Why Captain America’s Shield Has Become More Powerful In Phase 4

The thematic conflicts of ideology and identity depicted in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier prove that Captain America’s shield is more important and more powerful in the MCU’s Phase 4 than it has ever been in the past. The series sees Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) struggle with the legacy of the shield and the country that it is meant to represent. While Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) became Captain America in the 1940s when the world was at war, Sam inherits a very different kind of crisis. After the Blip from Avengers: Endgame left the planet reeling and destabilized, people are divided in ways that are much more complicated and ambiguous than they were when Steve first bore the Captain America title during World War II. Additionally, neither Steve nor Bucky (Sebastian Stan) understood what it would mean for Sam to take on the role of Captain America as a Black man in a country whose history includes hundreds of years of racial discrimination and inequality.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier shows Sam’s journey towards accepting the Captain America shield, as well as all the complexities that the symbol embodies. The shield’s power as an ideological emblem is examined and debated in the series to a degree it never had been before in the MCU. In episode 1, “New World Order,” Sam gives the shield to the Smithsonian as a tribute to Steve Rogers’ legacy, unwilling or unable to detach the idea of the shield from the memory of his friend. However, the U.S. government wastes no time in bestowing the Captain America title and the shield on a white man, John Walker (Wyatt Russell), who uses it to brutally bludgeon a man to death.

Events over the course of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier demonstrate that the symbology of Captain America is bigger than Steve and that the world needs a hero like Sam, ultimately convincing him to step into the role he had been so reluctant to consider before. He sees that he can use the power of the mythology that Steve created to try and help people – and that that power is too impactful to allow it to be wasted or misused. Sam taking up Captain America’s shield also represents the conceptual transition of “Captain America” from an individual person – Steve Rogers – to a title that can be passed on over time, making the idea of Captain America much more important, accessible, and enduring than it was when it referred to a singular figure.

As the series shows, the Captain America shield comes with a lot of historical and ideological baggage. To Sam, that baggage is largely tied to the memory of his old friend; for Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), it is tied to the flag it bears, standing for a country that utterly betrayed him. As Bucky tells Sam: “That shield represents a lot of things to a lot of people.” For someone like the MCU’s Bucky Barnes, the object is deeply sentimental, as he calls it “the closest thing I’ve got left to a family.” There are very few symbols, either in the MCU or the real world, that carry that kind of weight for so many, making the iconography of the shield extraordinarily potent. Now that Steve is gone, it has become even more significant because it draws strength from his memory.

In addition to its powerful cultural implications, Captain America’s shield is also made of Vibranium, a scarce and strong material that rarely leaves Wakanda. This makes the shield extraordinarily physically powerful. Vibranium has a rich cultural history of its own, and that too is part of the shield’s ever-growing legacy.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was as much about Captain America’s shield – and all that it represents – as it was about Sam. As one of the earliest MCU Phase 4 projects released, the series set the tone for the past, present, and future of Captain America, with Captain America 4 to look forward to in Phase 5. In the meantime, Phase 4 spent six full episodes illustrating that the power of the shield is stronger now than it has ever been, which only makes what comes next more exciting.

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