Pete Wright: Welcome back to the Marvel Movie Minute, a weekly podcast in which we assemble to explore the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe five minutes at a time. In this, our ninth season, we’re looking at Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I’m Pete Wright.

Matthew Fox: And I’m Matthew Fox.

Pete Wright: And today we are talking about minutes 121 through 125, which begins with the fall of Steve and ends with a sad invitation for a group travel that no one wants to join.

Matthew Fox: I would go to Europe with Nick Fury.

Pete Wright: I would go to Europe with Nick Fury.

Matthew Fox: Right?

Pete Wright: This is ridiculous. What are these guys thinking?

Matthew Fox: I don’t get it.

Pete Wright: A bro trip to Europe with Fury?

Matthew Fox: There might be some explosions, but I think we can deal with that.

Pete Wright: Nobody’s going. We could totally deal with that. And then instead, there’s secret plans that we don’t know about yet. Things are going to happen.

This is where this set of minutes opens. One of the things that we’ve talked about in the past is the beautiful art of the fall of Steve. And this picks up right where that left off. We get to see where ultimately Steve lands in the Potomac, sort of.

Matthew Fox: Right. So what do we think is the plot significance? His first movie, he crashes into ice.

Pete Wright: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Fox: His second movie, he crashes into water.

Pete Wright: Yeah.

Matthew Fox: So if I remember my basic physics, I think the next state is air, right?

Pete Wright: Gas, yeah.

Matthew Fox: He’s got to just crash into like Bessman.

Pete Wright: It just crashes through clouds.

Matthew Fox: I don’t really know what the significance of that is, but clearly aquatic landings are an important part of the Captain America story.

Pete Wright: Yeah, right. They’re huge. You’re absolutely right. I hadn’t thought of that. But it is an interesting callback too, because the other thing that strikes me is that in the last movie he wakes up at the end of the movie disoriented in a fake hotel or a fake hospital room, and he runs outside and he’s in Times Square.

Matthew Fox: Right.

Pete Wright: This movie, he wakes up disoriented and he’s sitting next to Sam listening to “Trouble Man.”

Matthew Fox: Yeah.

Pete Wright: That seems to be a nice sort of sentimental callback too. Both of these movies, Steve wakes up, and now he’s kind of at home.

Matthew Fox: Right. Yeah, I think it definitely is. And remembering that Captain America is going to be well taken care of at this point — he’s going to get a nice big private room.

Pete Wright: Yeah.

Matthew Fox: That tells me that Sam could have put himself on either side of that hospital bed. He intentionally chooses to be on the right so that Cap can wake up and say, “On your left.”

Pete Wright: Yeah.

Matthew Fox: So that’s just kind of one more nice gesture by Sam.

Pete Wright: I do love the fact that in my head now, Sam thought that far ahead. I can imagine Sam saying, “Wouldn’t this be funny if his first words are ‘on your left’?”

Matthew Fox: Yeah.

Pete Wright: I’m going to give him a shot.

Matthew Fox: So it calls forward a whole bunch further. Do you think it’s possible that Doctor Strange is like, “All right, Sam, you’re going to be the first to go through,” or at least, “You’re going to be the first to tell him we’re going through.”

Pete Wright: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Fox: “So we’re going to start opening up some portals,” and Sam goes, “No, no, no, no, no. We’ve got to come in on the left.”

Pete Wright: Yeah.

Matthew Fox: Is that a conversation that happened back? Do you think they shot that somewhere for Avengers, but it just didn’t make it?

Pete Wright: So good. Yeah, I do. I believe it. I have to believe.

Matthew Fox: You’ve got to lean into the bit.

Pete Wright: But before that, we have to talk montage. Because he falls, Cap falls, he’s in the water, and explodey things all around.

He’s in the water. We go to black for kind of a long time. It’s like three or four seconds, probably. And we fade up slowly, and who is dragging Cap to the shore? It’s Bucky. And Bucky gets a moment where he gets to look at Cap and survey the surroundings, and then walk away, having saved Steve and left him presumably drowned. He doesn’t turn him on his side. I assume his lungs are full of water. That’s okay. He’s Captain America.

