Agents of SHIELD. Season 1 Discussion Thread

But it is illegal for Americans to take over foreign lands to setup as a Hydra free zone. And in the MCU the US government is rounding up suspected Hydra, because of their SHIELD employment both within and outside of US borders.

 

Building an island in international waters works around pesky trouble with resltless natives but, since you asked the question...

It's completely illegal to invade a sovereign state right up to the point that the invaders take power, afterwhich the new president for life can pardon himself and all his underlings.

You know, what Castro did, and what Saddam Hussein did twice.

Saddam was the nuts and bolts guy, the number two to some other guy who got his ring kissed between 1969 to 1979. Goebbels and shit, y'know. So Saddam's boss is at the movies when Saddam gets a platoon to take out the movie theatre he was in with machine guns. and he kept power for the next 23 years.

Not a nice man, but effective.

Do you think that the British wanted to acknowledge the legitimacy of the United States?

Minutes of a meeting from the mid 50s came out recently where Winston Churchill is ranting that Gandhi wants to starve to death, let him die.

Wouldn't it be a happier world is Britain still controlled India?

(No it wouldn't. At least I doubt it would.)

If Britain still controlled India, would all Bollywood movies be made in English?

 

But another common thread of Whedon shows is that main-cast regulars often get killed off or written out, and new regulars replace them. I think it was planned all along to set up Ward as a red herring, reveal his betrayal, then bring in Triplett to take his place permanently.

I mean, heck, they successfully made a lot of viewers want to see Ward replaced. People were complaining about him on a number of levels -- he's too boring, he's too aloof, they should've cast a black guy instead for team diversity, etc. I think they were priming us all along to want someone more like Triplett, so that when Triplett came along, we'd welcome him into the ensemble rather than seeing him as an interloper.

 

About that TAHITI report:

Am I the only one who was put in mind of plots from 1950's suspense/horror-genre comic books?

 

Devious! But I wouldn't doubt it.

 

Yes, he sure was!

 

Only one "Baron Strucker" has appeared in the MCU so far in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. But HYDRA in the MCU could potentially have access to immortality/longevity chemicals.

 

We speculate plausible assumptions that are likely to be wrong all the time trying to converge universes. It's okay to fail, as long as you're interesting while doing it. Or at least that's how I am operating in quite a few threads on this bbs.



In Marvel Comics, in the late 1960s, in an uncanny X-men, by Claremont, in a flash back episode, when Xavier knocked up Gabrielle Haller with their child David, which at the writing of the book was probably the late 60s or early 70s... Strucker has collected all his billions in Nazi Gold to one place because he was ready to found Hydra and take over the world.

Magneto pantsed him, and took the gold.



Comics Strucker uses a Hydra verion of the infinity formula. He's old as dirt.

Just becuase we hadn't seen Strucker in First Avenger, it doesn't mean that he wasn't having a gay old time doing donuts in formation with Rommel in Africa, but then the character might not have existed at all conceptually out of frame.

So, still the ame question...

Same guy (that we have never met) or grandson?

 

Somebody must have screwed with the timeline again-- Claremont didn't start writing X-Men until 1975 (or was it 76?).

 

Between my gobble gobble, I claimed this happened during a "Flashback" set near the conception of Xavier's dipshit son. Which was closer to World War 2 than the founding of the X-Men, but I didn't exaggerate how Marvel-Time is on a sliding scale, since most of the teenagers in the X-Men books have been teenagers for the last 30 years and brave Marvel keeps pace with real time in the real world, by pulling all the X-kids' birthdays consistently forward.

The book in question was

1. ^ a b Uncanny X-Men #161, September 1981

For a synopsis on Uncanny 161, and a good look at the cover, consider following the link below...

http://marvel.wikia.com/Uncanny_X-Men_Vol_1_161

 

Conceptually he did exist at the time of the movie - they used him in the tie-in videogame. (Which is obviously not canon, but it at least had Marvel's blessing at the time.)

If he's going by the title of "Baron", I'm inclined to think same guy until proven otherwise.

 

it'd be complicated (probably involving other major world leaders as part of Hydra), but possible.

A lot of people's origins can be "changed", perspective-wise. America's expansion is considered by some done through purposeful genocide of Native Americans...yet we're not as reviled by many as Nazis.

People don't hate Russians the same way as Nazis, despite Stalin's killings.

Hydra LEFT the NAZI's, so they could , in a sense justify by saying they slowed down the Nazi expansion. And did they have concentration camps and do a Holocaust? The Jewish people made sure we never forget -- maybe no group that Hydra attacked had such organization & dedication?

We'll see how it plays out...i predict a resurrected SHIELD by 3rd season...albeit less funded, and less comprehensive.

 

Did May see the video? I'm assuming so. If that's the case, unless I'm missing something big, didn't she just give him the very knowledge the video warned led to mental deterioration? Doesn't that, in effect, render all the brain surgery, mental implants, etc. ineffective?

There could be someone behind all this who wants Coulson to know. It's not too subtle to give him a trigger phrase after anyone mentions the name of the project. Imagine if those who worked on the Manhattan project were given a cover story that they were in Manhattan the entire time. And then, when anyone mentioned their time there (as in, "Weren't you in Manhattan last year?"), they'd reply, "The city so nice, they named it twice."

