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.
Kyle Olson:
I’m Kyle Olson.
Matthew Fox:
And today we’re talking about minutes eighty-six through ninety, which begins with Cap feeling guilty about Bucky, and Pierce wanting to use Bucky’s brain as an extra asset. Kyle, what’s your take on these minutes?
Kyle Olson:
This is — we’re into some heavy plot stuff now. There’s some twists and surprises, and then we get to see how people are interacting. They find out they’ve been lied to, or brainwashed, or manipulated. And we also have some karmic injustice that we’re going to have to discuss, as one of the corporate overlords has overlorded over one of the people who appears in these scenes, and we’ll talk about that too.
Matthew Fox:
Definitely. And we start out with Cap feeling guilty. I really like this scene for two reasons. One is that I think it’s very true to Cap that his first feeling is, “Oh my gosh, I let Bucky be captured. This is all on me.” The guy fell two hundred feet into a ravine. The train you were on was still going, and there was stuff you had to do on that train. There was no way you were going to stop it, but of course Cap feels that guilt.
And then Natasha — he’s not saying that, he’s saying just about what happened — and Natasha’s able to cut through it immediately and go, “No, dude, this is not your fault. You need to not feel this guilt.” I really like that character beat for both of them.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, I like her saying that even though I think she knows it’s not going to matter. It’s good that she says it, but he’s going to be like, “Yeah, cool, I’ll just shoulder that as well.”
Matthew Fox:
Yeah. “Now I am making you feel like you have to stop making me feel guilty.” Having been in many relationships, I know how this works.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. It’s a nice beat, and also the fact that Sam is really the odd man out in this whole thing, just kind of going, “Yeah, I don’t know what anyone’s talking about, but I’m also here.”
Matthew Fox:
Right. And it turns out there’s someone in the back of that van who doesn’t know who Sam is, although presumably he’s had some experience of him by now.
Kyle Olson:
That’s right.
Matthew Fox:
Maria Hill. We get this fun moment where they’re starting to debate, like, do we do something? And then all of a sudden one of the what seemed to be Shield-slash-Hydra agents is charging a taser, and then uses the taser on the other guard, makes a joke about the helmet being too tight — look at it, it’s Maria Hill.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. Sam is asking for medical help, and then this guard pulls out one of the stun rods, as if they’re going to shock him into submission, and then turns around, hits the other guard. Boom, Maria Hill. They talked about Maria Hill a lot when she first showed up in Avengers. She’s a Brian Michael Bendis-created character. She’s one of my favorites. I think Cobie Smulders is fantastic. And, you know, justice for Hill, because I hope she has a Nick-Fury-style surprise reappearance in the MCU in the future.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah, I’ve not seen Secret Wars, but I understand that she does not survive till the end of it. So, Secret Vision — thank you, thank you.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, Secret Invasion. Because, unfortunately, Secret Wars is a thing that’s coming, so we don’t know when people are listening to this, so we need to be clear.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah. Nope, nothing important there. And so — have we done a deep dive on Maria Hill this season?
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, she’s great. I think they did it back when she first showed up in Avengers, so I didn’t want to cover any ground they had done back then. But she’s a character created by Brian Michael Bendis, and she’s been in this position — she’s always been sort of Nick’s right hand. She’s run Shield for a while. She’s run covert ops for a while. And she’s all around great. No powers, just skilled — kind of even below Black Widow in terms of that. She’s just skilled.
Matthew Fox:
And am I right that she generally doesn’t push back against Nick? We don’t necessarily know if she’s morally jaded the way he is, but she certainly is not his conscience. She’s not the Jiminy Cricket. She’s just like, “Okay, yes, boss, let’s get it done.”
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, she’s the Girl Friday, the right hand. Whatever you need done, “Yeah, I’ll do that.” She’s not the one to challenge what he’s doing, but more the one to make sure it gets done right.
Matthew Fox:
We’ll have a fun moment about that in just a few minutes. But before we get there, the last thing I want to ask about her is: do we have a history with her of her showing up like, you know, “Guard number three turns out to be Maria Hill”? Is that a thing with her, or does it just work in this movie? I’m wondering if that’s a callback in some way.
Kyle Olson:
No. I mean, there have been a couple of things where she has run some covert ops groups. There actually was a Secret War — as opposed to Secret Wars — that she was running point on, getting people into stealth suits and things. But no, this was a movie invention. Not an homage, as far as I can remember.
