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. 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. S01E17 – Review

By: Jed Whedon & Maurissa Tancharoen (story)

The Story: The team discovers who has a Hand in the destruction of S.H.I.E.L.D.

The Review: At the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, with S.H.I.E.LD. in ruins, I wondered what this would mean for Coulson and Co. My theory was since Hydra hadn’t been eradicated along with S.H.I.E.L.D—”Cut off one head,” and all that—Coulson’s team would be left to clean up the mess the Avenger left behind. They’ve done it before, but there’s much more glory to their janitorial role this time around. The show’s needed a big, overarching threat, and Hydra goes right up that alley.

For that matter, the fallout of Winter Soldier addresses a lot of what the show’s needed, most crucially in enlivening several of the core characters. Never will you complain about May being relentlessly cold again, as she emotionally lets herself go to an almost alarming degree, allowing Ming Na to marshal all those acting chops she usually has to keep under wraps within May’s frosty exterior. But this level of passion is necessary to keep her from looking totally callous once the extent of her deception comes to light. Winter Soldier showed firsthand the destructive nature of secrets, or “compartmentalization,” even when the purpose is good, and May suffers that lesson quite bitterly.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S01E16 – Review

By: Paul Zbyszewski (story)

The Story: It’s not easy sneaking up on a Clairvoyant.

The Review: I don’t know that I’ve ever been interested in the Clairvoyant’s true identity so much because I really care who he is, but rather because I want confirmation as to whether psychic or precognitive powers really don’t exist in this world. As you can see in this episode, S.H.I.E.L.D. agents seem rather reluctant to believe they do, which seems rather small-minded for people who have encountered gods, pyro-kinetics, and ghosts.

By the time I watched this episode, I was mostly signed onto the theory that the Clairvoyant is someone inside S.H.I.E.L.D. I then lost all hope that a telepath would be revealed at the end of the search when Coulson convinced his superiors to start searching for telepaths. It’s a mystery rule of thumb: the first leads rarely pan out. In real life, going down a list and tracking the most logical suspects is the way to go, but in fiction, it’s never that straightforward.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S01E15 – Review

By: Shalisha Francis (story)

The Story: The ultimate girly-girl and ultimate tomboy have it out, once and for all.

The Review: As I mentioned in my review of Loki: Agent of Asgard #2, Lorelei is a minor figure in the Thor mythos—minor in the sense that she’s far less likely to be recognized than the Warriors Three, Sif, or even her big sis Amora.  That makes her a somewhat unusual, but safe choice for S.H.I.E.L.D.’s first bona fide supervillain.  We’ve had power players on the show before, but Lorelei is of a different level altogether.

You can see that right from the cold open, in which her voice alone puts a whole motorcycle gang under her permanent sway and she sends her first conquest flying with a single flick of her wrist.  True enough, her army of men never grows much beyond this first group of desert rednecks, but her potential for wide-scale chaos is very clear.  In that sense, she’s the perfect S.H.I.E.L.D. target, someone who poses a major risk that they can preemptively shut down.

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.