every time a writer reaches for it. When a sympathetic faction needs to become defeatable, somebody innocent dies offscreen, and the audience reads it as a cheat even when they can’t name the mechanism. Here it feels like the writers lost their nerve.
The finale then resolves the argument with Wilson delivering a speech to politicians, who listen. A show that spent six episodes showing that institutions don’t listen ends by having them do it, because the alternative would require an answer.
The speech is where the show loses me completely. Politicians nodding along to a lecture is the least believable thing in a series that has a super soldier serum in it.
If you’re not prepared to let your antagonist be right at the end, don’t give them a case you can’t answer. Raising a legitimate grievance and then discrediting the person holding it’s the most common evasion in political fiction.
The version that works commits. Either the protagonist concedes something real, or the story shows why the grievance leads somewhere worse, argued instead of asserted by a body count. Watch for the offscreen death. It’s almost always a signal that the author needed permission to stop engaging, and readers feel the shift from argument to justification immediately.
Zemo Steals It
Daniel Bruhl returns as the man who destroyed the Avengers with a file and a phone call, and he’s the most entertaining thing in the series by a wide margin.
The character works because his position is coherent. He believes superhumans shouldn’t exist, he has personal reasons, and he’s been right about more things than either protagonist. He’s also a baron with excellent manners and an obvious contempt for both of them, and I’d happily watch a whole series of him being polite and superior to these two.
His presence is also an admission. A show that needs a villain from a previous film to generate scenes has told the audience that its own antagonists aren’t producing enough, and the middle episodes run almost entirely on him.
The dancing became a joke online and it’s a good character beat. A man who has spent the series being the most controlled person in every room, alone on a floor, enjoying himself, with no one to perform for.
The Madripoor sequence is the other thing that works, and it works because it puts all three of them in a situation requiring performance. Zemo is comfortable, Barnes has to become the thing he escaped, and Wilson is visibly out of his depth. That tells you more about the three of them than the plot around it ever does.
Two Men in a Room
The therapy scene in the second episode is the other thing the series gets completely right. Two men who don’t want to be there, made to face each other on a mat by a counselor who won’t let either of them leave.
It’s funny, uncomfortable and efficient. The show establishes everything the audience needs about the relationship in about six minutes, and plays the discomfort as physical instead of verbal. That’s why it works.
Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan are good together throughout and the show knows it, giving them a car, a road and a long argument whenever the plot allows. Those stretches are the reason the middle is watchable.
The boat is the other good idea and it’s under-used. Wilson working on his family’s fishing vessel, trying to get a loan, while a bank praises him and declines him in the same conversation, is the most grounded material anywhere in the phase, and the series manages to find room for roughly fifteen minutes of it across the whole of its six hours.
The 5 accounts for what the series is when those two aren’t in a room. It’s a competent pursuit story with helicopters and a shipping container, made by people who had a considerably better show available and were required to deliver an action serial.
When two characters generate scenes without effort, build the structure around putting them in rooms. Every writer has a pairing like this and the discipline is recognizing it early enough to restructure. Physical discomfort communicates a relationship faster than dialogue. The staring exercise does more than a page of backstory because the reader watches two people fail at something simple.
The diagnostic for your own draft: which scenes did you enjoy writing. That’s usually where the book is, and the plot connecting them is usually the part you’re dutifully completing.
Should you watch The Falcon and the Winter Soldier?
Watch the second episode and both Isaiah Bradley scenes, and skim the rest if you like. A 5 is where I land because there’s a serious forty minutes about who gets to represent a country buried inside a serial about stolen serum, and I resent how much digging it takes to reach them. The people who made this had a better show in their hands and got stuck delivering an action serial.
