‘Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ is a series that has extensively explored Steve Rogers’ legacy as Captain America. Since the decision of Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) to hand over the shield until the election of the United States Government of John Walker (Wyatt Russell) to succeed Steve Rogers (Chris Evans). That has led to it being a series about a moment marked by indecision in the Marvel Universe, something that has come to an end with the premiere of its fourth episode.
It is true that the Disney + series already raised the intensity last week in terms of violence, but there was something about it that detracted from it, since they gave the feeling of being the result of an insignificant danger that the protagonists were going to end up overcoming. Yes or yes. ‘The world watches us’ has changed that with a final section that represents a before and after for ‘Falcon and the Winter Soldier’.
Watch out for episode SPOILERS from here on
Clearing the picture
The great axis of ‘The world watches us’ has been to see if it was possible to find an understanding between the good and the bad. It is true that the series has once again suffered from some uninspired scripts when it comes to addressing the themes of the series, but the talk between Sam and Karli (Erin Kellyman) has served to convince the viewer that, in reality, their positions are much closer than they seemed at first.
That’s when the ghosts of the past have reappeared with Sam’s doubts to become Steve’s successor, since he did seem to have enough left hand to find a peaceful solution to the conflict, being the entry of the new Captain America that has brought the situation to a point of no return. First breaking his promise to let Sam deal with the situation in his own way, and later with two decisions that make it clear that he is not up to the task of his position.
However, before going directly to the end of the episode, long the best of ‘The world watches us’, I would like to highlight once again the contributions of Daniel Brühl to the series. It is true that his Zemo has felt very different from the incarnation of the character we saw in ‘Captain America: Civil War’, in part due to the need to lower his threat status in order to see him as an asset to our protagonists.
This has led to his character oscillate between serious and humorous, a cocktail that could have gone very wrong but has been one of the main virtues of the series so far. And it is that he is still someone you can never trust at all, but his presence in ‘Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ has been valuable, leaving a future in the air that everything points will be clarified in ‘Black Panther 2’.
The John Walker Change
However, the great doubt that the episode leaves is what exactly will be now of John Walker, because any possibility that he is a Captain America at the height has completely disappeared, first with the death of Lemar (Bennett Key) and then with the cold-blooded execution of one of Karli’s allies. We already knew from the comics that it was not clean wheat, but such a defining moment in a series precisely marked by doubts was what the series needed to take that leap forward that so resisted it.
That image of Captain America with the bloody shield with a terrified crowd around him marks the beginning of the end of the road and the birth of a villain. The funny thing is that the series was so aware of the importance Of these last minutes that it is even allowed to stop a battle when it has become clear that something serious has really happened in that pitched battle, probably knowing that violence tends to be somewhat innocuous in the Marvel Universe.
It is no longer only that it serves to illustrate the passage to the dark side of Walker’s character, because what it also does is to finish making it clear that those who seemed like villains are not so. That is something that the writers of the series had already tried to underline through the dialogues in that previous conversation between Karli and Sam, but it is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words and here we have a further proof of it, both in terms of performance and by Russell’s great performance.
In this way, the episode has had a more coherent progression than the previous ones, knowing how to go from less to more in a logical way and consistent with what was being counted. The series still does not drive me crazy, because visually it has strength, but in the narrative it was being slightly frustrating. At least until now, because this was what it took for them to stop making the partridge dizzy and gave it their all in the last two episodes of the series.