I pointed out that they were stealing food and medicine, because that’s a pretty good indicator that the refugee camps are short of both. The point was to demonstrate that the people in the refugee camps aren’t just whiney mooches, but are facing significant hardships. That the Flag Smashers have also committed less morally defensible acts doesn’t undermine that observation, because that observation isn’t about the moral correctness of the Flag Smashers’ actions, but about the underlying conditions that have motivated them to act.
I have no idea what that’s meant to be an analogy for.
And it is somewhat less effective for having made it clunky exposition instead of having left as showing it. It is clear that the Flagsmashers are Displaced People. It would better to respect the viewers’ intelligence to understand who they are being displaced by and why than to knock us upside the head with it.
To be fair the case has been strongly made that there may be cut scenes and story elements that did show it better, with clumsy exposition having to fill the gap.
Wellll, in hopes of getting out of that argument that’s gone on for a while…
I will consider my Disney+ money well spent, if there’s a scene where Walker throws his shield at Sam, who launches his shield. The two hit, and Walker’s shield is sliced in half.
I’ve finally caught up on the show and read this thread.
I like the discussion on the Flag Smashers because it clarifies a whole lot for me. In a way, I agree with both sides of the argument. While I accept that there is a motivation that is logically consistent, I totally didn’t understand it from watching the show.
My recollections are:
(1) When the Flagsmashers are introduced there is some dialogue to the effect that the flagsmashers want things to return to the way things were after the Thanos snap. They aren’t clear on what they mean by this, but at the time I took this to mean the flagsmashers wanted to kill half the population. (You know, because that’s the way things were after the snap)
(2) I got confused about the refugees. I thought the refugees were snapped people. Then I got doubly confused about the flagsmashers helping refugees because that ran counter to the “I like snapping” ethos.
So while there may be a consistent story in there, it wasn’t all that clear to me.
Here’s the quote from Sam from two episodes ago that I think makes it pretty clear:
For five years, people have been welcomed into countries that have kept them out using barbwire. There were houses and jobs. Folks were happy to have people around to help them rebuild. It wasn’t just one community coming together, it was the entire world coming together. And then, boom. Just like that, it goes right back to the way it used to be.
Did anyone else feel weird about Julia Louis-Dreyfuss’s intro? She rattled off her name like she was reading it for the first time, not like someone who was actually named that would have. I dunno… just weird for me.
On the whole, the show feels like it had too many ideas for 6 episodes and didn’t put them together well. So far Sharon’s plot seems just a way to give the actress a paycheck. Could have been cut easily. The Donya Madani bits seem tacked on to give Karli depth, but would have been better with a “show don’t tell” flashback or two. I agree that the flag smashers need a better intermediate goal. Their motives and long term goals are fine, but they need some Macguffin that Sam and Bucky can thwart. The best parts so far have been Sam and Bucky dealing with Walker and what Steve’s legacy means. I admire the writers for including Isaiah and not shying away from the racial implications. But between the good stuff, there are long stretches of “who cares?”
Also, Sam and Bucky keep talking about Steve like he’s dead. He’s just old! Bucky says the shield is all the family he has left. Go visit Steve and chat about old times for a while! Maybe Sam can ask him for advice about taking up the shield, or something. Did I miss a bit where they showed that he died since the end of Endgame?
We really don’t know what happened to Steve, but in Far From Home, which takes place around the same time, the public story seems to be that he’s dead.
I assumed he went back to the different reality where he spent his life with Peggy. They’ve never been clear on how that all worked, but he’s not around. They even say “Steve is gone” on the show, not dead, so that’s what I’m going with.
The public story, yes. But Bucky and Sam know the truth. It’s possible that the truth includes him dying offscreen between Endgame and Far From Home, or between Endgame and TF&TWS, but that seems important enough that we the viewers would be told/shown it. All the memorial footage from FFH showed young Steve, not old, so I assumed the public story had Steve dying young, either in battle vs. Thanos alongside Tony, or if the public knows about the Time Heist, while putting back the stones.
I agree, they’ve been very coy about this, but my take is that “our” current reality is the one where he spent his life with Peggy. The one where he didn’t is now the alternate reality. He didn’t pop onto the time machine pad from another reality, as Old Steve in the time suit. He just walked up to the bench in civilian clothes, as far as we know. He caught up to the others “the long way round.”
Word of God (the Russos) is that the timeline he spent his life is an alternate timeline, but they’re being coy about how he got back to the main timeline. Considering that they hinted at what happened to Steve in the first episode, I’m guessing they’ll give some sort of answer in the last episode. Maybe in the post-credit scene.
The way time travel is describe in Endgame that would have to be the case. Bruce and Tony are very explicit that you can’t change the timeline by going back to the past, which a Steve Rogers living from the 1940s to the present day would do. If nothing else, we have multiple canon appearances of Peggy, from the 1950s to the 2000s, and it’s clear in all of them that Steve is dead in her timeline. But the Ancient One is also very explicit that mucking around in the past can create alternate timelines. Old Steve pretty much has to be from an alternate timeline.
As to how he got, apparently temporarily, back to the “main” timeline, well, his alternate timeline would still presumably have some version of Tony, Bruce, Hank Pym, Doctor Strange, and any number of other characters that could have the ability to slip him into an alternate timeline for a visit.
I don’t know that they have to go any deeper than that. I personally hope they don’t try. Trying to explain time travel never works, and trying to “close” “plot holes” in time travel stories almost always just makes things worse.
The problem with that is it means Steve just sat around doing nothing, knowing that Hydra is undermining Shield and that his best friend is being tortured and brain washed into becoming an assassin. It means he knew decades ahead of time that there were going to be multiple attacks on Earth by hostile aliens, and did nothing to warn people or help prepare for it. That’s a pretty hard-core character derailment.
We don’t actually know what all Steve did in that alternate time line. Remember, it’s alternate. History won’t necessarily play out the same, and there is actually no reason he can’t have a life with Peggy AND serve some role in mitigating future hazards.
As an aside to other methods, Steve was already provisioned with gear to return to the core MCUniverse. He could have just put the suit and Pym particles in the closet until Peggy died. He knew she’d likely die of Alzheimers by the time Endgame happened, and then just completed his final trip.
In the alternate timeline, sure - but the suggestion was that Old Steve who showed up at the end of Endgame had come back “the long way around,” which means he’s been hanging around in secret during all the events of the MCU, never helping or giving anyone a heads up about what new villain was waiting to show up to kill a ton of people.
My headcanon is that there is absolutely an alternate timeline where Steve and Peggy spend the 1950s fighting Hydra spies together, and I’ll fight anyone - up to and including Kevin Feige - who says different.
That planet is probably a huge utopia. Bucky broken out. The elder Stark doesn’t die early. Shield is still around. Maybe the Tony Stark doesn’t grow up scarred because his uncle Steve is around making Howard less of an ass.
And perhaps Steve is able to prevent whatever massive physical trauma that resulted in the massive reconstructive surgery that resulted in Howard’s total facial transformation sometime between the early 50s and the early 70s:
