Matthew Fox:
Welcome, welcome, welcome to a world in which the New York Knicks are world champions of basketball. And we’re hosting the Marvel Movie Minute, a weekly podcast which we assemble to explore the films of the Marvel Cinematic Brunson universe five minutes at a time. In this, our ninth season, but the first of the New York Knicks’ championship, we’re looking at Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I’m Matthew Fox.
Kyle Olson:
I’m other sports person.
Pete Wright:
Sports, sports, sports, Pete Wright.
Matthew Fox:
And today we’re talking about minutes 91 through 95, which begins with Nick and Maria introducing the MacGuffin of the film and ends with biometric hazard lantern lanyards. So let’s start with Bucky’s brain wipe. We just see this is the thing, I guess, that wipes his brain. What are our thoughts on this?
Kyle Olson:
Well, as someone who has spent a lot of time working in IT: when in doubt, reboot. That’s exactly what they’re doing here.
Pete Wright:
It is. They put him in the sort of Phantom of the Opera device that covers half his face for some reason, and they wipe him and start over.
Matthew Fox:
I like it.
Pete Wright:
I do too. I’m okay with it being in a bank vault. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
You use what you’ve got, and who knows where all this equipment came from, but I do like that Bucky gets his reboot.
Matthew Fox:
At this point, I think it’s worth noting that the movie is doing a very sharp left turn, because it started with “the Winter Soldier is the scariest thing that’s ever scared.” And now it’s trying to say, but Bucky is just a nice, soft little Bucky who loves Cap, and it’s not his fault that he’s a mass murderer. I’m joking about it, but I think it actually does a very good job. Little scenes like this, like that little scream, show how much this is not what Bucky wants. It reminds you that it’s okay to be rooting for Bucky, because he doesn’t want to be the Winter Soldier. And they are literally torturing him to get him to do these things.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, it makes me think it’s the opposite of Darth Maul, where during the climactic fight in The Phantom Menace, he’s anxiously pacing outside the thing, cannot wait to get back into the fight. This is the exact opposite, where he would prefer not to have to do this, but he is part of the conditioning.
Matthew Fox:
Exactly. So the story goes.
Kyle Olson:
I also like the kludgy nature of all of this stuff. It’s not cool and slick and smooth. It’s all janky and put together. This is clearly the mobile unit. Somewhere there’s probably a really slick — well, slick for the fifties — version of this, but this is the one they can fit in the back of a truck so they can take it from place to place. This is the mobile Winter Soldier operating system.
Pete Wright:
It’s like Tony’s briefcase suit version.
Kyle Olson:
Right. It does all the stuff — some of the stuff, but not all the stuff.
Pete Wright:
We don’t have a lot of time with it. There’s some knuckle-cracking from Pierce at the “wipe and get on with it” bit, but we pretty quickly move back to our core folks.
Kyle Olson:
That’s right. Our heroes have been reunited with the formerly dead Nick Fury.
Pete Wright:
Who is all slinged up. What do we think of Nick and his — this scene is actually really great, because Nick thinks he’s still in charge. And this is the scene where he is disabused of that.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, there’s a big power shift that happens in the middle of the scene.
Matthew Fox:
He thinks he’s still in charge, and he thinks this is still a controllable problem.
Kyle Olson:
Mm-hmm.
Matthew Fox:
He starts out, and first of all they introduce the MacGuffin, which are not targeting chips, they’re targeting blades. I am not a computer person. Is that a term that has any relevance in computers, or is it just to make them sound cooler?
Kyle Olson:
No, it is a term that has relevance. However, these are not server blades. They make a big — I think they just thought it sounded cool. Server blades are much, much bigger. Each of them would be about the size of a — well, I’d say a lunchbox, but does anyone even know how big a lunchbox is anymore?
Pete Wright:
Nobody eats lunch anymore.
Kyle Olson:
That’s another dated reference.
Matthew Fox:
I took a lunchbox to school.