Matthew Fox:
So we get to the point where the van is parked. Our friends from Hydra are getting ready to go in. I do want to point out that he says, “Three holes — start digging.”
Kyle Olson:
Yeah.
Matthew Fox:
And literally no one goes to start digging a hole.
Kyle Olson:
No. And also they’re in the middle of the city.
Matthew Fox:
There is no shovel.
Kyle Olson:
Where do you think these holes are going to be dug?
Matthew Fox:
I don’t get it. I wondered if that line was an artifact from when it was maybe going to be shot in a different location, or something. But either way — then of course what they find out is that once again a Shield member has escaped from a vehicle by cutting a hole in the bottom and then cutting a hole in the ground.
Kyle Olson:
The not-quite-lightsaber, yeah.
Matthew Fox:
I have some questions, because I think the van was moving most of the time that this was happening.
Kyle Olson:
Yes, that was my thought as well. We see the hole cut in the bottom of the vehicle, but we don’t see underneath that. So were they the last one in the line? Did this happen just after they stopped it — like, “Okay, go,” and then they cut a hole and then cut into the ground the same way Nick did? Or was it that they cut the hole and dropped to the ground, and then the convoy kept going on? I don’t know. It was unclear.
Matthew Fox:
Fair enough. We then cut back to where they’ve gone, which is apparently to some secret sort of hospital unit, where, surprise, surprise, Nick Fury is still alive.
Kyle Olson:
That’s right. This is shot at Lake View Cemetery. It’s at 12316 Euclid Avenue, not far from University Circle in Cleveland. It’s the resting place of Harvey Pekar, who you can see a movie about called American Splendor; Eliot Ness, who you can see in The Untouchables; and President James Garfield, who had a recent miniseries on Netflix called Death by Lightning, which was highly underrated — you should look for that.
Also, if you’re interested in comic books and Eliot Ness and Brian Michael Bendis, have I got a story for you. There’s a comic book called Torso, which tells the true story of how Eliot Ness helped stop one of the first documented American serial killers. Based on a true story, it’s a really good indie comic — and we’re going to be talking about indie comics and their importance a little bit later too. But this is where this particular thing was shot. And we also see another cameo: Joe Russo, as Dr. Fine, comes running down there.
Matthew Fox:
Oh, okay. I thought that guy was kind of familiar. So, the Russo Brothers.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. I assume that Dr. Fine is a “Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard” Three Stooges homage, but I don’t really know that for sure.
Matthew Fox:
And so we learn that Fury is still alive. I don’t know if you remember your feelings the first time you watched this movie, but do you remember — was this a surprise to you?
Kyle Olson:
It was. I really thought they were going for broke with this movie, that they really were not pulling punches. I was like, “Oh wow, this is a way to have him exit the thing.” And then when he shows up and says, “About damn time,” I was like, “Oh, Nick, you got me again.”
Matthew Fox:
Yeah. And this was definitely one where the meta conversation was a part of it as well. At this time, the MCU was still not something that serious actors were really spending much time with, unless they kind of needed to rehabilitate their career — like RDJ, or, you know, some others who’d been like, “Okay, well, maybe I need to get remembered again.” And Samuel L. Jackson was very big. He’d been in the Star Wars movies, obviously. He’d been in a lot of more serious stuff — he was in a couple of Spike Lee movies that he was incredible in. He was a working actor with a lot of great stuff on his pedigree.
So I remember being like, “He’s not going to stick around for long.” Maybe the nine-movie deal had been announced and I just didn’t know about it, or it hadn’t happened yet, but I definitely thought, “Okay, Samuel Jackson is not going to stick around too long. This is a good movie for him to go out in a blaze of glory.” So I was definitely surprised, but I thought the way they set it all up worked.
Kyle Olson:
Mm-hmm. For any other franchise player, that’s a pretty good way to go — you’ve done all this stuff, and then you hand off, and now you have someone to avenge as they go into the final battle. But nope, Nick fooled us all one more time. He’s actually still alive and still pulling some strings.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah, very much so. He says pointedly — because Cap asks, “Why did you let us think you were dead?” — he says, “I didn’t know who to trust.” And what’s being made clear there is that he trusts Maria Hill, he trusts Dr. Fine, and maybe it’s just those two, maybe there’s one or two others involved in this little base, but no — clearly he didn’t trust Natasha, and he doesn’t trust Cap.
