This is what I was afraid of when I heard the Marvel Cinematic Universe was being downsized to television and other personal screens for streaming. Mind-numbingly intricate character development, nonsensical political struggle, and TV filler. We don't merely see superheroes and villains knock each other around, we see them walking to the fighting destinations and talking incessantly to delay those confrontations. The same arguments replayed over several different episodes. I didn't want to watch Sam and Bucky fix a boat, or Sam apply for a bank loan, or Bucky talk in circles with a shrink. And, I doubt the post-blip politics of a war on terror over national borders or whatever could be more vaguely inconsequential. Sam's speech at the end was atrociously artificial--a supposedly moving speech to rally the common folk as engineered by Disney executives. The generic fanaticism of the Flag Smashers even worse.

Even as movies released theatrically, the MCU has been a serial--a 20-plus-and-counting episodic series on bigger screens and with bigger budgets. Not necessarily a bad thing I think. After all, the first comic-book superhero movies were serials released in theatres: "Adventures of Captain Marvel" (1941) and the Fleischer Studios "Superman" (1941 and thereafter) cartoon series. When the Superman and Batman feature-length blockbusters came in the 1970s and 1980s, they too became part of multi-film franchises. Imagine if instead of six episodes released one per week--seemingly just enough time for us to forget the last episode was the same thing--this were split into two or three theatrically-released movies instead. In that spirit, it's the worst MCU episode since "The Incredible Hulk" (2008).

"The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" is all the more disappointing because it comes on the heels of the cleverly-reflexive "WandaVision" (2021). That's a show that understands and exploits its medium instead of suffering from it. A TV series about the magic of creating them. Even Wanda's grief-stricken retreat into nostalgia works better on the level of character interest. It's a show that ingeniously ended with shapeshifting in an empty theatre. Here, we're just supposed to get excited by a cameo from an actress who reminds us of a better TV series, I guess. Usually, the dichotomy isn't this simple, but "WandaVision" is smart, and this isn't.