FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER - Ep 3. Power Breakin’! (Patreon)

*every other header image felt too spoilery*

I spend a lot of time talking about character motivation.

That’s because it’s probably the second most important thing to understand about how to write something compelling - in that it is a fundamental component in knowing how to execute conflict (which is the most important thing). It’s just so easy to present “danger” on screen and think that does all the work. To have people rush in with guns. To put characters in seeming peril. But that’s not the same as meaningful conflict. For it’s all about what happens when two characters face off with conflicting, understandable motivations. Then you turn the screws and twist the knife and play with the audience. That’s when you have something really compelling. And I bring this up because character motivation is the single most important thing to making the structure of episode 3 of Falco & Winty work this week. What with it’s start to finish scenes of stand-offs and negotiations and a whole bunch of fun textural stuff…

Unfortunately, it all felt a little… fuzzy.

Which is not to say bad! It’s just a little unclear / winging it. But as a result I mostly felt like I was rolling along with scenes instead of really digging into the conflicts and feeling the pressure / relief. Take the big Zemo team up. I know he’s a bad guy, but I’m sitting there trying to remember what his whole deal is and, more importantly, what he wants. And even when I went back and read back his MCU database in the middle of the episode, I was like “I literally don’t remember any of this.” And even once I caught up and had clarity? It STILL felt a little fuzzy to me when I was trying to track his motivation in each scene. And it’s especially true for Falco and Winty’s motivations in keeping him around.

It matters because we’re playing with a time honored trope of “teaming up with the bad guy.” These are always pretty fun! You get to see new dynamics and people acting out of character. Hell, the Fast and The Furious has literally turned this into the modus operandi of the series. Is it always ridiculous? Sure! But the rules still matter and they make it so you believe those changes / account for the past actions and history. Take the fact that when Deckard Shaw came over in Fast 8, half the fans revolted not because of the mere idea of their team up - but because it never really accounted for his murder of Han (which just a movie prior, was the reason he was regarded as the worst possible villain). It can be silly, but you still gotta have a clear reason to buy the team up.

Which is why I was so put on my heels in this when Winty went from zero to “let’s bust this dude out of jail to team up” in like TEN SECONDS flat. And the fact that Sam only comes around because of “just trust me real good” doesn’t work. Because it’s the audience who are the ones you have to sell most of all. And it’s the kind of decision whose problems are doubled down on when the plan goes to hell and Zemo SHOOTS THE SCIENTIST, puts on the mask - seemingly like he’s going to run now - and instead and then comes back with the car? And they literally don’t even address him shooting the scientist? Like this is sloppy, sloppy stuff, ya’ll. And so much of it has to do with abandoning the lines of conflict.

It sort of infects a lot of things in the episode. For instance, when you look at that same scene, it’s so noticeable the way it doesn’t aim for tension. The “i’ll hold em off while you negotiate” is another huge suspense trope. The WHOLE idea is to try and get information out cleverly as the person outside is barely hanging on. But Sharon is outside as the “bad guys close in” and she just absolutely fucking takes em out like a badass (and yes, it is very cool!) but it never once made me feel like there was actual pressure on the interaction below, which sort of just spills out like story time. Even when Zemo slowly takes the gun, it doesn’t play the tension one direction or the other after that. He just suddenly shoots at a moment where he gets a view. The whole scene just keeps releasing the tension and I worry it’s because it wasn’t even trying to find it.

Again, it all just keeps coming back to meaningful conflict and the way that underlines so many scenes being from failing to engage. Take the scene where Karli talks with her compatriot on the street (an actor named Desmond Chiam, who I looked up because he is VERY hot). I like the tenderness and content of what she’s saying. But rule number 1 of any exposition scene is “find the conflict in the scene to make it compelling.”And the whole scene I’m like “oof, this is a lot of telling.” And you’ve probably heard “show don’t tell” advice before, which is honestly a descriptor that I think is still too vague because it makes it seem like one should be wordlessly conveying something it a shot. It really should be “dramatize don’t tell,” which requires a baseline conflict between two people who want different things. When you do that? It doesn’t ever feel like exposition, but instead a naturally evolving part of the story. But everything about this scene is pure demonstration. She’s explaining things from her past and things she feels, but the characters already get all this so really she’s to the audience - which means the scene has no reason to exist.