Matthew Fox: Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright: He’ll be able to cough it up. And then Bucky goes away.

Matthew Fox: I’m certain that if they had a moment of Bucky giving him mouth to mouth, that that picture would not have found any misuse or been the basis of any theory anywhere on the internet. So we’ll just assume it had happened.

Pete Wright: We’ve already talked about this — this is really a fascinating breakup of minutes, because the first minute, almost exactly sixty seconds, is Bucky saving Cap. The next minute is waking up “on your left” in the hospital room to “Trouble Man.”

At two minutes, we begin full montage territory, and we get Sharon Carter in her CIA garb, actually doing target practice. We get Maria Hill, presumably she’s in some sort of a polygraph situation at Stark Industries.

Matthew Fox: Right. Specifically the HR office.

Pete Wright: Yeah.

Matthew Fox: So to me, she is either in the last stages of personnel interviews, or she has been hired and now has to do some polygraph stuff. But either way, I think this is the opposite of the band getting back together. This is the thing that sets up the band having to get back together next time. It’s the montage of the theater is closed and everyone has to go their own way.

Pete Wright: Yeah, we’re at the reckoning sequence here.

Matthew Fox: Yeah.

Pete Wright: So full-on in minute two. I do wonder, though, why Maria Hill has to interview anywhere. I mean, she’s Maria Hill. They know her at Stark Industries. Give her a job.

Matthew Fox: Well, except remember, Tony isn’t part of all of this.

Pete Wright: That’s true.

Matthew Fox: And Tony has never trusted Fury.

Pete Wright: Yeah, that’s a good point.

Matthew Fox: And now he has seen that actually a lot of his fears about SHIELD were true, that a lot of his fears about Fury were true. He already is even angrier at Fury because of Avengers 1 and all the stuff that came out there. And I think he’s never seen Maria as anything but Fury’s woman.

So to me it would be perfectly fair to have some real questions of, are you here to be a spy for Fury? Are you here to try and turn Stark Industries into SHIELD 2.0, or something like that?

Pete Wright: Right.

Matthew Fox: So to me, I think it is fairly deserved.

Pete Wright: Okay, all right, fair. I’ll buy that.

We cut from that to Senator Stern — Garry Shandling — who is coming in.

Matthew Fox: Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright: He’s on the phone and he’s being interrupted by authorities. And those authorities are the FBI. The FBI is taking him in, and this leads to the next sort of reckoning: Rumlow. We have kind of a hard cut to emergency services. Rumlow is being wheeled around on a gurney and he is scarred.

Matthew Fox: Yeah.

Pete Wright: Now we start cross-cutting. We have two sequences happening at the same time. The first is Fury’s shed. Fury’s got some sort of a container with a bunch of his goodies in it.

Matthew Fox: Right. Which I was trying to remember — I don’t think we’ve seen that before, have we?

Pete Wright: No, I don’t think we have.

Matthew Fox: Okay.

Pete Wright: And this, I think, starts the legacy of Fury finding caches of goodies all over the place, right?

Matthew Fox: Yeah.

Pete Wright: Because he does the same thing in Secret Wars. Once he’s boots on the ground, literally, he starts finding stuff all over the place. Everything he needs is in some sort of a cache or a chest or something. It’s very video game mechanic. In this case, he’s got a bunch of Pelican cases and things with buttons on them.

But we start cutting back and forth with a Senate hearing, an inquiry. And this is Natasha sitting before some sort of a committee.

Let’s just get the Fury off the board part. He burns it down and walks away from all of his goodies. He actually symbolically puts the eye patch down and puts on his sunglasses.

Matthew Fox: Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright: And then he lights a match and he walks away. He literally burns it down. I don’t know how much he’s trying to get rid of, but he does get rid of his goodies in this particular cache.

Matthew Fox: Right. Certainly all the information. And it’s funny, because when we get to the Congress part, I’m going to have maybe some hot takes on that. But watching it this time, I’m a little frustrated because I want accountability.

Pete Wright: Why?

Matthew Fox: All of this happened because everything was being hidden and everything was secret.

