The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Review

Two things in this are genuinely strong. The first is Wyatt Russell, whose John Walker is a decorated soldier handed an impossible symbol and destroyed by it, and whose public execution of a man in a square with the shield is the most shocking image the studio has produced for television. The second is Carl Lumbly's Isaiah Bradley, a super soldier imprisoned and erased by the country he served, whose two scenes carry more weight than the rest of the season combined.

Between them sits a lot of ordinary spy television: a fugitive group with a cause nobody can articulate, an interchangeable set of European locations, and a plot about resettlement that the writing raises and then resolves with a speech. Sebastian Stan and Anthony Mackie are relaxed and funny together, which sustains long stretches, and Daniel Brühl's Zemo dancing is the best joke here. But Karli Morgenthau is a villain the show is too nervous to let be right, and the finale delivers the answer to the shield question in a monologue rather than a story.