The roster of Marvel Cinematic Universe shows set to stream on Disney Plus don’t have defined episode counts, and each is being judged by the strength of its narrative and the time it’ll take to tell. We got nine installments of WandaVision, Loki and Secret Invasion have been confirmed for six each and She-Hulk will have ten, but the finale of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier made it clear that we could have done with another hour or two spent in the company of Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes.
“One World, One People” was always going to be a Sam-heavy installment given that he was suiting up as Captain America for the first time, and it was important to see how the other characters and the wider world reacted. However, it did relegate many supporting players to the sidelines, with several important arcs either being rushed through or glossed over entirely.
John Walker barely factored into the finale at all after turning up for a fight scene before slinking off into the background, and he’s apparently cool with Sam, Bucky and the rest of the world despite murdering a guy and nearly veering completely off the deep end. Karli Morgenthau, meanwhile, was anticlimactically shot and killed by Sharon Carter, with the big Power Broker reveal landing with a thud, although the ending did set both her and Walker up for much bigger things in the future.
As a result, the sixth episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier currently holds the worst rating in the series on Rotten Tomatoes, and at the time of writing it’s still sitting on a Rotten 59%. It could yet rise higher, but with the exception of Sam’s journey, everyone else got left in the dust a little bit, which isn’t ideal for a highly-anticipated small screen finale.