Pete Wright: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Fox: And now you’ve got Congress — and it is Congress, not the Senate, because we know that the main person coming after Natasha is named Congressman Wortham. And I only know that because I looked him up.

Pete Wright: Yeah, good.

Matthew Fox: He’s played by Stephen Culp, who — West Wing fans, if you recognize that voice being politically annoying, it’s because he played GOP Speaker of the House Jeff Haffley for, I think, a season and a half on The West Wing.

Pete Wright: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Fox: But I don’t know that the questions he’s asking are wrong. We’ll get into that in a second. The accusations, the way he’s coming at Natasha, is problematic, obviously. But to me, what happened here is that a secret organization got taken over, in part because everything was so secret and so no one saw what was happening.

And Nick Fury has been trying to say to the whole world, “Everyone should trust me.” And that didn’t work out well in Avengers, and now it hasn’t worked out well here. And instead of there being some real accountability and a real attempt to say, “Let’s shine sunlight, the best disinfectant, on everything that happened here,” Nick’s just burning it all and kind of walking off into the sunset to be his own man and do his own thing. And I don’t love it.

Pete Wright: Okay.

Matthew Fox: I don’t love it. And granted, a lot of it’s because of what Natasha says later, so it’s kind of hard to separate those two. But I’ll say that it looks badass. He’s got the hood. He does not look like Nick Fury. He looks like someone very different right now.

Pete Wright: Right.

Matthew Fox: It’s a great look. It’s a badass scene. But the more I think about it, the more I’m like, no, this is just how we keep having the same problem over and over again.

Pete Wright: Yeah, right. Nick should be under this particular investigation. Nick should be sitting in front of Congress right now.

Matthew Fox: Right.

Pete Wright: But again, everybody thinks he’s dead. That would be a much bigger reveal. So in this way, Natasha is the public face of bad handling, and she handles it poorly — if we then transition to, with regard to your point specifically…

Matthew Fox: Right.

Pete Wright: We transition to the congressional hearing and she’s sworn in. She’s sitting there taking questions. The committee members are asking how they’re supposed to move forward. They’re saying, “How is this country expected to maintain its national security now that he, Captain Rogers, and you have laid waste to our intelligence apparatus?”

These questions imply a support for Hydra as the intelligence apparatus. So we have to square that the Congresspeople are still not completely able to internalize what had happened to the security apparatus.

Matthew Fox: Right. So let’s keep more secrets. That to me is the exact reason why you say let’s get everything out on the table. Let’s help you understand.

Pete Wright: And instead, yeah.

Matthew Fox: And again, kind of going through it, if the entire intelligence apparatus was just destroyed, then where is Sharon Carter? Because last I saw, she was wearing a shirt that says Central Intelligence Agency.

Pete Wright: Yeah, she’s at target practice, right? CIA.

Matthew Fox: Last I checked, that is part of the intelligence apparatus.

Yeah, to me — and this is going to presage a lot — I think this is setting up an idea that they do a very good job of paying off and continuing to show. Look, this is what Natasha and Cap and the rest of them believe. And I think they do a very good job of it. I just think they’re fundamentally wrong.

And this becomes — not sure there’s a Civil War discussion — but to me, when Tony says we need some kind of oversight, I think he’s right. When he then says the oversight we need is Sokovia, he’s clearly wrong and Cap is right, and that’s where the conflict starts.

Pete Wright: Right.

Matthew Fox: But to me, when Natasha says, “I know you don’t like it, but you need us, you have to just trust us” — that’s exactly what SHIELD was saying.

Pete Wright: Yeah.

Matthew Fox: And SHIELD needed oversight. And to me, Natasha is dead wrong in this. And I get where she’s coming from. But that’s also why Natasha shouldn’t be the spokesman for this organization right now.

Pete Wright: Right. How did she end up as the face? And when I say she handled it poorly, I think it’s written in such a way where she gets to have a public display and a political tantrum.

Matthew Fox: Right.

Pete Wright: Her standing up and walking out is the tantrum. “You know where to find me” — thumbing her nose at Congress, which does continue to perpetuate the belief that they are, and believe strongly they should be, above the law, above oversight.

Matthew Fox: Right. And I get that. There’s always debates about whether comic books are fundamentally liberal or conservative. I think this has been one of the most conservative ideas in comic books for a long time — that one strong individual and his buddies, they know best and they should do what’s right, and everyone else should just stop their whinging and shut up and let them be heroes. And I hate that. It’s just wrong.

Pete Wright: Yeah.

Matthew Fox: But I do think that’s the point that the Russos are making. And it’s funny, because I don’t think I felt this way when I first watched this movie. I think it’s in part getting Civil War, and also just how much the world has changed between now and then.

Pete Wright: Right. Isn’t that interesting? That context actually matters a whole lot when we’re watching this movie.

Matthew Fox: And I admit, I thought I was going to be way off on hot take island, but it seems you’re mostly agreeing with me here.

Pete Wright: Yeah, I think I am. I think I’m in a very similar place. And I surprise myself as much as you. I feel like the difference is there is what is politically and narratively right versus what is comic right. And I know nobody’s wringing their hands over this as a comic book adaptation, but what does it represent? And it does represent something that I think, if we take ourselves and put ourselves in the universe of the real, suddenly it becomes harder to watch.

Matthew Fox: Right.

Pete Wright: And I think it becomes harder to watch because we’ve seen so much of it in the real so clearly since this movie was made.

Matthew Fox: The other part of this — and I’m being a little bit funny here, but I do think it’s one sort of little hole in the writing. In every spy movie that’s ever been made, when the enemy comes over and says, “Okay, I’ll work with you,” one of the things they say is, “I need a signed letter from the president granting me a full pardon.” I don’t believe there is any world in which Natasha switches sides without getting that.

Pete Wright: Yeah.

Matthew Fox: And so the idea that she’s going to be ashamed, that she’s going to be put through the public wringer, that she’s going to be made uncomfortable in public and maybe have to go into hiding or something — I believe all that. But the idea that she’s in any way legally culpable for this stuff? Natasha’s smart. There’s no way she doesn’t get a full pardon.

Pete Wright: Speaking of the economy of character in this movie, is there somebody you think better equipped to have been sitting in this scenario than Natasha?

Matthew Fox: Yes. Captain America. I think he’s a coward for not doing it. And it’s funny, I was so angry at him for not stepping up in this moment, because he is the one who made the decision to tear it all down. I think you have to tear it all down. But then to just leave the wreck — her statement of “the wreckage in the pool is his statement”? No, it’s not.

Pete Wright: Yeah, no.

Matthew Fox: You’ve got to—

Pete Wright: If anyone has a statement — Natasha has never once expressed any sort of ideology beyond “finish the mission, do whatever it takes to finish the mission.”

Matthew Fox: Right.

Pete Wright: And obviously I’m overstating, because obviously the fact that she’s a part of SHIELD is an expression of her renewed ideology to do good in the universe.

Matthew Fox: Right.

Pete Wright: Great. But she’s not a press face of SHIELD. She never has been a press face of SHIELD. And I don’t know — that’ll be interesting for Kyle to follow up on. What are you and I missing?

Matthew Fox: I think Maria Hill. And maybe that was why they needed to show Maria Hill going off to Stark. But I still think, if they still have subpoena power, I would one hundred percent subpoena Maria Hill.

Pete Wright: I would have bought that, I think, better than Natasha. I think Maria Hill would have been a better voice than Natasha.

Matthew Fox: But I don’t think Maria Hill would have given quite as much the FU. I think the line works because it’s Natasha.

Pete Wright: Yeah.

Matthew Fox: But again, that’s the thing — I want the congressional hearing. I want a whole movie of Tony and Cap sitting down in a boardroom discussing what Sokovia should look like.

Pete Wright: Yeah. You want the “you can’t handle the truth” moment.

Matthew Fox: Yeah, I like the bureaucracy.

Pete Wright: Yeah. Well, we can’t have that with Cap because he’s busy being sneaky at a gravesite. And so after this sequence in the courtroom where Natasha gives the FU to Congress, she stands up and leaves, and we head back to the grave. And the grave is Fury’s grave.

