It took me a little while to get around to Disney+'s Marvel TV series WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The latter I liked a lot more as it was really more my speed as a fairly straight-forward action thriller in the mold of Captain America: The Winter Soldier rather than featuring a bunch of magic and crap like that. Still, what both really do is fix some of the MCU's sloppy storytelling over the past 13 years.
The thing is that both of these shows really put a spotlight on characters who hadn't seen tons of action in the MCU. Wanda Maximoff was first shown in Age of Ultron with her brother Pietro; they were villains from Sokovia who later became heroes. Pietro died saving some of the people of Sokovia while Wanda survived. The Vision also had his origin in that movie as a body for Ultron that was inhabited by Tony Stark's Jarvis AI and brought to life with the Mind Stone, one of the Infinity Stones. In Civil War the next year, Wanda and Vision fell in love though they were on different sides of the conflict. In Infinity War they were on the run in Scotland until they went to Wakanda to have the Mind Stone removed from the Vision and destroyed until Thanos showed up and killed Vision and took the stone. Then Wanda was snapped out of existence along with Falcon and Winter Soldier and all three only had minor roles at the end of Endgame.
Bucky Barnes first appeared in the first Captain America movie but he died and was brought back to life by HYDRA and the Soviets to be used as a brainwashed assassin. Sam Wilson, aka Falcon, appeared in Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a counselor for PTSD-ed soldiers who befriends Steve Rogers and becomes his partner in trying to stop the Winter Soldier, aka Bucky Barnes. Sam had a minor part at the end of Age of Ultron as one of the new Avengers, a cameo in Ant-Man, and then in Civil War joined Steve in trying to help clear Bucky's name. And like I said, then he was snapped out of existence in Infinity War.
The point of all that is none of these characters had tons of screen time and most of it was action scenes, not character building scenes. So what these shows do is start to fill in some of the gaps, especially with Wanda and Sam Wilson.
The structure of WandaVision, while a big selling point in getting attention for the series, kind of hinders the character development. It's not until Episode 8 that we really find out Wanda was fascinated with old sitcoms because her father used to smuggle DVDs in Sokovia and Wanda would watch the DVDs with Pietro and her parents until their house was blown up. It wasn't really something established in the movies and like I said it's 8 of 9 episodes total before we get into that. But still that episode especially helps to fill in the gaps that were left from the character's limited screen time in the MCU.
Falcon & The Winter Soldier fills in more gaps for Sam Wilson than Bucky Barnes. Bucky was somewhat fleshed out in the first Captain America movie as Steve's friend who joined the military before him. Most of his character work in the series focuses on him trying to atone for the things he did while brainwashed as the Winter Soldier.
Early on Sam goes to Louisiana and we meet his sister and nephews and learn about the family shrimping operation. None of which had really been mentioned before so it's like, Wait, whaaaaat? It was nice to really get more of a backstory for him than just that he was formerly in the military and worked with soldiers. The rest of Sam's character development is somewhat timely as he struggles with the idea of being a black man taking up the mantle of Captain America. This is highlighted by the story of Isaiah Bradley, a black man who was given a shot of super soldier serum and then locked up in prison for 30 years to be a guinea pig for government scientists. In the final episode Sam has a long speech to world leaders to reconcile the issue.
What both shows also do is help to align the movie characters of Wanda and Sam with their comic book counterparts. For a period from about 2013-2017 Sam Wilson was Captain America, though Steve Rogers came back about a year or two into that and they had two different Captain Americas. But with Chris Evans departing the MCU, they obviously needed a new Captain America and so this series allows Sam's Falcon to pivot to Captain America, complete with a comics-accurate costume courtesy of Wakanda.
In the comics, the Scarlet Witch is one of the most powerful characters. She famously changed the whole world in "House of M" so that her family ruled the world and ordinary humans were the underclass. At the end of that she took powers from almost all mutants (except the most popular ones) just by saying, "No more mutants." In the last couple episodes of WandaVision it's finally revealed that she's a witch not by birth or training but because of experiments by HYDRA that exposed her to the Mind Stone. In the end she has Agnes Harkness's book on witchcraft and is studying it to learn to control her powers. It's a little different from some of the comics I read before this where Wanda's mother was a Gypsy witch and Agnes was her mentor in witchcraft, but I suppose this was a way to reconcile the movies and comics.
Falcon and the Winter Soldier also makes a big change to the character of Sharon Carter. In the comics she was frequently Steve Rogers's girlfriend, but in the MCU they never really set that up and when they got rid of SHIELD, she was pretty much abandoned. In the series she's gone to Madripoor, which like in the comics is a hive of scum and villainy in the South Pacific. There she's become "The Power Broker," who as you might guess is a crime lord. The heel turn doesn't really seem in character for the niece of Peggy Carter, but I guess they didn't really have anything else to do with the character with Steve Rogers gone back in time to marry Sharon's aunt, so why not make her a bad guy? Maybe they could have tried hooking her up with Bucky instead? That would have helped build up both characters, but whatever.
Anyway, I went through WandaVision in about 3 hours by fast-forwarding all the fake sitcom crap I didn't care about. I'm sure there were Easter eggs and whatever but I didn't care. I just watched the real modern day stuff. I'm sure they were hoping to do some clever, mind-tripping stuff like FX's Legion, but the solutions to what was going on and why ended up being pretty simplistic. Really I think instead of a series it could have been cut down into a movie but they probably didn't think there was enough interest in a movie involving two relatively minor MCU characters.
I liked Falcon and the Winter Soldier a lot better. Generally I think the TV series format works better for more grounded superhero shows like this, Arrow, Daredevil, and Luke Cage because most of the time you don't need a lot of showy special effects that just don't look good because the studios don't spend the same amount of money on them versus movies. As I said at the beginning, the plot for this was pretty much a straight-ahead action thriller. I was somewhat surprised it was only 6 episodes when WandaVision had 9 episodes, albeit the runtime on most of them were shorter. It was pretty cool when in the last episode they changed the title card to Captain America and the Winter Soldier to reflect Sam finally becoming Captain America. Something I noticed in the first couple of episodes was how the credits alternated whether Sebastian Stan or Anthony Mackie was listed first, which I guess made it fair to both actors so that neither was really featured above the other.
I guess the next Disney+ MCU show is the Loki one, which unlike these ones doesn't seem like it would really help fix the character's backstory since he already had plenty of development in the Thor and Avengers movies. The Hawkeye one would probably be more along the lines of Falcon and the Winter Soldier and help to add some backstory to the character and introducing Kate Bishop, the other Hawkeye in the comics. I think I'd be more interested in that one.
2 comments:
I really enjoyed the two shows but FaWS was my favorite too. Tons of action and deep character development. Especially when you consider we don’t know the parents name of 99% of the MCU. The shows are a real chance to develop the world and deepen them. I’m not sure about Loki to be honest. I rewatched Avengers the other day and he’s an amazing villain. It’s almost a shame they retconned him into a hero. Good article Pat.
I liked Wanda Vision, but it was hard to get into not really knowing what was going on in the first three episodes. My daughter kept telling me to keep going before giving up. I used to watch most of those old sitcoms. Then I was starting to get frustrated with Wanda until she redeemed herself. If anything, Wanda Vision was different. I haven't seen Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but I plan on it, along with a lot of other shows. I hope Loki is good because he's like an anti-hero, and I tend to find those interesting.
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