And paradoxically, all that explanation can actually muddle the effect of character dynamics. You make it easy to lose people in the moment instead of directing their wants. Like, I kept getting confused in the early Madripoorand hey, maybe it’s on me, but I kept feeling like I kept amassing information, but was still baseline fuzzy about what I was supposed to be worried about as the baseline tension of each moment. Like we’re supposed to be working our way up to the power broker, but then there’s a moment in the bar where we think the power brokers people are coming after then, then we meet the contact and it’s muddled ever so slightly to the point that you go, “wait, is this supposed to be the power broker?” Same goes for the rules on Falcon staying in character. I’ve seen these kinds of subterfuge scenes done so many times, but this episode was really fuzzy across the board. But hey, the little beat of him pulling away the snake goo shot before downing it was really fun.

And the fun is mostly what sustains me. Which is okay. Because again, so much of what I’m sort of doing in these columns is not trying to take this fun show down a peg, but be asking that critical question: “how could this be working better? Specifically in the application of baseline fundamentals of drama?” I KNOW Marvel is very good at getting you to roll along and take in the fun stuff. And even if lacking in tension, Sharon’s fights are really well-executed (it’s really hard to make a knife throw feel organic in an uncut sequence - and her tossing the knife into that dude's arm as she charged was just A+ craft). The yelling about action movies is fun. And playing with Zemo being a baron with an old butler is also really fun. This episode was a classic “fun and games” point in the story and I suppose I had enough fun, but…

I wish the rules of the game were a bit clearer.

RANDOM THOUGHTS!

-“Sebastian Stan gets to do things!” I keep writing that in my notes, but again, after all that time ignoring him in the movies it really does make me feel better about where it was all going.

-Re: Walker as new cap - The “do you know who I am???” line hits and hits hard, but it’s this thing where… I’m not exactly tracking the reasons for this evolution? Like I fully got his arc in the last episode and how it built up to the “don’t get in my way” line… but this move felt really like we got one step ahead too quick. Especially given that spent so much time setting up the “aw shucks” decency at the start, then we really gotta buy the turn.

-I always thought the Power Broker was a really neat idea for a character and I’m so excited to see what they do with it.

-Question! During the scene on the plane they start talking about something, I think it was “steve’s book,” which led into a conversation about marvin gaye? And I’m sooooooo confused by what they were talking about. Seriously, I rewound the scene like 7 times but I felt like a proper noun was missing??? Any help would be appreciated cause I really missed it.

-Speaking of rewinding, I asked on twitter if anyone has had rewind / fast-forward problems with the Disney+ app and a litany of hands shot into the air. Using the D-pad  makes it much better, but still. HOW is this a big problem with so many streamers? I will take this opportunity to say Netlflix’s controls are pretty well done and should be the standard.

-Re: “putting people on pedestals and forgetting about the flaws.” It’s amazing how much the MCU does this at large. I really hope this investigation isn’t lip-service and leads to something meaningful, especially for Sam who seems to be questioning it. But it sort of brings up a whole issue I have now that we’re halfway through the story. Because right now, he’s sadly the character with the least going on? Or at least not as much that I can openly track. Because I get how the Isiah moment impacted him, but like the Walker moment above, the turn feels beat to fast - It’s like he’s gone from zero to cynicism really quick. Especially if he’s going to say the “maybe i just should have destroyed it” line about the shield. In my brain, I’m like “How did he get HERE already?” And this is why tracking character motivations is SO important.

-Madripoor was neat? Maybe something weird about how it was presented? I dunno, it also had Cyberpunk 2077 vibes.

