Okay, so The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is over now. And it did some things well, and it tried to do some things well, and it did certain things terribly while wholeheartedly believing that it did them well. This is the nature of the Beast—the “beast” in this case being the MCU and pretty much every other franchise owned by a megacorp like Disney.
But now that it’s over, I have a bone to pick with James Buchanan Barnes, and everybody’s gonna hear about it.
Some spoilers ahead.
I was hoping that this particular issue would actually get addressed by the end of the show, but the final episode came and went, and nothing happened, so here I am about to complain to you that Bucky Barnes is a terrible date. And I expect a fair share of eyerolls, and a lot of “who cares?” or “obviously”s issued in response to that, and that’s where you’re wrong. Because this is a thing in television, and it’s pretty dangerous to perpetuate without thinking about how it comes off to your audience.
Here’s the scenario, in case you need a memory jog: Bucky has weekly lunches with an elderly fellow named Yori Nakajima because he can’t quite bring himself to confront the man about the fact that he murdered his son while he was the Winter Soldier. At their usual lunch spot, Mr. Nakajima notices Bucky’s interest in their server, Leah, and sets them set up on a date despite his protestations.
The next night, Bucky arrives with flowers, and he and Leah sit down after her shift in the restaurant to get to know each other. Leah asks a series of benign questions to facilitate that, and Bucky is visibly uncomfortable, giving answers that seem awkward (the fact that he’s actually 106 years old, his discomfort with online dating), or lying outright (stating that he wears gloves for “poor circulation” when he’s trying to hide his metal arm). Leah suggests a game as a further icebreaker, and they start up a drinking round of Battleship. When she jokes that she’s reading his mind to find the location of her next target, Bucky says “Please don’t.” Leah asks about Bucky’s siblings, his relationship to his parents, then mentions that she thinks it’s sweet that he spends time with Yori—the man has been having trouble since the death of his son, and not knowing how he died is particularly difficult. Bucky gets upset, and immediately departs their date without a word of explanation, leaving Leah alone.
When we watch something like this, we’re supposed to worry about Bucky because he’s a main character, and thus the scene is tied to his point of view. He’s the character we’re familiar with, and so we know why these questions are hard for him to answer, and why he’s suddenly so triggered that he has to flee the date without so much as an apology or faked excuse. We are not encouraged to notice the opposite side to this encounter—a woman who put herself into a vulnerable position, and by all accounts just had a date with a total creep.
Because that’s how Bucky’s behavior comes off without context: he’s shifty, he’s unhappy, he has a hard time answering direct questions, he makes a point of saying that he doesn’t want his mind read, thereby indicating that he has something to hide. He wears black leather gloves and tries to pass off the “poor circulation” excuse as though it sounds viable or realistic. (My hands get cold a lot too, dude, and I don’t wear black leather gloves everywhere, even when it’s a readily apparent not-weird option, and despite the fact that I own a pair.) Then he bolts the instant you bring up something heartfelt and sad.
If that was your date, you wouldn’t think, gee, I hope that poor guy’s okay. You’d think, gee, I’m pretty sure that guy was a serial killer and I somehow just avoided getting murdered.
It would be bad enough just to see it here, but this scene is common enough that you could call it a staple in TV and film. Supernatural’s Sam Winchester gets strong-armed into a date with a young restaurant worker named Lindsay, who assumes that his avoidant behavior is down to him being a former addict like herself. (She doesn’t know said addiction was to demon blood instead of something normal, say, cocaine.) On Being Human, Hal is too awkward to avoid his date with Alex, so he recruits chaperones and tries to avoid ever being alone with her. (If he behaves strangely, you should probably always assume it’s because he’s a vampire.) Superheroes have prime real estate in this sort of scenario, usually because they’re trying to avoid giving away their super-identity. (Clark Kent, Peter Parker, Matt Murdock, Fenton Crackshell, the list goes on for guys who think they’re somehow hiding how distracted and guilty they feel for attempting to have a normal life with everyday priorities like making out with someone cute.)
The problem with these scenes, conversely played either for laughs or wrenching emotion, is that they ignore one sweeping, simple truth—that women are always on guard for strange behavior from men on dates for the sake of self-protection. Because if they aren’t vigilant, their safety is at risk. Inevitably, watching these scenarios becomes an exercise of suspension in disbelief because you know that most women would never let a situation like that continue. You keep having to explain to yourself why she hasn’t gotten a strange “emergency” phone call, or excused herself to the bathroom, or finally pressed pause to let the guy know… sorry, it’s not you, it’s me. I should go.
