Matthew Fox: Welcome back to the Marvel Movie Minute, a weekly podcast 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 Matthew Fox. And that’s all we got today. We’re talking about minutes 41 through 45, which begins with Steve, Natasha, and Maria Hill sitting shiva for Nick Fury, and ends with Pierce telling Steve why he needs anger management classes. What did we think of these minutes?
Kyle Olson: We sort of start off on the somber note — there’s still mourning and death — and then the plot kicks in, and we have a very interesting conversation. I’m curious to hear your thoughts about why we spend so much time in Pierce’s office at this point, but we’ll get there.
Matthew Fox: I thought kind of similar. I like these minutes. We’re moving the pieces on the board and setting up some interesting things. There are a couple of threads I don’t quite know where they go that I want to ask you about. Let’s start with this framing where Natasha’s the closest and she actually touches him —
Kyle Olson: Fury is laid out in state. The body is there under the sheet.
Matthew Fox: — and Steve is a couple steps behind her, and Maria is back almost against the wall.
Kyle Olson: Yeah.
Matthew Fox: Maria says to Steve, “You need to take him.” Okay. At least that partly explains it. So what is she saying — that she’s going to physically take custody of his body?
Kyle Olson: I believe so. That’s my question. We talked a little about this in the last episode too, but at this point is Hill in on the plan? Is this part of it — that they’d set up a protocol where they’d have a fake doctor pronounce him dead because he took the drugs, and then she takes the body because she gives him the antidote that brings him back?
Matthew Fox: That would seem to make the most sense. Of these three, and really of everyone in SHIELD, Maria Hill is far and away the person Nick Fury is going to trust the most. The person he works closest with, the person he is most connected to.
Kyle Olson: Yes.
Matthew Fox: Everyone else is kind of doing their own thing and partnering with him in some way. Natasha works for him more than Steve does, but Natasha still has her own agendas. Natasha goes out on her own. Maria Hill is his girl Friday.
Kyle Olson: She’s the ride-or-die.
Matthew Fox: One hundred percent.
Kyle Olson: Everybody else are kind of employees, I guess. She is the right hand. Anyone who’s worked in an office setting knows the power is in the secretary, not whoever’s in the big office. Maria Hill is the one who knows where all the bodies are — she’s probably the one who was carrying the shovel most of the time.
Matthew Fox: Very true. So Natasha starts to walk out of the room and Steve calls out for her.
Kyle Olson: Yeah.
Matthew Fox: She keeps going, and he calls after her again, and she turns around and says, “Why was Nick in your apartment?” Why was Steve calling after her? Do you think he was just trying to comfort her and be a good guy?
Kyle Olson: Maybe, or even to start talking about this whole strange situation. But the code switch that happens in Natasha there is incredible. You’ve seen her as close to tears as we’ve ever seen her — touching his forehead, the laying on of hands, sitting shiva as you said. That was an apt metaphor. And then as soon as Steve calls out, she switches back. As soon as she turns around, she’s in spy mode. It’s not even a beat — it’s instantly, “Why was he in your apartment?”
Matthew Fox: Yeah.
Kyle Olson: Like she’s back on the job.
Matthew Fox: And it would have been very easy to play this as though she’s faking the emotion. I don’t think that’s the case here at all.
Kyle Olson: No, I don’t think so either.
Matthew Fox: I think she genuinely is feeling these emotions. Nick is really the person who set her on the path to putting black in her ledger after so much red.
Kyle Olson: That’s right.
Matthew Fox: And yet that’s just how good she is — she’s able to say, this is the space in which I can feel my emotions, and now I need to close that door and be a professional again.
Kyle Olson: That’s sort of the Black Widow of it. Natasha was there, and now she’s put the armor back on. Her default mode is cool, has everything put together, has all the answers, the wink-and-nod kind of thing. She shifts right back into that mode. And I think that’s the moment where she sees Steve is about to lie to her.
Matthew Fox: Very much so.
Kyle Olson: Although he doesn’t really lie. Everybody keeps saying that to him, but he really doesn’t know why Nick was there.
Matthew Fox: Nick said more than he’s revealing.
