In my 2021 review I gave this a 2 or 2 and a half, called the whole thing muddled, and said I wasn’t sold on Sam carrying the shield. I’d still give it about the same. What I got wrong was assuming none of it mattered, because almost every loose thread in this show turned into something considerably bigger.
That’s the genuine surprise of going back to it. In 2021 it plays as a self-contained six-episode series that doesn’t quite work. In 2026 it plays as setup for about four separate things. Valentina has two scenes in the whole run. Two. She turns up, makes an offer to a disgraced man in a car park, and leaves. That character went on to assemble a government team of damaged people and became one of the more consequential figures in the entire franchise. Walker’s disgrace, which I read at the time as an ending, was the beginning of his actual story. And Isaiah Bradley’s history, which I thought was a strong thread wasted inside a crowded show, became the hinge of a feature film four years later. I wrote then that the series had too much plot for its character work and not enough to sustain the running time. What I was actually looking at was a show quietly planting things.
Which doesn’t make it good, and I want to be careful here, because “it set up other things” is not the same as “it works” and there’s an obvious temptation on a rewatch to upgrade something just because it turned out to be useful. It’s still muddled. The Flag Smashers still don’t cohere, the show still flinches from the argument it raises about the Blip and displacement, and Karli still ends up as neither a persuasive radical nor a proper villain. Six episodes is still the wrong length for this story. Watching it back knowing where everything goes makes it more interesting to think about and no more enjoyable to actually sit through. The best moment is still John Walker in the public square, taking the serum and murdering a surrendering man with the shield in front of a crowd of phones. Bloody shield, silence, credits. Five years of Marvel television since and very little has hit that hard.
The Sam question, and where I’d give ground
The big one. I said I couldn’t see how a man without the serum does what that shield actually requires, and that it should have been Bucky. I’m going to hold most of that, because the physics objection hasn’t gone anywhere. Brave New World made the no-serum thing its entire argument, which I respect as a choice, and I came out of that film with exactly the same reservation I had here. He’s a man in a very good suit doing things that ought to require rather more than a suit.
Where I’d give ground is on the character question, which I think I was quietly conflating with the physical one. Sam’s argument in the finale, that you can’t ask people to do better while behaving like this, is a genuinely Captain America position and it’s one Steve would have recognised immediately. On what the shield means, he’s right, and the show makes that case properly. On whether he can throw the thing, I’m still unconvinced. So my position now is narrower and I think more honest: Sam is the correct Captain America and the wrong Falcon-to-Cap conversion. The show never solved the body problem because it isn’t solvable, and it sensibly chose to make the story about the meaning instead. Fair enough. It’s just going to keep bothering me every time somebody catches a lump of vibranium travelling at that speed.
Here’s the thing that softened my complaint most, though. I wanted Bucky to have the shield. He didn’t get it, and what he got instead was five more years of being an actual character: the amends list, the therapy, the slow work of becoming somebody who isn’t defined entirely by what was done to him, and eventually a place on a team of people with similar files. If he’d taken the shield in 2021 he’d have become a symbol, and symbols don’t get to be interesting. The path he actually walked is better than the one I was arguing for, and that’s a real correction that only the rewatch produced. The bickering between the two of them still plays as half good and half stupid, and I still think resetting them to open hostility after Civil War was a continuity cheat for the sake of an odd-couple format.
Walker earned it, and Isaiah still didn’t get his due
The obvious criticism of what happens to John Walker afterwards is that he gets rehabilitated far too conveniently — a man murders someone with Captain America’s shield on camera and a few years later he’s on a sanctioned team. Watching the show again I don’t think it’s convenient at all, because the show never once asks you to forgive him. It asks you to understand him, which is a completely different job. He’s a decorated soldier with three Medals of Honor who was handed an impossible role, told he was the new Steve Rogers, given no serum and no support of any kind, and then broke in public with cameras running. What happens later works precisely because he isn’t redeemed in any clean way. He gets recruited by somebody who wants him because he’s damaged rather than in spite of it, and that’s a far more interesting destination than the show seemed to be heading toward.
Isaiah is the one place I’d go harder than I did in 2021. Carl Lumbly is superb, the story the show is drawing on is the most serious thing it touches, and it gets maybe twenty minutes across six hours. A Black super-soldier from the Korean War the government experimented on, used, imprisoned for thirty years and then wrote out of the record entirely. His flat refusal — that no Black man should ever pick up that shield given what the country that made it has done — is the hardest question anybody asks in this series, and Sam has to answer it rather than dodge it. I said at the time it deserved its own show. Instead it became a supporting element in a film with other priorities. Getting his name into the Smithsonian remains the best ending the series produces and it’s still the scene I’d point anyone toward if they asked whether the whole thing was worth it.
Sam’s on the roster for December and after five years I’ve made my peace with that even if I’ve never fully bought it. What I’d watch this for now is Valentina and Walker rather than the two title characters. The New Avengers exist because of decisions made in the margins of this show, and if December is going to put that team next to the originals, this is where you can see the assembly starting. Better than I remembered as a piece of construction, about the same as I remembered as six hours of television, and the reception at the time was roughly right. A 2 and a half stands.
Next in the rewatch: Shang-Chi, which had no setup, no baggage and no obligations to anybody, and turned out to be one of the better things in this whole run.