It got me wondering: we know that after the first attempt on Fury’s life, he goes to Cap’s apartment, he has that conversation, and then it’s at Cap’s apartment that he’s shot. So clearly he’s expecting another assassination attempt. He has this drug on him. Do you think that this conversation — where Cap honestly pushes back on him some, and is kind of, not from the Hydra perspective, but, like, “No, even you are a little bit a goody-two-shoes boy” — do you think if that conversation had gone differently, then Nick would have brought him into the inner circle sooner?
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, I think that was sort of his plan when he went there. I think he went to what he thought of as a safe place, which is right next to America’s ass — right next to the super soldier, probably the most trustworthy person he knows, in a time when he didn’t know who he could trust. I think, in Nick’s head, there was a version where he started forming whatever this group to stop this around Cap, as opposed to being shot through the wall by Winter Soldier and then having to do this whole super-clandestine operation.
Matthew Fox:
Now, I don’t remember, and I don’t know if — I think you’re the deep-dive person, but if you didn’t do this, don’t worry about it. The Dr. Fine who’s here — is he one of the doctors who operate on Nick when we see him in surgery?
Kyle Olson:
Yes, he’s in that operating room too.
Matthew Fox:
Okay.
Kyle Olson:
I think that’s the connection we’re supposed to make — to go, “Oh, okay, wasn’t there?” So I guess by the rules we established last time, this would not be a cameo, because it’s in two different scenes.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah. But that makes sense. I think the question is often, how did they fool the doctors? But if that doctor’s in on it from the beginning, then that makes total sense.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, or at least, maybe Nick has on his contact list, “If I get shot, this is the doctor to call,” because this doctor knows to administer the — let’s see, what is it — the tetrodotoxin B, which apparently, you found out, was developed by Bruce Banner to slow all the metabolic processes in the body. It didn’t work to stop the Hulk, but it does make you appear dead. So it was one of the things he did, and then Shield went, “I think we could find a use for that.” So Nick probably literally kept it in his back pocket.
Matthew Fox:
Okay. So Nick didn’t have to apply it to himself in Cap’s apartment, because he knew Dr. Fine would. But clearly he knew this was one of his last conversations to have. And the fact that he goes to Cap and not to Natasha, I think, also makes sense, because I think he’s probably a lot more doubtful about whether Natasha would be on his side.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. Or even if she found out — I’m trying to remember what the line is from one of the earlier movies, where she says, “I’m Russian,” like, “I sort of see which way the wind is blowing.” If she saw this was coming, did he believe she would do the heroic thing, or did he think she would do the thing to save herself? There’s still that trust. And I like the way they shot that scene too, where as he’s talking about there being no one he could trust, they immediately cut to Natasha, and you can see, just for a second, that that hit — that she was like, “Huh, okay. Now I know where I stand.”
Matthew Fox:
Yeah. And she’d already asked Cap, “Do you think I would have been the good person in that situation?” So clearly that’s something that’s on her mind quite a lot. Do you think Rumlow went to Natasha at some point and had kind of an initial feeling-out? Because I have to wonder, if I’m someone else in Shield — I don’t know her well, but I’ve probably worked with her some — I do know she has this reputation of being pretty morally gray and willing to cut corners and willing to do what Fury says. Do you think they just realized she was too — that she wouldn’t go along with this? Do you think they did an initial conversation and she never really noticed? Or even that they told her enough that she should have figured it out, but she was still in that “not my problem, I’m not going to worry about this” mode, and she’s not going to tell anyone for that reason?
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, I think there was probably a meeting. There was probably a conversation among the Hydra people, and maybe even with Zola involved, about running the numbers to see what it was — because we see later on that Pierce does have a contingency plan against Natasha, thinking he has her number. But I think by the time you get to the point where she’s standing next to Grand Central Station in the circle with all the guys fighting the alien invasion, between Cap and Hawkeye and stuff, I think they pretty much know, “Oh yeah, this is a person who’s never going to go for mass murder on this side.”
