Agents of SHIELD: Season 3 - Discussion (SPOILERS LIKELY)

[Christopher]

^There's a new Power Man? Well, I guess Luke Cage isn't using the name anymore, so it's up for grabs.

Bigger question: With Squirrel Girl on the team, why do they need anyone else?

 

[RJDiogenes]

^ During Sinkiewicz, it was a great book too.

I've never been a big fan of Sinkiewicz (well, he was okay when he thought he was Neal Adams) and he was totally inappropriate for New Mutants, which was, originally, about a bunch of schoolkids. If you were reading Amazing Heroes in those days, you might have seen an interview with him where he talked about somebody who mailed in the first couple of issues that he did, asking that they be removed from the sales figures-- unfortunately, he didn't mention any names, because that was me.

Avengers World.

Is there anybody who's not an Avenger these days? And have they merged all of their alternate universes?

In Avengers World Sunspot does joke that he's coming off as a villain, but the more resounding point is that with the right leadership, AIM is redeemed as a new force for good on Earth. They've figured out how to save the world and make a profit while doing it, so AIM under Mr DaCosta is actually a better AIM to work for than it ever was with MODOK in charge.

Is it a publicly traded company?

As shown in the current New Avengers series?

Sunspot's got the following people on board:

If it's his private squad, I wonder why he calls them Avengers. You'd think a big-time businessman would want trademarkable branding.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

See, New Mutants is about kids, but that doesn't mean kids don't encounter darkness in their world. The Demon Bear Saga is great for that reason, it's about exploring the loss of ones parents and it's about friendship, but it doesn't transform them into adults (after all, Sinkiewicz was just the penciler, the writer was the same before and after).

Plus, Sinkiewicz was the first to draw Warlock and he's the ultimate child.

 

[The Old Mixer]

I found the shift in art style too jarring to appreciate whatever was going on in the story. It looked like somebody threw up all over the page.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Roberto is/was an Avenger in the normal fashion, and eventually the team he was on needed a new leader, he stood up to the plate, which is no different from when any other squad passes batons. Using Stark's money is about as compromising as using Sunspot's money. It's just a team autonomous from Stark's money, which is also happening in one of the other books where they sell plush dolls of Deadpool to make ends meet.

Steve Rogers: "The UN finally figured out our secret. We'll save the world even if they give us nothing."

...

Spoiler: I don't know how the world transitioned back from Battleworld, but...

Ms. Marvel described the end of the world as a non event. So everything happened right up until "The End" including the convergence with Earth 1610, so battle world never happened according to the present. Although we don't know who retained memories/life experience/scars of Battleworld after the miniseries will have finished, if anyone.

 

[RJDiogenes]

^^ So there's no "Avengers Association" that coordinates the zillion existing franchises? I could start my own Avengers team and not get a cease-and-desist from the Maria Stark Foundation?

See, New Mutants is about kids, but that doesn't mean kids don't encounter darkness in their world. The Demon Bear Saga is great for that reason, it's about exploring the loss of ones parents and it's about friendship, but it doesn't transform them into adults (after all, Sinkiewicz was just the penciler, the writer was the same before and after).

I think Claremont wrote to his artist. There's no problem with kids having to face adversity, but I just feel that nightmarish style was wrong for the ambiance (but, of course, Claremont was going into torture mode himself-- look at what he did to Kitty in the K&W mini). I felt the same when Sinkiewicz was on FF. If he was appropriate for anything, it would be some kind of Horror book, but I honestly didn't like him no matter what.

Plus, Sinkiewicz was the first to draw Warlock and he's the ultimate child.

I never liked Warlock either. Probably because he was created by Sinkiewicz. Unfortunately, in terms of art and plot, New Mutants lost me when McLeod (and Buscema) left.

I found the shift in art style too jarring to appreciate whatever was going on in the story. It looked like somebody threw up all over the page.

Indeed. And the thing is, I love surrealism, but there's something about Sinkiewicz's styly that just flatly turned me off.

 

[Sci]

Ultimately, it's what the show is about: the conflict between SHIELD and Hydra. Complaining about that is like complaining that Harry Potter keeps using the Death Eaters.

seems like an excuse for poor writing and a lack of imagination to me. There are more villains than Hydra in the Marvel universe that SHIELD has gone up against. At this point, it's drawn out, boring, and we're stuck with piss poor acting from #1 bad guy Ward. Enough already...

