Yahoo Lifestyle Before You See New Captain America Movie, What You Must Know About 2 Falcon and Winter Soldier Characters
Before you head to the Cineplex to see Marvel Studios’ Captain America: Brave New World, there are a few things you should know — or, remember! — about two characters from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the Disney+ series that teed up Sam Wilson/Anthony Mackie’s big-screen debut as Cap.
Disney+’s second live-action MCU series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier streamed March 19 through April 23, 2021, and starred Mackie and fellow MCU vet Sebastian Stan as Sam and Bucky, who partnered teamed up to fend off Baron Zemo (MCU vet Daniel Brühl), John Walker aka the first post-Steve Rogers Captain America (Lodge 49‘s Wyatt Russell), and a terrorist group dubbed The Flag Smashers.
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By the end of the series, after a super serum’d Walker biffed his chance to wield the mighty shield, Sam suited up (Wardrobe by Wakanda) as the new Captain America to dash the Flag Smashers’ dreams. As such, Falcon and the Winter Soldier — along with, oddly enough, the 2008 film The Incredible Hulk — very much sets the stage for Captain America: Brave New World, which I screened on Tuesday night and lands in theaters Friday, Feb. 14.
In addition to Mackie’s Sam, two other Falcon and the Winter Soldier characters play significant roles in Captain America: Brave New World. If you never got around to the Disney+ series — or did but, well, it’s been almost four years — here’s a quick primer on Isaiah Bradley (played by Alias‘ Carl Lumbly) and Joaquín Torres (Top Gun: Maverick‘s Danny Ramirez).
WHO IS ISAIAH BRADLEY?
In the second episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Bucky said to a frustrated Sam, “There is someone you should meet,” and led them to a small house in Baltimore. After identifying himself as “that guy from the bar in Goyang,” Bucky got them inside to see Isaiah Bradley, an older (though really, older) gentlemen with whom Bucky had “a skirmish in the Korean War.” Isaiah, like Steve, had been a Super Soldier feared by HYDRA, but he now has no interest in helping Bucky or the U.S. government. “You know what they did to me for being a hero?” he said to Sam. “Threw my ass in jail for 30 years,” subjecting him to experiment after experiment. Isaiah then showed the men the door.
In Episode 5, Sam went back to see Isaiah, and the first Black Super Soldier detailed what “went wrong” during the war. “I saw the Red Tails (aka Tuskegee Airmen), the famous 332, fighting for our country,” he told Sam, “only to come home and find crosses burning on their lawn.” When Sam suggested that Isaiah could have gone on to become a new Captain America, Bradley made clear that after blonde-and-blue Steve Rogers, America would never give up chasing “the great white hope.” Isaiah revealed how his wife Faith had been told he was dead, when in reality, as the sole survivor of a handful of Black soldiers given the Super Soldier serum, he was locked away for experimentation. After 30 years of that scarring experience, Isaiah earned the compassion of a nurse who faked his death and delivered to him letters from Faith that had been intercepted over the years. “They will never let a Black man be Captain America,” he reiterated to Sam. “And if they did, no self-respecting Black man would ever want to be.”
At season’s end, Sam visited Isaiah once again to explain his decision to claim the Captain America mantle — “We built this country and bled for it, I’m not about to let anyone tell me I can’t fight for it” — and also to take Bradley and his grandson Eli to the Cap exhibit at the Smithsonian, which had been updated with a tribute to Isaiah, statue and all. “Now they’ll never forget what you did for this country,” Sam said, as the men hugged.
WHO IS JOAQUÍN TORRES?
Torres’ Falcon and Winter Soldier backstory isn’t nearly as deep or rich as Isaiah Bradley’s, but this character plays just as meaningful a role in Captain America: Brave New World — as Sam/Cap’s righthand man/Man in the Chair/wannabe Falcon.
As established in the Disney+ series, Torres is a United States Air Force lieutenant and intelligence officer, and a big-time fanboy of all things Avengers. In that capacity, he tips off Sam to the new threat being posed by the Flag Smashers, a group that believed the world was better during The Blip, with half of human life snapped away.
In Marvel lore, Joaquín Torres in fact claims the Falcon mantle, though in Brave New World, he is still in the process of earning it (or as Sam repeatedly puts it, “not dying” trying).
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