Kyle Olson: Yes.
Matthew Fox: Nick had already been attacked. It was such a public hit I can’t imagine it didn’t make the news. But we don’t know — was he already on the run? Steve could have said he was looking for a safe place. He could have said he told me his wife left him or kicked him out, which we all know is nonsense, but that could have happened.
Kyle Olson: Yeah.
Matthew Fox: Backing up a bit, this moment plays into something we’ve been talking about for the last couple weeks: this is the movie that really shows the difference between being a soldier and being a spy. This is the movie where, among other things, Steve becomes a spy. Part of this is about Natasha teaching him that — not that she’s trying to directly teach him, but a soldier has their emotions on their sleeve. I’m angry, I’m going to go on the battlefield, I’m going to fight. There’s no subterfuge.
Kyle Olson: Mm-hmm.
Matthew Fox: Natasha has to turn her emotions on and off. She has to know what to say and what to do. Steve doesn’t know who to trust, doesn’t know what to say, and can’t make the quick decisions the way Natasha does, because he’s so out of place.
Kyle Olson: And he’s still following Fury’s mandate. Don’t trust anyone. And now he’s trying to figure out — does that include Natasha?
Matthew Fox: Right.
Kyle Olson: Does that include Hill? Do you mean everybody, everybody? So he’s definitely reeling at this point, doesn’t know exactly what he’s supposed to reveal or not reveal.
Matthew Fox: Right. So then Rumlow comes to break it up, saying we need you back at SHIELD.
Kyle Olson: Yeah.
Matthew Fox: Steve says give me a minute, and Rumlow says no, we need you right back now. Do you think there’s some level of wanting to separate Steve and Natasha? Because that’s what it felt like to me — we don’t want these two comparing notes.
Kyle Olson: Exactly. They know Natasha’s not in on the plan either, so the more they get together and start talking, theoretically they could call the other Avengers. Natasha was in Tony Stark’s house for a long time — it’s very possible they have each other on speed dial. The last thing they want on this day is the Avengers in town.
Matthew Fox: Right.
Kyle Olson: Getting two of them together is bad enough, much less when the phone tree starts. But you also get to see a little of the antagonism we’re going to see between Rumlow and Cap. So far he’s been happy to be the grunt standing next to Captain America, but now we’re starting to see a little more animosity brewing. Because at this point Rumlow probably has his next set of orders — the plan is in motion, get Cap back here. What we’re going to see in the next set of minutes, the elevator ride from hell, is definitely already in the works.
Matthew Fox: Yeah. There’s a feeling — and we’ll talk about this in a few minutes, and a lot more next week — that Pierce might be able to convince him.
Kyle Olson: Yeah. I want to talk about that when we get into that meeting. But before that happens, Steve realizes that if he’s going back to command, chances are things aren’t going to go great and he’ll probably be searched, and he’s got this drive that Fury — in his mind — died for. So what’s he going to do with it?
Matthew Fox: Right.
Kyle Olson: It’s a nice little piece of editing they do. They don’t show him putting it in. To the side, you see a vending machine is open, and then when he walks away they cut back to the vending machine and there’s a close-up — and behind the Hubba Bubba, there’s the thumb drive.
Matthew Fox: I thought that was a nice touch. I don’t know if this is intentional, but I think Hubba Bubba is a gum company that’s been around since World War II.
Kyle Olson: Not quite that far. They came out in 1979. Their mascot was the Gumfighter — it was a whole Western thing.
Matthew Fox: Okay.
Kyle Olson: Their catchphrase was “Big bubbles, no troubles.”
Matthew Fox: That could be an Avenger in Avengers 23, but we’re not quite there yet.
Kyle Olson: Once we’ve worked our way through the rest of the roster.
Matthew Fox: Probably just a coincidence. So we get one of my favorite moments next — Cap being kind of obnoxious and kind of annoyed — where he comes across —
Kyle Olson: Yeah.
Matthew Fox: What name is she going by now?
Kyle Olson: Sharon Carter, Agent 13 — whatever you want to call her.
Matthew Fox: Agent 13. Because I think she hasn’t said “Carter” yet by any means.
Kyle Olson: No.
Matthew Fox: She’s talking to Pierce, who’s briefing her, and she’s looking upset and walking away, and Cap’s walking toward Pierce. She just says “Captain Rogers” — acknowledging that he’s not a neighbor but a military person, so she uses his proper title. And he says, with probably the most bitterness until he’s talking to Tony in Civil War —
Kyle Olson: Hmm. Yeah.
Matthew Fox: She says “Captain Rogers,” and he goes “Neighbor.” Just like —
Kyle Olson: He doesn’t even make eye contact with her. That was ice cold.
Matthew Fox: No eye contact. Just: I am calling you out. You were lying to me. That is not okay.
Kyle Olson: That’s the cattiest we’ve ever seen Cap.
Matthew Fox: What do you think has him so upset about that?
Kyle Olson: He’s being betrayed all over the place. And now to find out that this girl who was his neighbor, who he thought he was vibing with, was also a spy spying on him. She’s the only subordinate in this whole thing — the only one he can take his frustration out on. He’s about to go into a high-profile meeting with someone who outranks him. But she’s below him, so he can pull rank almost.
Matthew Fox: Yeah. And I think she really got him. It’s funny because she didn’t do anything to put him in danger.
Kyle Olson: No. She’s been a professional, as far as we know, doing exactly what she was hired to do.
Matthew Fox: But what she did was make him vulnerable. After everything that happened with Carter — the woman he fell in love with — this is the first time, with some prompting from Natasha, that he was like, hey, would you maybe like to come in and have a cup of coffee? There’s a real openness there. And he just feels betrayed, and kind of embarrassed, because he’s like — I’m supposed to be able to see through these things, and everyone is hoodwinking me now.
Kyle Olson: Right. And it goes along with exactly what you were talking about — he’s bad at this. He’s bad at being a spy, because there was a literal spy next door and he had no idea.
Matthew Fox: Exactly.
Kyle Olson: Just another thing to keep him off-kilter and out of focus. So then we see he goes and meets Pierce, and we find out he had not met Pierce before. So this isn’t someone in the regular chain of command — this is someone Nick reported to, but Cap had never met, which is actually kind of surprising to me. But it’s a genuine meeting of peers.
Matthew Fox: Pierce is a member of the council, but he doesn’t hold an official role with SHIELD beyond that, as far as I know. It’s like — I have a boss, and that boss might report to my CEO, but I’m probably not going to meet the CEO unless something special happens.
Kyle Olson: Yeah. Right.
Matthew Fox: But Steve is pretty special. So it’s probably a little significant.
Kyle Olson: Yeah. And then Pierce says his father was in the 101st — the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles. A light infantry division in the United States, started in 1918 but prominent during World War II. So his father was probably on the beaches at Normandy, probably in combat theaters adjacent to where Captain America was operating — or fighting alongside people who had at least met him.
Matthew Fox: His father.
Kyle Olson: Right.
Matthew Fox: And most significantly, that was the unit Cap helped rescue.
Kyle Olson: Yeah.
Matthew Fox: That’s a real way of saying: I owe you a debt. You saved my father’s life and I wouldn’t be here.
Kyle Olson: Yeah. There’s a question of timing, of course.
Matthew Fox: He then tells this story about how he and Nick first became friends — about Nick directly disobeying his order. Pierce thought they could negotiate with the terrorists; Nick decided they couldn’t, did a rescue mission, and it turned out Nick was right. And he reveals he has a daughter who was there and was saved because of those actions.
Kyle Olson: So there’s a question of when this took place, because they never say. I went through a bunch of Reddit threads on the timeline, and no one’s really been able to pin down exactly when this happened. Captain Marvel is set in ’95, and Nick seems more junior there — he doesn’t become director until ’97. So people are saying it probably happened around ’92, something in that range that led to him being positioned and eventually becoming director. Somewhere in the mid-’90s is where most people land.
Matthew Fox: Here’s my question. Do we have any reason to believe this event actually happened?
Kyle Olson: I don’t know. And the other thing — this whole scene is strange to me, because I don’t understand exactly what it’s doing. You hire Robert Redford and you want to get a Robert Redford performance out of it, so you give him these big meaty dialogue scenes with intrigue. But at the same time, what does all of that before the pitch actually get us?