-Does anyone else think the monkey idols were a reference to Hanuman and Winston Duke’s M’baka and the Jabari tribe? I got that one, but probably missed some other connections.

-Really liked the actor who played the bad doctor dude, Wilfred Nagle! IMDB isn’t updated yet so can’t get his name yet (UPDATE: His name is Olli Haaskivi! Hello and nice to meet you!) 

-Hehehe “100 bitcoins.” … btw I just looked that amount up and it’s $5,919,640 dollars.

-Best lines both come from Sam: “I can’t run in these heels!” / “they cleared the bionic staring machine and he killed almost everyone he met.”

-Okay, let’s talk about Sharon Carter. Clearly there’s something else going on with her when we see her get into that car at the end, but the whole “been on the run” thing also highlights how much I don't remember about where her story ended up? Also, “wow she’s kinda awful now” does seem to sum things up. That and she does a lot of murder. I’m sure there’s already speculation like iS sHe tHe PoWeR bRoKeR, but there’s probably some other moving part to this. Mostly the whole thing just made me feel weird. If I were Sam I woulda been like “Caps still alive and the timelines are screwed up so you maybe kissed your great grand uncle.”

-In the shipping container fight, did I see a lady goon get stabbed with the pole? It was pretty quick so I could be wrong. But either way, I think we need way more lady goons.

-So early in this episode they were treating the flag smashers as basically Robin Hood, but by the end she’s doing big murder? Honestly, after feeling like we were on a path I come out of this week more confused about the intent with this group. And again, it’s not the moral complexity that’s confusing me, it’s clarity of intent is what matters. Because a movie like Black Panther deals with 15 different characters with different views, but I actually understand each’s psychology perfectly so it plays out organically. This is just circular and evasive.

-Ayo! I am incredibly happy to see Florence Kasumba here, but I’ll be honest as the camera panned over I got excited for a quick second that it was Oyoke. Which sort of sucks for Ayo and totally shouldn’t be held against any of this? I dunno. It’s just easy to want the more prominent character sometimes… OH NO AM I PART OF THE FAN INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX NOW?!?!?

-Since this week’s conflict fuzziness really struck me as a bit weird (and especially given that last week's episode felt so ding dang clear on all these same fronts), I went to look up the writing credit. Now, assigning praise and blame to an individual in a writing team is an incredibly precarious thing. Like, really. You have no idea who did what and a lot of work in a team is often shared. But I will say that the writer of this episode Derek Kolstad (who writes a lot of the John Wick stuff) has run into a loooooot of these kinds of motivation / clarity problems before (which is weird for a series that started off with canicide, which is one of the best action movie motivations I’ve come across). I also saw Nobody last week and could talk about the motivation problems of the first 15 minutes endlessly, too. Anyway, moving on.

-Let’s end this with some more blip talk! Because it’s sort of a fascinating thing that still hangs over the MCU, no? Like most story conceits that have these huge, massive implications with all these endless possibilities, it ALWAYS invites the risk of “the more you look at it, the more it comes undone.” Like I love how they’re talking about the global repatriation council - but then that “laws and borders” comment feels super weird inside it, no? And for all the time spent on flag smashing, I still don’t get some core parts of the group's ethos and what it really has to do with the blip. At least not emotionally. But at the same time, I think tying the bad doctor guy’s motivation into getting blipped was tremendously smart and makes total sense!

But I still feel like there’s this huge thing when it comes to the untapped impact of this event. I know people make comparisons to The Leftovers a lot with it, but that’s a world that lost its mind with just a 2/% loss. And I love the way the sheer logistics were explored more in something like Y The Last Man. Whereas I still wonder so much about the 50% loss of the MCU and the problem of how that world came back together. I know we’re finally getting into, but it’s one of those things, the more you stare at it, the easier it is to fixate on the incredible implications (which is part of the reason I think the MCU likes staying away from it). Still, I can’t help wonder, how deep can these explorations go? And I don’t mean that in the conspiratorial plot sense…

I mean it in the emotional sense.

<3HULK