Kyle Olson:
Okay. So they’re large. A server rack is the big one you picture, and a blade is maybe a third the size of that, so they’d be big. These are really what we’d call shucked hard drives. These are just SSD drives that have been — and then the prop department made them all fancy, and they probably just really liked that term. Server blade. Ooh.
Matthew Fox:
And so Nick and Maria are giving us the exposition, explaining the MacGuffin. And it’s seemingly going okay until Nick says we have to assume every one of those ships is Hydra, but that he hopes we can still salvage something — and that’s when Cap jumps in.
Pete Wright:
Hydra.
Kyle Olson:
Hydra, yeah. There’s some great setup stuff here for the fight. Here are the rules, here’s the goal. I love this kind of stuff when a big action scene is about to come. Here’s what you tell — here are the goals, here are the rules, here are the things we’re supposed to do. It’s the video-game part of it. Get the blue cards into each of these things, and anyone you fight along the way is a bad guy and therefore can be punched off the side of this thing. We’re sort of clearing the moral judgment off of it. Hey, if you’re on that ship, you must be evil. Nick says that, and everybody just goes, okay. Wait, but hold on — aren’t there probably techs whose job is just to keep the stuff running? They’re not actually Hydra. But no, to have a clean moral fight here in Marvel, we cannot consider anyone else on that ship to be anybody who is not one hundred percent in favor of Hydra’s plan of murdering a bunch of people.
Pete Wright:
And there’s only one more objective as a result. This is boss level. This is the climax. There is no more complication, moral or otherwise. It’s just server blades and the fighting it will take to accomplish that goal. What do you think about the politics, though? The thing that surprises me the most is when Maria, right hand to Nick Fury, agrees with Cap. Is she angling for a job in the new regime? It’s not unexpected — I don’t have a problem with it, it’s just the surprise. I think it’s great.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah.
Matthew Fox:
I think it’s a surprise, but it makes sense. I don’t think Maria has any agenda here. I think this is what she’s supposed to do. Yes, Nick wants SHIELD. Yes, Nick wants to push forward. And yes, Nick keeps his cards very close to the vest. But I don’t think he’s the person who would surround himself with yes-men or yes-people. I think he keeps Maria around because she is one of the only people he can trust. Most of the time she’ll support him, but she’ll also call him out when he’s wrong. And I think Nick goes along with it, not because of what Sam says, not because of what Cap says, but because Maria agrees. Because for Nick, that’s like, okay. And even then it’s not like he says “you’ve convinced me.” It’s just “looks like you’re giving the orders now, Captain,” as he says.
Kyle Olson:
It’s nice how he does the whip-around. Maria is one of the first to say “yeah, we can’t do this,” and then he looks at each person going along with it. And one of the best reactions to that is Nat, because she gives him nothing.
Pete Wright:
Nothing. The lean-back.
Kyle Olson:
I love that. She just blanks. Now, that’s a combination of director, actor, editor. It could have been a regular scene — they were shooting her coverage and they put it in there — but the fact that it’s a flat affect, that she’s giving absolutely nothing, is perfect in that scene.
Matthew Fox:
The machine that we saw the Winter Soldier in —
Kyle Olson:
How much of that machine is Marvel Comics, I think, is what you’re asking. Not very. The conditioning in the comics was very, very different. There’s a lot more mysticism and that kind of stuff. So this is very much a movie invention. And I liked it — it goes along with the theme of Winter Soldier 2 of everything being very of the physical world. We don’t have anything mystical or weird. You had a talking AI — that’s about as sci-fi as it gets — and everything else is much more visceral, real, motor oil under your fingers.
Pete Wright:
If we stop and do a little armchairing — and I wonder if there’s some other comic lore that supports this — what is Fury imagining he’s going to get back by assuming everybody agrees we’re going to fight for SHIELD?
Kyle Olson:
So his thought is: we stop the ships, then we clean house, and by the end of the month everything’s back to normal.
