Agents of SHIELD. Season 1 Discussion Thread

I don't know why people keep saying that alien was alive, it looked pretty dead to me. Missing not just it's lower torso but at least one eye IIRC and some nasty facial wounds to the face and chest. Just because they were able to harvest some unknown compound from the corpse in a preserved state is hardly any reason to assume it's still alive. Some living tissue maybe, but in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, the obvious assumption is that the life-form itself has expired.

 

Or, perhaps, the Bus specifically fills that emotional role? For all the espionage trappings, it still fills that role.

 

Reverend: In any case, that alien - dead or alive - was not being treated decently in any sense. And letting whoever had him keep him looked about as abominable as letting the Clairvoyant acquire him.

And thanks to the guards' "security" measures, there wasn't much time to figure out a good solution.

 

Abominable? I didn't realise SHIELD had a way to contact the Krell, much less established a protocol for repatriating any discovered remains. If it had been a Chitauri or Jotun corpse in that facility, would it have made any difference? Indeed, we don't even know what they were doing exactly, besides taking samples for analysis and research.

 

No, but someone did claim territorial sovereignty to an oil rig.
Principality of Sealand

 

And there's a comic book about someone who does try to claim one of those garbage vortices: Great Pacific, published by Image.

Anyway, back to the SHIELD discussion...

 

What makes it different is that the agents are acting as individuals, not for the agency. They are not on any mission. They are acting against orders for their own personal goals.

Sorry Christopher, but that should be completely obvious by now. For example, look at the first time they went up against Quinn, it was on orders and they were acting as professionals. In that case, yes they violated numerous laws, but they weren't doing it to satisfy their own personal needs.

If James Bond was robbing banks and killing security guards to get money to pay for his aunt's operation, you would have a point. But he doesn't, and you don't.

It is like trying to argue that The Punisher isn't breaking any laws in his crusade against the Mob because the Mob is illegal. Frank Castle is constantly breaking laws; it is still a compelling story that we enjoy reading.

In "TAHITI" the team is NOT working for the Agency. They have taken off on their own, using Agency resources, vehicle, weapons, and stolen information to engage in their own private agenda. This is DIFFERENT. They stopped being spies in this episode.

 

We obviously don't know the process, but they seem to be retrieving body fluid on an ongoing basis. This would indicate the alien is still alive - possibly brain dead - in order to keep producing that fluid.

It's also possible it was a corpse and there was a limited amount of body fluid available which would support your idea.

 

What organization owned the site? U.S. Military, Area 51 style. Which is why Fury had to argue so heavily to get Coulson in there, having had the clearance to know about it and what those drugs and technology could do, and why SHIELD doctors would have been brought in and why the place wouldn't be under SHIELD's control once they were done.

As to why it was all but abandoned, no idea. Maybe they were focusing on the ship he had likely crashed in or on his nega-bands/exo-suit at another site, and part of the guards' duty was to regularly switch out the vials of compounds they were extracting. Clearly someone was actively managing them as we could see fluids going in and out of the stasis chamber.

Who was the alien? Like I originally suggested much earlier in the thread, Captain Mahr Vehl. With all the same ideas you cited as your own in the previous post.

As to why he was in the state he was in? Any number of reasons, but most likely he crashed (or was shot down) and was severely wounded in the process. Maybe beyond what his ability to heal was capable of at the time. From there, there's all kinds of possibilities to consider, not all of which are malign or as evil as you keep suggesting. For example, maybe he actually asked his rescuers to extract the drugs, offering them a portion of it for their own use/research in exchange for making a super-concentrated version of it that would allow him to heal the rest of his body. Or maybe the government was just as paranoid as they're often portrayed about alien "invaders," especially after NYC, and they did effectively imprison him and do disturbing research on him, keeping him in the stasis we saw him in precisely because he has the power to phase through any other type of prison they could come up with. Maybe a little bit of both, maybe none of the above.

But it's pretty clear that the place was, in no way shape or form, HYDRA for all the reasons specified earlier (namely, Fury wouldn't have handed it back to them when he was done, and mentioning of that would certainly have been in any of the same files that referenced the place to begin with). If it was Centipede, I'm sure the guards would have had some kind of augmentation if they were defending something of that value, and why would the Clairvoyant need to learn about it if that were the case? etc.

 

Do you know who S.W.O.R.D. is?

 

Well there you're getting into definitions of what constitutes "dead" and "alive" which is a tricky one since the more our medical science develops, the more blurry the line gets.

That's extremely pertinent given that the episode centres around Coulson having been most definitely dead and brought back, as it turns out with the aid of something harvested from this "dead" body.

So yes, I don't see any reason why it may not manage to rebuild itself in time, but at the same time that needn't mean it's currently "alive" as we understand the term. Conversely, there's no reason to presume he/it *will* come back either. I mean it wasn't that substance alone that brought Couson back, it only repaired his tissue damage. It took a much more invasive procedure to get his brain and central nervous system going again. Even if once it's out of that pod the body will be able to regenerate--in defiance of the principles of conservation of mass...but we'll let that slide since so is the Hulk--in all likelihood what will be left is an anatomically healthy brain dead vegetable...which is still buried under a mountain of rocks.

I'm not discounting the possibility that this thing will come back later, it probably will one way or another. I just feel that if they're really setting up Sky as Captain Marvel, it'll be sufficient to simply say she got her abilities from that thing and have done with it. I guess I just don't see Mahr Vehl as being worth bothering with...and if I'm totally honest, I'm not crazy about the idea of the first "true" female super hero in this franchise being an inferior derivative of a male counterpart.

It'd be nice if she could find her identity on her own without patterning herself after the "real" Captain Marvel.

 

Yes, and people have declared that off-limits when I first mentioned it way earlier in the thread because it probably belongs to the X-Men franchise due to its creative origins.

And if it was SWORD, why were they housing it on Earth rather than on a space station, moonbase, or something along those lines?

 

What I'm actually confused about is why the Clairvoyant couldn't have learned any of this. Fury, the doctor, and the two guards likely all knew what was going on at the very least, and there had to have been many others in the know. I could understand why getting into Fury's head would be hard (I'm sure he has some Wolverine-type mental walls in place), but the others?

 

The problem is that there was a data trail, and I'm sure there are files hidden away somewhere with more detailed information. I mean, it only took the wonder twins a few seconds to "hack" into SHIELD's systems and find the information they were after, and all the drugs and whatnot were in the file Coulson had. So someone like MODOK should have been able to pick up all that same data in no time. Considering the resources he has at his disposal, including all the augmented super-spies, and the fact that the base only had two dudes defending it... yeah. I just don't see how that works, either.

As for psychic powers not existing, we know that's not true. Just because they can't mention the X-Men doesn't mean they don't exist. It is odd how adamant Coulson is on the subject, though.

I have to admit, I have a hard time taking MODOK seriously. Not just because of the way he looks, but because of Marvel themselves.

 

They could have been S.W.O.R.D. year one. S.H.I.E.L.D. (in Captain America: TWS) looks like they just acquired Stark tech. Space fortresses may be far ahead.