There are a number of oddities around Bucky’s date that strain credulity, and require additional assumptions to make it play realistically. For one, I’m going to assume that Leah owns that restaurant if she feels comfortable having a date in it after closing with no customers around. I’m also going to assume that the kitchen staff are still cleaning up in the back, so she’s not totally alone with a relative stranger. (Bucky and Mr. Nakajima visit her place of employment frequently enough that they have a “usual” order, but that’s not the same as spending one-on-one time with another person.) I’m going to assume that Leah knows Yori quite well, and that they’ve maybe talked about Bucky when he wasn’t around, so she has reason to believe she can trust him. But none of these things are blatantly suggested by the script—I’m just filling in gaps to be less bothered watching a scene where I know very few women would stick around.
It comes with little surprise to note that these dates are nearly always written by men—the interiority of these women often don’t seem to matter much during these scenes. They are plot points, or they are prisms by which a male character can have his difficulties refracted back at him. He will learn or confront something, and she will probably cease to exist, at least from a narrative standpoint. If she does learns something (as is true for Lindsay and Alex), it’s likely that she should have been a smarter girl who knew to be afraid. But more often than not, this woman is the story equivalent of a very beautiful stepping stone on the path to character development.
And this was true for the end of Falcon and the Winter Soldier: After Bucky finally confesses to Mr. Nakajima that he is the one who killed his son, he looks in on the man having lunch. Leah is sitting there next to the old man as he eats alone, and she sees Bucky through the restaurant window. Her expression is impossible to qualify in that moment because it doesn’t track with the possibilities on offer; if Yori didn’t tell her what Bucky did, she would undoubtedly be confused as to why he wasn’t inside having lunch with his friend; if Yori did tell her that Bucky admitted to killing his child, she’d likely be angry on his behalf that Bucky was sniffing around the place. But this moment doesn’t exist to serve either of their characters, it exists to serve Bucky—he gets to see that Mr. Nakajima is getting on with his life and Leah is still around to look after him. It’s meant to be a small comfort to a man who has done the terrible work of admitting once again everything that the Winter Soldier identity has stolen from him.
It sets a bad example on more than just a narrative front, however. Because the ubiquitous nature of this setup suggests to women and girls that maybe the man who’s acting weird on their date? Well, he could be a superhero who’s trying to recover from a tragic backstory. At the very least, he’s probably a sweet guy who just needs to be drawn out of his shell with some drunken boardgame-playing. And that’s not a message that anyone should internalize—because the stakes are too high if you’re wrong.
So I hope this trope works its way into retirement. And I hope that the next time Bucky Barnes decides to go on a date, he leads with being honest about his past—prosthetic arm and all.
Emmet Asher-Perrin would absolutely lead on dates with their extremely impressive vibranium arm, if they happened to have one. You can bug them on Twitter, and read more of their work here and elsewhere.
To be honest I’m more bothered by the trope that there’s something wrong with you if you don’t date.
I’ve only dated two women in my life, and both times I had plans to marry them before we started dating.
There’s plenty of countries where romance with a stranger is a very odd notion.
And don’t even get me started on the fact that it’s still not cool to be asexual.
My wife married the first person she dated. Me.
TBH, the winter Soldier was a serial killer…
I’m more bothered by the fact that people don’t know who superheroes are. This is played with when Sam goes to get a bank lone, but how neither Yori nor Leah recognize Bucky is a little silly. This isn’t DC with secret identities. Bucky is a known avenger and it’s not like there are a thousand of them at this point.
I agree with this entire post. Bucky’s therapy got completely short-changed by this series, and Leah’s misunderstood role is perfectly captured in that gnomic glance through the window.
“lying outright (stating that he wears gloves for “poor circulation” when he’s trying to hide his metal arm)”
I actually thought that was part of his pattern of not outright lying, but finding an evasion. I mean, it’s not like there’s blood in the metal arm, so technically, it’s poor circulation.
However, your broader point also struck me at that ending scene. Even if Leah was attracted to Bucky, it did seem really weird that she didn’t have a different reaction at the end of the show.
I’d argue that this was one of the more entertaining scenes in the entire series to date. Personally the story of man re-entering the world after being a brain-washed assassin for 80 years is more interesting than can Captain America be a black man?–we’ve already had a black president, so yeah, Captain America can be black. So for me at least, any scene where we got inside Bucky’s life were interesting. This scene and his awkward answers were fun.
But you are 100% right that in the real world, she should have gotten the heck outa there right way. I wish the series had given us two more minutes to end cap his conversation with Yori better and another two minutes where he could have apologized for his terrible behavior to Leah.
Instead we got scene after scene with Karli. Karli is the worst. Honestly I wish now that Vos had ended up with all the coaxium instead of her.
Hmm…I see the general point, although I have a different perspective on the date itself, and this is as a woman who has had a date where you need the emergency call and then had to block the guy’s number afterward’s – I definitely have a paranoid streak. At least until he ghosts her (a dick move, to be sure) I didn’t see his behavior or answers as particularly creepy/threatening. Some guys are awkward and shy (that was 99% of my peer group to be honest so he felt like guys I’ve known) and I think it’s fine to keep in mind there’s always something going on you may not know. You don’t have to settle for it or let your guard down (I tend to usually also keep a list of ‘what ifs’ in my head even while extending some benefit of the doubt) but I’m also not going to immediately jump to the worst case scenario (even though, ironically, he actually WAS a killer). That said, if another girl felt a flag going up, then she should listen to her gut/instincts.
Even the ghosting my first instinct probably WOULD be to think, ‘wow, I just brought up a kind of intense/traumatic/triggering topic and he bounced’. I’d still have to think pretty seriously about what that mean in general for his emotional maturity/ability to handle a relationship, but I wouldn’t see it as dangerous, per se. Any more than a charming sociopath who says allllll the right things can be dangerous (I’m much more scared of those types). To me Bucky is a bad date mostly because he indicates that he can’t really commit or face his truths, whereas I find more ‘danger’ cues in the ones that are more clingy/needy/aggressive about such things.
And sometimes life just really is that way; what we see on one end of an interaction has way more going on than we know.
THAT SAID I agree about the last scene and it didn’t land with me. It’s possible at one point he went back and apologized (although I’m not sure if the timeline supports that) but Leah’s expression doesn’t land with me; I expected at best confusion, or at worst, a kind of protective disdain (assuming Yori told her). The little smile just seemed off because she doesn’t know what the viewer knows.
As a rule I don’t necessarily mind that the scene is more about Bucky than Leah, since he’s a main character, and there’s a point where side characters basically exist for their sake (Yori could be said to be the same) but that whole interaction just felt forced to me.
@1 – honestly, same. I’ve had two serious boyfriends and married the second. Both were friends first that I met and connected with in various ways. I did had a brief stint with “dating” when I was in grad school between the boyfriends (such as the disastrous one mentioned above) but I just didn’t really do well with dating. And I also got ribbed for it a bit. Honestly, I’d be completely hopeless in today’s dating atmosphere and the way online dating is treated as so…transactional (at least from the way my friends describe it). Although as it turns out, I did meet both of my boyfriends online first (not on dating sites but in online communities) and then we ended up meeting in person (although not with romantic intentions).
I would be totally on guard the moment my date showed up with flowers. Like 1) I have never been on a first date where anyone has given me flowers and 2) from a practical standpoint, now I have to carry this bouquet around with me all evening?
But I don’t think the problem is the “zomg, he might be a serial killer’ — not every straight women plays that calculus – but that being evasive like that is a huge frelling red flag that he’s not emotionally available or that he’s not telling you that while he and his girlfriend broke up months ago they still live together and share a bed.
I mean I more have a problem with how she handled it. Like why did she start to bring up another’s personal life like that? Even if she was trying to have a conversation about Bucky being nice to Yori, I would find it incredibly rude if a stranger started saying “oh his son died and he doesn’t know why” that’s personal and really none of her business. If my date ended like that, I would leave too. why the heck are we talking about someone else personal life that has a very bad moment for them? That’s rude to yori
My mom has something called Raynaud’s Disease, which is a circulatory disorder, so she DOES wear gloves everywhere.
