Hello!
Today it’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier episode 3, which dropped on Friday 2 April — the points worth flagging, the theories, and predictions for where all of this goes next.
Quick notes on everything that caught my eye on the first watch, the Easter eggs, and then the theories.
Spoilers ahead
The WandaVision episode reviews from the previous run are here!
For The Falcon and the Winter Soldier episode reviews, click the image below!
I’ve started photographing Hot Toys figures for fun recently. Camera is a ZV-1, shooting RAW and editing in Lightroom.
What I shot this time was
That one.
Hot Toys really is the good stuff.
The quality is absurdly high, and I’ve got about six of them now.
Nothing whatsoever to do with films or TV, but I went to the Hiroshi Yoshida exhibition and the Kashiwa Sato exhibition the other day, so I turned that into a video.
Let me go through the Power Broker, the thing episode 3 is named after.
First off, the comics have a company called Power Broker Inc., so that’s where I’ll start.
A company founded by Curtiss Jackson. It enhances ordinary humans and grants them abilities, then takes a percentage of the income they earn using those abilities as its fee.
Its main clients are superhuman wrestling. The augmentation is carried out mainly by Dr. Karl Malus. The process involves a great deal of danger and can result in the subject’s death or unintended mutation. There was also a period when it used a highly addictive drug under the pretence of stabilising the subject’s abilities, in order to keep the payments coming in.
After Curtiss’s death, an unidentified second Power Broker took over the existing operation while also branching out in new directions, such as investing in Hench, an app for hiring villains.
https://w.atwiki.jp/studentx/pages/1306.html
Next, the Power Broker himself. The first image is the original one, the second image is the second-generation one.
Put simply, they’re dealers who supply villains with high-risk, high-return power
The video below covers the details and is easy to follow.
In episode 3 it was only the name that turned up, but…
My prediction on whether he actually appears later is in the second half of this post!
The GRC advert takes “diversity” as its theme, and I thought it was impressive how properly it reads the mood of the times~
A personal question, this one. I imagine there were plenty of cases all over the universe where a pilot happened to be dusted by the snap mid-flight and every passenger died with him. In which case Thanos meant to halve all living things, but it feels to me like he actually wiped out more than half. Did they take any of that into account when everyone was brought back in Endgame, I wonder?
John’s feelings about the mission were running away with him a bit there.
But his partner Battlestar kept making cool-headed calls from start to finish, which was unexpected, and my opinion of him went up quite a lot.
Getting across the idea that any system or organisation, however good it is, has people as its weak point — and doing it by way of Machiavelli — that sort of intelligent staging was great
And it turns out Zemo is an actual baron of Sokovia!
And a baron is, well, a Baron, so that gives us his villain name from the comics, Baron Zemo! lol lol
That moment of everything clicking into place was the best——!
Him finding out about Mr. Nakajima and the others looks like it could be bad news…
Madripoor is a fictional East Asian nation made up of Hightown, where the wealthy live, and Lowtown, where the poor live.
The video below on the comics version of it is incredibly easy to follow.
The atmosphere in the comics is gorgeous.
What surprised me is that Madripoor is apparently built on top of an absolutely enormous dragon, and that dragon was recently brought down by a giant-sized Shang-Chi, or so I gather.
So maybe in the MCU it’s sitting on a dragon’s head too…?
Smiling Tiger (real name Conrad Mack) is a crook who looks exactly like Falcon.
There really is a villain called Smiling Tiger in the comics, and apparently he once set his sights on ruling Madripoor as well. Are the MCU going to make some rags-to-riches yakuza-style film set in Madripoor down the line, I wonder? lol
The dodgy biker gang in Madripoor and that shop sign reading “sudachi soba” felt like pure stereotype, and it was funny
The music playing while the Winter Soldier tears the place apart is “Winter Soldier” from the second Captain America film! It’s the track called “Winter Soldier” in the playlist below! Lovely that it’s the same composer this time round, too!
The song playing in Selby’s hideout is “Le Petit Homme” by Édith Piaf. It has the feel of the era Steve and Bucky came from, which is lovely~
The scene where Sarah’s call blows Sam’s cover was funny. Zemo and Bucky look set to tease him about it for a while.