Matthew Fox:
Right. I mean, there’s a difference between stopping the ships and destroying the ships, so that might be part of it. He might be like, force a landing and arrest all the people, clear them out that way. Part of it is that we know there was an aspect of Project Insight that Nick Fury was in favor of. And the movie is very careful to not say what the line is — how much of this Nick was okay with, and where it becomes something he would not have been okay with. And Hydra tried to kill him because of that.
In some ways I really like that it doesn’t tell us, because I think the point is supposed to be that Nick is a very morally gray character. Like we saw in Avengers — not that he’s in it for his own power, but that he’s kind of an Amanda Waller from DC Comics, where it’s not personal gain in the slightest. They have a very legitimate fear that Earth is going to be taken over, and they want to defend Earth, and they’re very suspicious of outsiders. And that has led to a kind of “the ends justify the means, whatever we have to do is okay.” I would have liked to see more of what Nick would or wouldn’t have been okay with, but I think it’s very intentional that we don’t, because Cap would probably be even less in favor of working with Nick if he knew.
Kyle Olson:
And if Nick was healthy — would he have actually stood up to Cap at this point? Cap is saying “I’m burning it all down. Everything you built, it’s all going.” If Nick was at his prime, if this was Avengers, there’d be much more of a confrontation, choosing sides, à la Civil War. Or is it that he’s so hurt? We know that none of the stuff he suffered was fake — he literally was shot several times that day, or the day before. And now he’s at the point of “okay, I don’t have the physical and I don’t have the mental power —”
Pete Wright:
Resources, for sure.
Kyle Olson:
Exactly. I’ve run out of spoons.
Pete Wright:
It is interesting to me. I asked the question largely because of how effectively they’ve constructed the film and the script in making this confrontation inevitable. There’s nothing we in the audience could imagine — what has Nick got left, right? Because there’s no way you’re going to be able to tell who was Hydra and who was SHIELD. There is no belief system that will allow me to imagine people who are Hydra saying, “okay, I was Hydra, arrest me.” The film has done a really good job, from the first act, of saying the last act is inevitable. We’re not going to be able to sort it out, and so this scene seems almost perfunctory — of course we have to have the turn. But Nick’s heart, like you say, Kyle, doesn’t appear to be in it. The moment he says it, I feel like he knows things aren’t going to go his way.
Matthew Fox:
I think he is at heart a pragmatist. I don’t think he’s had a change of heart. I don’t think he’s decided that Cap is right and he is wrong. I think he’s decided, “I’m not going to win this fight. I’m going to fight a different battle.”
And in terms of the inevitability of it, I think you’re right. This is one of the weird things about slowing a movie down this much, to five minutes a week. Because what I’m about to say is going to sound like a critique of the movie, but I think when we watch it, it’s doing it so fast that you don’t notice, and that’s a credit to it. The movie is doing one hell of a bait-and-switch — not even bait-and-switch, but pulling the wool over our eyes. Because not only is it getting us to believe this fight is inevitable, it’s getting us to believe that SHIELD versus Hydra is all there is. Whereas there is still an American president, there is still an American military. Dover Air Force Base probably has a whole bunch of jets that can knock these helicarriers out of the sky real damn fast, and probably would, once they start shooting civilians. But the movie gets us to forget all that, because the conceit has to be that Hydra is taking over everything. And it sort of has, but it sort of hasn’t. The movie’s very good at saying, “no, in this moment it feels like they have, and that’s all that matters.” So we’re constraining all of Nick’s options here. I actually think this scene is really important to help understand why Nick isn’t going somewhere else — why isn’t he trying to go outside SHIELD to get help? And it’s because he believes, “all right, Cap’s calling the play, I’m going to follow Cap.”
Pete Wright:
This is the answer to the scene we had before the elevator fight, when Cap walked into Nick’s office. It is inevitable that these two would have to have that turn. It is, after all, lest we forget, a Captain America movie.
