Zemo Understands The Captain America Problem Better Than Sam & Bucky

Baron Zemo is easily one of the most layered villains in the MCU, and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is making him one of the only characters to truly grasp the sinister implications of the U.S. introducing their own Captain America. The most recent episode of the show has already done a lot of heavy-lifting in terms of fleshing out Zemo’s backstory in ways we never got to see in Captain America: Civil War, transforming him from a scorned mercenary with a vendetta into the affluent Baron Zemo who uses his resources in pursuit of HYDRA’s destruction. While he still holds no goodwill towards the Avengers and superheroes as a concept, for the time being, it seems as if Sam and Bucky agree with him about the massive threat posed by the existence of the super-soldier serum.

Multiple different factions exist in the show right now, each pursuing the serum as means to their own ends. There’s the Flag Smashers for starters, a group of international terrorists using the serum on their own members. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the United States government itself, as it was recently revealed that they’ve been experimenting on various test subjects in an effort to recreate the serum, with Isaiah Bradley being one of them.

Now that the United States has introduced its own Captain America in the form of John Walker, it seems as if the stakes are set to get even higher. But while Sam and Bucky have their own reasons for distrusting him, it looks like Baron Zemo is the only one at the moment taking the implication of a new Cap seriously. He recognizes the true danger of the appropriation of Captain America arguably even better than the two heroes fighting for Steve Rogers’ MCU legacy.

When he’s first introduced in Civil War, Zemo attempts to use HYDRA’s iron grip on Bucky in order to kill two birds with one stone: both the Avengers as well as HYDRA themselves. In his opinion, metahumans are too irresponsible to be gifted with the powers they are, and when the Avengers are indirectly responsible for the death of his family, it’s hard to disagree with his initial assessment. However, Zemo also (rightfully) understands the danger of an entity like HYDRA, with a political and social agenda, being allowed to weaponize metahumans like the Winter Soldier, which is why he kills each original test subject from the Winter Soldier program.

Part of Zemo’s reasoning for helping Bucky and Sam is because he realizes that, by propping up another superhero at the forefront of their international affairs, the US government is basically making Captain America an extension of their own political agendas, instead of him being a hero representative of the nation’s ideals, which is what Steve was. This is incredibly dangerous because, as the show has made a point to hint at, John Walker is simply a man (for now), and by putting him on a nationalistic pedestal his superiors are setting him up for a meltdown when all that responsibility goes to his head.

This is a facet of the problem that Bucky and Sam can only see sides of. Sam doesn’t want to pick up the shield because he realizes that symbols open themselves up to being corrupted and becoming part of a legacy that can be manipulated, while Bucky feels that Sam should have taken on the mantle precisely to avoid the Captain America legacy from being misused. And while both of them have valid reasons for their viewpoints, neither of them can fully contend with the fact that John Walker is being propped up as a symbol to be used by the government for any purpose they desire, which is something that Steve Rogers actively fought against. While he might have been responsible for tearing the Avengers apart from inside, Baron Zemo always had a deeply rooted understanding of the impact of superheroes on the world, and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier isn’t shying away from that.

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