Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S01E22 – Review

By: Marissa Tancharoen & Jed Whedon (story)

The Story: The end and beginning of S.H.I.E.L.D.

The Review: I’ve come to a crossroads with S.H.I.E.L.D. While the show has seen marked improvement in the second half of the season, it hasn’t really left much of a mark. S.H.I.E.L.D. has learned to be dependably entertaining, but without reaching that addictive quality that keeps viewers—well, me, at least—attached. And with new comic book shows being greenlit by the day—Gotham, Constantine, Agent Carter, The Flash*–attachment is necessary to keep our attention from wandering elsewhere.

I’m afraid even to the very end, S.H.I.E.L.D. has proven to be a very small-minded, closed-off sort of world. Arrow‘s first season finale ended with a city in chaos and half-ruin, two major characters from both sides dead, and everyone else reeling from the disaster. This guaranteed that the Arrow that would return in the fall would have to be a very different beast than it had been, and so its second season has proven. S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s season finale, however, reveals a show that’s still extremely resistant to such big waves, reveling in changes that are more cosmetic than substantive.

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. S01E19 – Review

By: Monica Owusu-Breen (story)

The Story: In which the penny drops for Skye.

The Review: And here you thought that breaking up S.H.I.E.L.D. would take us away from the baddie-of-the-week procedural format that’s stifled the series since day one. Look, the team was always going to get back to tracking down superpowered threats eventually, but you would’ve thought we’d get a break on that while Hydra remains the outstanding threat. Unfortunately, the Fridge’s breach means the team has to worry about the newly freed criminals on top of everything else.

I should mention this excursion to take down Marcus Daniels* seems to be a momentary distraction. Thank goodness, because the purely formulaic qualities of the plotline remind you why S.H.I.E.L.D. suffered so much in the early episodes: Daniels’ total lack of development and the by-the-numbers tactic to defeat him. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired of seeing energy absorbers defeated by overloading, and the fact that the team uses the same exact same strategy that apparently brought him down before (only bigger!) makes the plot even more yawn-worthy.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S01E18 – Review

Story By: Brent Fletcher

The Story: They may not be able to track superpowers anymore, but they can still watch YouTube.

The Review: Now that the old S.H.I.E.L.D. paradigm is in shambles, we have a few episodes before us in which Coulson and his team struggle to adjust. Finding new purpose is easy: destroy Hydra, or get in their way as much as possible. Figuring out the logistics of doing so is going to be a lot harder. Without continued resources from S.H.I.E.L.D., taking down a global cult—that’s what Hydra basically is, right?—is going to be a rough task. After Coulson runs into breakdowns and defects in every corner of the Bus, he comes to Skye pleading for good news.

“We have internet.”

“Yay!” he says, with some genuine enthusiasm. “And boy, have I lowered my expectations.”

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. S01E13 – Review

By: Lauren LeFranc & Rafe Judkins (story)

The Story: S.H.I.E.L.D. on a train.

The Review: I don’t know about you, but my favorite part of any spy story is when everyone goes undercover.  Perhaps real spies will disagree—and if you do, feel free to tell us!—but I imagine this is the fun part of secret agent life: taking on new identities, exploring new settings, using low-key gadgets, etc.  From a fictional standpoint, all of these things afford characters the rare opportunity to improvise, which is always exciting, even when it doesn’t go so well.

It’s sad that it’s taken the show this long to deliver a fully committed undercover episode, where everyone is in the field, and it’s even sadder when you realize how much more fun it makes the show.  You can just tell there’s a lot more energy from the actors than usual, probably undercover stories are such an inherent acting challenge: you’re playing a character who is playing a different character, and you have to be committed to that secondary identity without subsuming the primary one underneath.