Matthew Fox:
Yeah, that’s fair. That’s probably fair. So after that, we cut to Bucky himself. And I think it’s a bit tropey, but it really works that up until now it feels like Bucky has always been the object. Bucky has always been the antagonist. We’ve never seen things from his POV. And now we get to switch to that. I think it’s because if you do that too soon, you give away the secret — there’s no way to go to his POV without showing you who he is. The idea is, now that everyone knows, now that it’s been revealed, now we cut to him. And we get some flashes to how Zola created him. It’s all very quick, all kind of implying rather than showing.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, and as you’re saying, it’s actually from his POV — we see literally the first time he sees his new hand.
Matthew Fox:
Right. And here’s Zola, and they talk about more operations and stuff like that. And he clearly is not Bucky, but he’s not as winter-soldiery as he’s supposed to be either. How did you take all of this?
Kyle Olson:
I thought it was a nice, quick way of catching up, as opposed to having a whole extended flashback sequence — a sort of pseudo-Frankenstein thing where you get to see him on his first mission out, or any actual torture happening, because this is still a Marvel PG-13 movie. We get to see the stump of the arm, and then we hear the saw going toward it, and they cut away immediately, because we’re not going to get into that body-horror type stuff.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah.
Kyle Olson:
But this is good, to directly connect the dots. Just in case you guys were paying attention, here’s exactly what it was like — Cap, train, fall. So anybody who didn’t get the “Bucky? Who the hell’s Bucky?” thing, now we get to see, back in the 1940s, in that sort of Joe Johnston 1940s lens, that different style, and then all the way through, catching up to now, and then seeing him literally frozen until they need him again.
Matthew Fox:
And they talk about thawing him out and what that means. I really love the way they play this, because on the one hand, they show that, like I said, he’s not reacting the way a normal person would. Pierce slaps him across the face, and there’s nothing — he doesn’t look ashamed, he doesn’t look angry, he doesn’t look hurt, it’s just nothing. And he asks about Steve. He says, “Who was that man on the bridge? Why do I remember him?” And I hadn’t even thought about it before, but it’s right that Steve is on a bridge in that scene we just saw a few minutes ago. And of course, when Bucky is blown off, he sees Steve as the guy on the bridge yelling out to him.
And then we get the idea that even now, when he’s not supposed to remember things — and maybe we’re reading too much into this, you tell me — but it feels like we’re supposed to know that he is somewhat morally involved in the things he’s doing, because Pierce says, “Your work has been a gift to mankind. We need you to do this again to help Hydra make the world free.” You don’t do that.
Kyle Olson:
He’s literally giving him the pitch. The whole, “Hey, we’re going to make the world a better place, and you’re a vital part — you’re a team player, you’re on the road to promotion. You’re Team Hydra. Bring it in.”
Matthew Fox:
You don’t do that to the Manchurian Candidate. You don’t do that to someone where it’s a complete personality thing. So what was your feel on that — on this idea of “he’s so gone, but still, even Pierce knows you need to convince him that this is the thing to do”?
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, it shows that he’s not a robot. He’s not someone they just program to go down and do the thing — because he’s having these conversations. He’s probably had a similar conversation like this before, multiple times when they brought him out, having to talk to him as a human being because there’s still something there. It’s not a drone that you just send out. As you were talking about, he slaps him and gets no reaction, and he does the pitch, and Bucky’s not even listening to it. It goes from “Who was the man on the bridge?” and then he does the whole pitch, and Bucky’s like, “But I remember him.” It’s like he’s still, “Yeah, yeah, okay, sure, say the better place — but who was that guy? Because he seems like he’s really important to me.” That’s the moment of, “We tried to get this stuff out of him, but it’s still down deep.” So we get to see a little bit of the man inside the monster.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah. And for me — and this is obviously writing in later — it actually helped me feel better about a scene from a project that happens much later, both in the timeline and in the MCU production timeline, which is The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Because in that, one of the running plot lines is that he feels deeply guilty about the things the Winter Soldier did.
Kyle Olson:
Yes.
Matthew Fox:
And I remember at the time we had a discussion — we wanted to know more about why, because if it really was like his body did those things but it was a completely different personality to which Bucky Barnes has no connection, then it doesn’t seem like he should feel any culpability. It’s like his body was just kidnapped. If, though, he was pretty solidly brainwashed, but there’s still enough of something in there that was making an active decision to go along with Hydra — no, I don’t think he’s legally culpable, no, I don’t think he is ninety percent morally culpable, but it makes me understand why the Bucky of that point might still have enough of a connection to the person who got convinced by Pierce. It helps me understand why he feels some moral guilt.
