Falcon and Winter Soldier was NOT a TV Show.

Last month, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier (the MCU’s second series on Disney+ and the closest thing we have to a monoculture) ended and I asked my patrons, my dear patrons, if they wanted to hear me talk about it. After all, my most recent video at the time had been my marathon through the elements of copaganda in the larger MCU and here was a show deeply interested in policing, American exceptionalism, and American imperialism.

Ultimately, they told me to get to work on the next episode of copaganda (the long teased Spooky Cops™), but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the show. So I’m going to spend a little time here purging all of my thoughts about this mess of a series so I can finally have some peace and quiet.

There are a lot of social aspects that have continued to frustrate me long after the finale. John Walker’s redemption moment was laughably fumbled. In one moment he’s a cop murdering a surrendering enemy with Captain America’s shield in his rage, and in the next he’s chumming it up with Bucky. Everything about the Flagsmashers was hamfisted, from their vague radical mission of open borders and healthcare for refugees to anarchist murder or...something.

These are ideas that have been covered at length elsewhere on the internet and don’t need me to chime in on. But there are a few problems I had that I think went unaddressed in the general discourse. Numerous people took to Twitter to express disappointment at Marvel’s continued handwaving of leftist ideologies.

Then there was some backlash to the backlash, as people pointed out that good villains should be relatable! Internet Renaissance man Hank Green popped in to say that, actually, no, these movies aren’t trying to make all leftists into villains, they’re just trying to sell movie tickets. While I think that argument has a weird sort of dissonance — “they’re not demonizing anti-capitalists, they’re just trying to make money” is a sentence that seems in conflict with itself — he makes some strong points.

It is more than reasonable to critique methods of political ideologies. It’s one thing to post on Facebook that abortion is immoral, and another to assassinate a doctor providing them. And I think it’s good to remind audiences not to be too reductive in critiquing a “villain problem.” There are plenty of right-wing villains in the MCU from Loki in The Avengers to Red Skull in Captain America to all of the greedy capitalists in the Iron Man trilogy.

But I’m not sure how many of those caveats apply here. Nobody made The Falcon and The Winter Soldier address these issues. These are topics of conversation that the show’s creators chose to talk about.

This show repeatedly brought up criticism to American policy (The Global Repatriation Council is led by a US Senator), only to demonize those doing the talking. Karli and The Flagsmashers talked about the rampant inequity of global hegemony, making real political points about the plight of refugees. They were dismissed as misguided teenagers who were simply too radical. In a (very long) speech in the finale, Sam preaches to the GRC but his argument is more about preventing future extremism rather than addressing the Flagsmashers’ political argument.

Similarly, Sharon Carter shows off her cynicism calling out American “hypocrisy” and “that stars and stripes bullshit.” But instead of looking at her claims as reasonable critiques, the show robs her of any legitimacy by revealing her to be the villain The Power Broker. Zemo argues against heroes and America as well, but we’ve already learned that he’s a villain and not to be trusted.

It’s worth noting that the show does equivocate “the whole hero thing” with “America.” Any criticism of heroes can be read as a criticism of America, and likewise, if you believe in heroes then you must believe in America as well — a significant departure from the Steve Rogers Captain America who sunk SHIELD into the Potomac.

However, without a doubt, the most egregious example of the show handwaving dissenting political opinion has to be the case of Isaiah Bradley. Bradley was experimented on by the US government who was trying to recreate the Captain America supersoldier serum, for decades. They jailed him, cut him off from his family, and told them he was dead. On top of that, he carries the scars of endemic racism, telling stories about how his fellow Black soldiers came home from war to find crosses burned on their lawns. The United States did our man dirty.

The scene when he shares his story with Sam in the fifth episode is so powerful that it literally breaks the show. “They’ll never let a Black man be Captain America, and even if they did, no self-respecting Black man would ever wanna be,” Bradley tells Sam, and frankly, I believe him.

But his sister tells him not to “let Isaiah Bradley get in [his] head” and Sam dons a new Captain America costume. Sam gives a lot of patriotic lines in the finale, but when he returns to Isaiah to discuss his decision, he says “I’m not going to let anyone tell me I can’t fight for [my country].”

This simply isn’t the issue being debated. Isaiah fought for his country too. The question is whether America is worth fighting for if this is the way it treats Black people. Historically, America has been only too happy to send Black men to die in wars.

Sam then takes Isaiah to the Captain America museum where he has apparently gotten them to put up a statue for Isaiah. Isaiah sheds a tear of joy, roll credits.

I’d really like to know what the plaque for that statue says. Maybe something like “here’s a man that the government of our country conducted medical experiments on and tortured for 30 years. Cool right??” The show again focuses on the act of celebrating America, rather than considering what is actually being celebrated.

Perhaps it is too big of a question for the MCU to tackle, the question of “is America worth it,” but the show brought it up, and that actually leads me to my biggest issue with The Falcon and The Winter Soldier: it’s not a TV show. That’s right. The MCU is TV show, but The Falcon and The Winter Soldier is not.

We can argue endlessly about the politics of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier (which my friends and I snootily refer to as Bird/Boy. Well, at least I’m snooty when I use it). After writing over 8,000 words on the MCU, you’d think people would be pretty clear on where I stand on the MCU’s portrayal of the police, but a number of people have tweeted at me or asked me if this show changes my mind at all.

After all, it has a bad version of Captain America that they beat! See? The show is taking on the toxic elements of American Exceptionalism! It’s drawing a distinction between Captain America the ideal and police! They have that whole police execution thing!

Normally, I’m loath to put too much emphasis on a show’s finale. TV is about the journey, the overall experience. Since it can go on for weeks or months or years, what’s most important isn’t the single guiding narrative, but what we consistently walk away from the show thinking.

But The Falcon and The Winter Soldier actively avoided that. It consistently presented a muddy moral framework where political arguments were both reasonable and illegitimate. America was presented, at both times, as an evil empire and something that only cynics would describe as such. The result was a show that constantly kicked the can down the road to a finale. We were encouraged to think constantly about what kind of final argument the story would make, what side it would ultimately come down on.

The element of time is what separates film and TV. A film can be more easily ruined by a bad finale than a great TV show. Nobody likes the ending of Dexter, but it doesn’t ruin seasons 1-4.

But that’s exactly what happened in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. It blurred its opinions and asked us to wait until it made its final argument, which inherently reduced the scope of what it could say. This wasn’t a six-hour contemplation on what it means to be American. This wasn’t an examination of American political philosophy from multiple perspectives.

This was a simple story affirming American Exceptionalism, made muddier to fit the 6-hour runtime.