This week the movie stops to explain itself, and honestly? It’s the best villain-monologue real estate Hydra ever bought. Dangling off a rooftop, Jasper Sitwell coughs up the whole plan: an algorithm that reads your bank records, your emails, and your high school transcripts to decide whether you get to keep living. The targets run from a TV anchor in Cairo to the Under Secretary of Defense to — and we cannot stress how unbothered the movie is by this — the high school valedictorian in Iowa City, filed in the exact same tier as Bruce Banner and Stephen Strange. (The Strange name-drop landed a full three years before his own movie, which is either masterful franchise planning or the most patient of inside jokes.) This came out less than a year after the Snowden leaks, which means Markus and McFeely either had their finger on the pulse or were quietly receiving documents of their own.
Then the exposition does what all good exposition should — it gets thrown out of a moving car and immediately flattened by a Penske truck. (Second one this movie.) And with that, the film stops talking and the Winter Soldier finally
arrives — not the sniper-in-the-shadows from the Fury hit, but the full apparatus: minions, a grenade-launcher caddy who hands him ordnance like a golf pro reading the green, and the most upsetting thing one human can do to a sedan, which is reach in and rip the steering wheel clean out. Cap rides his own shield down the highway like an Olympian, Natasha shoots the Winter Soldier in the eye from underneath an overturned car, and we get a Black Widow’s-gauntlets deep dive that ends up at
Tales of Suspense #64 and the holy gospel of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.
And then it just… stops. On Sam Wilson. Holding a knife. Against a man with a Gatling gun and a vibranium arm. We’ll find out how that works out for him next week — assuming there’s enough of Sam left to fill a follow-up episode.
Links & NotesCharacters / Comics (Marvel.com)