Falcon and Winter Soldier episode 4 summary: New Captain America gets extreme

After a trip to the Marvel Cinematic Universe‘s miserable hive of foam and villain last week, episode 4 of The falcon and the winter soldier – titled The Whole World Is Watching – ended up on Disney Plus on Friday. The show takes place six months later Avengers: Endgame, while the world is trying to deal with the unexpected return of billions of people.

Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) and the questionable ally Helmut Zemo (Daniel Brühl) are looking for the Super Soldier-empowered anti-nationalist Flag Smashers. However, Bucky discovers that they are being followed by Wakandan Special Forces member Ayo (Florence Kasumba), who is watching Zemo – the man who kills her country’s king.

Elsewhere, the new Captain America’s John Walker (Wyatt Russell) realizes that the collaboration of Sam and Bucky is the best way to reach the Flag Smashers and their leader, the ruthless Karli Morgenthau (Erin Kellyman).

Let’s stop some SPOILERS.

Blood on the shield

The episode ends with Walker, newly empowered after sneaking the last of the Super Soldier Serum and flying furiously after Karli accidentally killed his partner Lemar Hoskins (Cle Bennett), aka Battlestar, with a single super-powered punch on the chest.

Karli manages to slip into the crowd, but Walker runs on her fellow Flag Smasher down the street and kills him in public with Cap’s shield. As you would expect, most people capture this dark moment and the image of the bloodied shield is broadcast to the world. Uh Oh.

The image of Walker hitting his shield in a fallen enemy falls back to Captain America: Civil War, in which Steve Rogers does the same to Iron Man to eliminate his armor. The difference is that Steve stopped when his enemy was beaten, while Walker conceded to his bloodlust (and maybe decapitated that Flag Smasher).

Pad na mag

Much of the episode is devoted to getting Walker up to this point. From the moment he arrives in Latvia, he is very intense in taking down Karli, but clearly frustrated by a feeling of powerlessness.

We also hear that he received three medals for something he and Lemar did in Afghanistan. But whatever it was, it left their scars. They think about the lives they could have saved if they had the serum.

“Power just makes you more yourself,” says Lemar, emphasizing what Steve and Karli have become, and predicting that Walker is on his way.

Walker has also stopped shaving since we first saw him. It looks cool, but reinforces its dark edge.

The peaceful approach

Sam, on the other hand, sees the opportunity to negotiate a bloodless solution with Karli. He empathizes with her sense of loss and cause, but gives her a sense of the harm she is doing. That’s until Walker pulls up and destroys the moment.

He also tells Zemo that he would not take the serum if he was offered it. It feels inevitable that this show will end with Sam picking up the shield, emphasizing that he will not need superpowers (outside of his flying suit) to do so.

Sam hardly needs to be improved anyway; he killed one of Thanos’ space trolls with his wings in Endgame.

Estate complex

“We can not allow her and her acolytes to become another religion faction among real people,” says Zemo of Karli and company. “Super soldiers can not be allowed to exist.”

This mission statement comes after he shot Karli and smashed all but one of the remaining bottles of Super Soldier Serum. For the brief moment, I thought he would hit one back, such a feather in Zemo’s sticking to his skewed principles.

His superpowers are his heaps of money and genius (a bit like Batman) as well as his supply of ‘irresistible’ Turkish pleasures. Eventually he escapes through a hole under the bath, which Sam refers to as ‘an El Chapo’.

In 2015, Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán escaped his prison cell in Mexico City through an extensive tunnel dug under the shower. He was re-arrested the following year and is serving his sentence in a Colorado prison. And he apparently exists in the MCU.

Emerging solutions

This episode reveals the moment when Bucky knows he’s free from Hydra’s brainwashing, six years ago in Wakanda.

“Longing. Rusty. Seventeen. Dawn. Oven. Nine. Good. Coming home. One. Truck,” Ayo said in Russian, uttering the words used to activate his Winter Soldier programming in a final test. They do not work, to everyone’s relief.

Later, the Dora Milaje, Wakanda’s special women’s force group, make an absolute fool of Walker (and Lemar, Bucky and Sam, to a lesser extent) by easily beating them when they come for Zemo. They even have a trick to drop Bucky’s Wakandan-made vibranium right away – a pretty excellent failure of which he had no idea.

While this is happening, Zemo just hangs out with a drink before escaping. What a cool cat that guy is.

Observations, WTF questions and Easter eggs

• The name “Donya” is repeated many times in this episode – it’s hard to connect with this plot line. She was clearly meant to be Karli’s moral compass and bow image for the displaced people, but the show did not build her character at all. A look back at her and a younger Karli would have gone a long way.
• Zemo says Turkish Delight was his deceased son, Carl’s favorite. His wife and son died Ultron attacked Sokovia’s capital.
• Where has Zemo gone? Given his ‘no more supersoldiers’ view, he would probably run after Karli and even try to kill Bucky.
• Karli says she would not hurt Sam’s sister, Sarah, but it feels like she will only go to his family if she gets desperate.
• Power Broker is furious that its source of Super Soldier Serum is gone. He also sends another threat to the Flag Smashers, reminding us that he is there.
• Nico, the Flag Smasher killed by Walker, says he was a Cap fan as a kid. Makes his death even darker.

Join us for next Easter eggs and sightings next Friday episode 5 of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier hits Disney Plus.