I'm still interested. I've always felt that the show has yet to dig deep enough into Hydra's ideology to really understand what motivates Hydra's people, why they believe in what they believe in. I may not like the idea of Hydra-as-ancient-conspiracy, but giving them something they believe in beyond "world domination" does a lot to give Hydra a greater sense of psychological reality. So I don't think it was time to move on from Hydra yet, and I'm glad they've kept Hydra around.

Yeah, as I said last week this is probably the least interesting option they could have gone with, but it's not massively improbable.

Not sure how this new bit of information speaks to why the people in Hydra do what they do since it's apparently a very well kept secret, reserved only for the higher levels.
With that in mind I get the sense that Malick is unusual in that he's a modern day Hydra "head" who's also a true believer, whereas the likes of List, Reinhardt/Whitehall, Zola and von Strucker senior were mostly in it for more pragmatic reasons.

Up until this point I never felt that Hydra's obsession for world domination needed to be justified.
I pretty much take it as read that people who want power and control generally do so because they want to change the world. Usually operating from a belief that the current state of affairs is unacceptable and/or the current decision makers and event shapers are either corrupt, incompetent, philosophically wrong headed or lacking a vital trait (i.e. not being the person who wants them gone.)
It's the same basic drive that propels most politicians. The money, greed and corruption generally come later and in fairly short order. It turns reformists into conservative yes-men, freedom fighters into terrorists and idealists into criminal gangs.

I don't think that a plot to commit the largest singular instance of mass murder in human history -- 20 million people in one fell swoop -- can stem from an organization full of people with the same mundane motivations we see in your local county Republican Party. I think trying to understand characters like this requires us to understand the motivations of real fascists, and what draws them to fascism when they live outside of a culture in which fascism is a widespread phenomenon. It's easier to understand what draws people to fascism when it has become a widespread movement, but Hydra in 2014 was anything but that. What, to make an analogy, draws someone to the Nazi Party circa the Beer Hall Putsch rather than circa the 1929 referendum? And in particular, what draws rank-and-file members to Hydra?

"They want power" is, I think, a somewhat simplified answer that doesn't address the complex motivations that fascist ideology appeals to.

Regarding the idea that the plant Jemma fought in the pond on "Planet Hell" is related to the HYDRA octopus symbol, remember that nothing had ever gone back to Earth from the planet as far as HYDRA knew. So, it would have had to have been something that HYDRA sent through the portal themselves, perhaps an offering to their Inhuman god, for there to be a connection.

I mean, I took it as linked from an out-universe POV, as a bit of meta, not as an in-universe connection.

I don't see why everyone is complaining so much. Hydra was never just a monolithic organization and see no retcon at all that Schmidt founded the modernHydra.

Well (setting aside how much more unrealistic the idea of a millennia-old secret society is), basically, I just like the idea of Hydra as a science fictional offshoot of a real-life evil fascist organization. (Really, I would prefer it if Hydra were more Nazi-like, but of course making them too real in their evil would make it harder for fans to use Hydra as a vent for their own dark sides the way fandom usually likes to do with villains.) To me, it adds a level of verisimilitude to the traditional hero/villain dichotomy.

Plus, I felt there wasn't enough Captain America fighting Nazis in CA:TFA.

Like cousins who beat each other up before saying hello.

Hydra had a plan to kill the President.

"Changing" who the President is, would screw with Hydra's moderate range plans.

If AIM had succeeded, Hydra would would not have been happy.

Plus if HYDRA was planing to kill the guy any way in a surprise attack no one would see coming would they really decide to kill the guy months earlier in an over the top pub[l]ic spectacle.

Why not? After all, Ellis was one of thousands of targets of Project Insight, and I'm sure that target list was regularly updated as new threats emerged. It seems to me that if they already had a president in place who was in their back pocket, that would've probably made it easier to achieve the larger Project Insight. For one thing, the assassination of the POTUS would've made it even easier for Pierce to overcome any civil-liberties objections to Insight, because we all know how quick Americans are to surrender their freedoms and privacy when they feel threatened. And having a Hydra-friendly President Rodriguez already in place when Insight launched and killed thousands of other people would've helped them solidify their takeover -- he could've declared a state of emergency and martial law, made an address to the nation about how Insight was necessary for the greater good, etc. Killing off Ellis first would've been better for Insight, not worse. After all, they'd already infiltrated SHIELD and Congress beforehand -- surely having a man already in the Oval Office would've been desirable as well.

