The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Episode 3: "Power Broker' Recap and Review
The line between right and wrong has been blurred, as old friends and enemies return during a tense ride for our heroes.
WARNING: Contains Spoilers
The Captain America of old had a very distinct and unbreakable sense of right and wrong. The world was black and white for Steve Rogers, a trait that endeared him to millions of Marvel fans. But that Captain America is gone, and so is that unbreakable line. Black and white have crashed into each other, creating a new world of grey for everyone to navigate. “Power Broker”, this week’s episode of “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”, gives us a glimpse at how everyone is navigating this new world for better or for worse. The new world feels refreshing, closer to reality than the world of good vs evil that we have come to associate with Cap. But somewhere during the episode, the gravity of what Sam (Anthony Mackie) and Bucky (Sebastian Stan) are doing is lost amongst a sea of set pieces and action sequences.
The episode begins with an introduction to the Global Repatriation Council, contrasting their sunny public persona with their militaristic, behind the scenes reality. The new Captain America (Wyatt Russell) and Battlestar (Clé Bennett) lead a heavily armed group of G.R.C. Agents as they raid a safehouse previously used by Karli Morgenthau (Erin Kellyman) and the Flag Smashers. The lead goes nowhere, and we get a glimpse of John Walker’s temper.
In Berlin, Sam and Bucky pay a visit to the incarcerated Baron Helmut Zemo (Daniel Brühl). Bucky goes in alone, due to the higher chance that Zemo would sympathize with Bucky and agree to help. Without consulting Sam, Bucky aids in Zemo’s escape from custody. They convene and slowly Sam realizes what Bucky already knows, that they need Zemo’s help. Zemo’s resources are vast, as it turns out he was actual Sokovian royalty and has the wealth that one would expect with a title such as “Baron”. The goal is to find the Power Broker, figure out how he was able to recreate the Super Soldier serum, and eliminate his ability to do so. The first step brings the trio to the lawless island of Madripoor, where Zemo seeks out a meeting with a mid-level underboss named Selby (Imelda Corcoran).
Meanwhile, in Latvia, Karli spends time with her mother as she passes away from an unspecified illness. In order to infiltrate Selby’s night club hideout, Sam has to disguise himself as a man with the alias Smiling Tiger, and Bucky has to play a role he knows all too well, the Winter Soldier. The club is filled with dozens of lowlifes and one mysterious hooded woman. After the Winter Soldier puts on a terrifying display of what he is capable of, the group are granted a meeting with Selby. After some negotiations involving a trade for information on the Super Soldier serum for control of the Winter Soldier, they learn that the serum is on Madripoor, and a man named Dr. Wilfred Nagel (Olli Haaskivi) is responsible for recreating it. A sudden, ill-timed call from Sam’s sister Sarah (Adepero Oduye) blows their cover, leading to a daring escape with the aid of the hooded woman. The woman turns out to be former Agent 13 of S.H.I.E.L.D. Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp). Sharon has been on the run since she provided aid to Steve Rogers during the events of “Captain America: Civil War”.
Sharon takes them to her place, where it is revealed that she has accepted her situation for what it is, has been prospering on Madripoor, and has become jaded by the “hero” business. Sam offers to help clear Sharon’s name so she can return to the United States, to which she agrees to help them. After a brief break in a nightclub, they track Dr. Nagel to a shipping yard and find him in a secret lab hidden in the shipping containers. They interrogate Dr. Nagel and find out that the Flag Smashers stole the revamped serum Dr. Nagel invented using Isaiah Bradley’s blood. Sharon gets attacked by bounty hunters and joins the group in the lab. Zemo takes the opportunity to put a bullet in Dr. Nagel, ensuring that he would never make any more serum. The lab is rocked by an RPG and explodes, putting Sam, Bucky and Sharon on their heels as they fight off more bounty hunters. However, they are reminded that Zemo was special forces in Sokovia as he eliminates the bounty hunters allowing the others to escape.
Sharon stays back as Sam, Bucky and Zemo head out to find Karli, who is now in Lithuania beginning an assault on a G.R.C. facility. In Berlin, John Walker and Battlestar follow Sam and Bucky’s trail after Zemo’s escape. Karli and The Flag Smashers steal the supplies from the facility, and Karli crosses a line this time by detonating a car bomb, killing the G.R.C. agents trapped inside. Zemo takes Sam and Bucky to a safehouse, but Bucky goes off on his own immediately, telling them he was going for a walk. What he actually does is follow a trail of decorative beads he noticed, which leads him to Ayo (Florence Kasumba) of the Wakandan Dora Milaje, who tells him that she has come for Zemo.
