There are lots of franchises out there and lots of storylines one needs to remember. Previously On is our way of providing a quick refresher with the plot points you may need to keep in mind for that upcoming sequel or spinoff. This installment updates you on all the happenings in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as it relates to the upcoming Captain America: Brave New World.
The 21st century has become an age of marvels.
But many of these heroes and wonders have roots that extend back to the previous century in a number of ways.
Captain America And The Super Soldier Program
In the early days of World War Two, the United States government was looking for every advantage of the Axis threat they could find. Out of this need came the Super Soldier project from the Strategic Scientific Reserve. The brainchild of Dr. Abraham Erskine, the program sought to create an army of soldiers with heightened strength and reflexes that would excel in hand to hand combat over ordinary men. The test on the first human subject, Steve Rogers, proved to be an enormous success. Unfortunately, Erskine was assassinated by an agent from the Nazi science initiative known as Hydra. Unable to recreate Erskine’s formula, the US government tries to make Roger’s a propaganda figure, touring as “Captain America” in war bond drives.
Later, when Rogers learns that a company of soldiers, including his friend Bucky Barnes, has been captured by a Hydra contingent. Against orders, Rogers leads a small commando unit to rescue them. In the process of freeing the soldiers, he has his first encounter with Hydra leader Johann Schmidt, aka the Red Skull. Following his return to the Allied frontlines with the freed soldiers, US industrialist and Strategic Scientific Reserve scientist Howard Stark gives Rogers a circular shield made from vibranium, a metal which can absorb kinetic energy.
Rogers, Barnes and the commando team would go on to destroy a number of Hydra bases, stymieing Schmidt’s attempts to harness the power of a mysterious object known as the Tesseract. During one such raid, Barnes falls off a train into a deep, snowy ravine, and is feared dead. (In reality, he is found by Soviet soldiers and ultimately brought to a Russian base established by Hydra after the end of World War Two where he is experimented on, brainwashed and turned into the assassin known as the Winter Soldier.) In the closing days of the war, Rogers would have one final encounter with Schmidt, stopping him from launching an attack against New York City. However, in order to insure the city’s safety, he sacrificed himself by crashing the plane carrying several warheads targeting Manhattan into the Arctic Ocean, seemingly dying. Rogers would remain lost, frozen in suspended animation until he was rediscovered and revived in 2010, just in time to help form the Avengers and stop an invasion from the alien Chitauri.
The Continued Quest For The Super Soldier
But the loss of Rogers and the end of the war didn’t mean that their was no longer interest in replicating Erskine’s Super Soldier work. If anything, it launched a covert arms race for its discovery. After the fall of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union took in a number of Hydra scientists including Armin Zola. There, they continued their experimentation on Bucky Barnes. Through brainwashing, they turned Barnes into an assassin code named the Winter Soldier. Hydra’s long term plan was to slowly shape geopolitics into a single world government it could control. Their need for the Winter Soldier was sparse, so in between missions he was kept in cryogenic suspended animation. He is later linked to the assassination of President John F Kennedy and the 1991 deaths of Howard Stark and his wife Maria.
During the Korean War, a number of Africa American soldiers were subjected to an experimental Super Soldier serum variant by a faction of Hydra hiding within the US government . The formula had a number of adverse effects, killing all except one soldier, Isaiah Bradley. During this time, Bradley has an encounter with the Winter Soldier and the two fight to a standstill. After this version of the serum project is closed down, Bradley is imprisoned and further experimented on for another three decades.
The search for a perfect replication of the super soldier serum was still ongoing as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first. Biochemist Dr. Bruce Banner is deceived by US General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross into heading up one such research project under the guise that it is to help shield soldiers from being affected by gamma radiation on the battlefield . The results are disastrous when Banner tests the developed serum on himself, causing him to experience rapid growth and strength enhancement while losing control of his higher reasoning functions. After he destroys his lab as this raging Hulk, Banner goes into hiding for five years. During that time he contacts a colleague, Leonard Stern, and the two collaborate via email on a potential cure for Banner’s condition.
