Main cast: Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson/Falcon), Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes/Winter Solder), Wyatt Russell (John Walker), Clé Bennett (Lemar Hoskins/Battlestar), Erin Kellyman (Karli Morgenthau), Daniel Brühl (Baron Zemo), Emily VanCamp (Sharon Carter), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Valentina Allegra de Fontaine), Carl Lumbly (Isaiah Bradley), Danny Ramirez (Joaquin Torres), Florence Kasumba (Ayo), and Georges St-Pierre (Georges Batroc)
Director: Kari Skogland
Truth is the second to last episode of this season of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and it seems like the party is ending even before I have started to warm up to the festivities. Incidentally, this episode deals with the fallout of a dramatic event—at least on paper—at the penultimate of the previous episode, so some major spoilers of that episode will be present in this review, right after this paragraph, in fact. So, avert your eyes now if you haven’t watched this show but intend to use it as a sleeping aid some time in the future.
Anyway, John Walker killed a man in the previous episode out of fury, when the robotic Raggedy Ann Bore downed his buddy Battlestar during a confrontation. This episode opens with a hilariously hypocritical scene of Sam and Bucky lecturing John on the need to give up the shield because as a superhero, John should never harm a civilian. Yes, these two seem to have forgotten their own history of collateral damage in past MCU movies, and it’s also depressing how Sam has been nothing but a sanctimonious prig up to this point throughout the entire season. The rest of this episode is mostly moping and moaning from all parties—business as usual, in other words—and once again, I’m bored out of my mind.
What are the people behind this show doing? It’s so bizarre how they are handed two interesting protagonists that by right are polar opposites, only to give these two a dull, lethargic story line. The story itself is interesting on paper, but the people writing the scripts and directing the episodes seem to believe that they are filming some woke-themed commercial for a fashion label or something. Sam’s lines in this episode are particularly eye-rolling as they are straight out of the Gillette “The Best a Man Can Get!” handbook of shallow, ultimately meaningless feel-good babbles designed to sell products made in third-world sweatshops. It is as if these people go, “Oh! Sam is black, so that means, we’ll turn him into a woke line machine!” This won’t be so bad if Sam had any other personality trait on this show, and he hasn’t.
To be fair, Bucky is one-note too. He’s just an emo Eeyore for the most part. Still, he isn’t being made to utter lines ripped out of an armchair activist’s Twitter wall, for what that is worth.
Worst of all, though, is that Raggedy Ann Bore creature. The actress playing her is atrocious, and the only acceptable excuse for her even landing that role is that Kari Skogland in her infinite wisdom told the young lady to impersonate a toaster while playing the role. Erin Kellyman has only one facial expression throughout—mildly constipated—and her line delivery has zero emotion, only accent. This is really bad because Raggedy Ann Bore is meant to be a sympathetic villain, one that is driven to extremes because she feels that she has no other choice, and with an actor like that playing this role, Raggedy Ann Bore just comes off as a toaster in need of a trip to the repair shop ASAP.
John Walker is another wasted potential. His arc parallels Raggedy Ann Bore’s in many ways, but the script fails to do this arc justice. The drama comes too late into the season, especially when his role is sidelined and even turned into a punchline in the last few episodes. If you ask me, he should have been given his own show, with this arc and him facing off Raggedy Ann Bore (preferably played by a human actor instead of this broken toaster of a lady), while Sam and Bucky are given a more lightweight Lethal Weapon-esque show.
But no, instead, we get this show, which suffers from hideously botched pacing, poor character development, limpid action scenes, lots of wasted potential, and all around missed opportunity. The finale is next? Good, let this overlong snooze come to an end so that we can all move on with our lives.
