Sam Wilson: cutest meet-cute, you're adorable and badass, I love you, fandom, prove me wrong and do well by your tragic backstory, your hard-won well-adjusted self, and your epic journey with Steve to recover Bucky—all of which is way more fodder to work with than Clint Barton. Ahem. (Also, your flying scenes were great.)
EVERYTHING ABOUT SAM WILSON.
I didn't know him at all; I am not a Marvel reader. His flying scenes were magnificent and I love that when he's not super-soldiering, he's a trauma counselor. I hope we see more of him.
Natasha: you're adorable and a badass, I love you, I ship you and Steve harder than ever and now I have way more to base that on.
. . . I don't actually ship them at all and really enjoyed the portrayal of a non-romantic relationship between two characters who would have been romantically linked in a more conventional story, but that's one of my things. I like non-romances.
(That first post-credits scene, people more in the know than me identify them as Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch; they're mutants in the comics, right? But there was something about volunteers in the scene, so maybe they're experimented-on instead? (That was Loki's staff, right? I was pretty tired by the end.))
It looked like Loki's staff to me? The twins are definitely presented as the results of experimentation: we have some creepy double-talk from the formerly HYDRA scientists in their the underground bunker to confirm that.
"What about the volunteers?" "The dead will be buried so deep, even their ghosts won't be able to find them." "And the survivors?" "The twins . . . There's nothing more horrifying than a miracle."
I was watching with gaudior and derspatchel, both of whom recognized the twins as Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. I'm seeing some theories that their new backstory is the product of complicated copyright dynamics and plausible deniability—they can still be Magneto's kids, but their powers could be the result of exposure to the Tesseract as opposed to mutant DNA, and if someday the filmmakers get the rights to incorporate X-Men film continuity into the Avengers-verse, then perhaps the result of exposure to the Tesseract that caused their hitherto unexpressed mutant DNA to bloom.
Computer stuff: makes no sense at all. I have no idea why "we can identify the geographical coordinates where a program on a thumb drive was written" is worse to me than "1970s computer tech allowed the uploading of personalities," but there it is.
I greatly enjoyed Armin Zola existing as a ghost in miles of reel-to-reel, but I really liked that his entire villain speech is just stalling for time until a S.H.I.E.L.D.-targeted missile can melt Steve and Natasha off the face of the earth. Plus the fact that I was already thinking about Wernher von Braun when Natasha said "Operation Paperclip," making it a clever, bitterly plausible piece of secret history. Of course the U.S. would have wanted as much fringe science as it could get from HYDRA. It's not like we turned our noses up at Nazi rocketry.
(I'm not so cool with the idea that all the ways the latter twentieth century went down the toilet were the stealthy work of HYDRA behind the scenes of S.H.I.E.L.D., because I firmly believe that humanity is capable of screwing itself over without encouragement, but, eh. It raises the stakes.)
(Speaking of misleading, I flat-out squeaked when Pierce's "your work has shaped the century" line turned out to be to the Winter Soldier. Awesome.)
That, agreed. And the one line in the scene with Pierce and Bucky—"He's been out of cryo too long"—implying both that the longer Bucky is awake, the less hold his programming has on him, and explaining the Winter Soldier's sixty-year tenure as a "ghost story." Whatever Zola did to him and the Soviets after, it didn't make him immortal; he's just never spent more than a couple months—years, at best—unfrozen over the last half-century. In some ways, he's got even more history than Steve to catch up on. Steve at least has the internet.
Was that what's his face, the guy with the shock sticks who was sad about disappointing Cap and fighting Falcon, being all burned and treated at the end? I assumed so but now I'm not sure.
Yes; I figured at that point that we'd been watching the origin story of some supervillain I don't know about, but I'll find out whenever it becomes relevant to the next movie. I can't even remember his name right now. He was mostly OH GOD THAT GUY I'M SO GLAD SAM WILSON IS AS UNIMPRESSED WITH YOUR THIRD-RATE PROPAGANDA AS I AM.
Speaking of confusing at the end and fakeouts, am I right that Natasha shorted out Pierce's phone and therefore, somehow or other, only got a partial charge from the biometric device? It didn't put a hole in her clothes, I think, after all.
I think she EMP'd the biometric device so that it didn't respond when Pierce tried to burn her; she just basically had to tase herself to do it.
