Spoilers

Six months after Steve Rogers handed Captain America’s shield to Sam Wilson, the Falcon is working with the US Army, and the former Winter Soldier is in government-mandated therapy…

The first episode of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier does something I hadn’t expected. Coming off the back of the trailers I’d anticipated the two titular heroes to already be working together, to be fighting crime in a grumpy old dad kind of way.

Yet they’re not together. In fact they don’t even meet by episode’s end.

What we’re given is a really interesting exploration of what the soldier does when they get home, how they pick up the pieces. There are really strong elements of the 2008 film The Hurt Locker here (directed by Kathryn Bigelow) and I found myself taking this show more seriously than I’d expected.

The show opens with a set piece which is pretty cool even if a little bit American Flag wavy for my tastes, rampaging over other people’s borders as if they’re only really there to provide good scenery (more on this later).  It’s adventurous and sets up a friendship I hope will be important through the rest of the series.

However, once we’re done with the action we switch quickly into something entirely more sombre. We see both Bucky and Sam trying to live normal lives. We see them trying to get bank loans, go for lunch, integrate with people who kind of recognise them but are really interested in how they’re going to pay the bills or how they’re recovering from their own trauma following the blip.

The blip really marks out the MCU from our world because, despite the conceit of it being essentially the same world as this one, following the consequences of the blip properly means we’re departing from the similarities with what you see when you look out your window.

Sam’s future isn’t clear from the beginning of this series. He clearly feels taking the vibranium shield isn’t for him. He returns home and for the first time we meet his family and witness what it means to be a hero when there’s no world needing saving. Someone asks him how he makes money. They suppose Stark paid him. The truth is more mundane and, in the end, challenging. There are hints Sam will be able to run away from the boring everyday challenges he’s facing but I really hope they see this through. There’s a set of brilliant questions asked here in this first episode about the lives of people outside their hero personas and I want to see that explored more.

As Sam navigates bank managers and fishing businesses Bucky is wrestling with the after effects of trauma and being alone. Here’s a man who’s 106 years old, whose entire family have died of old age and who has no friends.

The show suggests to us in a way it only hinted at for Steve Rogers, that Bucky is a man out of time and not simply lost but adrift with no shore in sight. In a series of brilliantly shot scenes we experience not only his loneliness but also how Bucky has made a cage for himself and if he opens the prison door it can only hurt him more than staying inside.

Although there’s definitely ‘plot’ in this opening episode it focuses on where these two men have gotten to after the events of Endgame. The show works hard to establish these characters and the director, Kari Skogland and lead writer Malcolm Spellman have done a brilliant job of delivering people we can understand and sympathise with.

By the end of the first show, when Sam discovers his goodwill gestures are taken for granted and abused, and Bucky sees clearly just how trapped he is we almost want them to have an adventure to whisk them away from their problems. The desire for them to escape their earthly bonds is strong but having seen this first episode, I hope the show isn’t going to offer us something as simple as a buddy cop arc or a Scooby Doo mystery to solve.

I do have a couple of issues even at this stage and I’d normally have given them a pass but in the wake of the ending of WandaVision I feel the need to raise them now. The first is the idea that the bad guys are people who want to do away with borders. This is presented as somewhat sympathetic until the point where, as in so many shows and movies of this kind, the place where an alternative political view is put suddenly ends up occupied by a villain engaged in egregious acts of theft and violence. It’s… absolutely standard for this kind of fare and I’m hoping they take it in a new direction and have something interesting to say. I worry we’ll end up with just more Killmonger; an antagonist who was actually right but who can’t be allowed to be anything other than a villain to punch which has the deeply unfortunate side effect of completely undermining his well thought through political position.

Add to this the sentiment that prosperity is a zero-sum game (as uttered by Sam in a depressing moment where the PoC hero literally suggests if he’s to do well then others must suffer) and somehow we’re set for a fight against people who want everyone to prosper and a couple of ex-Avengers who believe that only some people can be privileged literally by definition. Right now, after episode 1, it feels like it could go in any direction but my trust in Marvel’s ability to explore complex moral issues is low right now, so fingers crossed but…

For a show which is in the same episode concerned with the plight of the poor and those who struggle financially, the positioning of Sam’s political point of view seems to entirely ignore the cultural consciousness of the last twelve months, especially the Black Lives Matter movement to which one can’t help but suspect he’d be deeply in favour of.

As the show ends, Sam’s social position takes another huge knock and again we see something which could be read as the preference (by certain segments in the show’s context) of White Supremacy. I really hope this is explored but again I’m now expecting this to simply be a hook onto which to hang Sam’s own apolitical personal issues. We shall see.

If WandaVision showed anything – it’s that it’s entirely too easy to assume the show is concerned with this stuff when it’s actually focussed on something else.

Verdict: The construction of the show was great and thrilling but once again I’m worried that Marvel is avoiding or failing to tackle the issues it’s putting at the heart of its shows.

Either way, I’m all settled in and ready for episode two.

Rating? 8 bad dates out of 10

Stewart Hotston