So far,The Falcon and the Winter Soldierhas beenre-treading a lot of the same groundwith Bucky’s character. He’s still haunted by his past misdeeds as the Winter Soldier and he’s still not sure if his brainwashing is completely gone and he’s still struggling with his public image due to being one of the most famous assassins in the world. But, frankly, it’s about time the world gave Bucky a break.
It is true that he’s responsible for a considerable number of deaths – most of whom were relatively innocent, like Tony Stark’s parents – but he was under the influence of Hydra’s brainwashing when all of that happened. He never assassinated anybody as Bucky. As seen inThe Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s brutal flashback sequence, the Winter Soldier was a completely different guy. Hydraturned Bucky into a mindless dronewho would use his super-strength and metal arm to do their evil bidding.
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Since regaining his own psychological identity as James Buchanan Barnes, best friend of Steve Rogers with the same drive to do the right thing, Bucky has helped out in the Avengers’ effort to save the entire universe. Now, inThe Falcon and the Winter Soldier, he’s continuing to use the powers that Hydra gave him for good. But he’s still vilified in the wider MCU.
In the show’s first episode, we’re introduced to Christina Raynor, Bucky’s government-mandated therapist. It makes sense that the U.S. government would feel more comfortable if a brainwashed assassin was in therapy, but Bucky’s counselor, played by Amy Aquino, is strangely judgmental in their sessions. She seems less interested in helping him get into a healthier headspace and more interested in berating him for having blood on his hands – despite the fact that the only bloodshed his own mind is responsible for is the war effort against Thanos’ armies that saved trillions of lives and the fabric of reality.
When he travels to Baltimore with a fellow Avenger ina bid to bring down a terrorist organization, Bucky is arrested for missing a therapy session. John Walker has to come to the station and pull some strings to get him out of a holding cell and even then, he’s forced into a joint therapy session with Sam before he’s allowed to leave. How many lives does Bucky have to save before he’ll be allowed to just live his life? The Wakanda flashback showed that Bucky can hear all the keywords Hydra used to use to activate his Winter Soldier side and not make the turn – cut the guy some slack already.
Tony Stark being the hero of the Infinity Saga who gave his life to vanquish the Mad Titan and his cronies from existence complicates Bucky’s MCU arc. The Winter Soldier’s murders of Tony’s parents were particularly brutal andCivil War’s subversively intimate final battledidn’t exactly paint Bucky in a very sympathetic light. Tony sums it up best himself: Steve tells him, “This isn’t gonna change what happened,” and Tony says, “I don’t care. He killed my mom.”
The MCU has had to do some heavy lifting to make Bucky likable since the bombshell revelations inCivil War. Forall the closure thatAvengers: Endgameprovided, though, this is one story thread that it didn’t pay off. It’ll be difficult for Bucky to earn redemption for killing Tony’s parents now that Tony is out of the picture. It might’ve helped if there had been a moment inEndgame’s final battle in which Bucky saved Tony’s life and sincerely apologized and Tony forgave him for the deaths of his parents.
There are some characters inThe Falcon and the Winter Soldierwho can overlook Bucky’s past and accept thatthe Winter Soldier isn’t who he really is, like the girl he briefly dated in the pilot episode, but they’re in the minority. For the most part, when people in the world of the MCU see Bucky, they write him off as a heartless monster who takes human lives without remorse, but that’s not who Bucky is at all.
Before he was captured by Hydra and turned into an unstoppable killing machine, Bucky was a war hero. He was shipped off to fight for the Allies long before Stevetook the Super Soldier Serumand headed out there to join him. And on top of that, if Bucky hadn’t been such an encouraging, protective, and loving friend to Steve when they were kids growing up in Brooklyn, then there might have never been a Captain America.
The rest of the MCU’s world needs to start treating Bucky a little better. Bucky wasn’t exactly crucial inEndgame’s glorious victory like Black Widow and the Hulk were, but he was there fighting Thanos’ goons alongside the rest of Earth’s mightiest heroes. That should be enough to redeem him for things he didn’t even consciously choose to do.
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