Any initial thoughts about the actual grave?

Matthew Fox: I have to remind myself that even though it was only maybe 15 years ago, the degree of the surveillance state that we live in today is not the same. I fundamentally do not believe a face is identifiable by search algorithms as Nick Fury.

Pete Wright: I wonder if that’s what I’m thinking.

Matthew Fox: You could not pull off him going into hiding in this kind of way today. And I had to remind myself that could work at this time.

Who’s in that grave? I’m sure they have all sorts of human remains kind of lying around that they could fill it with.

Pete Wright: Any particular note on the actual — what’s written on the grave?

Matthew Fox: I don’t think I paid much attention, so no, I’m not sure what you’re getting at.

Pete Wright: That is a nod right there. What it does say on it — it says Colonel Nicholas J. Fury, and “The path of the righteous man,” from Ezekiel 25:17. That is Samuel L. Jackson’s speech from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and that is one of our glorious Easter eggs.

Matthew Fox: Yeah, it’s what he says in Pulp Fiction.

Pete Wright: If you find those kinds of jokes funny.

Matthew Fox: Yeah.

Pete Wright: I admit it, I find that joke funny. I was glad to see it. And I think they should have picked “filled with furious anger,” Ezekiel 25:17, but they did not.

Matthew Fox: Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright: So that’s what we have.

Matthew Fox: It is worth noting, it is not from Ezekiel 25:17.

Pete Wright: Oh no, absolutely not, because none of that was true in Pulp Fiction.

Matthew Fox: Yeah, he is misquoting it.

Pete Wright: Yes, it has been misquoted, and that was part of the joke in Pulp Fiction.

Matthew Fox: Right. And we do know that the Samuel L. Jackson cinematic universe does exist within the MCU, because Tom Holland’s Spider-Man has seen Star Wars movies.

Pete Wright: Yes, for sure.

Matthew Fox: So putting that aside, I do think it’s a very appropriate quote if the filmmakers realize that he’s wrong. But I don’t think they do. Because part of the point of it in Pulp Fiction, I think, is that the problem with the righteous man isn’t that he’s so often beset by all these things. It’s that most of the time he’s nowhere near as righteous as he thinks he is.

And I think if there’s any way I would describe Nick Fury, it’s that he and Cap are both convinced that they are righteous men, and therefore that they are above question.

Pete Wright: Yeah.

Matthew Fox: And that how dare others question the way — and you made the reference to A Few Good Men, and I’m not going to quote that. What Jack Nicholson’s character says is, “I don’t want you to question the way I provide that blanket of freedom. I’d rather you just said thank you and went on your way.”

Pete Wright: Yeah.

Matthew Fox: I have seen that movie more than once.

Pete Wright: Yeah, right.

Matthew Fox: And I think Cap is a lot more righteous than Fury is. I think he is a righteous man, for sure.

Pete Wright: Which becomes the fabric of Civil War.

Matthew Fox: But I think that’s the thing — you don’t make a rule on the assumption that someone’s righteous, because if Cap can do it, then Fury can. And maybe Cap is right, but Fury definitely is not.

Pete Wright: I think you’re making my case that it should have been “fueled by furious anger,” or vengeance. That should have been the quote, because that speaks more to what Fury’s next chapter is than “the path of the righteous man.” If you’re going to misquote Pulp Fiction, misquote the best part of it. And what this says to me more than anything else is that they didn’t think that deeply about the Easter egg.

Matthew Fox: Well, no. The quote from Samuel L. Jackson is Ezekiel 25:17, “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish.” So that quote is correct. It’s just not, I think you’re saying, the best part of it.

Pete Wright: That’s exactly what I’m saying. I think the best part should be the part that describes Nick Fury. If you’re going to put an Easter egg in, actually get the part of the quote that represents Nick Fury and what he represents to SHIELD, not this thing that clearly doesn’t.

Matthew Fox: Which is, I think, doubly funny, because the actual quote is from the Bible: “I will execute great vengeance on them with furious rebukes, and they shall know that I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon them.” Which also describes Nicholas J. Fury at this point in time.