Or if the Roswell Conspiracy is true, but everyone was mind-wiped to reply, "It's a dry heat," when Roswell is mentioned.

I think it's obvious they wanted Coulson to find out the truth. So it this another of Fury's games? Coulson himself feeling that if he was used as a subject, he should at least know what happened to him? A HYDRA agent dropping the hints so Coulson would lead a high-placed HYDRA spy to the Guest House? Or something more?

Watching the coda to this past week's episode left me feeling the same way I did as a kid, when Algernon started to show signs of mental deterioration and eventually dying.

 

No, the video suggested that the knowledge of having been resurrected could lead to the mental aftereffects. Coulson already found that out months ago. Also, it's not a fact that the knowledge alone triggers the degeneration, just one of the suggested possibilities (and Coulson's continued stability argues that it isn't the right answer). The video also said that it may be a side effect of the resurrection process and that neural rewiring could correct it. And Coulson's already had the neural rewiring.

I don't think that was intentional. I think it was an unplanned side effect of the memory conditioning. He was programmed with certain memories and feelings about "Tahiti," but the programming wasn't subtle or detailed enough for his reactions to be natural and spontaneous. So instead he had an essentially Pavlovian conditioned response to hearing the name Tahiti.

Whereas I think it's clear that they didn't. Remember, this was a prototype procedure, one that we now know had never actually succeeded before. Of course even a successful application of the technique was bound to have imperfections, such as the kneejerk "Tahiti" response and Coulson's general feeling of something being off, and those imperfections would make him want to know what was going on and begin investigating the question of his recovery.

The problem with conspiracy theories is that they rely on the assumption that nothing ever happens by accident or mistake, that everything fits into some perfectly calculated and executed pattern and represents someone's deliberate intention. Reality -- even fictional reality, generally -- is not so well-organized. People and organizations screw up. Things happen by accident or misfortune. Perfect crimes have imperfections that allow their exposure. Look at Operation Insight in The Winter Soldier. That plan came within a hair's breadth of being executed perfectly, but there were enough imperfections in the plan to get Fury wondering, and that led to Cap starting to figure out that something was wrong, and they and Widow dug deeper until they discovered the truth. Does that mean that Alexander Pierce wanted Fury to discover the truth all along? No, it means HYDRA's plan had flaws. And by the same token, Fury's attempt to resurrect Coulson and cover up the truth had flaws, and digging into those flaws led Coulson to the truth, just like in any detective story.

 

So.

Steve Rogers?

Tahiti Beta Test?

 

So...odds of Coulson being the first successful test subject?

(Assuming that they don't want him to make a Flowers for Algernon/Charly-style exit at the end of this TV series, of course.)

If he is, that makes him not just a "liability" to use Hill's word, it makes him a Highly Desirable Commodity.

 

Okay, good point. Still gives me the "Flowers for Algernon" feeling and even moreso at this point. It also leads to the whole "Coulson is unwinding" bit, which I wonder if they're going to bring up more in Season 2. Fury had May checking up on Coulson, to cover this, but what about Hill? Does she know everything? If so, why is she okay with leaving Coulson out in the wild?

And that Pavlovian response is to the very project's name. I'm no expert, but if it were me, I might have chosen a different fake location than the very project's name.

As a kid, I had a crush on a girl named Shayna. I was hanging out with a friend one day in middle school and we had just walked/biked/ran. We happened to be watching an episode of Saved by the Bell where one of the characters was named Shayna. Every time they mentioned her name on the show, I used my sore muscles as an excuse to let out an "ow." It was my early teenage way of letting my friend in on a secret, without saying it out-loud. I was hoping he'd pick up on it, but he never seemed to.

I look at Tahiti as something similar. Maybe others would pick up on it, maybe not, but I think a super-secret project with a triggered response to the project's name as a side-effect is a major problem.

 

You're arguing from retrospect there. Remember, nobody in the show had any idea that "Tahiti" was the name of the project until they actually stumbled upon the sign saying T.A.H.I.T.I. -- well after they'd learned of Coulson's resurrection and the project's existence. So the name Tahiti was never, at any point, a clue to the existence of the project; rather, all the other clues led them to the project that, as a final punch in the gut, turned out to be named T.A.H.I.T.I.

After all, there is a real Tahiti which is famous as a paradisical vacation destination, so that in itself serves as a perfect red herring. The name would naturally lead people away from the project rather than toward it. The clue was never the name -- the clue was how Coulson reacted to hearing the name. And if the conditioning had been more subtle and his reactions more natural, nobody would've suspected a thing.

Which is exactly my point: It was a major flaw in the programming, one that tipped Coulson off that something was wrong and led him to seek the truth. People make mistakes. As the saying goes, never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. Particularly where the exposure of secrets is concerned. The bigger a secret is, the harder it is to keep, simply because it is the truth and will always be the truth no matter how hard people try to hide it. So if people fail to keep a secret, that absolutely does not prove that they wanted it to be discovered. Most of the time, it proves that no coverup is ever perfect.

Again: This is the first time the resurrection process actually worked. It makes perfect sense that there would be uncorrected bugs in the process. Therefore it makes no sense to assume that any flaw has to be there as a result of someone's deliberate design. The process isn't perfected enough to be that controllable.

 

Coulson debuted with the first entry in the MCU, Iron Man and has been with it every since. I doubt that they would do that to the character.