Agents of SHIELD. Season 1 Discussion Thread

I'm hoping this episode is good. I'm starting to lose faith in SHIELD. I would never guess that Joss Whedon had anything to do with it if he wasn't in the credits. I'm a huge Whedon fan, and I love all of the shows he did before. Not every episode of his old shows were always great obviously, no show has only good episodes, but I'd be hard pressed to find a Buffy/Angel/Firefly/Dollhouse episode that has outright bored me as much as, say, The Asset (ep 3, with the gravity stuff) did, or characters as boring as Skye and Ward. SHIELD seems to work best when Skye and Ward are background characters, like in Eye Spy where they only had a few scenes and they were actually interesting in small doses. When it starts spending a huge amount of time talking about Skye/Ward, or hinting at a relationship between them, the show just falls apart and becomes almost unbearable. I just wish this show was a bit less generic crime/spy show and was allowed to have a bit more personality. I'm still going to keep watching the show, but I hope we get more episodes like Eye Spy and less episodes like The Asset.

Also, I just looked it up, and Scorcher is the name of a fire based Marvel villain, so I am glad to see they at least used a bit of the Marvel universe in the last episode outside of extremis stuff.

 

Joss does almost have nothing to do with it.

He's teaching his brother how to ride a bike.

Training wheels my ass.

 

I have to wonder how much influence Jeph Loeb has on the day-to-day. At least as far as animation goes, he has yet to produce much of anything that I care about for Marvel.

 

I think you're forgetting that Jed Whedon already has a fair amount of television experience, including stints as a staff writer on Dollhouse and a co-producer on Spartacus. So, in fact, he has more TV-production experience now than Joss Whedon had when he started Buffy.

And of course Maurissa Tancharoen has done it all alongside him, something you neglected to mention. And let's not forget that Jeffrey Bell is also a showrunner here. He has extensive prior experience.

 

Aristotle was no Plato, and Plato was no Socrates.

I've seen Jed's credits, and he doesn't have his own voice.

 

Cue flying car.

 

Parachute? Did we all not see the flying car sitting on the ramp! Lame.

 

Eh, maybe it doesn't work at great altitude? Anyway, very good episode. Liked it a lot.

 

A pretty good outing. The show actually is getting better.

- Love the episode title... FZZT! The sound of an electric shock.

- Lots of sudden camaraderie that we've never seen before. I liked it. You could see Whedon's fingerprints all over it.

- Typhoid Mary was mentioned.

- Fitzsimmons is an odd little entity. You'd think that they're an item but the male half is interested in Skye who knows this but deflects his advances. So what are they? Psychically linked after all? Just really good friends?

- I thought that Fitz was going to take Lola to go after Simmons.

- Ward came off as more comical that heroic. Maybe I feel that way because they were making fun of him.

- Maybe the Thor 2 tie-in will deal with How Coulson came back.

 

I actually thought they were going to kill the girl. Joss tends to off a major character in the first few episodes of a new show. I would have been sad to have seen her go, though! But it would have given the surviving character a personal tragedy to deal with, and bonded the team together, and then you could have introduced a new character as an outsider.

 

I think Fitzsimmons are just close co-workers. Maybe "at most" step-siblings. I don't think Fitz is as interested in Skye so much as he's just attracted to her and feels the need to impress.

I'm beginning to think more and more there's no mystery or anything great that happened to Coulson. I think it really is as simple as that he died and was [somehow] revived. Whether that revival was Earth technology, Asgardian or otherwise remains to be seen. But I'm no longer thinking LMD, clone or anything along those lines. His death was just, well, simply retconed.

Again, a good episode. Really enjoyed and think the series is really growing and getting better.

Like in Firefly when in the first few episodes he killed off.... Well, he killed...

Darn.

Anyway, Joss's involvement in the series seems to be pretty limited so I doubt he's got much influence in the regard to the longevity of characters. For a moment I expected Simmons to die as well but when I realized there was enough time in the episode left for the solution to come about.

 

They'd never do that. Then we'd have to start calling Fitzsimmons "Fitz".

Actually, the thought crossed my mind too but this doesn't strike me as the kind of show to make dramatic changes like that. At least not in episode 6.

 

Yeah, sounded like they were describing a near-death experience. Coming back cooler is even a side effect. Now how he came back remains to be seen.

 

Well then there's the method of *how* he was resurrected. Which may be Asgardian resurrection chamber or some other Marvel entity or system. But I think at the base of it all, we're talking simple "brought back to life" rather than anything more sinister.

 

Or maybe Ward does not know how to fly it.