Well, ultimately, this speaks to the question of just what Hydra's goals were after launching Project Insight. Was their goal to simply rule directly, by brute force, from the Hellicarriers and their captured SHIELD (and other military?) bases? Or was their goal to use the chaos immediately following their 20 million-person mass murder to seize control of the remainder of the government, and use the surviving structures of government to rule from the shadows? This is still unclear.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

^ During Sinkiewicz, it was a great book too.

I've never been a big fan of Sinkiewicz (well, he was okay when he thought he was Neal Adams) and he was totally inappropriate for New Mutants, which was, originally, about a bunch of schoolkids. If you were reading Amazing Heroes in those days, you might have seen an interview with him where he talked about somebody who mailed in the first couple of issues that he did, asking that they be removed from the sales figures-- unfortunately, he didn't mention any names, because that was me.

Man, I loved New Mutants and Sinkiewicz's work. I think he does the best Cannonball, Rahne and Magik. Magik in particular seemed to get some great expressive work.

I never gave it much thought but the sketchy messy line work maybe does make sense for a bunch of teen misfits trying to find themselves.

 

[Guy Gardener]

^^ So there's no "Avengers Association" that coordinates the zillion existing franchises? I could start my own Avengers team and not get a cease-and-desist from the Maria Stark Foundation?

Hickman's Run was about "We need something bigger" (It actually wasn't. That was all just a distraction so that no one noticed that the Illuminati were blowing up a couple alt Earths a month to save 616 as the multiverse was dying.) so Stark invented an "Avengers-Machine" which was built from 40 active members and probably 100s of reserve members that could be called in for emergencies and resource specific missions.



I wonder if the Maria Stark Foundation was handing money out to Osborn's Dark Avengers during the Dark Reign and the 50 State Initiative?

can you imagine the letters sent back and forth between the Great lakes Avengers and the Maria Stark Foundation over the years?

"Give us money!"

"Cease and desist!"

"Give us money!"

"Cease and desist!"

"Give us money!"

"Cease and desist!"

"Give us money!"

"Cease and desist!"

"Give us money!"

"Cease and desist!"

"Give us money!"

"Cease and desist!"

"Give us money!"

"Cease and desist!"

"Give us money!"

"Cease and desist!"

"Give us money!"

"Cease and desist!"

"Give us money!"

"Cease and desist!"

 

[Nerys Myk]

When everybody's an Avenger it kind of loses it's oomph.

 

[Guy Gardener]

According to Luke Cage, every one is an Avenger, except maybe Junkies.

When Ilyanna went into the past to get magic schooled by Doctor Strange before the Avengers and the X-Men really started loathing each other, he was amazed to find out that he would be an Avenger, and said something like "I cannot think of a reason why I would possibly do that."

Now that The Human Torch is a an Avenger, it's pretty clear there's no bouncer at the front door anymore.

 

[RJDiogenes]

^^ Indeed.

When everybody's an Avenger it kind of loses it's oomph.

Really. I remember back around 137, when they started looking for recruits because Vision and Scarlet Witch were off on their honeymoon and so on, Thor mentioned that only something like sixteen people had ever been Avengers, so asking somebody to join was a very big deal.

 

[Lyon_Wonder]

As we know, shield was doing experiments with the Tesseract in the "Avengers" when hydra was still embedded within it's organization and Gideon Malick was in the World Council. I think Malick and hydra intended to figure out if they could use the Tesseract as a gateway to get the ancient inhuman from the planet and back to earth.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

As we know, shield was doing experiments with the Tesseract in the "Avengers" when hydra was still embedded within it's organization and Gideon Malick was in the World Council. I think Malick and hydra intended to figure out if they could use the Tesseract as a gateway to get the ancient inhuman from the planet and back to earth.

That possibility occurred to me, too. The Tesseract seemed to send the Red Skull somewhere, but, even if it killed him instead, a gateway seemed to open up when it did.

 

[Marsden]

If the orb in GotG was a guide, then an average person would have died, but the Red Skull probably did not. He was far stronger than a normal person.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Maybe the ancient HYDRA leader is the Red Skull, transported back in time by the cube. I doubt they'll go there, but....

 

[Turtletrekker]

Natalia Cordova joins the cast as the speedster known as Yo-Yo Rodriguez, aka "Slingshot".

In the comics, Slingshot was a member of Daisy's Secret Warriors team.

 

[Mr Light]

Cool! The more lady heroes the better!

 

[Admiral2]

Cool! The more lady heroes the better!

Agreed.

 

[Marsden]

Maybe the ancient HYDRA leader is the Red Skull, transported back in time by the cube. I doubt they'll go there, but....

That would actually be Cool. I agree with the, but....