Kyle Olson:
That’s what I was thinking too, because I was talking to another Marvel zombie about Daredevil: Born Again Season 2, and how the longer that season went on, the more ridiculous it was that no one showed up. It wasn’t that Matt Murdock called for help and no one came. It was literally that no one ever came, and Spider-Man’s in the city. He’s literally in the same city. By the end, the whole nature of the thing started to fall apart. But here, the call should be to Tony. By the nature of it, of all people, he’d be the one person you could trust, because he doesn’t care about any of this — he’s not involved in any of it. The way they’ve built this, you never even think about it. It’s “oh, we’ve got to keep the circle small, we have to do this ourselves.” Well, but you were on the Avengers. The Avengers are still an active thing. There are several of those people who would take your call right now. Can you trust the Hulk? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure he’s not going to work for Hydra.
Matthew Fox:
And I do think this movie — as much as, after the first Avengers movie, that’s always going to be a question. Granted, the second Avengers movie at least gets both Thor and Bruce off the chessboard, because they’re off wherever they are. But I do think this movie is much better than a lot of the others, in that, if I stop and think about it, I’m not thinking about Tony the way I do with Daredevil, with Defenders, which was another Daredevil project, with some of the Spider-Man movies — and granted, those have licensing issues —
Kyle Olson:
Right. And then you start to get into the legality, and the budget, and the scheduling.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah.
Kyle Olson:
And I don’t want to be thinking about that when I’m watching this.
Matthew Fox:
But some of the Black Panther stuff, too — there’s a lot of other stuff where you’re like, “wait a minute, why are the other Avengers not getting involved?” You can ask that question here, but I think they do a pretty good job. Again, I wish there’d been a line like “can we reach out to Tony? Can we trust him?” or “he’s retired,” or whatever. But this movie is better than most at not giving you a chance to ask that question, because it’s going so fast.
Kyle Olson:
I agree.
Pete Wright:
And this is less about a superpowered soldier and a legendary leader of superpowered people than it is about two men and their egos and the way they handle conflict. Once you get into that kind of mano-a-mano discussion, it becomes the thing they have to resolve together — adding Tony wouldn’t help. It’s why the final fight of Civil War is between two men: these two egos, these two personalities that have to resolve their stuff. And that’s what we get in this scene. So I’m here for it. I like it. It’s only right now, when you guys plant the seed that I should be thinking about Tony — of course I should be thinking about — you’ve ruined the movie for me, Kyle. I’m hanging it up.
Kyle Olson:
No — I’m not trying to plant the — I’m saying they did it in such a good way, and also it’s so fast, because they say this all happens in like three days. So it could be that they’re all on their way, but they just don’t get there in time, because this all has to be done within forty-eight hours. The one thing I will say is, in the first draft, Hawkeye was in this movie. During the chase, where they’re trying to get Captain America, there was a scene where the helicopter was going and Hawkeye was there and basically missed the shot. And they’re like, “you never miss,” and he’s like, “oh well, first time for everything. And also, I don’t want any part of this. I’m just going to go back to my farm,” and he left. So they did have a cameo by him — by our new definition. But they were like, it’s not really worth it for that one thing. It is conspicuous by their absence, though — they never even say he’s a SHIELD agent. He is part of this whole thing, and they never even mention his name.
Pete Wright:
Mention him, right?
Matthew Fox:
Especially because he’s so important to Natasha.
Kyle Olson:
Exactly.
Matthew Fox:
I should also mention — I made an error. So if you’ve already hit send on your angry email, fine, but if you’re still typing, please slow down. This movie is not after Age of Ultron, it is beforehand.
Kyle Olson:
This is before, yeah.
Matthew Fox:
So Thor might well be off doing his own thing, but Bruce Banner is around. He was literally name-dropped as one of the people these people are going to go after. I would think, if I knew I was trying to stop some helicarriers that were possibly going to kill one of my friends, I might give my friend a call.
Pete Wright:
Maybe the big green guy is the guy.
