Agents of SHIELD. Season 1 Discussion Thread

Guy did say "if" we wanted, not that we had to. I think I'll head out to Applebee's.

 

The X-Files is a bad example. The writers were obviously making it up as they went along, the main arc collapsed like a house of cards when that series ended.

Many fans ended up preferring the standalone episodes over the mytharc episodes.

 

Maybe I'm not understanding what you meant. You are agreeinng with "Wereghost" about the "season long arc as a slow burn in the background" with the occasional arc episode pushing momentum along? How is this different from what the X-Files did (and this is not a rhetorical question)?

Are you making a distinction betwen the two because Buffy had only season long (overall) arcs while X-Files' arc was series' long? Please explain the difference because I'm not seeing it.

 

I think what we're all saying is that X-Files didn't have an arc structure at all. Just a series of sporadic and increasingly convoluted "mythos" episodes that didn't amount to anything of substance.

By definition a story arc has to have a definite beginning middle and end. X-Files just had a bunch of vaguely related stuff happen, followed by a sudden cessation of said stuff. Soap operas have more cogent arcs than the X-Files.

To give an example of a mini-arc show other than those mentioned, take a look at Stargate SG-1. Each season presented a new adversary (usually in the form of an increasingly powerful system lord.) While most of the season would consist of stand-alones, the ongoing arc would occasionally be referenced as background to the A-stories, with a few episodes to more directly pushing things forward. Then by the end of the season things would usually come to a head, typically altering the status quo for the next season to build on.

 

Yeah, I disagree.

 

You can disagree, but you'd be wrong. Even Chris Carter and the writing staff admitted to not really having an idea where their story was going. This is not bad--Best of Both Worlds Part I was written as a challenge of sorts to the writers of Best of Both Worlds Part II, for example--without any idea how to resolve the cliffhanger.

Wheadon always had an idea what the endgame was when a season was started, even if he did not know the specifics. That makes the difference.

 

My big problem with the X-Files model is that it was literally two different shows that never interacted with each other. There were the Conspiracy episodes and the MOTW episodes. They were just in two different worlds.

What I love is when the Big Bad has random encounters with the MOTW, like they did with the Mayor in Buffy Season Three. I love it when bad guys (and different storylines) bump into each other.

 

That's fun, but you don't even need that to have an overall arc in the background. Writers just need to acknowledge the effects of the arc on the mood of the show and on the effects of the characters. Buffy and Angel did this well.

This used to be something only soap operas did. TNG prided itself on bringing back elements of previous shows without becoming a soap opera. But even then, if you were a fan you wanted them to be a little more character arc driven.

 

Agents of SHIELD: 1x04 "Eye Spy"

 

Well, that certainly doesn't sound at all like the episode from two weeks ago.

 

*Raises hand*

 

:also raises hand: The myth stuff was too unclear and undefined for me.

 

Better episode synopsis:

 

I know they seem determined to make this more of a spy series than anything else... but it's still only natural to expect a show set in the Marvel Universe to have some actual superheroes in it. The longer they hold out on actually showing us any (even some simpler, scaled-down versions), the more I think the general audience is going to slowly lose interest in this show.

I'm just not sure it's enough to have them chasing after mysterious artifacts, rogue agents, and random mutants-of-the-week.

 

^Except that the Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. comic book that this series is nominally based on was itself focused more on spy stories than superheroes. The Marvel Universe has never been exclusively about superheroes; in fact, it was already well-established for its horror, romance, and Western titles before the superhero stuff came to dominate, and they're all part of the same continuity. Patsy Walker was the lead of a romance comic for decades before she became the superheroine Hellcat. Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy originated as the villain in a story in a horror anthology. Even The Fantastic Four was essentially a horror comic for the first two issues before they donned blue tights and started fighting supervillains rather than monsters and alien invaders.

The movies have already established that they can tell a wide range of different stories. Captain America was a WWII epic, Thor was mythic fantasy, Iron Man 3 was more toward high-tech intrigue. Apparently Thor: The Dark World is going to be even more in the epic-fantasy direction than its predecessor, The Winter Soldier is going to be more of a spy story, and Guardians of the Galaxy is straight-up space opera. So they're not trying to make the franchise homogeneous in its focus -- just the opposite. Each work is meant to reveal a different aspect of this broadening universe. We've got superheroes in the movies; the show is about the normal people trying to cope with living in a universe that has superheroes and supervillains in it. It's sort of a cross between Nick Fury and Damage Control.

 

True, but I'm not sure how much the general audience knows about all that. Most likely they see the opening Marvel title, and hear the references to the Marvel movies, and expect to eventually see some of that world in this show at some point.

And at least so far, we're not really seeing "normal people coping with a world of superheroes" either. We're just seeing a handful of agents chasing after weird alien/scifi tech while making cute wisecracks, and then locking the tech away somewhere at the end. They don't seem terribly troubled or haunted by what they're finding at all (at least so far).

 

But "the general audience" are not comic/superhero fans. They're the people who are skeptical of superhero stories and need to have those stories tailored and rationalized and toned down for their benefit. They're the people who want their television shows to be familiar and formulaic, the people who are responsible for the domination of the airwaves with standardized procedurals because that's what they like to see. Marvel has done a pretty good job with outreach to that audience in recent years, making the superhero universe accessible and acceptable to them, but that doesn't mean that audience craves the more fanciful and colorful elements of superhero fiction the way we genre fans do.

It's always important to remember that there are different audiences out there with different tastes. When doing a show like this, the goal is not to cater to any single audience -- especially not a niche audience -- but rather to find a way to appeal to more than one audience at once, to do something that has the niche appeal to satisfy the genre fanbase while simultaneously being grounded and familiar enough that it doesn't scare off the more general audience. That's a difficult balance to achieve, and it's certainly possible to tilt too far in one direction or the other. But it's necessary to keep both audiences in mind.

The whole idea behind the diversity of the MCU is that they're not narrowcasting. They're consciously choosing to diversify the Marvel brand as much as possible. They want their different films to attract different audiences. The last thing they want is for everything they make to appeal to exactly the same demographic with no variation. It's fine if this show appeals to a different audience than the movies do, because that way the overall reach of the franchise gets even larger. If it only appealed to the people who were already fans of the movies, then it would be redundant. I hear people complaining that the show isn't the same as the movies, but it isn't supposed to be. The whole point is to complement them, to go in a different direction.

 

Post Avengers. 2 billion dollars and counting... All movie goers, even if they have never read a comic book, consider themselves comicbook fans.

 

Maybe, but I can't see the people who have no interest in comic books or the scifi genre being all that interested in a show about spies chasing after alien artifacts and mutants-of-the-week either.

And it's not like the superhero genre is some strange, cultish little thing out there anymore. Right now it's about as accessible and mainstream as anything else the masses like to sit down and watch. The Spidey, Iron Man, and Batman movies figured that part out long ago.

 

Ignorance and stupidity can work for us.

The rubes with all the money, buying automobiles at exactly the right moment, so that it looks like advertising works, somehow might not notice that this is about comic books or that it is connected to comics books or the super hero movies.

Yes, people can be that dumb.

You've never talked to someone who didn't know the sides in "World War Eye" or think that World War Eye-Eye has something to do with pirates?