Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S01E21 – Review

By: Jeffrey Bell (story)

The Story: The team proves that motel living has only made them tougher.

The Review: I aired out my feelings about Ward pretty thoroughly last week, so I won’t go back into them now. I’ll only say again that it was always going to take something major for us to consider cutting him a little slack on this whole betrayal thing, and this episode definitely does not give us that. Bell makes a sincere attempt, but unfortunately he takes a misguided approach that only leaves you even more ambivalent about Ward’s character.

While Bell uses flashbacks to examine the Ward-Garrett relationship from their first contact in Ward’s juvie facility to Garrett jumpstarting Ward’s S.H.I.E.L.D. career, none of this really helps us to process Ward’s slavish devotion to Garrett. The older man promises the young Ward, “No one will ever screw with you again,” and fulfills that promise by abandoning the lad in a Hatchet scenario for five months, but on paper, this doesn’t sound like much of a bonding experience. What Bell needed to do was backtrack even further, to the point when Ward set his family home on fire (with his brother inside) or even before. We need to see how Ward’s home life was so toxic that Garrett’s physical and emotional abuse was preferable by comparison.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S01E14 – Review

By: Jeffrey Bell (story)

The Story: Unsurprisingly, S.H.I.E.L.D. makes it even harder to get your medical history.

The Review: I’ve always had serious questions about this show’s attempts to wring a sense of closeness out of the cast before they’ve fully earned it, ever since the second episode, when they set all friction aside to watch the sunset together.  Things have improved since then, with the last episode in particular displaying how good a chemistry the team can have when allowed to bounce off each other, instead of delivering one-liners in between exposition.

The thing is there’s still a gap between the unity the show thinks they have and what actually comes across on screen.  Early in the first act of this episode, after S.H.I.E.L.D. medics strive and fail to repair Skye’s mortal wounds, a doctor tells Coulson and Co. to contact Skye’s family.  Coulson takes a beat and declares, “We’re her family.”  Allow me a dubious “Hm…” as I discuss the presumptuousness of that line.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S01E04 – Review

By: Jeffrey Bell (story)

The Story: The team gets an eyeful of betrayal.

The Review: It’s very important to remember that even as a series, TV or otherwise, goes on and gradually becomes comfortable with itself, the audience also starts adjusting its expectations until both reach a happy middle ground where each accepts the other for what it is.  With S.H.I.E.L.D., it’s going to take a little more work from viewers than usual as we accept the cold hard fact that this isn’t the weekly Marvel extravaganza we all secretly hoped it would be.

So what is S.H.I.E.L.D. going to be instead?  At the moment, it feels like a higher-rent Chuck, a spy-comedy with an emphasis on tech-driven plots and quirky character relationships.  What S.H.I.E.L.D. lacks is Chuck’s effusive warmth.  Chuck became the little-show-that-could because it wore its heart so openly that fans sunk their investment deep to see whether that vulnerable instrument would get damaged.  S.H.I.E.L.D. is much more guarded by contrast, though this episode shows important growth in this area.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S01E02 – Review

By: Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, Jeffrey Bell (story)

The Story: The team that fends off Peruvian soldiers together, sticks together.

The Review: The pilot had plenty of good things in it and accomplished what every pilot should do, which was demonstrate that it had enough potential to make a season’s viewing worth it.  That’s nothing to sneeze at; plenty of pilots, even ones that make it on the air, don’t manage to do that much.  At the same time, the episode also suffered noticeably from great deal more conventionality than you might have expected from such a highly publicized project.

That remains the case here, but if anything, this episode conceals it less successfully than the pilot, perhaps due to Joss Whedon’s absence from the script.  To be more accurate, the episode not only fails to disguise how thoroughly conventional its plot is, it practically calls attention to it.  It really only takes you about fifteen minutes to realize that the episode is about bringing this scrappy team together, but the writers seem to feel that you won’t get it unless they address it directly—and loudly.