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

[JD]

I think he was just trying to teach Malick to broaden his horizons, to try doing something that even he, a super powerful evil world-manipulating billionaire, had never done before.

The thing that I wasn't quite sure about was the final line of the episode, when he was talking to Giyera on the phone and Giyera said he sounded afraid. Did that mean that Malick was afraid that he didn't fit into Hive's new world order?

Btw, speaking of the Neo/Matrix comparison before, the "he sounded afraid" line immediately took me to Starship Troopers. (the brain bug scene at the very end)

I assumed he was just freaked out by the vision he got.
This one was good.
I saw Matthew Willig and Blair Underwood in the credits, so I knew Andrew/Lash was/were going to pop up somewhere, but I did not expect him to just turn himself in like that. I really liked his scenes with May. It will be interesting to see if Lash plays any kind of role in the upcoming episodes.
All of the stuff after Daisy got to the Transia building was great.
The stuff with the vision was cool. I always get a kick of these kinds of stories.
Hive Ward if definitely creepy.

 

[kitik]

Thanks for reminding me guys, appreciated. You're right.

It will be interesting to see if Lash plays any kind of role in the upcoming episodes.

That's pretty much a stone cold certainty, isn't it?

 

[Alidar Jarok]

This episode felt rather cinematic. At least the finale. Filmed differently or something.

It was directed by Kevin Tancharoen (brother of one of the show runners). He should direct as many episodes as humanly possible because they almost always stand out:

3x15 - Spacetime
3x2 - Purpose in the Machine
2x19 - The Dirty Half Dozen
2x13 - One of Us
2x4 - Face My Enemy

He's the one who had the one-take fight with Skye last season (which he tried to beat this episode) and the one where Melinda May face slams her opponent onto the table.

 

[Turtletrekker]

It will be interesting to see if Lash plays any kind of role in the upcoming episodes.

That's pretty much a stone cold certainty, isn't it?

I mean, what possible use could an Inhuman killing machine that only kills Inhumans possibly be when going up against an ancient Inhuman monster who won't kill Inhumans?

 

[Reverend]

Using the foreknowledge of the vision to rehearse the fight ahead of time was certainly novel. I wonder If the idea for that came out of someone watching the cast & stunt team's actual stunt rehearsals.
Either way, there's something oddly endearing about May shouting "bang" at people between all the rolling and flipping around.

I mean, what possible use could an Inhuman killing machine that only kills Inhumans possibly be when going up an ancient Inhuman monster who won't kill Inhumans?

A baffling mystery indeed.

 

[Admiral2]

Using the foreknowledge of the vision to rehearse the fight ahead of time was certainly novel. I wonder If the idea for that came out of someone watching the cast & stunt team's actual stunt rehearsals.

It's like killing two birds with one stone. You're going to have to rehearse the scene anyway, so you might as well do it on camera and get some production value out of it.

 

[jbny67]

I was reminded of when CBS ran the TV movie of Stephen King's Salem's Lot, many many moons ago.

M - O - O - N spells....
Sorry, wrong Stephen King story.

They interrupted with election results just before each planned commercial break. The result was that we missed every single end-of-act cliffhanger moment, and pciked up after each commercial not knowing what had just happened. Obviously it wasn't that bad this time, but I still ended up screaming the same "WHO CAAAARES?!?!?!!?" every time.
News should be told during the news program. Period.

It's especially annoying in this day & age. It was one thing before cable, when you only had a handful of channels.
Today, if someone wanted that information ABC would be one of the last places they would go.
Anyone can easily watch ABC and keep up with the election using a Phone, tablet, PIP etc.
You probably get the info sooner as well.
By the time they broke in to make the announcement, it was "old news".

 

[Mr. Adventure]

Are you kidding? That's all they did throughout most of the episode. They tried to make sure that the people in Daisy's vision stayed at HQ. They spent hours training May to win the fight that Daisy had seen herself having, with the goal of changing its outcome by preventing the guard from triggering the alarm. But circumstances conspired to bring about the predicted outcome. Andrew's arrival meant that May couldn't go, so Daisy went instead. The others planned to stay behind, but once they saw Ward, all bets were off and they had to go after him.

It seemed odd for a soldier like May to accept not going even given the circumstances but I don't know couldn't they send a team into that room? Did Simmons actually have to come along? Could Lincoln find a hockey mask or riot helmet? Just seemed to me if you really want to try to crack the inevitability of events there would be some measures you could attempt. I'm sure I'm wrong about this and will hear about it in detail but that was what was in my head at the time.

