Falcon & Winter Soldier Continues The MCU's Bucky Powers Problem
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has a problem regarding Bucky Barnes’ powers and abilities, and this continues in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The Infinity Saga coming to an end doesn’t mean it’s the end of the MCU as well, and this connected universe will continue expanding with a new wave of movies and TV shows in its highly-anticipated Phase 4. This new era of content is especially exciting as the upcoming TV shows will directly connect and affect the movies, contrary to what happened with Netflix’s Marvel shows.
Kicking off the MCU’s Phase 4 was WandaVision, and now that it came to an end, viewers are enjoying The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, set a couple of months after the events of Avengers: Endgame. The series follows Sam Wilson/Falcon (Anthony Mackie) as he decides whether to take the mantle of Captain America or not, and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), who continues to struggle with the demons of his past as the Winter Soldier. The first episode was all about catching up with them, and the following one finally saw them joining forces again to fight the Flag-Smashers, but this also showed that the MCU still has a problem with Bucky’s powers.
Bucky Barnes is a war veteran turned super-soldier by HYDRA after he supposedly died. Under Arnim Zola’s supervision, Bucky underwent various experiments with a variant of the super-soldier serum that turned Steve Rogers into Captain America, and also went through numerous memory wipes and a lot of reprogramming. As a result, he has enhanced strength, speed, agility, stamina, reflexes, regenerative healing factor, and ages much slower than a normal human. In addition to that, his bionic arm grants him even more strength and is incredibly durable, especially after getting a new one made of vibranium, he is highly trained in combat, excels in knife fighting, and is highly proficient in handling firearms with great precision – and yet, the MCU hasn’t fully embraced everything Bucky can do.
Bucky has been mostly reduced to a character with a weapon who can throw some punches and hasn’t really shown any of those super-soldier skills all those experiments left him with. Bucky has been heavily underused in the MCU, mostly in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame (though the latter can be somewhat justified by the big amount of characters present in the Battle of Earth), and is always underpowered, when everyone knows his skills are on par with those of Steve Rogers (and could probably do more). So far, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier hasn’t fixed this problem and continues to portray Bucky as inferior, now in comparison to Falcon, which doesn’t make sense when looking at everything Bucky can do.
Of course, as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is only getting started, there’s hope for the series to finally fix this problem regarding Bucky Barnes’ powers and show him as the super-soldier he really is, making him a very powerful (and dangerous) hero in this new era in the MCU and one with a lot of potential for future adventures.
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