The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: What’s hidden in plain sight in episode 5
By Mike McNulty
Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine
If you watched Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine, or “Val” for short, and said to yourself, “Gee, this woman seems to be borrowing her recruitment techniques from Nick Fury’s playbook,” you couldn’t be more right. Because the Contessa is very much associated with Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. As a matter of fact, they’re lovers. If Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is the James Bond of the Marvel Universe, then the Contessa is every Bond girl rolled into one. And she’s a triple-agent, to boot.
To simplify her convoluted backstory, S.H.I.E.L.D. recruited Val during the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union, not realizing that she was a member of Leviathan – a super-secret organization with ties to the KGB. Due to her excellent martial arts skills, marksmanship, and all around use of tradecraft, Val quickly rose through the S.H.I.E.L.D. ranks to the point where she even led her own squad called Femme Force, which included Sharon Carter. And of course, she really made an impression on Fury, as evidenced by one of the most famous (and infamous) comic book pages of all time from Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #2.
Oh, and she also had a thing for Steve Rogers, too, primarily just so she could drive Fury jealous whenever he kept going back to his other on-again, off-again interest, the former Hydra agent Laura Brown. Val also switched sides to join Hydra, as well, and became their new Madame Hydra. However, this was all part of her and Leviathan’s plan to destroy both S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra from within, and it almost succeeded.
As for why Val has that purple streak in hair? It’s actually white in the comics. So why is it purple in this series? Well, it looks as though the MCU is combining Val with another character who does have purple hair streaks: Victoria Hand, the co-founder of the Dark Avengers. And in one of the iterations of that team, guess who was also a member.
Zemo’s arrest
As shown in Captain America: Civil War (2016), Helmut Zemo (Daniel Brühl) bombed the summit where the United Nations signed the Sovokia Accords, resulting in the death of T’Challa’s father, King T’Chaka. This, of course, explains why Ayo (Florence Kasumba) and the Dora Milaje wish to arrest him. What’s not explained is that, after Bucky (Sebastian Stan) helps bring Zemo in during “Truth” is why the Dora Milaje decide to take him to The Raft, the super-villain supermax prison. Why wouldn’t the Dora Milaje take Zemo back to the prison he’d already been in before? Better yet, why aren’t they taking him back to Wakanda to answer for his crimes?
Well, let’s not forget who runs the Raft in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That would be General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (William Hurt), and it’s been rumored that he’ll be the one to create The Thunderbolts made up of incarcerated super villains. And in the comics, the original leader of the Thunderbolts was Baron Helmut Zemo under the guise of Citizen V.
From this then, it’s very likely that reason the Dora Milaje brings Zemo to the Raft, not for the sake of any legal jurisdiction, but for the sake of setting up the Thunderbolts. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if, in the final episode, we get a mid-credit or end-credit scene showing Zemo being brought before Ross to talk about heading a special new team.