Six episodes to decide who carries the shield, and I finished it unconvinced by the answer. It should have been Bucky.
Not one of my favourite Marvel shows. I’d put it at a 2, maybe 2 and a half, and the problem isn’t any single episode. The whole thing just feels muddled.
This isn’t about Anthony Mackie, who’s perfectly good, and it isn’t about the idea of Sam taking over, which the show argues for seriously.
It’s that Captain America needs to be physically exceptional and Sam isn’t. He has technology. He has wings and a very good suit. What he doesn’t have is the serum, and I don’t think you can do this job without it.
Think about what that shield actually requires. Throwing it hard enough and precisely enough to ricochet off three surfaces and come back, and then catching a lump of vibranium travelling at that speed without it taking your arm off. That’s not a skill issue, it’s a physics issue. Steve could do it because he was engineered to. Sam is a very fit man in a flight suit. It doesn’t make sense to me, and the show never addresses it because addressing it would undermine the ending it wants.
Bucky has the serum. Bucky has seventy years of experience. Bucky was Steve’s actual partner. The show goes out of its way to explain why he shouldn’t have it, and I never bought the reasoning.
The bickering is half good
Sam and Bucky can’t stand each other, and the show mines that for most of its comedy.
Some of it works. They’re a genuinely funny pairing when the writing lets them be, and the therapy session where they’re forced to stare at each other is the best comic scene in the run.
A lot of it is a bit stupid, though. These two have history. They fought alongside each other in Civil War, in the airport scrap where Spider-Man turned up and comprehensively demolished the pair of them. They had a relationship already. It wasn’t a warm one, but it existed, and the show resets them to open hostility because it wants an odd-couple format more than it wants continuity.
Walker is the best thing in it
John Walker is meant to be hated and Wyatt Russell does a great job of making that happen.
What I appreciated is that he isn’t simply a jerk. He’s a decorated soldier with three Medals of Honor who has been handed an impossible job and no explanation of what it is, and he’s aware every second that he’s being measured against a legend and coming up short. That’s genuinely uncomfortable to watch.
The public square killing, when he takes the serum and murders a surrendering man with the shield in front of a crowd of phones, is the strongest moment in the whole show. Bloody shield, silence, credits. That’s the one image from this thing that’ll stay with me.
The Flag Smashers don’t work
Here’s where the muddle is worst. The show wants Karli and her people to have a legitimate grievance and it half-commits.
The premise is decent. During the Blip the borders came down and resources got shared, and now that half the population is back, those people are being forcibly resettled and are worse off than they were. That’s a real idea with a real argument inside it.
Then the show gets nervous about it. They start bombing buildings and killing people, so the argument gets abandoned rather than answered, and Karli ends up neither a persuasive radical nor a proper villain. You can feel the series trying to have a political position and flinching.
Zemo is around for a chunk of it. Meh, kind of okay. He’s funnier than he was in Civil War and the dancing bit is good, and he doesn’t add much beyond a convenient way to move the plot.
Isaiah Bradley is the real material
The one thread with actual weight. A Black super-soldier from the Korean War the government experimented on, used, then imprisoned for thirty years and wrote out of the record entirely.
Carl Lumbly is superb in it, and his refusal is the hardest question the show asks: no Black man should ever pick up that shield, given what the country that made it has done. That’s a proper argument and Sam has to answer it rather than dodge it.
Getting Isaiah into the Smithsonian at the end is the right ending for that thread. I just wish the six episodes around it had been as focused.
After WandaVision this is a step down
Nowhere close, honestly.
WandaVision had a formal idea and committed to it completely, and whatever you thought of the ending, it knew exactly what it was doing week to week. This is a fairly conventional action series with a serious theme it keeps picking up and putting down, and the six-episode shape doesn’t suit it. There’s too much plot for the character work and not enough plot to sustain the running time.
The finale being a speech rather than a fight is the right instinct, at least. Sam telling a room of politicians they can’t ask people to do better while behaving like this is the most coherent the show gets.
Where it lands
A 2 or a 2 and a half. Nothing amazing. Some good performances, one outstanding scene, one thread that deserved its own show, and a lot of material that doesn’t cohere.
The bigger issue for me is that it’s the show that had to sell me on Sam carrying the shield after Endgame handed it over, and it didn’t. There’s a Captain America film with him in it coming at some point, and it’s going to have to answer the question this series avoided. Until somebody explains how a man without the serum does what that shield requires, I’m going to keep watching the wrong person hold it.