I have no idea if they were thinking of this particular line when they wrote that scene for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier — or is it The Winter Soldier and the Falcon? — but I did really, I was like, “Oh, okay, that makes me better understand what happens down the road.” It’s not a complete break between Bucky and Winter Soldier.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, but it seems like, because of the way he’s talking to him, that it’s definitely that he is a soldier who is now having to follow orders. They sort of brought back that he is now part of a different army, but he’s still a soldier doing the things. He’s the Winter Soldier, but the part of that is “soldier” — he is still continuing on to do this. And I think that maybe is the part where Zola’s stuff gets in: “Yeah, you’re still following orders, you’re still doing things, you’re still helping the world just like you were before. It’s just that there’s — you’re working for a different unit now.” That’s the part that is there, but still continuing on — the person he was, all his training, all his patriotism, all his belief in doing the right thing. They just changed what the right thing is in his head.
Matthew Fox:
Mm-hmm. Right.
Kyle Olson:
But I think it’s still, yeah, as opposed to a walking bomb. He really is — because if you’re out in the field having to do all these things and make these decisions and choose to shoot through someone, you have to be a full person, not just a Terminator, unstoppable force. You have to be able to improvise, you have to be able to think on your feet. We know he’s not a covert operative like Natasha is, where she could just infiltrate, I think, but he has a definite different set of skills. He needs to be a human being in order to do the things they want him to do.
Matthew Fox:
Right. Yeah, for sure.
Kyle Olson:
This scene, with all the cool bank — clearly it’s a bank vault. This is actually shot in the Cleveland Trust Building, at the southeast corner of East Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue. So if you’re taking the tour, you could just go down the street from the cemetery to here. But this is not the first time this has been used in an MCU production. The same building was used in The Avengers, where they shot the whole bank scene — where Cap does a thing where he jumps on a person and launches out the window. This is the same set, the same building they used for that.
As Pierce is walking in, there are two scientists there — one guy in the bow tie, and the other guy not in a bow tie but dressed similarly. The first one — Scientist Number One is what his credit is — that’s Pat Healy, born in Chicago, so shout out to the Windy City. He has 120 credits on IMDb, with prominent roles in Better Call Saul and Station 19. And then Scientist Number Two is Ed Brubaker. For those of you who have been paying attention, Ed Brubaker is the creator of the Winter Soldier. He was writing Captain America at the time and had this idea of bringing back Bucky and doing this whole thing. So, as a wink-nod, and also as a point, they brought him in, and he actually got to be on set and do that. And, as we’ll see when we roll into the next one, he’s the one who actually puts the machine on and sets it to wipe him.
But he’s a great writer. He’s still out there, still working. Interestingly, he’s one of the people who worked prominently for Marvel and DC and now doesn’t, because of things like this. He essentially created Winter Soldier, they took it and then did this. He found out they were doing a Winter Soldier movie the same day that we did, when they announced it. He’s like, “Oh cool, they’re doing my story, all right, neat.” And — there was a podcast he did with Kevin Smith and Mark Bernardin where he says he made more money from this cameo than he did writing for Marvel and creating the Winter Soldier.
Matthew Fox:
So ridiculous.
Kyle Olson:
So, for this role and the residuals he gets from it, more than he actually did creating Winter Soldier. And then after that, because it’s work-for-hire, nothing that’s done with Winter Soldier — he doesn’t get a dime from that.
Matthew Fox:
Right.
Kyle Olson:
And he’s not being — I mean, slightly bitter, but also, “Hey, I created this thing that you’ve now made hundreds of millions of dollars off of, and I get a special thanks in the credits.”
Matthew Fox:
I mean — and that is terrible.
Kyle Olson:
Cool.
Matthew Fox:
It is also, unfortunately, by no means unique to the comic book industry. Pretty early on after creating the character of Batman — Kane, I forget the name — it’s something Kane and someone else.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, Bob Kane and Bill Finger are the two.
Matthew Fox:
Bill Finger, thank you. I think they sold it within two years or so, and he never saw a dime since — not even any kind of residual, not even any credit. And it was, I think, when the Michael Keaton era of movies — that then became Val Kilmer and all the rest — some kind of lawsuit was brought. I think both those men were long dead by that point, but it was brought by their estates. At least now, every Batman product always has “based on the creation of so-and-so,” in the same way every Superman does. And I think their family did get some piece of residuals.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, and Siegel and Shuster too. There have been a couple of off-the-record “thank you” checks written, and Jim Starlin has talked about this with Guardians of the Galaxy and SF2, but never anything formal — like, every time a character shows up, they’re not legally required to put up who created the character, or to give them any money, just because that’s how good Disney’s lawyers are. And Warner Brothers, too. Like I say, not a unique story, but something that still is a continual source of resentment. This is how you lose great creators.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah.