Pete Wright: It totally describes Nick Fury. It totally does. So okay, I’m going to give them credit. I’ll give them eight out of ten for trying, because they point loosely at an idea that represents Nick Fury if you read as closely into it as we did. That’s fine.

We then lead to — we actually get some scripted content between the boys. And this is the end. “So you’ve experienced this sort of thing before,” says Nick Fury, as he walks up to see Sam and Steve standing at his own grave, at Nick’s own grave.

Matthew Fox: Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright: Steve says, “You’ll get used to it.” This is the closing of the film. So we’re kind of wrapping up. Here’s what our characters are going to do next.

Nick says they’ve been going through — I don’t know who “we” is in this case. I guess he could be talking about Natasha. Maria is interviewing for jobs. Is she a “we” in this scenario? Anyway, Nick’s point is a lot of rats didn’t go down with the ship, and “I’m going to Europe,” and he wanted to ask if you guys would come. And both of these guys say no. Steve says, “There’s something I’ve got to do first.” Sam says, “I’m more of a soldier than a spy.”

And that’s it. That’s it. What is he doing in Europe? Do you have any idea?

Matthew Fox: So if I’m right, we have this, and then Guardians, and then Ultron. And Ultron does open with them chasing down — I think it’s Strucker — and the heads of Hydra as they now exist, who are in Europe.

Pete Wright: Yeah.

Matthew Fox: So presumably he’s going to start that part of the mission.

Pete Wright: Yep.

Matthew Fox: Which — you kind of wonder, is it that he just does that and then he calls up Cap or some others and says, “Hey, let’s get the band back together, here I am”? That’s never really been made clear in Ultron. And I think it also may connect to — because remember, this movie happens concurrently to Agents of SHIELD.

Pete Wright: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Fox: And so I think Agents of SHIELD may further answer that question, but it’s been a decade since I saw it, so hold me to that.

The part that throws me is Sam says, “I’m not a spy, I’m a soldier.” What is Cap about to go do? Cap is off to go be sneaky-sneaky and try to track down this Winter Soldier and hopefully free him.

Pete Wright: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Fox: How is that not spy work?

Pete Wright: It seems like spy work. It seems like they’re getting into some real James Bond stuff.

Matthew Fox: Yeah.

Pete Wright: And we don’t know what, because that’s in the next set of five minutes. In this set of five minutes, Nick says, “All right then,” sigh.

Matthew Fox: Yes.

Pete Wright: And they go about their business. And that makes the end of this five minutes.

Does this make for a tidy end of the story of Captain America: The Winter Soldier? Do you feel like we’re leading into something great, or is it ending on a bit of an anemic kind of gulp?

Matthew Fox: No, I think this is a strong ending. Again, I’m finding that I disagree with the characters more than I did when I first saw it. It used to be that I was like, I love Cap in Winter Soldier, but for me, Civil War is where it starts to go wrong. And now I see much more of that same through line.

But I think I can really enjoy a movie about something I disagree with. I think the movie A Time to Kill, with Matthew McConaughey and Samuel L. Jackson, is one of the greatest trial movies I’ve ever seen. It is fundamentally a legal defense of vigilantism, which I fundamentally disagree with.

Pete Wright: Yes.

Matthew Fox: But it is a fantastically good and enjoyable and thought-provoking opinion that I disagree with.

Pete Wright: Yeah, we can hold two things in our minds at once. Yeah, for sure.

Matthew Fox: And I kind of feel like this at the end. I still think my feelings on Natasha and Cap don’t change the fact that I greatly love the movie and I’ve enjoyed every minute of this.

Pete Wright: Yeah.

Matthew Fox: And yeah, this feels like a good wrapping up. It feels like this story is done. The bureaucrat in me wants there to be more congressional investigation, but clearly there’s not going to be. We’re just going to wait until the next time government authority and the actions of the Avengers pop up against each other — which, don’t worry, we’re not going to have to wait long for that.

And we’re set up for — it feels like a very kind of Empire Strikes Back kind of ending. Everyone’s going off on their own way. But no one’s going to sit in the sun. This isn’t — they’re not all going to go have shawarma.