Is it comics canon that she married a Howling Commando, specifically the black guy who spoke all the languages, or is that just this one fic I read?
She has a canonical relationship with Gabe Jones, so I assumed that's who she was talking about when she mentioned her husband. Which would be fine by me.
I could have used more Bucky, but I really liked what we saw: that last post-credits scene is a poignant stinger. And, yes, Steve. Yay.
no subject
EVERYTHING ABOUT SAM WILSON.
I didn't know him at all; I am not a Marvel reader. His flying scenes were magnificent and I love that when he's not super-soldiering, he's a trauma counselor. I hope we see more of him.
Natasha: you're adorable and a badass, I love you, I ship you and Steve harder than ever and now I have way more to base that on.
. . . I don't actually ship them at all and really enjoyed the portrayal of a non-romantic relationship between two characters who would have been romantically linked in a more conventional story, but that's one of my things. I like non-romances.
(That first post-credits scene, people more in the know than me identify them as Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch; they're mutants in the comics, right? But there was something about volunteers in the scene, so maybe they're experimented-on instead? (That was Loki's staff, right? I was pretty tired by the end.))
It looked like Loki's staff to me? The twins are definitely presented as the results of experimentation: we have some creepy double-talk from the formerly HYDRA scientists in their the underground bunker to confirm that.
"What about the volunteers?"
"The dead will be buried so deep, even their ghosts won't be able to find them."
"And the survivors?"
"The twins . . . There's nothing more horrifying than a miracle."
(At which point I got Bitter Seeds flashbacks.)
I was watching with
Computer stuff: makes no sense at all. I have no idea why "we can identify the geographical coordinates where a program on a thumb drive was written" is worse to me than "1970s computer tech allowed the uploading of personalities," but there it is.
I greatly enjoyed Armin Zola existing as a ghost in miles of reel-to-reel, but I really liked that his entire villain speech is just stalling for time until a S.H.I.E.L.D.-targeted missile can melt Steve and Natasha off the face of the earth. Plus the fact that I was already thinking about Wernher von Braun when Natasha said "Operation Paperclip," making it a clever, bitterly plausible piece of secret history. Of course the U.S. would have wanted as much fringe science as it could get from HYDRA. It's not like we turned our noses up at Nazi rocketry.
(I'm not so cool with the idea that all the ways the latter twentieth century went down the toilet were the stealthy work of HYDRA behind the scenes of S.H.I.E.L.D., because I firmly believe that humanity is capable of screwing itself over without encouragement, but, eh. It raises the stakes.)
(Speaking of misleading, I flat-out squeaked when Pierce's "your work has shaped the century" line turned out to be to the Winter Soldier. Awesome.)
That, agreed. And the one line in the scene with Pierce and Bucky—"He's been out of cryo too long"—implying both that the longer Bucky is awake, the less hold his programming has on him, and explaining the Winter Soldier's sixty-year tenure as a "ghost story." Whatever Zola did to him and the Soviets after, it didn't make him immortal; he's just never spent more than a couple months—years, at best—unfrozen over the last half-century. In some ways, he's got even more history than Steve to catch up on. Steve at least has the internet.
Was that what's his face, the guy with the shock sticks who was sad about disappointing Cap and fighting Falcon, being all burned and treated at the end? I assumed so but now I'm not sure.
Yes; I figured at that point that we'd been watching the origin story of some supervillain I don't know about, but I'll find out whenever it becomes relevant to the next movie. I can't even remember his name right now. He was mostly OH GOD THAT GUY I'M SO GLAD SAM WILSON IS AS UNIMPRESSED WITH YOUR THIRD-RATE PROPAGANDA AS I AM.
Speaking of confusing at the end and fakeouts, am I right that Natasha shorted out Pierce's phone and therefore, somehow or other, only got a partial charge from the biometric device? It didn't put a hole in her clothes, I think, after all.
I think she EMP'd the biometric device so that it didn't respond when Pierce tried to burn her; she just basically had to tase herself to do it.
Is it comics canon that she married a Howling Commando, specifically the black guy who spoke all the languages, or is that just this one fic I read?
She has a canonical relationship with Gabe Jones, so I assumed that's who she was talking about when she mentioned her husband. Which would be fine by me.
I could have used more Bucky, but I really liked what we saw: that last post-credits scene is a poignant stinger. And, yes, Steve. Yay.