Sharon having turned into a small-time crook was a shock…
Throwing parties at home that double as auctions, no less…
And she seems to resent Cap as well… If someone had looked out for Sharon over the five years leading up to Endgame, it would never have come to this…
The song playing when they get to Dr. Nagel’s lab is “Comin’ Home Baby” by Mel Tormé. Great track with a groove all of its own.
I took over the Winter Soldier programme
after the five failed experiments in Siberia.
HYDRA fell and the CIA hired me, and in the blood of one test subject
a serum close to a stable state was found.
⋮
An achievement nobody has managed since Erskine.
Nagel produced a super soldier serum out of Isaiah’s blood — no huge apparatus needed, and it doesn’t turn you into a slab of muscle either. Impressive.
But he was wiped out by the snap, so it seems there was no major incident during those five years.
Incidentally, Dr. Erskine is the doctor who created the super soldier serum back in the first Captain America film.
The woman lying ill at the start of episode 3 is Donya Madani, someone Karli held dear, and she died of tuberculosis. Karli has it in her to care about other people like that, and yet the terrorism…
Zemo in the purple hood turns into an outrageously bold, powerful fighter, the kind that calls back to his special forces days. Why does he need to put a mask on at all?! is what I thought, but it looks cool so it’s fine lol
And then, just when it looked like he’d driven off and left them, he came back to pick them up — top marks for that.
Ayo, who belongs to the Dora Milaje, the Wakandan king’s royal guard, appears at the very end. Well, yes, breaking Zemo out of prison was obviously going to get you told off.
Will they touch on things like T’Challa having passed away, I wonder?
Once the whole business was over, Sharon got into a car with a driver and went off somewhere.
Note that she tells the woman driving that “things got serious,” and that she’s in the back seat, which is to say the VIP seat — and there’s a case to be made that Sharon herself is the Power Broker.
On the other hand, there’s no ruling out that the life on the run is a lie and she’s embedded as a S.W.O.R.D. agent (with the driver as her S.W.O.R.D. subordinate). Or, as mentioned above, maybe she goes on to be the lead of a rags-to-riches story set in Madripoor?
Is this mask of Zemo’s something handed down through the family, or something else entirely? What is it, exactly?
Now that Isaiah has been exposed, there’s a chance Zemo goes to kill him, as someone opposed to the super soldier serum. And Bucky has had the serum too, so it’s conceivable he uses Mr. Nakajima in order to kill Bucky.
If Zemo doesn’t die in this show, a development where he becomes a member of HYDRA — the boss of it, really — the way he is in the comics is entirely possible. He’s shown a fairly comic side of himself in this show, so ideally he’d keep turning up in future
Bucky’s fight in Madripoor was being filmed, so the whole world may already know that Bucky has stopped being a civilian
If that happens his pardon gets revoked, so there could well be a development where he lives out his life in Wakanda not as Bucky but as the White Wolf.
I think only eight or nine of the Flag Smashers have used the super soldier serum so far, which leaves about eleven doses of the drug spare.
There looks to be another round of trouble coming over that leftover drug. The new Captain America and his lot taking it, for instance. And Sam beating them would prove that what makes a Captain America isn’t a super soldier serum, which sounds thrilling. Also, I hope that round of trouble becomes a talking point on a global scale, so that Sam’s low profile gets a lift.
Karli blew up people who couldn’t move an inch, but one of her own crew was visibly appalled by it. Would be nice if he turns on her
Sadly, Sokovia was worn down by the events of Age of Ultron, absorbed by the surrounding countries, and had ceased to exist…
Zemo was saying something about a memorial, and sure enough it shows up in the trailer too.
And I think this disappearance of Sokovia might be setting up the arrival of a certain someone.
The absolute ruler of the small nation of Latveria and one of the world’s foremost scientists, with designs on conquering the world. Arrogant and full of himself, but a big-hearted man, upright and proud.
https://dic.pixiv.net/a/Dr.%E3%83%89%E3%82%A5%E3%83%BC%E3%83%A0
Doctor Doom is famous as the arch-enemy of the Fantastic Four, and he’s actually a character whose popularity rivals Darth Vader’s.
He was born in the small nation of Latveria, so maybe he’s involved somehow with this disappearance of Sokovia in the MCU and the countries around it… something like that feels plausible!
Episode 4 is here!
On July 24, 202…
Cass!
Put that cereal away, now.