Even as the credits rolled on the adventures of Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes, there was one more moment that may shine a light on the future of Marvel’s Disney+ plans. Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, seemingly riding a redemption arc, is not only alive and well but, thanks to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Contessa character, is kitted out in a brand-new black and red super-suit in a scene he likens to a “carrot dangling in front of you. It was so much fun.” Russell told Vanity Fair that his character’s reaction to the new uniform was the same as his own.
“When I went to see the costume, I thought there’d be a lot to deal with. It was…it’s really the exact same costume but it’s just black and red,” Rusell said. The actor emerged from his fitting like a deflated “kid on Christmas” and said: “It’s cool that it’s a different color but it’s, like, the same suit.” His real-life non-plussed reaction made it into the final cut of the episode: “It provided a fun thing for me and Julia beyond what was on the page in that scene.”
Louis-Dreyfus reprised her mysterious Episode 5 character who has returned, in earnest, to draft John Walker into some new super-team. Speaking with Marvel.com this week, producer Nate Moore confirmed Vanity Fair’s reporting that Louis-Dreyfus is playing Nick Fury-esque character in this new Marvel phase: “Whenever we talked about Valentina, even in the writer’s room, she was sort of a more acerbic, funnier, but darker Nick Fury… Someone who knows her secrets, who’s not afraid to operate in the moral gray area, but maybe who isn’t as inherently altruistic.”
The black and red costume will look familiar to comic book fans who know that it’s the suit John Walker wears when he goes by the moniker U.S. Agent. In the comics, after he’s stripped of the title of Captain America for using excess force after beating a villain to death (sound familiar?), John Walker is declared dead by the U.S. Government. But super soldier serum is a terrible thing to waste and the Government sets Walker up with a new identity and shiny red and black costume to match and calls him U.S. Agent. In that guise he joins the West Coast Avengers and looks after Vision. Will that be this John Walker’s fate? Unlikely.
Russell sounds hopeful that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier fans will come out the other side of this series able to see things from John Walker’s perspective: “Hopefully you were taken from someone who you really are set up to despise down the journey of understanding where he came from. Whether or not you like it or agree with it, you’re going to understand why he’s doing it.”
Russell himself sounds ambivalent about whether John Walker comes back at all: “Part of the way I approached Marvel was it’s all your last time you’re going to do it.” If this scene with the Contessa is setting Walker up for something specific, Russell is in the dark about it. It’s possible that if fans don’t wind up connecting with Walker on any level, he won’t return at all. Rusell says: ”Marvel operates in a really cool way where they don’t make decisions before they see what works. I’m not a part of any of this decision making, obviously.”
Some fans believed the black and red motif on Walker’s new uniform was indicative of him joining the villain super-team known as The Thunderbolts. That’s not Walker’s fate in the comics, but Russell did say: “At the end of the series, he’s grown into himself in a very dangerous way.”
But it would appear Walker took a sharp turn towards the light side in the season finale. He tosses away his makeshift shield and a persona that never really fit him in order to become a real hero in his attempt to rescue a truck full of hostages. Not only that, but he and Bucky were downright quipping by the end of the fight. Walker even gives the new Cap a tight nod of approval. John Walker, it seems, is one of the good guys now. Albeit with a looser moral code than either Steve or Sam. It will be interesting, to say the least, to see what Walker gets up to with the Contessa as his guide and to know what, exactly, she means about things getting “weird.”
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