Doesn’t Matter If It’s Thunderbolts or New Avengers, WTF Is the MCU Doing With Bucky Barnes?

This article contains spoilers for Thunderbolts.

Thunderbolts finally joined the MCU pantheon last week after a long wait and high anticipation. While none of us were quite ready for the film’s emotional exploration of depression and the quest to find one’s purpose, it was a welcome addition to Marvel’s traditional storytelling that clearly resonated with fans. While I’m on board with all of that, you might have already read just how much Thunderbolt’s ending missed the mark for me and, unfortunately, I have one more bone to pick with the MCU. Not to put too fine a point on it or anything, but I would like to know what in the hell this franchise is doing with Bucky Barnes. His trajectory in the last two films has been strange at best, and where we leave him at the end of Thunderbolts is downright irritating.

First we had the whole congressman situation unceremoniously dropped in our laps in Captain America: Brave New World. It didn’t make a lick of sense, but it was so out of the blue and so far-fetched for the MCU’s iteration of James Buchanan Barnes (Sebastian Stan) that it was hard not to laugh. Brave New World was already chock-full of distractions pulling from Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson with the film being a stealth Red Hulk movie and all, so it was pretty easy to write the moment off and hope Thunderbolts would offer some meaningful context.

No such context came, though, and Bucky’s MCU narrative only got worse.

Even worse, it became immediately evident that Bucky either had no interest in being a congressman or absolutely no knowledge of what it would entail. He wants to impeach Valentina (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) but isn’t even reading the packets?! To the point where it needs to be a scene?!

Listen. You do not become a United States congressman by accident. It is something that you have to actively choose. And, when you’re a former mind-controlled assassin whose history is so complex it broke the first iteration of the Avengers nearly beyond repair, you have to campaign like hell to convince people you’re not going to literally (or figuratively) blow more stuff up. America might have a history of electing some real pieces of work both in reality and fiction, but the kind of detachment from reality that benefits the Wilson Fisks of the world in voting scenarios doesn’t transfer to actually decent people so far as history and voters are concerned. In short: Bucky very likely had to fight for something he didn’t even want and, worst of all, made no dang sense for his character. But don’t worry, it gets worse.

Smash cut to the post-credits scene of Thunderbolts, where it’s revealed that not only did Bucky go along with Yelena (Florence Pugh) and the rest of the team when it came to letting Valentina get away with everything, but he was destroying his relationship with Sam over it.

Let’s start with the Valentina of it all. Bucky has a whole conversation with Val’s assistant Mel (Geraldine Viswanathan) in the first act of the film where he tells her that he didn’t have a choice who he worked for when he was Winter Soldier, but Mel does when it comes to working with Valentina. Mere days later, Bucky and the team are working for the enemy.

The film tries to skirt this with perhaps the least meaningful resolution to a Marvel movie yet with Yelena’s little “we own you now” whisper during Valentina’s press conference revealing the New Avengers, but the thinly veiled threat means absolutely nothing. Valentina got away with murder, and all of the Thunderbolts are now complicit.

Here’s the thing about the Thunderbolts, though. For the rest of the team, working with the evil overlord because of your own hubris makes sense. John Walker (Wyatt Russell)? Absolutely belongs on a team with Valentina. The guy hasn’t known right from wrong since the second he dosed up on super soldier serum and now has a misguided chance to absolve himself. Ghost (Hannah John Kamen)? Bless you girlie, I want nothing but wonderful things for you but the trajectory tracks. Red Guardian (David Harbour)? Yeah! Obviously. He wants to be with his daughter and he wants fame and fortune. Yelena? She’s still too green to see past her own ego and believes that she has the upper hand for once.

But Bucky? No. Bucky Barnes being willing to be tied to a woman who he knows murdered a bunch of people to get a super soldier serum on steroids is profoundly against character. Bucky’s past is marred with sins, but he didn’t make any of those choices. We were all able to collectively absolve Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) for the people he killed while under Loki’s (Tom Hiddleston) control, but all it takes is one weepy Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) for everyone to forget that Bucky Barnes was kidnapped, tortured, and used against his will for decades.

All of the above would be ridiculous on its own, but the Sam Wilson situation is where it shifts from absurd to inexcusable. At the beginning of Thunderbolts’ second post-credits scene, a forlorn Bucky sits on a couch in the tacky redesign of Avengers tower, lamenting to his new team that not only would Sam not be giving up the name “Avengers” but that he would be suing them for the rights.

Back in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Bucky delivers the most poignant line of his MCU tenure in “because if he was wrong about you then he was wrong about me!” It’s an emotional exchange between him and Sam, where Bucky’s frustration over the future Captain America’s reticence to take on the shield and all that it means finally comes to a head. Sam must be Captain America because Steve Rogers chose him to be, and if Steve made the wrong choice then maybe that means that his faith in his best friend was unfounded. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is marred with issues, but developing Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes’ relationship is the best aspect of the series by a mile.

Steve Rogers’ two best friends eventually become all that each other has as they fight through their respective struggles and gradually become best friends themselves. The MCU further solidifies this point by having Bucky appear right when Sam needed him the most in Brave New World. To then have Bucky completely betray Sam to side with a smarmy war criminal who made it her mission to create a would-be god? And to cram it all in a throwaway post-credits scene? Infuriating.

I don't know what the MCU is doing with Bucky right now, but boy do I hope they course correct before we have another Civil War on our hands.