Matthew Fox: Here’s my take. The key is the line where Pierce transitions from the story about Nick into talking to Steve directly — “to build a better world sometimes means tearing the old one down.” And that makes enemies.
Kyle Olson: Yeah. But that’s at the end of all of this. There’s so much buildup before we get there.
Matthew Fox: I think this is his way of feeling out whether Cap would go along with Project Insight. Because the whole point of the Bogota story is that Nick was willing to do the hard thing and take the risk, because he recognized just how dangerous the world was — that you had to, you couldn’t wait for everyone up the chain of command to say yes.
Kyle Olson: Yeah. Okay. Okay, I like that.
Matthew Fox: Who else has been willing to say, I’m going to do what I think is right and necessary, even if everyone up the chain of command says I shouldn’t?
Kyle Olson: Yeah.
Matthew Fox: Cap. That’s what he does.
Kyle Olson: And will again.
Matthew Fox: That’s literally what he did to rescue Pierce’s father.
Kyle Olson: Yeah.
Matthew Fox: So I think that’s the connection he’s trying to make. Look, you rescued my father, Nick rescued those hostages — we were willing to do the thing that sounds like maybe you shouldn’t, because we knew how dangerous the world was. To make the world a better place, you have to tear down the old, and that means making enemies. I think he’s kind of like the Emperor talking to Anakin — feeling him out, telling him the Darth Plagueis story, trying to see if Steve were to say, yeah, I’m just as angry as you are that Nick got killed, I want to do something about this — and then Pierce can say, well, what if we could do something? What if there was a way to work out who the dangerous people are? I don’t think he’s planning to give everything away. He’s certainly not going to mention Hydra in this conversation.
Kyle Olson: No. Not at this point.
Matthew Fox: And we can even debate to what extent whether Pierce himself is Hydra. I think that’s an open question, at least until later in the movie — or whether he’s more of a true believer that they’re manipulating.
Kyle Olson: Yeah, because at this point what we’re supposed to believe is that he’s a high-level government bureaucrat and something is amiss. But I don’t think we’re supposed to have any suspicion about him yet. Except that he’s an antagonist to Cap because he’s the order. He’s the authority. He’s the guy in a suit, so you automatically don’t trust him.
Matthew Fox: I think there’s also the level of — he and Nick had a conversation where Nick kind of wanted to slow down, and he didn’t really seem to like that idea, and then someone tried to kill Nick.
Kyle Olson: Yeah.
Matthew Fox: So I do think we’re supposed to have some suspicion already.
Kyle Olson: Okay.
Matthew Fox: I think the elevator scene is going to be the biggest confirmation we get.
Kyle Olson: Sure. Yeah.
Matthew Fox: But you’re right, we’re not there yet. Knowing what we know later, to me that’s what this scene is: are you willing to go to the dark side for what you think is right? Are you willing to get your hands dirty?
Kyle Olson: Yeah. Because there are a couple of moves he makes in this conversational gambit. You start with the Bogota story. Then immediately he asks the exact same question Natasha asked — “Why was Nick in your apartment?” Interesting that he says Nick and not Fury, because they’re on a first-name basis. Then you switch into: your apartment was bugged, and Nick was the one who bugged it. Then you get to Batroc — he was captured, he’s not an assassin, just a hired gun, and through these shell companies it was Nick who hired him. So you have: Nick came to you, but I’m also saying Nick bugged your apartment because he didn’t trust you. And he hired all these people to steal intelligence and get away with it. And then: “To build a better world, sometimes means tearing the old one down.” And then: “That makes enemies.” And he immediately turns and looks at Steve. So knowing this is a Hydra agent saying “that makes enemies” — but also saying there are enemies out there — that’s kind of his pitch. Do you think he was legitimately making the pitch to see if Steve would come over?