When I watched this scene I remember saying that it was a dick move to leave and never address it later with an apology but it wasn’t registering as a big a deal as this article makes it out to be. Mostly because it was clear to the viewer (and I would think obvious to his date) that Bucky was very not into this situation. Either he’s uninterested, or he’s very shy. Given that he’s extremely attractive, dresses very well, maintains a good look…then I would assume it’s him being uninterested…if this was a real-world situation. In a Marvel story where every one is hot, then I would assume socially awkward, which I think is how Stan was trying to play it. Then during the date, he is very obviously playing it as social awkward as possible. I have known plenty of guys like this. It doesn’t come across as dangerous, just sheltered. If I had been his date and he rushed out like that I would 100% assume I said something upsetting and he needed to bounce to calm down. That’s not scary? The reverse is scary when they stick around and crowd you.
@5 Bucky is more a known killer than Avenger (he took a time out in solitude and only fought in that same unobserved location). And he had long hair that was in his face and a mask. Even the wanted poster in Civil War was blurry and generic. His date would have had to go to the Smithsonian to see pictures of him as he looks now. And though he is attractive, he’s not got any specific features that stand out. Same for Falcon/CA. Good looking guys that are relatively low-key. I LOVED that they played that for laughs because yeah if you aren’t the big 3-4 no one cares. Even in real life, most people can’t ID the Marvel pantheon if they’re not fans. It was spot on.
When I watched this scene I remember saying that it was a bad move to leave and never address it later with an apology but it wasn’t registering as a big a deal as this article makes it out to be. Mostly because it was clear to the viewer (and I would think obvious to his date) that Bucky was very not into this situation. Either he’s uninterested, or he’s very shy. Given that he’s extremely attractive, dresses very well, maintains a good look…then I would assume it’s him being uninterested…if this was a real-world situation. In a Marvel story where every one is hot, then I would assume socially awkward, which I think is how Stan was trying to play it. Then during the date, he is very obviously playing it as social awkward as possible. I have known plenty of guys like this. It doesn’t come across as dangerous, just sheltered. If I had been his date and he rushed out like that I would 100% assume I said something upsetting and he needed to bounce to calm down. That’s not scary? The reverse is scary when they stick around and crowd you.
@5 Bucky is more a known killer than Avenger (he took a time out in solitude and only fought in that same unobserved location). And he had long hair that was in his face and a mask. Even the wanted poster in Civil War was blurry and generic. His date would have had to go to the Smithsonian to see pictures of him as he looks now. And though he is attractive, he’s not got any specific features that stand out. Same for Falcon/CA. Good looking guys that are relatively low-key. I LOVED that they played that for laughs because yeah if you aren’t the big 3-4 no one cares. Even in real life, most people can’t ID the Marvel pantheon if they’re not fans. It was spot on.
I now realize that this date scene played a lot different to me than to it would to a woman. I was watching Bucky being in pain, not thinking about how it came across to his date. Like Bucky never thought what it meant to be a black Captain America, I never thought what it is like to be a woman on a date with a man who is acting creepy.
Woman who has a first date with a guy in an empty restaurant, tries to get him drunk (I’m assuming she switched her glass for something else), she doesn’t react to signals that something’s off, and her last scene with him suggests she wouldn’t be adverse to a second date. Oh, and she makes a joke about reading his mind. Also, this is the MCU.
Conclusion: Bucky had a date with something not human who hadn’t made up her mind about whether or not to eat him. The smile suggests she may be considering a second date in the vicinity of a large oven with no witnesses.
This is interesting. I don’t know that I agree that the date itself is the problem–that is, after all, exactly what we should be thinking about Bucky at that moment. He is living under false pretenses; he is disregarding his therapy; he is making himself dangerous to other people and by avoiding being honest with himself, is hurting people. That he mistreats his date is part of that.
What’s really bad is the follow-through. His ‘therapy’ is a joke, and like most TV therapists what his does seems unethical and actively harmful. The show wants us to take Sam’s work as a counselor seriously, but it doesn’t take the therapy work that Bucky needs seriously. And so we get everything very inappropriately tied up with those scenes at the end of the series. You are correct, she should be a lot more wary of him.
This is an interesting take on this scene. I honestly didn’t think of it this way. The point seemed to me that his dishonesty with Mr. Nakajima, and his other casualties, would continue to effect his future relationships. It was supposed to read as a horrible first date, to show how Bucky is doing the wrong things to move on with his life. If he doesn’t learn how to correct his behavior, he will continue to hurt good people. In the end he didn’t approach her or the interior of her work place after the weird date. Not that Leah hadn’t already guessed that Bucky was there for the wrong reasons. Bringing out Battleship on the first date is a bit of a “maybe he just needs a friend” move. Just a few thoughts on perspective.
