‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ Episode 3 Recap: Less Than Zemo

The city-state of Madripoor has a beautiful skyline. As seen from a nearby bridge by night, it’s a glowing nightscape of neon-lit high-rises, like a Disneyfied Blade Runner, or Times Square by way of Speed Racer. For a moment, it looks as if the title characters of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier — along with their newfound frenemy Baron Zemo (a game Daniel Brühl), whom the latter just broke out of prison—are going to take us there.

Instead, we go to a different part of town, one drawn from half a hundred “nebulously foreign criminal hellhole where anything goes for the right price” depictions before. Once there, they get in a jam with a flamboyant crime boss, they have a shootout with some goons, they get rescued by their old friend Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp), they go to a party for some reason for an inexplicable minute of screentime, they track down the doctor who created the bootleg Super-Soldier serum whose users they’ve been battling, they kill some more goons, they leave, and they get tracked down by Ayo from Black Panther (Florence Kasumba).

What they don’t do is anything half as interesting as that skyline looked. For one tantalizing moment it appeared the show might actually attempt to approximate the vibrant colors of superhero comic books. It’s a wasted opportunity, like so much of this show.

At a certain point, it starts to feel like the plot holes outnumber the plot threads. One minute, Bucky’s so concerned about Baron Zemo’s hatred for the Avengers that he won’t even allow Sam to speak to him; the next, he’s breaking Zemo out of jail and presenting a team-up with him to Sam as a fait accompli. Sharon Carter has been on the run for the better part of a decade for a crime for which everyone else involved has long been forgiven, including various enormously famous and beloved superheroes. (Once again, I just don’t buy the lack of clout Sam commands as a member of the world-saving Avengers who has an ongoing relationship with the U.S. military.) Sharon just so happens to be on the scene when Sam, Zemo, and Falcon need rescuing; bounty hunters spontaneously appear in the hidden location to which the foursome have traveled to find the evil doctor; Ayo appears to have arrived at the group’s destination before they even got there. Stuff keeps happening, seemingly just to keep things moving, regardless of whether it happening makes any sense.

And look, I get it. Sometimes, in lightweight genre fare like this, “it happens because without it there wouldn’t be a story” is acceptable, provided it’s entertaining. As ridiculous as it is on its face—you’re telling me Bucky and the Falcon don’t know anyone friendly who’s a potential expert on the Super-Soldier serum?—I don’t mind the pair teaming up with Baron Zemo, because reluctant hero-villain team-ups are a tried and true superhero staple, and because it’s just kind of funny. (Dainel Brühl seems like the only actor aware of this, and he makes it work, playing the character with a welcome light touch.)

But what about the sudden heel turn by Flag-Smasher leader Karli Morgenthau? In order to save one group of refugees, she decides it’s necessary to blow up another, just because the organization feeding them had surplus supplies, shocking even her devoted followers. This is a cheap 180-degree moral rotation for the character, and it’s difficult not to feel like this is the Marvel hivemind telling us once again that it’s wrong to challenge the status quo embodied by their army of good-looking super-people. It certainly outweighs the script’s nods in the direction of social critique, i.e. the assholish new Captain America bullying people, or the evil serum-concocting doctor saying the CIA hired him after his old bosses, HYDRA, went belly-up. At the end of the day, we’re still being presented with someone who cares about refugees and rejects rigid border enforcement acting like a moral monster. What message are we supposed to draw from this? (“It’s just a superhero show, chill out” is not an acceptable answer, but thank you for playing.)

There’s a theory in professional wrestling that the best heels tell the crowd something they hate to hear because they know it’s true. And in theory, that’s the role Baron Zemo is now playing. Much of what he says about his home country of Sokovia becoming a plaything of American military might in the form of the Avengers rings true, as does his fear and loathing of the potential for an army of Super-Soldiers instead of just a handful. (One of them, the elderly Isaiah Bradley, was used against his will as the basis for this new batch.) But it’s the superheroes who have their names on the marquee, not the not-so-super villain. The game is rigged to land our sympathies squarely on the superheroes’ side. Maybe there are still good stories to tell within this genre, stories that live and breathe like real dramas instead of a ramshackle morality play like this. For now, like the Madripoor skyline, they’re tantalizingly out of reach.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch The Falcon and The Winter Soldier Episode 3 ("Power Broker") on Disney+