Matthew Fox:
Just to be like — if you want to come help, great. If not, maybe just go to a gym and don’t be out in the open for a while.
Pete Wright:
We get our — with Sam, and one of the great lines of the movie. “I do what he does, just slower.” Oh god, I love this guy. He’s just so great.
Kyle Olson:
So great in this. And as we’re talking about things that aren’t here, this is also where there’s a very famous deleted scene — maybe the most notorious deleted scene in all of the MCU. It’s about a minute and a half, and it’s really good, and it should have been in the movie, honestly. This is where you get Natasha and Nick together, which they don’t get a lot of screen time together in this movie. It would follow immediately after this, before we go to the flashback. They have this conversation, and he gives her the photostatic veil, which she’ll eventually use down the line. It’s a deus ex machina, it comes out of nowhere later on. But in that scene they’re having this quiet moment, and he gives it to her. That’s how, even though we don’t know what it is later when it shows up, you go, “oh, that’s the thing he gave her.”
Matthew Fox:
Well, I think that scene would have been great, both for that reason and because, as we mentioned before, she does not take a side in this. She’s just stoic. She started the movie very much on Nick’s side. To me, she’s just over the line from Maria Hill. Maria Hill is a little more trusted, but she’s pretty darn close. There’ve been some interesting things about the way they position them in terms of who is closer to Nick, her or Maria. And then we’ve seen her more and more turn to Cap. Does Nick ask her what she thinks of this at all during that scene?
Kyle Olson:
Not exactly. As she says, he walks in and she’s just sitting at the desk, same expression, and she says, “I thought you were dead, Nick.” And Nick is once again trying to justify it. He says, “I had to keep the circle small. You’d have done the same thing.” And she says, “I know. And that’s a problem.” And that’s where it ends. But once again — theme. There we go. It’s the thing of, “oh yeah, maybe this is the problem.” It’s the trust thing.
Matthew Fox:
And I think that’s a very good way of showing — yeah, she has been convinced by Cap, because it’s her time with Cap that makes her see it’s a problem. So yeah, that would have been great.
Pete Wright:
That’s a miss, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a really good scene between these two actors, discussing grief and their relationship with one another, and it’s so short. It is mind-boggling that they cut it for that reason. Second, because I do think the photostatic veil is made better by it. This was the comic-lore question, Kyle: does she have a photostatic veil in her bag of tricks?
Kyle Olson:
No. SHIELD did a lot more stuff with LMDs, but that’s a whole other thing. Agents of SHIELD did a whole LMD thing, so if you want to know about life model decoys, they did a couple of seasons around that. But they did much more of like full replacement, as opposed to just — there’s lots more of a lore there. I’ll have to break out my reference again and see if I can find something.
Pete Wright:
It’s just one of those things — the fact that it exists in her bag of tricks. I get thinking it’s a thing she might plausibly have, in her job. And the fact that they have this scene with Nick, I think it makes it better that Nick is already a co-conspirator, because he doesn’t say, “here’s what it is, and here’s how you’re going to use it.” It’s, “here’s a thing that you get to have,” and she takes it and she knows what it is. Right — Chekhov’s veil.
Kyle Olson:
Just slides it across.
Pete Wright:
Okay — flashback.
Kyle Olson:
Flashback. So we go outside — we’re still at the dam. We see Steve is in his head, and we go back. For those who didn’t see First Avenger, now here’s Bucky — here he actually is, as Cap remembers him. By what I could tell, this was about 1936. Sarah Rogers is Steve’s mother, and she has died. In the MCU continuity, she was a nurse at a tuberculosis clinic, got TB, and died from that. So this is about seven years before we see Cap the first time, in the movie theater and at the expo and stuff — that would be 1943. So they look just like they did in that one, but they’re actually a lot younger than when we see them in First Avenger. But, you know, movie magic. And then we see Skinny Steve.