Kyle Olson:
He did all this stuff for both companies, and now you don’t get to use — you don’t get to do this stuff anymore, because you burn them out and then just get somebody else in to do the job. Okay, if that’s how you want to run an operation. But, like I say, he’s still out there, still making comics and still actually doing some stuff in Hollywood. He’s currently on the latest Batman animated series. I would say, if you want to support Ed Brubaker, he has a bunch of independent comics out, including Criminal, which will soon be a television series, so he’s now directly involved in that as well. And Scientist Number One, Pat Healy, is going to be in that series. So maybe, the two of them on set — maybe they hit it off so much that when he was putting it together, he went, “Hey, want to come be in this thing too?” I don’t know where that’s going to be, but there’s a big IMDb page for it, so it’s out there somewhere.
But yeah, I would say, if you want to support any of these guys, try and find the independent work they did, because more of that money goes to them. If you go right now and buy the hardcover omnibus of Winter Soldier — Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting and any of the guys who worked on it — they don’t see a dime from that. It all goes to the mouse.
Matthew Fox:
Very much so. Well, let’s actually close on that, because I’m glad you brought up the comic books. The last couple of seconds — they first say something like, “We can’t —” I didn’t quite understand it, so maybe I want you to help me understand. There’s something Pierce wants them to do, and they’re like, “No, he’s been out too long.”
Kyle Olson:
Sure.
Matthew Fox:
And then he says, “Okay, then just wipe him again.” I’m curious — first, can you walk us through what’s actually happening there, and then also tell us how much this does or does not represent what’s in the comics?
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, my thought was that, essentially, if they have him out too long, the Bucky in him becomes stronger — like, the conditioning is not as all-inclusive as we think. When he comes out, he’s still in that disoriented state where they can just say, “Okay, you have to do this.” He has his skills but not his memories, and obviously he doesn’t remember his previous missions — from mission to mission, at this point.
Matthew Fox:
But clearly they want him to carry something over from mission to mission while he’s out, so that if he attempts to kill someone on Monday, he remembers that enough to learn how to better kill them on Wednesday. So if the memory circuits are allowed to work there, that’s how they could start getting jarred again.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, exactly. And it’s almost like an internal thaw. The longer he’s out, and the longer he’s doing stuff, the more the humanity of the man comes out. So this is why they probably have a timer — essentially, after a certain point, he gets unstable, where he starts to remember that he’s an American soldier who doesn’t want to be out killing all these people. So they have to put him back in the ice and then reset. And it seems like the reset is much more dangerous, maybe, at this point, because they don’t really want to do it.
So I guess what they’re going to do here is erase all the stuff he’s done in the last couple of days and reset him back to zero — when he comes out of the ice coffin, back to there. So he won’t remember any of the fight he’s just had. All the things he’s learned and changed — like about catching the shield — will all be back to zero. So when he sees them again, they’re hoping there’ll be no memory, no Steve/Bucky connection, but it also makes him less effective, because he doesn’t have what he just learned about the people he’s going after.
This is very similar in the comics. In the comic, it gets much more comic-booky, because the Cosmic Cube is involved, so there’s a mystical, science-y thing they use to remove his memory. And Red Skull’s involved, and Russians, and all sorts of stuff. But it’s very similar in terms of going into the ice, coming back out, resetting, and then going back out. Movie-wise, the Manchurian Candidate was a good pull — that idea.
Matthew Fox:
And of course, this is all science fiction. The idea is supposed to be that this is a technology we don’t quite have in our real world. In the same way, you don’t want to know the exact energy output of a phaser on Star Trek, because the whole point is it’s not supposed to be real. Every time something like Star Trek or Star Wars tries to get technical — don’t start off telling us there’s a scientific explanation, because then we can question the science. So I think having this all be a little hand-wavy conveys clearly what’s meant: they are trying to figure out how to prevent Bucky from reasserting himself instead of the Winter Soldier.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. And we’ll talk more about the design of it too, because I love how janky all of this is. This thing they have built is not super-slick chrome, like what we saw even when Captain America becomes Captain America — even that whole style. Everything looks very kludgy. It’s like they just threw it in the back of a truck and have to run it from place to place. I like that, the messiness of it.