Matthew Fox: I think so. I appreciate you reminding me — I watched these minutes a little while ago and I have a very sick kid, so I wasn’t able to rewatch right before this. I think he’s a good manipulator and a good recruiter. Part of a recruitment pitch is reading the person and adjusting on the fly. The first thing he tries is: what if Nick isn’t the person we believed him to be? Because that’s a classic tactic — in a cult, a fundamentalist church, whatever — you make them question everything they thought was solid. And then you start to say, but you can trust us.
Kyle Olson: Mm-hmm.
Matthew Fox: I think his goal at the start is to say, you shouldn’t have trusted Nick — Nick was dirty. But look, I’m not. Help me. And then he hits a wall. Because Steve says, well, but you knew Nick, so that couldn’t have been true, right?
Kyle Olson: And then immediately — this is where it’s great to have a Robert Redford — immediately he’s like, “I don’t believe that either.” Like, that whole line of attack just got dropped.
Matthew Fox: Exactly. And that’s part of being a manipulator, part of being a gaslighter — figuring out, okay, that tactic didn’t work, how do I seamlessly make it seem like I was just playing devil’s advocate or whatever?
Kyle Olson: “That’s how smart you are — you figured out that part wasn’t true.”
Matthew Fox: Exactly. So he switches from “Nick was dirty and we have to clean up his mess” to making Nick a martyr. And if Nick’s a martyr, all the more so we have to do what Nick would have done. And if Nick would have been willing to break orders, we have to be willing to do what seems wrong — and okay, maybe kill ten thousand people, but we’re doing it to rescue the hostages that are the whole earth, or whatever nonsense.
Kyle Olson: Yeah. Unfortunately the conversation comes to an end before the end of his speech. The last thing Pierce says is, “Captain, you were the last one to see Nick alive.” But we don’t know how the conversation ends because it rolls into the next minutes. This is a very chess kind of episode — very much just moving pieces and getting things in place. We just had some action, we just had a major death, and we’re about to hit a big action scene. So this is the calm before the storm. And that’s nice, because that action scene seems to come out of nowhere — turns out there was a plan going all along.
Matthew Fox: Yeah. The ambush is planned unless Pierce says cancel it.
Kyle Olson: Right.
Matthew Fox: And the other thing — I hadn’t even made this connection until you brought it up. Him asking “why was Nick in your apartment” — part of the point is he’s asking the exact same question as Natasha, but from a completely different angle.
Kyle Olson: Yeah.
Matthew Fox: Natasha honestly doesn’t know, and she thinks Steve might have part of the picture, and that question will help get her there.
Kyle Olson: Yeah. I’m thinking in terms of emphasis. “Why was Nick in your apartment?” versus Pierce’s “Why was Nick in your apartment?”
Matthew Fox: Right. And Pierce knows why. Pierce knows someone was trying to kill Nick.
Kyle Olson: Yeah.
Matthew Fox: Natasha genuinely is trying to understand. Pierce just wants to know: what does Steve know, and how much? Is this someone we can still recruit and bring to our side, or is he a threat we have to take down?
Kyle Olson: Exactly. Is he passing or failing the test? We don’t know. We’ll have to wait for the next series of minutes to find out.
Matthew Fox: I have a hunch it’s not so good.
Kyle Olson: Good for us.
Matthew Fox: He could have used an SAT tutor. All right, I think that’s about it. Anything else you want to get in? Oh — actually I had one more question.
Kyle Olson: Yeah, go ahead.
Matthew Fox: They mention the name Jacob Beach as part of the financial chain that leads back to a house next to Fury’s mom’s house — with the same address.
Kyle Olson: Yeah. Same address. I couldn’t find anything on that.
Matthew Fox: Is Jacob Beach a character from the comics, or some kind of Easter egg?
Kyle Olson: No. I couldn’t find anything. They’ve only mentioned it the once, so it seems like a name they just made up on the fly — a red herring.
Matthew Fox: Okay. Well, sometimes herrings are red. That’s the way they work.
Kyle Olson: Exactly.
Matthew Fox: Well, on behalf of Kyle and myself, thank you all for listening. Pete and Rob, I’m sure, will be back next week, and we hope you’ll be back too. Please keep sending your comments on Discord or by email — we love hearing them and talking about them. Stay classy, Washington, D.C.
Kyle Olson: Enough said.