Pete Wright: Right.

Matthew Fox: Shawarma’s great, by the way. And Mayor Mamdani’s made it easier to get in New York City. Avengers like Mamdani. Anyway, yeah, so I just think it’s great.

Pete Wright: Anyway.

Matthew Fox: I think this is a good coda, and I know there’s a couple more minutes that are going to happen. I don’t remember exactly what that’s going to be, but I think a lot of movies kind of miss the landing. Either it ends immediately after the big fight, or they just stretch on way too long after the big fight.

Pete Wright: Yeah.

Matthew Fox: This feels like a very satisfying wrapping up of SHIELD is gone, all these people are going in different directions, here’s what’s going to happen next.

Pete Wright: I totally agree with that. And I think that’s one of the most important bits to note — just how well the post-fight is paced. It puts everybody in a place ready to move on to some next thing, and it does it very efficiently.

I will say, the next three minutes — speaking of pacing, the next three sets that we have, and that’s it, that’s all we’ve got, is three more episodes on this. The next one, we get our full first post-credit sequence, and it doesn’t stop in the middle. We get the whole thing. And it’s kind of juicy for us to talk about.

So next week we’re going to talk about the first post-credit sequence. And this movie did drop a bit of a character bomb. And I think it’ll be interesting, especially on the heels of talking about Spider-Man: Brand New Day and its gloriously controversial post-credit sequence.

Matthew Fox: Yeah.

Pete Wright: Yeah, so—

Matthew Fox: And I’ll just say, granted I missed out on Avengers and a couple other movies, but even when you and I were doing Thor 2, one thing we talked about is, are we now far enough into the MCU that we should be talking about how it’s doing its job as an MCU movie? And I think the last couple minutes are always going to be one of the places where that question most comes up.

Because one of the things I judge an MCU movie based on is, how well does it find the balance of making me feel like this chapter is done? Like I don’t feel like we’re just stopping in the middle of the story, I feel like we have gotten to a satisfying endpoint. But that there’s enough hanging that I’m excited for — I have a theory of what’s going to happen next.

Pete Wright: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Fox: And I think some movies do that better than others. Go listen to me talk about Brand New Day and how it relates to Doomsday — not on the Marvel Movie Minute, on The Film Board.

Pete Wright: Yeah.

Matthew Fox: But yeah, I think this does a very good job of, I’m excited to see what comes next.

Pete Wright: Absolutely.

Matthew Fox: But I also wasn’t — I remember going to see Guardians of the Galaxy and I wasn’t like, “Oh my God, but I need to know more about what happened to the Winter Soldier.” No, Winter Soldier’s done. The threads are there for the next person to pick up.

Pete Wright: Yeah. We get some Avengers after that. It all happens as it should happen. And we were still looking forward to every next thing.

This has been great. We’re going to close the book on 121 to 125. Next week we wrap up the last few lines of the movie and we start our credit run. And who knows what that’s going to be like.

Matthew Fox: Sounds good.

Pete Wright: All right. Thank you everybody for downloading and listening. Make sure you head over to marvelmovieminute.com. It’s not too late to sign up and subscribe and get early access to all the episodes. We would love to have you over there.

And also don’t forget to check out ethicalpanda.com for all the shows that Matthew puts on. And you can find me just strewn about, peppered across TruStory FM. We’d love to have you check out more of our shows there.

Matthew Fox: There’s a whole latticework of Pete’s work out there, including some great writing that I think I am promoting more in my show notes than Pete is promoting in his.

Pete Wright: I have such a hard time doing it.

Matthew Fox: I know, I know. So go to my show notes of anything and you’ll find a way to buy Pete’s books and give me a couple bucks and probably throw some money to Jeff Bezos and his yacht.

Pete Wright: Everybody wins.

Matthew Fox: Yacht bucks. Everyone needs yacht bucks. So let’s go, orcas.

Pete Wright: Thank you, everybody, for joining us on the Marvel Movie Minute. I’m Pete Wright. We’ll see you next week.

Matthew Fox: I’m a podcaster, not a spy.