Pete Wright:
It’s been a while since we’ve seen that. We get Skinny Steve, and that’s the real gift of this sequence. I missed Skinny Steve.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. That helps us remember him, too — that as we see Cap about to be leaping around and throwing shields and stuff, he’s still that little kid, just bulked up.
Matthew Fox:
Well, I think you’re both burying the lead, which is that to me the most important part of this flashback is that it reminds us of the line they’ll pass back and forth through the rest of the movies: “with you till the end of the line.”
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Kyle Olson:
That’s right. Plant it here, because it’s going to come back again and again.
Matthew Fox:
And not to be a broken record, but is that a line that comes from the comics, or is it something the Russos came up with?
Kyle Olson:
No, that was Markus and McFeely. That was something they did.
Matthew Fox:
Because it’s very effective.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah.
Matthew Fox:
And it sounds old-timey enough that it really works.
Kyle Olson:
So then we see his first partner and now his current partner, because we come back to the dam, and there’s Sam, there’s the Falcon, having a thing, and Falcon is basically saying, “hey, so we’re about to kill your best friend.”
Pete Wright:
You’re going to be able to do that, right?
Matthew Fox:
Yeah.
Kyle Olson:
Being very pragmatic about it. “Hey, so you’re prepared to put a bullet into your best friend, right? Because that’s probably what’s going to happen.”
Pete Wright:
Another of Sam’s great lines. “I don’t think he’s the kind of guy you save. He’s the kind of guy you stop.” “Yeah, I don’t know if I can do that.”
Kyle Olson:
“He’s the kind you stop.”
Pete Wright:
“I don’t know if you’ll have that choice, but let’s go. Do you know what you’re going to wear?” And then Steve goes shopping.
Kyle Olson:
What’s the dress code for this? What are we —
Matthew Fox:
So, I don’t know if this is just because I’m Star Wars obsessed, or because this was an intentional callback, but for me I can’t see that moment without immediately thinking of Obi-Wan telling Luke, “you can’t save Vader, you’re going to have to kill him,” and Luke basically saying, “no, there’s still good in him.” Even some of how it was shot, the blocking, the way they’re positioned against each other, felt very similar to that. I don’t know if they had a conscious thought of it, or just — like every person of my generation who doesn’t hate film, they’ve probably seen that scene a dozen times at least, so it was in their heads somewhat. But it is, to me, very much an homage to that, because it’s the same idea: is there still good in this person?
And it raises a question I often wonder about with these things — that I think this movie does a pretty good job with, but that I think is worth asking. It’s one thing to say, “I will risk myself because I think I can save this person, even if, while I’m trying to save them, they kill me — I’m willing to take that risk.” But sometimes what happens is: I could stop them now, but I’m going to try to save them, and in between stopping them now and saving them later, they kill a whole bunch of people. To what extent am I responsible for that? We were talking about Daredevil. In Jessica Jones, she doesn’t want to stop her mother — she thinks her mother can be saved — and her mom kills a bunch of people in between. There are a number of other examples where that happens. Even in the Obi-Wan show, Obi-Wan not stopping Vader, there’s some level of that. I don’t think it’s going to come up here, but it always needs to be part of the equation when we’re asking: yes, you believe they can be saved, but what is the consequence of not stopping them in the moment when you can? So that’s a framing I want us to have in mind when we get to those scenes.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
That’s interesting. And I feel like I just watched this whole movie and I still don’t remember how many people he kills after Cap knows. Do we have any more scenes of just Winter Soldier brutality?
Kyle Olson:
No. The next time we see him, it’ll be on the helicarriers, or around that area, during that fight.
Matthew Fox:
And I don’t think there’s a moment where Steve pulls his punch. I want to see this fight again, so I think we escape that question for the most part, but we’ll see.