 

[Turtletrekker]

It was directed by Kevin Tancharoen (brother of one of the show runners). He should direct as many episodes as humanly possible because they almost always stand out:

3x15 - Spacetime
3x2 - Purpose in the Machine
2x19 - The Dirty Half Dozen
2x13 - One of Us
2x4 - Face My Enemy

He's the one who had the one-take fight with Skye last season (which he tried to beat this episode) and the one where Melinda May face slams her opponent onto the table.

Kevin Tancharoen will direct the season finale.

 

[The Old Mixer]

It's especially annoying in this day & age. It was one thing before cable, when you only had a handful of channels.
Today, if someone wanted that information ABC would be one of the last places they would go.
Anyone can easily watch ABC and keep up with the election using a Phone, tablet, PIP etc.
You probably get the info sooner as well.
By the time they broke in to make the announcement, it was "old news".

That, plus they have the option of just running something at the bottom of the screen. They really didn't have much to report that couldn't have been done that way.

 

[Christopher]

That, plus they have the option of just running something at the bottom of the screen. They really didn't have much to report that couldn't have been done that way.

At least now we have the option of On Demand and online viewing to catch up on any part of the episode we missed. I still remember the "Good Night, Central City" episode of the first The Flash TV series, back in May '91. Two guest characters got into a big fight, they wrestled over a gun, the gun went off between them, there was a tense moment as they both stood there... and then Dan Rather cut in with a special bulletin about how President Bush had had a minor heart issue and been taken to the hospital. He reassured us that it was totally harmless and Bush would be fine, yet he still spent half an hour talking to reporters and medical experts about it, and so I didn't see the last half of that episode until years later. (It was pretty easy to guess which one of the characters would die, but still, talk about the worst possible moment to interrupt!)

 

[The Old Mixer]

AIR, it wasn't really so much about Bush's condition per se, as the news agencies wanting to know if, at any time, Dan Quayle had assumed the role of president.

 

[Commander Richard]

Was it all about social responsibility or ratings?

 

[The Old Mixer]

It was about the scoop. President Bush had a spell but he's perfectly fine wasn't news. President Quayle was.

 

[Christopher]

Wow... Looking at the current slate of Republican candidates, the idea of a President Quayle suddenly doesn't seem so bad...

Was it all about social responsibility or ratings?

Back then, CBS News still had plenty of integrity as a journalistic outlet. CBS had built up a well-deserved reputation as the premier television news source, thanks to greats like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, and Dan Rather was the inheritor of that tradition and he took it seriously. I'm sure the prime concern was to keep the public posted on a story of national significance. The only problem is that they were trying too hard, since it wasn't a big enough health scare to really warrant a whole half-hour of coverage, at least in my opinion.

 

[jbny67]

Wow... Looking at the current slate of Republican candidates, the idea of a President Quayle suddenly doesn't seem so bad...

Never in my life would I have believed that this would ever be said without it being a joke.

 

[The Old Mixer]

The only problem is that they were trying too hard, since it wasn't a big enough health scare to really warrant a whole half-hour of coverage, at least in my opinion.

In retrospect (and by that, I'm including right after it aired), no...but there was the potential that history had been made for a few minutes there.

Wow... Looking at the current slate of Republican candidates, the idea of a President Quayle suddenly doesn't seem so bad...

 

[Reverend]

It's like killing two birds with one stone. You're going to have to rehearse the scene anyway, so you might as well do it on camera and get some production value out of it.

Actually they probably rehearsed the rehearsal scene too. That must have been bizarre to witness.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Fitz's description of time as the 4th dimension argues in favor of its mutability-- if the three spatial dimensions are not fixed, why would the 4th? If they wanted the future to be immutable, he should have said that time is governed by quantum uncertainty and the act of witnessing it collapses the wave function.

 

[Reverend]

Fitz's description of time as the 4th dimension argues in favor of its mutability-- if the three spatial dimensions are not fixed, why would the 4th? If they wanted the future to be immutable, he should have said that time is governed by quantum uncertainty and the act of witnessing it collapses the wave function.

I don't think the idea is that time itself is governed by it, only our perception of what we call events. In that witnessing "the future" fixes us on that particular path through it. The rest of time is still there and always was, we just went a different way.

I liked Fitz's practical demonstration. Reminded me of Carl Sagan's "flatland" bit from Cosmos.