Agents of SHIELD. Season 1 Discussion Thread

It shouldn't absolve them. None of the team has clean hands. Of the four who went in, Fitz was the only one who didn't fire a weapon, but he got them past doors, which he knew weren't being opened for parleying, and he carried and produced a flash-bang-type thing on request, which he knew wasn't just for show and which was used to create the opportunity to mortally wound one of the guards. Fitz is just as guilty as any of them. Coulson gave tactical orders and fired his weapon, and all four of them knew what they were doing.

Coulson made it clear he feels remorse, and under his leadership, the team has appropriately acted so that the guards' sacrifice won't be in vain. Even if it turns out that two (or more) of Coulson's team were evil, it would be wrong for the rest of them to scapegoat the evil members and lay all the blame on the evil members' shoulders, for actions they all cooperated in carrying out.

 

Fake bullets don't put bloody holes in people's skulls.

 

From a new Q&A with Jed and Maurissa...

 

The Marvel Universe is a big place. Deep Space Nine was able to tell stories that didn't step on The Next Generation's continuity. The various CSI shows are able to maintain independent storylines.

And sure, AoS will have to adjust its plotlines to adapt to whatever happens in the movies, but that's no different from what individual Marvel comic titles have to do when a big crossover event like Civil War or Spider Island happens. The goal of the MCU has been to bring the storytelling style of the comics to the screen, and this is a part of it -- except now it's the TV shows that fill the role of the regular monthly titles, and the movies that fill the role of the massive miniseries or crossover events.

What I've heard is that

Spoiler: Age of Ultron

Age of Ultron is going to be less connected to SHIELD than the first movie was. Which makes sense. Again, the movie continuity is designed to stand on its own without the audience needing to follow the TV continuity as well. So it stands to reason that in the next Earth-based MCU movie after TWS, SHIELD would still be gone. So the Avengers in Age of Ultron won't be hanging around on a Helicarrier and answering to Nick Fury. Samuel L. Jackson's already said that Fury's role in the film won't be very large. The Avengers are going to be more on their own, presumably operating out of Avengers Tower (formerly Stark Tower) and relying on their own resources (well, mostly Tony's).

So the connections between AoU and AoS are likely to be relatively small. The film will surely be referenced in AoS just as Thor 2 was and Guardians has apparently been, but they won't be overlapping as closely as AoS did with The Avengers or TWS.

Certainly. It takes far longer to make a movie than it does to make a TV series. The producers of AoS knew about the script to TWS as soon as they went into production, so they've been knowingly building toward this point all season. For any future movie, they'll probably have up to a year's advance notice, enough time to gear an entire season toward setting up the movie, if there's a need to.

It just struck me that what May said about Fury's reasons for assigning her to spy on Coulson might explain why his resurrection hasn't been revealed to the Avengers. May and the team were meant to keep an eye on Coulson and be prepared if something went wrong with his resurrection. That means Fury wasn't sure it would actually work, and that the jury's still out on that issue. So maybe Fury doesn't want to tell Stark and Cap and the others that Coulson's back and then get the call that Coulson's turned into a zombie and May had to take him down when he tried to eat Fitz's brain. He wants to keep the secret until he's sure Phil really is back for good.

Although

Spoiler: TWS

now that Fury is maintaining the cover that he's dead, I guess there's nobody to break the news to the Avengers.

Indeed, the fact that Coulson is still considered dead as far as the movies are concerned is a perfect example of the principle that the films are meant to work independently of the show, that the overt influence goes in only one direction. The show is designed to be an optional piece of the puzzle, something that can be added to the picture but that still leaves a complete and coherent picture if it's left out.

 

I'm disappointed that Hand is dead now like

Spoiler: Captain America: The Winter Soldier death

Sitwell in The Winter Soldier

. I mean, come on, they were among the only characters from the comics that were on the show!

 

Great episode and some great twists that really kept people guessing.

Does this partly explain why we haven't heard anything about whether the show will be renewed for next season? Just announcing that it would continue would be kind of a spoiler. Or for that matter, announcing that it would be brought back but with a new name (Ex-Agents of Shield or whatever) would be hugely spoilerific.

 

This boggles my brain.

Last night's episode was a direct crossover with a major Marvel movie which set an April box office record. It was an amazing excellent episode with huge plot twists.

So, naturally, it got a series low rating for the program.

 

There was a lot of hype that the episode would cross over with TWS, so perhaps viewers who haven't seen the movie yet didn't watch?

 

People who haven't seen the movie yet weren't (or shouldn't have been) watching.

 

Why are people quoting my "a Ward shot the cameras" instead of my edited "and Ward shot the cameras".

So that's how The Walking Dead virus started.

Not to mention Deathlok, -

Spoiler: shown in Building a Universe and next week's trailer.

Major Glenn Talbot, and Agent Eric Koenig

 

Noticed while doing some rewatching:

"I'm a bit of a sweet talker when I need to be. You wouldn't believe what I could talk this son of a gun into"

Garrett, talking to Coulson about Ward, on his first appearence on T.A.H.I.T.I.

 

10 years ago, in the comics, because the Kree had been utterly done over by te detonation of a negabomb, they'd been relegated to gypsie trash that could never rebuild... In Avengers comics there was a story called "Live Kree or Die." which was about a stunt where the Kree where adapting/infecting... Humaniforming (kreeforming?) 5 and a half billion Earthlings into Kree.

Which is a blip compared to what introducing Skrull flesh onto the food table did to America after Reed Richards lost track of some skrulls he hypnotized into believing that they were cows.

Oh, and some guy fucked a monkey in the 80s, which turned out to be an awful idea in retrospect.

 

I saw something later today that said the final rating was revised upwards by 2 tenths of a point, so it wasn't quite the series low.


That said, the fact that they're rerunning this episode next week as part of a doubleheader with a new one is certainly telling about whether Marvel/Disney/ABC themselves thought that some people would hold off on watching last night if they hadn't caught TWS yet.

Yeah, whatever part Shield/Fury/etc will play in AOU, the writers at AOS should have all of those details before they start working on Season 2 (if there is going to be a season 2), so I would expect that if there's anything to be built around with Avengers 2, it'll happen just as impressively as we've seen in the last few episodes of AOS.


Speaking of how the show has been set up and designed right from the very start, last week's episode "End of the Beginning" sure was appropriately titled, wasn't it?

 

Another thing that disappointed me; I saw no ads for the tv show when I was in the movie theater. You'd think they would have done SOMETHING. Maybe over the credits, check out AGENTS OF SHIELD for the full story on Hydra or something like that...

 

^I saw a poster somewhere saying that they did see a commercial for the show before the movie. I don't know if there was one when I went to see it, since I was a bit late and missed the start of the trailers. (Though unfortunately not late enough to miss the trailer for the Adam Sandler movie.)