1x05 Truth

[7.4/10] I don’t know what to do with this episode. It starts out with one hell of a fight scene. It includes one of the best-acted scenes in the whole MCU. It sets up Falcon to assume the role of Captain America, or at least accept the shield and everything it means, good and bad. Those are all good things! This one digs deep. It touches on nerves. I like that.

But it also devolves into a lot of speeches and montages, and both veer toward the cheesy. This show has tonal issues sometimes, vacillating between hard-edged, down-to-earth discussions of racism and geopolitics, with 1980s action movie beats and wacky comic book stuff. It’s not always a natural mix, and that becomes particularly tricky here.

Still, the good stuff is very good, particularly Isaiah Bradley’s monologue about what was done to him and his brethren when he was Captain America. His tale of punishment and experimentation is haunting. The show earns his rejection of his country, his rejection of the shield, his desire to stay unknown lest he be killed for daring to call it all into question with his very existence. Carl Lumbly says the depths of his despair and disillusionment over there, making Bradley’s experience the negative image of Steve’s.

When Steve went behind enemy lines to save his captured comrades, he was recognized as a hero. When Isaiah did, he was turned into a prisoner himself, robbed of his autonomy, bodily and otherwise. There’s shades of Tuskegee and mass incarceration that shades his story with reality, and it’s ghastly enough, his declaration that no black man ought carry that mantle, that you legitimately question whether Sam should just give it up.

Frankly, it’s a bill that “Truth” doesn’t fully pay. Sam’s contrary path is basically just “I have to stand up and keep fighting.” And I get that, but it’s a cliché and a truism, which doesn’t do much to sell him disregarding the truth bombs that Mr. Bradley laid on him. I know this is a superhero show, and by the final act, the good guy has to don a suit and punch away the bad guys. But still, for all the triumph and catharsis the show wants to pack into Sam finally accepting the role of Captain America, this episode undercuts that with Isaiah’s pretty damn good reasons for him not too.

It doesn’t help that a lot of the build to that moment is pretty corny. The whole “calling all our friends in to help fix mom & dad’s boat” bit is such a cliché. The fixin’ it up montage is right of a 1980s popcorn movie. The same goes for Sam’s training montage, which wouldn’t feel out of place in a Rocky film. It should be momentous when Sam takes up the shield and accepts himself as the new Cap, or at least Steve’s worthy successor. But instead, the show dresses it up in tropes and leaves it feeling more stock than it should.

The one strong idea at the core of this is that Sam wants to hold onto the history of his community. The show never fully vocalizes that as his reason for accepting the shield anew, which is weird because it spells out most other things in dialogue, but it at least adds some emotional ballast to he and Sara’s decision to hang onto their family boat. (No pun intended.)

Some of that on-the-nose speechifying comes when Sam tells Bucky that if he wants to heal, he has to serve the people he’s hurt, not just avenge. (It’s worth noting that John Walker wants to avenge rather than help people heal, just another brick in the wall for why he was a poor choice to be Cap.) That too is a pretty tired old chestnut, and the attempts to make Sam and Bucky feel like buddies here isn’t as good as it’s been in some prior episodes, but it’s the right answer. Presumably Bucky will talk to his elderly friend whom we met in the first episode, deal with the fallout, and be back in time to help punch the people who need punching in the finish.

Much of this episode plays like piece-moving and taking stock before that sort of big confrontation. Normally I like that sort of thing. But the quieter and more personal moments here just aren’t as effective as they’ve been in other episodes (Isiaih Bradley’s speech notwithstanding.) There’s some cool table-setting with Bucky turning Zemo over to the Wakandans, Sam getting a new set of wings, a return appearance from Batroc, and the Flag Smashers being ready to move on New York City and the GRC. Still, the more intimate interludes meant to draw out the motivations and character development for the folks who’ll eat at that table aren’t as successful.

That said, there’s some interesting material with John Walker in this one. I have to admit, while the threeway fight between Falcon, Winter Soldier, and Fake Cap was cool (shades of Civil War), I was puzzled by where it led. I like the titular duo taking the shield back from John, but why was this the last straw?

It’s particularly puzzling that killing one of the Flag Smashers gets Walker stripped of his title and discharged by the government. Wouldn’t they want him to take out the Flag Smashers? Steve definitely killed people during WWII and beyond. Sam killed people in the first episode of this show! I can see why Sam would take issue with John killing a member of Karli’s crew in anger, but why would the feds? The best you can say is that maybe it’s because he did it in public, something that Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character (!?) seems to intimate.

(As an aside, is she supposed to be the Power Broker, maybe? Apparently there’s some chatter that she could be Madame Hydra, which doesn’t contradict her also being the Power Broker.)

But maybe it’s just because I recently rewatched Apocalypse Now, but there’s something strangely (and, credit where its due, at least partly deliberately) hypocritical about the government sending Walker on these missions and then turning their back on him when he does what they’ve trained him to do. To be frank, I’m not sure what they’re doing with Walker anymore, where they want the audience’s sympathies to lie, but I suppose that’s a feature, not a bug. His homemade Captain America shield (I guess he minored in metallurgy?) presage a bitter brute with an axe to grind, one who will no doubt cause trouble whenever Sam and Bucky end up facing the Flag Smashers.

Overall, this is one of those big mixed bag episodes, with some truly fantastic and thought-provoking material on the one hand, and some material that feels like it could be in any and every superhero show there is. I don’t know quite how to balance it out in the final tally, but there’s a lot to love and a lot to vaguely roll your eyes at.

Recently I've been reading all of these articles saying "we're [x] many episodes into The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and I still don't know who the villain is". And I think that's kind of what is great, but also seems a bit thick for anyone to think.

Villainy has easily been Marvel's biggest issue in the MCU. You need to look no further than when they pull it off correctly: Killmonger and (to a much, much lesser extent) Thanos. What is great about how the series works is that it's clearly taking more of a Killmonger approach to antagonism. It goes through the motions of how radicalization can be rooted in a desire for positive change through questionable methods. In Black Panther, this was the MO. It was the arc of T'Challa to understand that his monarchy need not be defined by forsaking others. Here, it's using a similar technique to create another sense of tragedy. For as much as Karli's methods are straight up wrong, her ideals aren't.

All of this has been used as a bait and switch--one that a lot of us probably saw coming. Because antagonism really isn't that simple here. Karli is definitely one antagonist, but I think thematically Walker has been the villain the entire time because he actually opposes the protagonists on a thematic and moral level. It's villainy of his own making. I love this classification: there's radicalization from external factors (Karli, nearly backed into terrorism) and there's self-made villainy. A golden-boy suddenly faced with his own failures, entirely of his own doing, unable to accept that he could be wrong because he's always been put on a pedestal. It's Rittenhouse, it's Chauvin, it's Zimmerman. The antagonism here takes abstract forms because the fight isn't always external. To back up real threats it's better to have some meat on the bones. Sure, Thanos was terrifying because we saw him succeed and commit genocide, but here the evil is abstract. I'll contradict myself here: yes Walker is making himself into a villain, but it's based on morality supported by American culture. It's terrifying here because it's real. And we see it all the time. Hell, it's on trial at this moment.

Edit after finishing the season: oof I whiffed some of my predictions here.