Sam Wilson, The Falcon
By 2012, Steve Rogers was working for SHIELD when uncovers that the espionage organization has been infiltrated and taken over by Hydra. Together with SHIELD agent and Avengers member Natasha Romanov, aka the Black Widow, and a former USAF pararescueman equipped with a powered wingsuit, Sam Wilson, he manages to stop Hydra from launching an initiative that would have killed millions. Following the 2015 Sokovian Incident – in which an artificial intelligence called Ultron tried to destroy all human life only to be defeated by the Avengers – Wilson joins the team full time. However, the political fallout from the Incident leads the nations of the world to sign the Sokovia Accords in 2016, an effort to bring superpowered people into some sort of control. The passage of the Accords split the team, with Rogers and Wilson opposing the measure. After a fight with pro-Accords heroes led by Tony Stark, Rogers, Wilson and number of other heroes go underground rather than agree to the Accord’s terms.
By 2018, Rogers, Wilson and the other anti-Accord heroes are still on the run, hiding out in the African nation of Wakanda. They are brought out of hiding by the arrival of Thanos, an alien looking to acquire all six of the fabled Infinity Stones, which would give him the power to simply wipe out of existence half the life in the universe. Due to a quirk of fate, three of the Stones reside on Earth. But the assembled Earth heroes are unable to stop Thanos and he succeeds in erasing from reality half the universe’s population including a number of Earth’s heroes, Wilson included.
Five years later, the Avengers regroup to use time travel in an attempt to gather the Infinity Stones and reverse the devastation that Thanos wrought and bring back all the people who were blinked out of existence. They also inadvertently bring Thanos and his forces forward in time from nine years in the past. In the final showdown between the Avengers and Thanos at the team’s upstate New York compound, Wilson leads the charge of the returned heroes that helps turn the tide of the battle in Earth’s favor. Afterwards, Rogers journeys back through time to return the Infinity Stones to their proper places before living out a full life with the woman he fell in love with during World War Two, Peggy Carter. In 2023, shortly after Wilson saw a young Rogers leave on his time travel mission. he is approached by an elderly Rogers who bequeaths him his shield and the mantle of Captain America.
Post-Snap
Following the defeat of Thanos by the Avengers and the restoration of the people who were snapped out of existence by the intergalactic tyrant, the world was in chaos. Returnees were finding that in their five year absence that their homes and other belongings had been repossessed by those that had survived or that family and loved ones had moved on with their lives. Millions of people were dispossessed causing a growing humanitarian crisis. The Global Resettlement Council is established to help alleviate the issue. However, the terrorist group the Flag Smashers, who view that the world was better for the five years that half the population had ceased to exist, oppose what the GRC is working towards and launch terrorist attacks on them.
During one of these terrorist actions, U.S. Air Force first lieutenant Joaquin Torres, who has served as a liaison with Wilson on previous military operations, sees that the Flag Smasher terrorists appear to have augmented strength as if they had been injected with a Super Soldier serum variant. He reaches out to Wilson, who investigates alongside Bucky Barnes. The pair’s investigation leads them to meet Isaiah Bradley, who has been living in seclusion in Baltimore, before they stop the Flag Smashers from attacking a GRC conference and killing all the delegates.
Elsewhere, a group of near immortal beings known as Eternals are finding that their time on Earth is coming to an end. Their mission, unbeknownst to the human inhabitants, was to protect the incubating cosmic being known as a Celestial at the Earth’s core. But as the time for the Celestial’s birth approached, some of the Eternals find that they are compelled to abandon their mission, as allowing the Celestial in the heart of the planet to emerge would destroy all life on Earth. A fight ensues among them, ultimately ending with the emerging Celestial dead, its head and one hand emerging out of the Indian Ocean. This cosmic corpse would quickly be discovered to be rich in valuable new metals, the ownership of which would become a key issue in the 2024 presidential election and beyond…
