Bucky Barnes

Rogers is initially used as a propaganda mascot. He goes rogue to rescue captured soldiers — including his childhood friend Bucky Barnes — and becomes an actual field commander, leading the Howling Commandos against HYDRA alongside Peggy Carter and Howard Stark, who builds his vibranium shield.

• Steve Rogers — will wake in 2011 and lead the Avengers
• Bucky Barnes — is not dead. HYDRA finds him
• Peggy Carter — founds S.H.I.E.L.D. and lives a full life; Rogers's unresolved grief over her drives his final choice in Endgame
• Howard Stark — co-founds S.H.I.E.L.D.; father of Tony
• Arnim Zola — HYDRA scientist, captured, and quietly allowed to work for S.H.I.E.L.D. This is a catastrophe nobody notices for seventy years

16 December 1991 — Long Island. Howard and Maria Stark are murdered on a country road. It is reported as a car accident. It is not: HYDRA sent the Winter Soldier — the brainwashed, cybernetically-armed Bucky Barnes — to retrieve super-soldier serum from their car. Tony Stark does not learn this for twenty-five years.

The enforcer sent to stop them is the Winter Soldier — Bucky Barnes, alive, kept in cryogenic storage between missions and repeatedly mind-wiped for seventy years. He half-recognises Rogers, pulls him from the river, and disappears.

Season 1 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is a genuinely good companion to The Winter Soldier — the show's status quo collapses at the same moment the film's does. Everything after that drifts into its own continuity that later films don't acknowledge. None of it is required.

At the signing in Vienna, a bomb kills King T'Chaka of Wakanda. Bucky Barnes is framed. T'Challa pursues him for vengeance. The real culprit is Helmut Zemo, a Sokovian intelligence officer whose family died in Ultron's attack, whose entire plan is to break the Avengers from the inside rather than beat them.

Zemo's method: he shows Stark grainy footage of 16 December 1991 — Bucky Barnes killing Howard and Maria Stark. Rogers admits he knew. Stark tries to kill Bucky; Rogers stops him; the friendship ends in a bunker in Siberia. Rogers leaves the shield behind.

Shuri's team removes it before Infinity War; The Falcon and the Winter Soldier confirms it on screen when Zemo reads the words aloud and nothing happens.

Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who appears in the post-credits, is a senior US intelligence figure who recruits damaged, disposable people for deniable work. By 2025 she is Director of the CIA. She recruits Yelena here and John Walker in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

Sharon Carter is Peggy Carter's great-niece, a S.H.I.E.L.D./CIA agent introduced in The Winter Soldier. She helped Rogers in Civil War by stealing his shield back and was branded a traitor for it. She fled to Madripoor and became the Power Broker — the criminal figure the whole show has been chasing. In the finale she's pardoned and reinstated at the CIA, with full access, which nobody knows to be alarmed about.

They survive. They find Bob Reynolds, a test subject with functionally unlimited power and severe depression, whose despair manifests as a reality-consuming entity called the Void. Alexei Shostakov rescues them and names them the Thunderbolts, after Yelena's childhood football team that never won a game. Bucky Barnes, now a congressman, joins the investigation.

1. Sam Wilson's Avengers — Sam as Captain America, Joaquín Torres as Falcon, and Isaiah Bradley as an ally rather than an operative. Small, and being rebuilt since Brave New World
2. The New Avengers — Yelena Belova, Bucky Barnes, John Walker, Ghost, Alexei Shostakov, Bob Reynolds/Sentry — operating from the rebranded Avengers Tower, "the Watchtower," with Valentina de Fontaine nominally in charge and actually under their control

Tier 2 — the texture that makes the above land Winter Soldier (FILM) · Doctor Strange (FILM) · WandaVision (SERIES) · Falcon and the Winter Soldier (SERIES) · Multiverse of Madness (FILM) · Shang-Chi (FILM) · No Way Home (FILM) · Hawkeye (SERIES) · The Marvels (FILM) · Agatha All Along (SERIES) · VisionQuest (SERIES)

Phase Two (2013–2015): Iron Man 3 · Thor: The Dark World · Captain America: The Winter Soldier · Guardians of the Galaxy · Avengers: Age of Ultron · Ant-Man

Phase Four (2021–2022): FILMS — Black Widow · Shang-Chi · Eternals · No Way Home · Multiverse of Madness · Love and Thunder · Wakanda Forever SERIES — WandaVision · Falcon and the Winter Soldier · Loki S1 · What If...? S1 · Hawkeye · Moon Knight · Ms. Marvel · She-Hulk · Guardians Holiday Special