This article and the subsequent discussion is very interesting to me. That date scene in the first episode stood out for me too, but not actually for the reasons mentioned; I was more aghast that this “date” took place at the same bar/restaurant where she works. Wouldn’t she want to go somewhere else? Is it a 24-hour bar and she’s the only one who works there so she can’t leave? Is it like a WandaVision thing where she ceases to exist if she tries to leave the bar? We never did see her go outside.
More seriously, I guess I wasn’t that weirded out by her reaction to Bucky in the last episode, mainly because we don’t know what Yori’s reaction was. Was he angry? Upset? DId he understand about Bucky being brainwashed? We never saw, so there are various possibilities, and thus various possibilities for how she might react; a vague smile doesn’t seem out of the question.
“Good evening. I used to be a brainwashed super soldier. I killed hundreds of people. Don’t worry, I’m fine now,” is probably too much for a first date.
Her choice of location for the date is strange–dark and apparently deserted. He reads as more awkward than creepy.
Isn’t Bucky a celebrity? What with the whole Civil War deal?
I’m pretty sure we can give a pass to a guy that had his last date 75 years before and spent the interim brainwashed and killing people.
If someone can’t forgive that dude a bit of awkwardness, Maybe dating isn’t the thing for them either?
I generally agree with you on this date, Emmet, but there was one possibility that struck me–what if, when Leah says she is reading his mind, she was telling the truth. That’s a possibility in the MCU.
Her having mind reading powers actually fits pretty well with her look in that final scene–better than if she didn’t.
I had a different reaction to the location of the date – by choosing to spend time with him in the restaurant, she wasn’t telling him anything about herself that he didn’t already know. It’s also a location where plenty of people likely knew where to find her. Not every precaution involves a faked emergency.
As to the larger trend of women in media not noticing when their dates are giving off “creepy” vibes – in this case, Leah is a waitress in New York. It’s highly unlikely that anything Bucky did was registering on her scale of weird. However, based on their interactions when Yuri was setting them up and throughout the date itself, I was surprised when Leah didn’t look at Bucky with a smile and say, “You’re not actually into this, are you?” allowing Bucky to give her something of a relieved smile and they close out the evening as friends. Then again, she also seems oblivious to his increasing discomfort to her questions, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised.
That’s not to say the date going badly is all Leah’s fault – Bucky clearly isn’t ready at this point, and his “therapist’s” god-awful approach to his recovery wasn’t doing him any favors. Even if he followed her spectacularly bad advice to the letter, I don’t believe it would have saved this date.
The scene seemed to be written to be from a humorous perspective of someone who has not dated in a long time, so for me anyway, I am much more likely to willingly suspend disbelief.
Even so, I’m skeptical that “very few” women would have stuck around during the date. Lisamarie in comment 9 does a good job of explaining one reason, but while I’ve only dated a relatively small number of women—largely because I’ve been married for the vast majority of my adult life—but even among that small number were those credulous enough that they would not in fact have been wary.
But an even bigger issue, even if that number is indeed very few: The attractiveness of the partner can short circuit a lot of cautions for members of both sexes, and let’s face it, maybe we can assume that Sebastian Stan is playing an attractive but not stunningly attractive man, but if we take it at face value, a lot of people—not just women—would barely be able to think if they met someone that attractive in person. I am not a perfect judge of male beauty, but I do remember asking my wife when we were watching the earlier MCU movies if that character were attractive, and she said, “Oh, yeah!”
All that said, I definitely agree that I would have liked to see some additional closure for that scene, e.g., at least apologizing for running out on her earlier.
The scene seemed to be written to be from a humorous perspective of someone who has not dated in a long time, so for me anyway, I am much more likely to willingly suspend disbelief.
Even so, I’m skeptical that “very few” women would have stuck around during the date. Lisamarie in comment 9 does a good job of explaining one reason, but while I’ve only dated a relatively small number of women—largely because I’ve been married for the vast majority of my adult life—but even among that small number were those credulous enough that they would not in fact have been wary.
But an even bigger issue, even if that number is indeed very few: The attractiveness of the partner can short circuit a lot of cautions for members of both sexes, and let’s face it, maybe we can assume that Sebastian Stan is playing an attractive but not stunningly attractive man, but if we take it at face value, a lot of people—not just women—would barely be able to think if they met someone that attractive in person. I am not a perfect judge of male beauty, but I do remember asking my wife when we were watching the earlier MCU movies if that character were attractive, and she said, “Oh, yeah!”
