Episode 4’s Shocking Ending Explained

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Season 1, Episode 4, “The Whole World Is Watching.”]

John Walker (Wyatt Russell) was always going to break bad. Even if you never read any Captain America comics or knew about U.S. Agent, it was clear by the end of Episode 2 that Walker already represented the banality of white supremacy, and that some kind of heartfelt introspection and change was not in the cards for a guy who had been handed Captain America’s shield because he was the white face that the American military wanted.

Episode 4 of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, “The Whole World Is Watching,” brought a swift end to any kind of moral high ground Walker sought to occupy. Convinced of his own rightness and a need to be the hero (the shield feeding the ego feeding the shield in a cycle of self-aggrandizement), Walker suffers two major blows this episode. The first comes when he gets beat by the Dora Milaje, and the show hammers home the character’s white supremacy. It’s not just that he got beat by two people who weren’t super-soldiers. He’s a white guy that got beat by two black women. Rather than respect the skill, educate himself, and reassess his biases, Walker turns inwards, and after a brief conversation with his pal Hoskins (Clé Bennett), he feels justified in taking the serum.

Wyatt Russell as John Walker in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier — Photo by Julie Vrabelová. ©Marvel Studios 2021. All Rights Reserved.

However, the serum isn’t enough to save Hoskins. During a fight with the Flag Smashers, a super-powered Walker is tussling with the group when Hoskins rushes in, gets punched into a pillar, and dies. Driven mad by grief, Walker jumps out a window, chases down one of Karli’s comrades (who had mentioned earlier in the episode what a big fan of Captain America he was when he was a kid), and beats him to death with the shield. He’s surrounded by people recording the action on their phones, and the final shot is Walker standing above his kill with a blood-drenched shield.

The symbolism here is pretty obvious because it harkens back to Sam’s warning back in Episode 1: symbols are nothing without the people who give them meaning. The shield is just a piece of metal, but it takes on new meaning when you put in different people’s hands. Walker, on the surface, fits the profile of who should have the shield. He’s a war hero, he “looks” the part (read: he’s white and blonde, and therefore resembles Steve Rogers as well as who America typically casts as its heroes), and he’s patriotic. But this episode interrogates what it means to be a war hero when you’re recognized for doing horrible things in the name of freedom. Furthermore, being “successful” in war does not necessarily make someone “good.”

That all comes to a head when Walker lets his grief and rage take over and murders a guy in cold blood because he has the power to do so. The shield is supposed to stand for American ideals, but as the show points out, the America of Steve Rogers fighting Nazis is very different than the America of the 21st century with its global community and moral ambiguities. But there are still moral absolutes and beating a defenseless man to death in the middle of the street is still generally considered bad. When you hand a guy a shield because he looks the part, you take his actions out of the equation.

Ultimately, those actions speak to what America is rather than what it wishes it could be. If Steve Rogers was the ideal, then John Walker is the cold reality: insecure, fearful of power that isn’t white and male, reckless, and ultimately violent and impulsive. Meet your new Star-Spangled Man.

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