Coming right off the heels of the first season of ‘WandaVision’, Marvel’s second Disney+ series ‘The Falcon and The Winter Soldier’ premiered Friday, with the first episode finding Sam ‘Falcon’ Wilson and Bucky ‘Winter Soldier’ Barnes (played by Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan, respectively) separately trying to find purpose in their lives in the aftermath of the apocalyptic events of ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ and ‘Avengers: Endgame’. You would need to stream approximately 13 hours of Marvel Cinematic Universe films to understand what’s going on here in this series. You would then need to stream pretty much all of the rest of them to understand those 11 hours.

Since I’ve seen pretty much all of them, from my perspective this first episode was pretty good. Aside from a scene or two where the studio pretty obviously skimped on hiring extras to fill out a crowd, the production value is pretty much indistinguishable from the rest of the Marvel Cinematic universe, unlike ‘Jessica Jones’ and the other earlier Netflix Marvel series (which were supposed to be connected but Disney didn’t give a shit about continuity errors and then completely abandoned them after a few years). Hell, Don Cheadle even shows up. If I had to come up with one complaint about ‘The Falcon and The Winter Soldier’ it would be the name. It’s pretty clunky. But I can’t come up with anything I think is better and I don’t think the producers could either.

Anyway, check out ‘The Falcon and The Winter Soldier’ on Disney+ if you’re a Marvel fan and haven’t seen it yet. You’ll like it. Way more than DC Comics fans would like “Zack Snyder’s Justice League”, which also premiered this week. I don’t want to talk about that.