It’s an arresting visual, I’ll give it that. A man in a red, white, and blue angel costume descending from the heavens, cradling the dead …
It’s an arresting visual, I’ll give it that. A man in a red, white, and blue angel costume descending from the heavens, cradling the dead body of a slain radical in his arms. If it took five-plus hours to get us to that one image, it was probably worth it to Marvel for the gifs and fan art alone. The episode that surrounds the shots of the angelic new Captain America sprinkled throughout, though, the Season 1 finale of The Falcon And The Winter Soldier? Good God, what a mess. Written by series creator Malcolm Spellman and Josef Sawyer, “One World, One People” is a shockingly incoherent product for an experienced purveyor of unobjectionable and slick genre fare like Marvel, right down to borrowing its idealistic-sounding title from the very radical group its heroes spend the episode defeating and killing. The killing is as good a place as any to start, since the plot (Karli Morgenthau’s Flag-Smashers attempt to kidnap and execute a bunch of international political bigwigs, Bucky and Sharon Carter and old-new Cap John Walker and new-new Cap Sam Wilson show up and stop them) can be summed up in a parenthetical. Karli gets killed by Sharon, who shoots the young idealist to death ostensibly to save Sam; yet since the show finally reveals that Sharon was the nefarious Power Broker who runs the city of Madripoor, and who provided Karli’s group with bootleg Super-Soldier serum in the first place, it feels like she’s covering up a crime by silencing a co-conspirator. Not that Sam or Bucky see it that way. As the evening ends, they and Sharon simply go their own separate ways, all seemingly forgiven.