Matthew Fox:
And one thing that I think is a really smart thing to do — and also shows how much they were starting to think of this as a franchise that really was going to carry on for a while — I was thinking about this: a lot of the things I think of in terms of how you activate the Winter Soldier, we actually learned about in the third Captain America movie, Civil War. Because the reading out of the names and the numbers and the words in a weird order — Zemo digs all that up. There was something smart about leaving something on the table. They show you enough to understand this movie, but they don’t give you the full flashback, which allows Civil War — which I think is by the same guys, right, the Russo Brothers?
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, same writers.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, the Russo Brothers, and the same writers as well.
Matthew Fox:
And so I don’t honestly know if they had the whole idea and then just decided, “Let’s leave some of that, because we’ll come back to it in a later movie,” or if they were just like, “We left ourselves a lot of room to play, let’s see.” But either way.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, true. It’s smart, because we don’t see him coming out, even in silhouette — we don’t have the “awakening from the casket” moment of this. He’s already out and doing stuff. So there’s a bunch we don’t know, and we don’t know that we don’t know it. Assuming that, by what we know now, all that has happened — they bring him out, they thaw him out, they run the words, and then he’s reset and ready to comply. But we didn’t see that here, but presumably it happened off screen.
Matthew Fox:
And in some ways, the more detail you give now, the more of a box you’re putting them into for Civil War.
Kyle Olson:
Yes.
Matthew Fox:
So, cool.
Kyle Olson:
Yes. And also, we have the assumption that there’s only one Winter Soldier, but it turns out —
Matthew Fox:
Yeah, there’s a bunch more. There’s a spring soldier, there’s a summer soldier, there’s a false-autumn soldier, you know, all the things.
Kyle Olson:
Uh-huh. That’s right.
Matthew Fox:
All right. Well, this has been a great conversation. Kyle, any last tidbits or trivia you want to make sure we mentioned today?
Kyle Olson:
No, I think I got through all the things I wanted. It’ll be interesting, as we get to see the Bucky that we’ve already learned about, now he’s back to where he was before. What will that mean when they meet up again? Plus, schemes are happening in the next one. So Cap is about to make a big swing.
Matthew Fox:
So many schemes. What’s going to happen? Well, Kyle, where can people find you if they want to learn about what schemes you are plotting in other parts of the internet world?
Kyle Olson:
I’m part of a little show called Craftin’ Chaos — craftinchaos.fun. We are on a hiatus at the moment, but that means you have plenty of episodes to catch up on. It’s about making art when it seems like everything is terrible, and we get into some really silly shenanigans over there. It’s a lot of fun, and our own Pete Wright is a part of that as well. So if you like his voice — and why wouldn’t you — you can hear more of him over there.
Matthew Fox:
Nice. Yeah, definitely all worth checking out. I, of course, am the Ethical Panda, and you can check out my podcasts, Superhero Ethics and the Star Wars Generations podcast. I’ll mention that Spider-Man Noir is now out, and I have an episode that will be coming up, I think, next week. It’ll be coming up in mid-June, so depending on when this episode airs, either check it out or put it on a list to go back and check out. I had a lot of fun talking about that show with Will Freeland of the Hype Is My Superpower podcast, who’s been a guest on this podcast. So all the lines connect.
Of course, check out other things that Pete Wright does. You can find all of his writings. I’m about halfway through his first sci-fi novel, Lattice, which is going to launch a number of other books. I’m really enjoying it. I really recommend it to others. You can find all his writings — I think it’s thisispete.com, or it’ll be in the show notes.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, I think it’s Pete — but, Pete, if you look for Pete D. Wright on Amazon, you’ll find his book.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah, and it’s Wright — W-R-I-G-H-T.
Kyle Olson:
Books — plural.
Matthew Fox:
And then, of course, go to TruStory FM, and you’ll find all three of us — and Rob Kubasko — and all the various podcasts we are on. So you’ve got myself and Kyle and Pete and Rob, and all the great people here at TruStory FM. Thank you all so much for listening. May the Force be with you. Let’s go, Nicks.
Kyle Olson:
Enough said.
