Following the events in Madripoor, the episode “The Whole World is Watching” takes the titular characters to the Latvian capital where the show feels like it’s spinning its wheels.
Sam and Bucky continue their search for Karli Morgenthau (Erin Kellyman), believing that finding the location for a funeral would be their best chance. But they face complications due to Jack Walker encroaching on their mission and the Wakandans demanding Sam and Bucky demand they hand over Zemo after eight hours.
The Falcon and The Winter Soldier felt nowhere near as revolutionary as WandaVision. It looks and feels more like a Marvel movie being stretched out rather than a TV show. The first two episodes did a fair enough job setting up the new situation for the MCU world and the characters and ‘Power Broker’ functioned as a focused episode.
‘The Whole World is Watching’ felt meandering. The best example of this was the reintroduction of the Dora Milaje. Their appearance did make some sense because they wanted to bring Zemo to justice because of the events of Captain America: Civil War. But their appearance boiled down to them having an action scene against the new Captain America and give him the humiliation he deserved. They were a plot device and to help fill some time.
Ayo suffered from an issue that affected characters in the last episode: over expository dialogue. Yet it was even worse for her because she was recounting information that both the audiences and the characters already know. It was redundant.
Where the episode does succeed was with the character moments. One of the key scenes was when Sam met Karli and they talked about the morality of her cause. It showed some moral complexity of the new world. Karli can be summed up as her cause was understandable but her methods were questionable.
Jack Walker got some character development. In “The Star-Spangled Man” Jack had doubts whether he could live up to the Captain America mantle and in this episode, he was shown to be impulsive. The episode ends with a dark moment but there should have been more of a build-up. The program needed to show more of Jack’s violent tendencies. Comic book fans would have predicted this turn but in the context of the show, it came across as too sudden.
“The Whole World is Watching” had smaller scale action than in the previous episodes. It worked in the context of the episode. The first action sequence had a parkour feel to it as characters get chased in an old warehouse. The final action sequence had the air of Skyfall and Mission Impossible III because characters had to race across a city to stop the villains from enacting their plans. It was fun to watch the Flag Smashers using knives when they were fighting.
“The Whole World is Watching” was at best a fairly standard episode of TV that felt more like filler.