Pete Wright:
It’s a good one, though. Okay, so we get our flashback. Bucky’s offering him a place to stay — “pull out the couch cushions like we used to when we were kids.” I love it. That’s very sweet.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. Steve’s dad died in World War One, so he was raised by a single mother. Now he’s on his own. They say it without saying it, which is the mark of a good screenwriter. Bucky’s saying “come live with me,” but they don’t actually say, “we talked about it, it would be a good idea if you came and lived with me.” You just, by inference, come in the middle of the conversation, and you get what he’s after. And the thing with the key is such a subtle touch of “I’ve been around.”
Pete Wright:
They’re in each other’s lives, yeah.
Kyle Olson:
Exactly. They don’t make a thing of it, like “don’t you remember, your mom always left a key by the brick.” It’s just a thing that happens.
Pete Wright:
I think that’s why I go back to it, because the next beat after they decide what he’s going to wear is him going back in time again. He’s just been in this flashback on the dam, thinking about his past, and where does he go? To the Smithsonian, to first of all get Stan Lee fired — cameo — and steal his original uniform.
Kyle Olson:
That’s right.
Pete Wright:
Not original-original, but original-ish. Original-adjacent.
Kyle Olson:
Exactly. Because he doesn’t go to the back for the Avengers one, which is much brighter colors. And Chris Evans notoriously hated the helmet from that one, too — it was very uncomfortable to wear. So to go back all the way — it’s like, “oh, reconnecting with him, I’m going to be dressed in the outfit that he last saw me in, when he fell off the train. Maybe that will help as well.”
Matthew Fox:
Oh, it’s funny that you think of it for that reason, because I saw it in a very different way. I saw it as him rejecting SHIELD.
Pete Wright:
That too, for sure.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, I think it’s both.
Matthew Fox:
The other one is the one that SHIELD gave him, and he’s like, “no, I’m going back to the one I had before anyone had even said the word SHIELD.”
Kyle Olson:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Even though the blues on the shield were so much better. Oh my god.
Kyle Olson:
Yes. And we talked about this a little when he visited this museum — he was in that suit when he went into the ice. So is that this suit? Or is it one of the other ones they’d made for him during —
Pete Wright:
He’d been wearing it for eighty years, and they took it off him and put it in a museum.
Kyle Olson:
Well, they took it — they probably got it from Phil Coulson’s apartment. It was probably on a mannequin there, and they brought it back and put it up in the Smithsonian. There’s probably a plaque — if you look really close, it says, “from the collection of Phil Coulson.”
Matthew Fox:
Look, if you’ve played D&D, you know that Noxious Fumes is our spell. And that suit is going to have a lot of moss, a lot of must, a lot of mold on it. That’s a weapon unto itself.
Pete Wright:
That’s so perfect.
Kyle Olson:
And then we see the unveiling of the heroes. Maria walks out, back in her SHIELD jumpsuit, which is absolutely a classic comic thing — all SHIELD agents wear sort of the classic jumpsuit. And then we see Sam in a slightly different version — he’s in a flight suit with the wing-suit pieces on top of it. So, thank God, not comic-accurate. Some comic things should be left in the comics.
Pete Wright:
This is what you imagine he would have been wearing when he was on duty.
Kyle Olson:
It is comic —
Pete Wright:
The first time he wasn’t on duty.
Kyle Olson:
Right. Especially flying at night, you don’t want to be in red and white. And then Cap appears in his full classic World War II gear. And wait — aren’t we missing someone? There were four heroes. Where’s the last one?
Pete Wright:
We’ll never know.
Kyle Olson:
We’ll never know. Because they cut back to the Triskelion, where we see the council has made a physical appearance and are being escorted by Pierce into the building.
Pete Wright:
Can I just say — I love the reverse shot. We’re behind Cap and Maria and Sam, and we crane up over the trees, and they’re across the Potomac from the Triskelion. Is there a boat? How are they — are they going to swim?
Kyle Olson:
I didn’t see anything, and I was thinking, “guess who’s on the wrong side of the river?”