All that said, I definitely agree that I would have liked to see some additional closure for that scene, e.g., at least apologizing for running out on her earlier.
I think you can see from some of the comments and the way that the scene was written that it will be a long time before the majority of people come to understand how pervasive the lazy writing technique of using female characters for the purpose of main male character development has become in television, movies, etc. I’m just glad he didn’t hit it off with her and then the writers decide to kill her off (i.e. fridging/women in refrigerators) to help develop his character or story arc.
It’s not the believability of the scene that’s the real problem, even though that is now what so many people have focused on, since plenty of people have bad dates. The problem is that yet again male writers have chosen to use a female character who is unlikely to play a significant independent role in the story to, as you put it, help a male character “learn or confront something.” The key to understanding this problem is to ask: Could Bucky have learned or confronted X about himself or the audience learn something about him without this date and character? If the answer is “Yes,” which it obviously is, then the entire interaction was unnecessary and does nothing more than hit viewers over the head with yet another instance of a female character being harmed for the sake of a male character’s development. Sadly, I’ve read fanfiction that handles Bucky’s potential dating problems, mental health issues, etc. better without using a female character this way.
As a huge fan of Bucky Barnes since CATWS aired in 2014, I admit that I was 100% in Bucky’s headspace during the date and not from Leah’s perspective, so I am very interested in seeing it from her perspective as well.
I would not make the leap to “he is a serial killer” though it is true that he has a really big secret. Bucky comes off as sad and awkward, and it’s not a big surprise to me that he runs away. I feel like Leah has observed him often from his dates with Mr. Nakajima, and I think she would not be surprised to find him sad and awkward. I’m not sure she is there alone with him; there may be other staff present; in the case of many small restaurants, possibly even family members.
Regarding the last scene, where Bucky sees them through the window: I was disappointed that we did not learn more about how Nakajima reacted to Bucky telling the truth. I see that he is no longer eating with Nakajima, but at least the old man finally has knowledge about why his son died (wrong place wrong time). I assume that Nakajima tells Leah that he is no longer eating with Bucky and leaves it at that. That might explain the wistful look she gives him. I would not assume that Nakajima would tell Leah the painful circumstances that Bucky revealed to him. That doesn’t seem like a casual conversation to have with your restaurateur. Perhaps one could imagine Nakajima saying “I doubt he will come around here again” and then Leah giving Bucky the wistful look through the window. If she is perceptive, Leah might see a deepened sadness and yet a relief on Mr. Nakajima — the effects of grief and yet a kind of closure.
I guess in the end, the article is a warning that women should be more careful about the circumstances in which they get to know someone, and that stories should reflect that. I have no argument with that! As this particular narrative goes, there might be different ways to read it. But writers should be aware of these pitfalls– most especially, creating a woman character who only exists as a reflection of what the male character needs in the moment.
“You’d think, gee, I’m pretty sure that guy was a serial killer and I somehow just avoided getting murdered.” And you’d be right. He was a serial killer. Now, he had no intention to murder her but if she thought that she is either very insightful or really did read his mind.
Frankly, the biggest storytelling twist in the entire MCU for me was that the writers think both Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes were straight.
C’mon Steve, you spent 2.5 movies doing little but talking/thinking about and relentlessly pursuing this really handsome guy you’ve known your whole life. Time for some self-reflection.
Just to remark, from reading the “Not Always Right” crazy-customer web site (also crazy co-worker, etc.), it seems to be routine for a not very senior person in a non-luxury restaurant to at least take a turn dealing with cash register and cleaning while the kitchen staff and the last customers leave. No manager on site. Of course, the stories are where it goes wrong, like the woman who brought her kids to eat just at closing time, our hero goes, “No, look, the cook is literally walking out the door now, look”, so then the woman tries to persuade the cook to come back and feed her family. He declined to do so.
So while Leah may be the Leah from comics who was Loki’s childhood friend (that’s very complicated) with some wild hidden agenda, she could just work at this restaurant, then lock the door and go home.
Which isn’t to say that this is not a night when she’d rather have done that and watched “Flash” on TV, instead.
I’m not saying there’s nothing to this, but she didn’t meet the guy on Tinder, he was the nice man who had been spending time with a lonely old customer.
