You need to watch Falcon and the Winter Soldier talk about Gandalf

There’s no new Marvel content this week other than the new Assembled documentary on Disney+. Next week, Marvel’s second MCU TV show launches, the highly anticipated The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (FATWS). We’re going to leave Wanda and Vision’s drama and sadness behind to explore another unusual couple.

Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) will go on a very different journey than the one we just saw, and it might be closer to what we see in the MCU movies. We expect plenty of action and comedy from this buddy adventure. And Disney just released a couple of exclusive clips that show Falcon and the Winter Soldier in action — annoying each other. Watching the two discuss Gandalf and wizards as they get ready for action is going to be the best thing you’ll see while you wait for the FATWS premiere.

This six-episode MCU adventure will give us a much better look at two iconic MCU characters that weren’t necessarily at the forefront so far. Both Sam and Bucky are Steve’s soldier friends, and both were Captain America’s sidekicks. Bucky’s character arc is better contoured given that he was a villain/antagonist for most of the MCU so far. But he still has to redeem himself, especially in the aftermath of Endgame.

The world is yet to comprehend what happened, and Steve Rogers is no longer Captain America. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will show us how and if Sam gets to be the new Cap, as Steve wanted. Or whether politics and special interests will get in the way. If you’ve seen the trailers and know what happens in the comics, you have an idea of what Marvel might do with the shield initially.

The TV show should also give us a few additional pieces of the bigger puzzle, no matter how tiny they might be. What we shouldn’t expect from FATWS are any big reveals. Kevin Feige made it clear that Marvel conceives the TV shows in such a way that watching any of them will not be mandatory to understand the movies. That implies big reveals can’t happen in TV shows, and WandaVision just proved that. If the last thing you saw in the MCU was Steve handing the shield to Sam, and then Sam becomes Cap in a future Marvel, that’s all you’ll need to know — this is just speculation for the sake of this point. But watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier would help you understand how Falcon got to accepting the shield — again, I’m speculating — and how the Sam and Bucky relationship evolved.

From the looks of the new clips that Disney released, the Sam-Bucky banter will be excellent. In the following clip, Sam explains to Bucky his “Big Three” vision of bad guys. That’s androids, aliens, and wizards, the kind of enemies they’re always facing. That’s how we learn that Bucky read the Hobbit in 1937 when it first came out. Bucky’s insistence that there are no wizards is all the more hilarious given what Wanda just went through.

The clip ends with the two of them getting on a plane to the next part of the mission, just as we see a “Cap is Back” poster in the foreground. They don’t have the shield.

The second clip is an extended version of what we saw in one of the recent The Falcon and the Winter Soldier trailers. Sam and “the incredibly annoying guy in front of [him] with the staring problem” are on the plane preparing to jump. Well, Sam is, because he’s in full Falcon costume. And he, like Steve, has a plan.

These scenes are probably from the first episode, but we’ll know more next week when the TV show launches on Disney+. We can only hope the entire show will feature the same chemistry between these co-workers. Speaking of working together, check out the following featurette, where Mackie and Stan explain the Sam-Bucky dynamic: