This review contains spoilers for episode 2 of The Falcon And The Winter Soldier.
Surprisingly, the Falcon and the Winter Soldier didn’t share a single scene in the first episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Last week’s series premiere, “New World Order,” set up Sam and Bucky’s post-Endgame lives separately. Traditional pilot episodes would have to pair up the title characters in order to get picked up for more episodes, but Marvel’s straight-to-series model has given showrunner Malcolm Spellman the freedom to take his time setting up Sam and Bucky’s eponymous partnership.
The action-driven storytelling and more grounded character drama of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier offer a perfect counterbalance to WandaVision’s experimental style and slower pacing. In its second installment, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier lives up to its promise as a “buddy cop” story. After “New World Order” caught us up on where Sam and Bucky are and how they’re doing, the second episode “The Star-Spangled Man” wasted no time pairing them up. Within a couple of scenes, Sam and Bucky are back together, preparing for a dangerous mission. The buddy cop dynamic has a great setup: the mismatched heroes have agreed to work together for the investigation at hand, then take a long break from each other.
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Sam and Bucky’s bickering back-and-forth – only seen in glimpses in the movies – takes center stage here, and as usual, Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan’s chemistry is off the charts. Throughout the episode, the two heroes barb each other about their powers, their personalities, their friendship with Steve – like any pair of frenemies, it’s a nonstop roast. The joint therapy session teased in the show’s trailers turned out to be a lot of fun, but also gave the characters an opportunity to get into the real problems they share, like grappling with Steve’s legacy.
Marvel fans were up in arms when the final moments of “New World Order” introduced them to Wyatt Russell as John Walker, “the new Captain America,” an impostor to the throne. While Walker may well turn out to be a villain like in the comics (“The Star-Spangled Man” offered a brief glimmer of the character’s hidden dark side), the show isn’t going out of its way to make him unlikable. In fact, the opening scenes of “The Star-Spangled Man” reveal that Walker has his own insecurities and hang-ups about being Captain America. Just like Steve, he’s a dedicated soldier with his own soulmate and best friend who wants to do the best job he can as Cap. Walker adds an interesting angle to the buddy cop dynamic, because as much as Sam and Bucky hate working together, they hate working with the guy pretending to be Steve even more.
The mysteries of the Flag Smashers are slowly being uncovered. This group makes for an interesting force of antagonism in the story, because their vision of a unified world without borders isn’t necessarily an evil scheme. They’re shedding a lot of blood in their journey to create a utopian society, but they actually want to make the world a better place and see themselves more as revolutionaries than straight-up bad guys.
One issue with the first episode was that it raised a lot of interesting ideas, like whether the world is ready for a Black Captain America and whether Bucky will ever be at peace with what he did as the Winter Soldier, but it didn’t really dig into any of them. The second episode continued to double down on Bucky’s inability to leave his past behind without really exploring it, but it did tackle some serious racial issues, from Sam being harassed by white cops to the revelation that there were mistreated Black super-soldiers. The introduction of Isaiah Bradley as one of the Black soldiers who was experimented on seemingly sets up The Falcon and the Winter Soldier to loosely adapt the thought-provoking racial themes from Truth: Red, White & Black.
“The Star-Spangled Man” has even more large-scale cinematic action to offer than last week’s mind-blowing set pieces. Between the aerial acrobatics of Sam’s Tunisia mission in the first episode and the brutality of the rooftop fight across two moving trucks in this one, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has proven concerns that Marvel’s shift to streaming would result in scaled-back spectacle to be unwarranted. It feels like the show is still just getting started and it’ll keep getting bigger and bigger on its way to the usual explosive payoffs. John Wick creator Derek Kolstad’s writing credits on the next couple of episodes tease even more visceral action scenes are on the way.
Disney Plus’ weekly release model has allowed Marvel to have fun with cliffhanger endings in its streaming series, and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s second episode ends on an even more tantalizing cliffhanger than the first one. Hopefully, this trajectory will continue into the next four episodes. “The Star-Spangled Man” has significantly raised the stakes of the story and expanded on the threat of the Flag Smashers. There are a lot of interesting story threads up in the air – now, the rest of the series has the daunting task of tying them all together and sticking the landing.
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