Streaming Saturday #15: Power Broker

 Okay, let's try this again.

This is your friendly neighborhood Ticketmaster, back after a bit of spur-of-the-moment commentary to again wish you a happy National Film Score Day (on the correct date this time).

It has only been an hour at the time of this writing since I last posted, but said commentary post hasn't gone over well yet. Perhaps I cursed too much therein, or perhaps social media is feeding me to its SEO-powered cancelling machines for even talking about a certain topic that shall not be named here, or perhaps people just didn't find it as interesting as the rest of my Streaming Saturday content.

Whatever the case, you're here for some actual Falcon & the Winter Soldier content, so remember to like and comment below (on this post, too, not just the social media stuff--for those of you on Facebook, you know what my participation traffic for Blogger really looks like) because every little click and word helps. Oh, and another SPOILER Warning! is in effect starting...NOW!

"Power Broker" is the third episode of Falcon & the Winter Soldier, and it opens with "Captain America" and Battlestar searching for Karli Morgenthau in Berlin. While the previous episode did a great job of establishing John Walker's character as "Captain America, but not as good," and giving him an almost sympathetic bent to his origin, this episode's first scene shows what feels like a completely different character, but is more likely supposed to be how Walker is beyond the public face: radically nationalist, savage, untrusting, and grey of moral character, speaking (as Karli puts it in a later scene following her own act of inhumanity) "the only language these people understand." His sick pride and entitlement also come to the fore with a booming shout of "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?" that draws stark comparison to Bucky's exchange with the police officer in the previous episode. Walker believes that he is, and deserves to be, Captain America, and is entitled to all of the goodwill and patriotic godhood that the title carried with it (when Steve Rogers was Captain America, and fought to earn and maintain every inch of it for the past eighty years). The peasants are not amused. On the other hand, Sam--as the Falcon--did not inherit a hero's legacy, but instead earned his own hero status through trials by fire, and sees himself as unworthy of Rogers' mantle.

As if to show further contrast (and some parallels) to Walker's extreme methods, Sam and Bucky visit Baron Zemo in prison to get intel on the Flag-Smashers' acquisition of the Super Soldier serum. Daniel Bruhl is amazing in this role, balancing Zemo's cool charisma and sinister calculation on a knife's edge that he would not hesitate to draw through the nearest jugular if it struck his fancy. Also see Bruhl in The Alienist, a turn-of-the-century police procedural where his character solves crimes using early forensic science and psychological profiling methods. Ted Levine (The Silence Of the Lambs, Joy Ride, and Monk) and Dakota Fanning (Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Gen:Lock) have supporting roles in it, too.

Getting back on track, Bucky gives Sam the old "suppose a hypothetical thing that's actually happening right now were to happen later and I had nothing to do with it, except I totally did" routine to stall him while Zemo breaks out of prison for an odd-thruple team-up, compounding the already awesome chemistry between the two heroes with his own twisted charm.

The three of them travel to the fictional island nation of Madripoor in search of commentary on classism, but also a HYDRA scientist who managed to perfect twenty doses of the serum before Karli Morgenthau stole them all. Posing as supervillains (Zemo and Bucky as themselves, Sam as "Smiling Tiger"), they manage to almost bluff their way through a contact meeting, but their covers are blown and the unseen Power Broker puts a bounty on their heads, leading to a brutal, if considerably more Netflix-budgeted, hallway-type fight in a shipping yard between the bounty hunters and a newly introduced Sharon Carter. Meanwhile, Sam, Bucky, and Zemo receive some exposition dumping from the scientist in his secret lab (hmmm...shipping containers and a secret lab; I know there's a halfway clever Dexter joke in there somewhere...). With the remaining bounty hunters closing in, Zemo inexplicably (is it really inexplicable? Or is Zemo also the Power Broker?) kills the scientist and disappears just long enough to arouse suspicion and make a cool, last-minute save.

Now, let's take a moment to satisfy the speculators. For those out there who aren't comic book geeks or Google researchers, the Marvel Comics version of Madripoor is most commonly associated with Viper (a.k.a. "Madame Hydra," last seen in movie form in The Wolverine, played by Svetlana Khodchenkova), Dragoness (I'm speculating that Karli Morgenthau, who is a redhead like Dragoness, will turn out to be an alias for Tamara Kurtz), Jessica Drew (who, in her original run, was a genetically altered HYDRA spy; could there be a possible Spider-Woman introduction in the works?), and the team everyone's been drooling to see canonized into the MCU since before WandaVision pulled a Boehner: the X-Men! With the introduction of Sharon Carter in this episode, Madripoor has been firmly established as a haven for outcasts of varying morality, so an easy fix for the "why suddenly mutants?" question--that doesn't involve multiversal madness--would be to mash Madripoor and Asteroid M together into another Wakanda-like country; a Wakanda for mutants.

Speaking of Wakanda, the episode ends in Latvia, where Bucky has a run-in with Ayo, the second-in-command of the Wakandan guard, who demands that he turn over Zemo to her.

I feel like this is a good place to stop because I'm tired, I've run out of theories, I just talked about the end of the episode, and I've probably said "Wakanda" too much. Time permitting, I will have a Just the Ticket on Godzilla Vs. Kong later this week, but I really need to shove some accounting knowledge into my brain, so good night, good luck, and

Wakanda,

Forever!