It seems as though Malcolm Spellman attempted to inform over five years of character development in just 54 minutes. Zemo is presented as being the same man who caused the split of the Avengers, but feels like a completely different character from the man we saw at the end of “Civil War”. Marvel was swift in making Zemo more like his comic book counterpart: making Zemo an actual Baron and giving him his comic-accurate purple mask. But the addition of wealth seemed to insert a bit of Tony Stark into his character, as well as a means for Bucky and Sam to jet around the world. He quips and assimilates to Bucky and Sam immediately, to the point that they almost seem to enjoy his company. He jokes around with his butler, acts like “just one of the guys”, and cuts a little rug on the dance floor. This is the man who framed Bucky, broke up The Avengers, and murdered the King of Wakanda, yet Sam and Bucky warm up to him in record speed.
This is most likely by design though, to set up a betrayal in further episodes, and Zemo does have his moments of brutality, but the immediate assimilation of his character into the group is jarring. That is not the fault of Daniel Brühl, who plays his role expertly by adding subtle hints to the depth of Zemo’s character. The future for Zemo doesn’t look as enjoyable as his time palling around with Sam and Bucky. Ayo has arrived from Wakanda, and she wants Zemo. Her arrival was both surprising and inevitable, as it makes sense that as soon as Zemo broke out of prison, Wakanda would not be far behind him. Bucky is in a unique position of understanding and debt to Wakanda for their help with removing the mental control Hydra had on him. The fact that Bucky is bonding with the man who killed the Wakandan king will absolutely lead to a bit of conflict and may even play into Zemo’s hard turn to full villian.
Sharon Carter goes through a bit of a transformation too. Five years plus on the run with absolutely no one to help her out has left her jaded by the very idea of heroes. Her transformation is somehow even more drastic than Zemo’s, yet feels earned. She was considered a traitor by the U.S. and didn’t have Steve Rogers to help her, which in and of itself shows that Steve isn’t perfect, but she was left hanging by the closest thing to the perfect man. Having been abandoned by the symbol of virtue himself causes her to lose faith in all heroes, and wade into the murky waters of black market trading.
Karli Morgenthau might be irredeemable at this point in the series. She blows up the G.R.C. facility to send a message that the Flag Smashers are serious with their intentions. It seems that her mother represented the little bit of humanity she had left. She is becoming brash and overconfident, which may lead to her downfall with the Power Broker. On that note, the fact that we are halfway through the series and still have not met our villain most likely means we have met them without knowing it. Normally, this would mean that we would only have the other three episodes to look for our big bad, but this is Marvel: there are over a decade’s worth of movies that could have featured the future Power Broker. Justin Hammer, Dr. Armin Zola, The Mandarin, Sonny Birch or even Zemo himself are just a few possibilities.
Now for the X-Men-sized elephant in the room. The island of Madripoor isn’t particularly special in the comics: it is an almost lawless island nation similar to the island of Tortuga in the Pirates of the Caribbean series. What makes it special here is the fact that before the Disney and Fox buyout, the fictitious island was off limits to Marvel. The island was created in the New Mutants series in 1985 which made its rights exclusive to Fox before the buyout. Since this is the first actual appearance eriof an X-Men entity in Disney, after the Quicksilver fake-out in WandaVision, it marks the first crossover into previously owned Fox material by Marvel, and could be another indication that we will be meeting the mutants sooner rather than later.
Reading out the episode’s events, one could infer a serious tone. But the banter between Sam and Bucky may have worked against the series in this instance. The severity of the events that take place in the episode are undercut by the tangents that Sam, Bucky and now Zemo go off on in their dialogue, not to mention the oddity of seeing Baron Helmut Zemo dancing like a suburban dad. Compare the buddy cop tone in this episode to the racial tension in the previous episode, and you’ll see a vast shift in how the series presents itself. The return of Sharon Carter and the interesting twist to her character, as well as the further progression of Erin Kellyman’s Karli Morgenthau, join the well executed action scenes in keeping this episode from completely making a farce out of the series. However, if the conflict between expected tone versus presented tone continues, it could lead the series down a path that Marvel absolutely should avoid.