Pete Wright:
Right. They came up on the wrong side of town. I appreciate that they snuck through the woods, but I feel like they could have been more efficient. Anyway.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. It’s that whole fox-and-the-thing of having to transport them across, so Falcon’s bringing them there one by one. The fox and the chicken.
Pete Wright:
Yes, the fox and the chicken and the corn, right.
Matthew Fox:
Oh, I’ve always heard it as missionaries and cannibals, which is probably a much more offensive way to describe it.
Pete Wright:
Oh, I like that. That’s horrible.
Kyle Olson:
Yes.
Matthew Fox:
So, yeah.
Pete Wright:
So, yes.
Kyle Olson:
Also, just as a side note — we don’t know that this Maria Hill is a Skrull.
Pete Wright:
Okay, now.
Kyle Olson:
But let’s move on.
Pete Wright:
We haven’t seen that post-credit scene yet.
Kyle Olson:
We don’t —
Pete Wright:
That’s true.
Kyle Olson:
We don’t.
Pete Wright:
All right. And then we’re in the Triskelion.
Kyle Olson:
This is what bugs me about that movie.
Pete Wright:
We have a great hero shot of the Insight, and it’s going to launch soon. We get some control people, and then we’re in the lobby, and Pierce is welcoming the rest of the council and handing them their — surely we’re not hanging a flag on it — lanyards, to clip on their clothes. It’s nothing, of course. It’s just going to get you through all the doors. Any doors you want to get into, it’ll give you unlimited access to the Triskelion. Surely he doesn’t mean that. We’ll never know. So that’s the end —
Kyle Olson:
And there’s also another little cameo. Well, no — by our new definition, not a cameo, a small role. The actor who says “we are go on guidance” is Aaron Himelstein, from Buffalo Grove, Illinois — shout-out my Chi-Town, folks. Forty-one acting credits on IMDb. He’s another Community crossover — another actor from Community who they brought over to do this.
Pete Wright:
What was he in Community?
Kyle Olson:
If you remember the episode about ethics — he was the motivational speaker in a wheelchair who was trying to prove to Jeff that there’s moral good in the world, and then launched himself, knowing Jeff would catch him.
Pete Wright:
Yes, I do remember that.
Kyle Olson:
He looks very different there. But yeah, he’s another one of their Community people that they brought in. And he’ll be back, because he’s going to take a moral stance as the minutes continue on.
Matthew Fox:
And I need to go in a minute, but next time let’s put a pin in it to talk about the actor who plays the older — I think he’s like a secretary of state, some kind of American political person — but he’s on the council. Because I’ve seen that actor in a million things and I can’t place any of them now.
Pete Wright:
For sure.
Kyle Olson:
Oh yeah. Within that episode, we did a deep dive on all of them.
Pete Wright:
Yep.
Matthew Fox:
Oh, then never mind.
Kyle Olson:
He’s mostly from Lost, is what he’s probably most famous for. He’s Charles Widmore.
Pete Wright:
All right.
Matthew Fox:
Cool.
Pete Wright:
And that’s it. We don’t get a perfect ending to the scene — they do actually get the end of the sentence, which is nice.
Kyle Olson:
That’s it. Nope.
Pete Wright:
“This will give you unrestricted access” — after acknowledging that SHIELD can’t control the traffic. And here we go. We’re still on the ride. Who knows what’s going to happen next. I’m very excited about it. Any last looks, last notes? I think that’s it.
Kyle Olson:
No. From here on out, I’d say we’re hitting third act.
Pete Wright:
All right.
Matthew Fox:
Bring on the next minute.
Pete Wright:
That’s right. So get out of here, everybody. MarvelMovieMinute.com — that’s where you can find everything about the show. You can even join us there and support us and become a member, get early access to this thing without ads. We would love to have your support. And you’ll also get into our Discord server, where you can talk at us, with us, to us. We would love to see you there. Thanks, everybody. On behalf of Kyle Olson and Matthew Fox, I’m Pete Wright. We’ll see you next week on the Triskelion.
