The Falcon & Winter Soldier

[Kitten Champion]

Spoiler: Old Man Yori

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It definetly is not a coincidence. I think Bucky actually befriended Yori in the hope of making amends, and the conversation with the waitress just scratched that wound bare and upset all the healing hes trying to achieve.

I thought that was to be reasonably assumed. It's just how the show chose to go about it ended with that as a reveal.

Spoiler

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- Start with Bucky's context-less nightmare flashback first for the audience to reacquaint themselves with the idea that he was a Hydra assassin for decades

- Then showing Bucky is deeply cut-off from the world and lonely with the sequence with his therapist and that he's doing this weird version of the 12 steps by confronting his victims.

- Then we see he does apparently have this friendship with this old man, who turns out to be a grieving father, and Bucky even gets a date.

- Then we see him bail on said date half-way while under some clear unstated anxiety.

- Then we get the big reveal what was really going on all along, that the flashback was of the assassination of man's son and Bucky life is sadder than we were first led to believe as everything he's been doing there has just been seeking more penitence - in the aforementioned 12 steps-esque process - but he can't bring himself to actually pull the band-aid off, so to speak.

Incidentally, watching Bucky being comfortable around people closer to his actual age kind of reminded me of Ultimate Captain America who spent most of his social life in veteran's halls and retirement homes. Granted Ultimate Cap was a pretty big a-hole and his unwillingness to move past his life in the 40's was - like a lot the Ultimate universe - played up to the point of making him excessively rigid and unrelatable.