The following contains spoilers for the second episode of Marvel Studios' The Falcon and The Winter Soldier.
For months, Marvel Studios has advertised its Disney+ streaming shows with an enticing tagline: “The Universe is Expanding.” The catchy phrase is also a promise that the cross-continuity world-building that has come to define the Marvel Cinematic Universe will continue in new and exciting ways. The Falcon and The Winter Soldier delivered on that promise in an unexpected way, pulling back the curtain on the whitewashed history of the Captain America mantle.
The show’s second episode introduces Isaiah Bradley, a retired Black Super Soldier, never before mentioned in the MCU until now. Though his brief back-and-forth with the title characters appears banal, his existence speaks to the show’s themes and its central character’s journey. Who is Isaiah? And why is his inclusion in the MCU so significant?
In an effort to gather intel on the sudden mass reproduction of the Super Soldier serum that transformed Steve Rogers into Captain America, Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes brings Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson to Baltimore, Maryland, where he meets Carl Lumbly’s Isaiah Bradley, “one of the ones feared by HYDRA the most, like Steve.” Old and embittered, Isaiah explains he met Bucky in 1951 in South Korea, during the latter's involuntary tenure as the Winter Soldier and the former's brief stint as a government-appointed Super Soldier. True to the serum’s potential, Isaiah held his own against HYDRA’s deadliest agent, destroying half of Bucky’s iconic metal arm during the fight.
Seventy years after their first encounter, the reformed assassin hopes Isaiah can shed some light on the serum’s history to locate its current whereabouts. However, the forgotten hero refuses, demonstrating his retained abilities and revealing he was unjustly jailed following his highly-classified Super Soldier career, confined and experimented for the next three decades. A bewildered and enraged Sam confronts Bucky’s secrecy: “So you’re telling me there that was a Black Super Soldier decades ago, and nobody knew about it?”
At first glance, Sam has a point: both within the MCU’s canon and outside of it, Isaiah’s sudden existence appears to be a blatant example of retroactive continuity, in which new characters or events are finagled into existing lore to imbue them with narrative importance. But Isaiah’s abrupt appearance is itself a deliberate imitation of American history’s worst habits.
Isaiah debuted in the 2003 comic miniseries Truth: Red, White & Black, by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker. The series reveals the US government had secretly experimented on hundreds of Black American soldiers in its attempt to recreate the Super Soldier serum. Isaiah was among the last test subjects standing, and after barely escaping certain death in Nazi Germany, he was betrayed by his country and sentenced to life in prison, similar to his MCU counterpart’s conviction.
Isaiah’s fictional origin draws heavy influence from the very real “Tuskegee Syphilis Study,” one of the most racist and unethical government operations in American history. In 1932, the United States Public Health Service and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention began documenting the long-term effects of untreated syphilis in approximately 600 impoverished African-American men in Macon Country, Alabama. When the PHS and CDC lost funding for the study six months in, they nonetheless continued discreetly over the next forty years, until the experiment’s existence was leaked to the press in 1972 and subsequently shut down. The study resulted in the deaths of 128 Black Americans, all of whom had been deceived by the United States government for decades.
At the heart of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier lies a fundamental question: What does it mean to be Captain America? For years, audiences were so enthralled with Steve Rogers’ personal journey that the weight and baggage of his mantle weren’t truly felt or considered. Now that Steve’s stepped down and Sam’s turned down the torch, the title has taken on a life of its own, with objectionable ownership (Wyatt Russell’s John Walker is given the title outside of Steve or Sam's jurisdiction) and a set of Super Soldier skeletons in its closet.
Isaiah’s arrival to the MCU also confronts the crucial racial context inherent to Sam Wilson’s internal struggle. Isaiah's past depicts a much different story from the first Avenger’s: instead of being celebrated as a hero like Steve, Isaiah was stripped of his freedom and treated as a guinea pig for decades. A Black man succeeding a white man as the USA’s superpowered mascot carries unavoidable political undertones, and Isaiah is living proof that Sam's country may not yet ready for a Black Captain America, even apart from his personal doubts about taking the title.
With four episodes remaining in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the jury is still out on Isaiah Bradley’s immediate importance to Sam and Bucky's ongoing search for the Super Soldier serum. But his appearance in the show alone speaks volumes of its ambition. It would’ve been easy (and cowardly) for the show to treat the Captain America title strictly on its most basic terms as Steve Rogers’ former occupation. Instead, the show demonstrates the mantle’s might by steering head-first into the violent and oppressive relationship between America and its Black citizens, reinforcing Sam's character arc and the show's central dramatic question. Hopefully, Isaiah Bradley's time in the MCU has only just begun.