As much as I adore Bucky, I have to agree with everything in this article. While I enjoy reading fanfic about his character in a variety of situations, the MCU/Disney is clearly clueless about the poor example this sets, as shown. Maybe there was more that wound up on the cutting room floor – the whole final episode felt rushed – I feel they did him and the fans a disservice the way it played out.
@36 Yeah….it’s not like she’s completely in the dark about him. He’s been HER customer, too, for many weeks. She’s had a lot of opportunity to take his temperature. Bad on Bucky for leaving her high and dry, but I think folks are reading too much into this.
I’m with @9 Lisamarie in that I didn’t find Bucky to be serial-killer-creepy in the slightest. His whole vibe is “I do not want to be here”, which starting out could just be first-date jitters, and when enough time has passed that that’s ruled out then it’s “oh, he’s not interested, and maybe just to be safe I’ll find something else as a precaution”. This is my opinion as a woman who once deliberately walked three blocks in the wrong direction through a maze of buildings in order to emerge as far from her workplace as possible before going to a public street corner to meet a not-at-all creepy internet friend/said friend’s sister, and I had a longtime trusted guy I knew in person to back me up.
I don’t know if my feelings about Bucky as a date are because I don’t get serial killer vibes at all, or because my serial-killer-vibe-alarm is seriously hypersensitive and I learn to ignore it in compensation, but that’s my vibe. (Or possibly because my bad experiences with men were always guys who INTENSELY FOCUSED ON ME EVERY MOMENT, not guys who had trouble taking their eyes and mind away from middle distance.)
That said, it was an awful date for her, and if she’s as much a mundane Muggle as the show has her, there’s no reason she’d be looking at him at the end in any way that wouldn’t be painfully aware of the awkwardness, whether angry or embarrassed or at least curious.
The really dangerous people aren’t the ones who act weird on the first date. They’re the ones who don’t, and seem perfectly normal right up until the moment they reveal their true self.
Some times a fictional world has fictional situations. As the saying goes you can’t make 100% of people happy 100% of the time. When watching fictional shows, I know what I’m getting into. I have watched Man in the High Castle and I can’t get angry/frustrated with any of the situations because it is a fictional world. There were many scenes that made me feel uncomfortable, but that is part of that fictional world. It doesn’t make it right, but that is the writers world. If I didn’t like it enough, I will stop watching it. By not watching it, it is one of the best way to get shows/writers to change.
I had forgotten about this scene, but regarding the scene at the end, her smile was so odd I actually thought that she couldn’t see him through the window (like, maybe the sun was in her eyes or something) and instead only Bucky was watching Leah & Mr Nakajima as a kind of ‘that’s a world I can’t enter anymore’ way. Because otherwise her look was really odd and now I am wondering if that mindreading thing is true and she’ll appear again.
Well, you may be right about this kind of awkward dates being a staple ware. I seem to recall a fair number of such with girls being awkward as well. But nevertheless I fundamentally disagree with your problem description. It is not like boys are getting more creepy on their dates because they see this. It is not like girl has to be more on their guard. It is also not like a film or serie has to follow up on the emotions and reactions of every side character. They have to concentrate on the main characters and the main plot line or the story will be hopelessly tangled.
And as for not everything making total sense and being realistic … well, what kind of production was this now again?
This trope, or whatever we should call it, with the awkward date is an efficient way to show off someones troubles in an enjoyable way, and the other person on the date (being man or woman) is normally very secondary. That’s life in showbiz.
Yeah, the flowers thing reminded me of a particularly creepy experience of my own.
The flowers were nice! It was meant to show that Bucky is old-fashioned because he is…wait for it…old! Granted flowers make a lot more sense when you give them to her at her home so she can put them in a vase, but Bucky is doing the best he can here. I’m sure creepy men can give flowers as well, but I think Bucky was completely innocent in this regard. It was a clever way to show how out of step Bucky was with the modern world.
Good Analysis. I hadn’t thought of it this way but that shows how right you are, it’s such a trope that we assume crap like this is normal. I would never, ever put myself in that situation so I don’t know why I never noticed this in movies. Thanks for the insight.
I’ve never seen a date in a movie or on television that seemed remotely similar to any date I’ve actually been on, so I guess I don’t analyze these things very carefully.
@@@@@32/Marci Kesserich: Bi/pan guys exist you know. :P