Agents of SHIELD. Season 1 Discussion Thread

I think I liked it a little better than the pilot too. It did a better job fleshing out the characters and the action sequences were great.

 

With the fondness for old things, perhaps he is Coulson's memories somehow downloaded into the Human Torch android shown in the Captain America movie. I can't recall, was that Human Torch a mechanical being, or a synthetic being that was more akin to flesh and blood?

Also, were wrist radios a S.H.I.E.L.D. thing, or was that an homage to Dick Tracy?

 

Agreed. There's probably more to it that her just being a double agent. Unless they want us to think there's more in which case the twist is that there isn't more.

 

If I remember correctly, the original Human Torch once provided a blood donation to a human woman, who gained flame powers as a result. (Spitfire, back in the original run of The Invaders.)

That sounds pretty organic to me.

 

Either the Serpent Society or the Sons of the Serpent. Take your pick.

 

You're not wrong. Between that and Baron Blood's bite and a couple of other factors, she's a Daywalker herself.

Wishing Paul Cornell could revisit that MI-13 stuff in the comics...

 

Not bad. It's a good idea to do a bottle show as the second episode -- it saves money after the expense of the pilot, it allows a focus on the characters and their interplay, and it lets us get to know the primary setting better. We did get to know the characters a bit better, and there was more conflict and potential for conflict explored.

Having the McGuffin be leftover HYDRA tech was a nice use of MCU backstory. Although I'd still like to see mentions of Marvel continuity that hasn't been mined by the films yet. I'm hoping that antimatter meteorite that almost devoured Miami is from a real comic-book story. (It would be neat if they occasionally referenced plotlines from classic Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD comics as past SHIELD missions.)

It also took a moment to sink in for me that the display tech Fitz-Simmons were using, with 3D graphics floating in space and manipulated by hand, was the same as Tony Stark's interfaces. It makes perfect sense that the government or SHIELD would use Stark Industries technology.

Leonor Varela seemed a bit young for the character she was playing (well, she's 40, so not impossibly young), but she was awfully hot, so I'm willing to forgive it.

Once more we get Coulson reflexively saying "It's a magical place" any time Tahiti is mentioned. I think that confirms that this is more than an in-joke -- it's some kind of Pavlovian conditioned response, part of whatever was done to falsify his memories.

The Samuel L. Jackson cameo in the tag scene (I can't really call it post-credits since it was pre-credits) was fun, but unfortunately it was nothing more than that. The scene didn't add anything of note to the story of the episode itself and didn't set anything up for future episodes. It didn't even seem that plausible -- would Fury really get that upset about the repairable damage to a single aircraft? It was just there for the sake of being there. I feel that cheapens the idea of the post-credits scene, makes it more a matter of formula than something with purpose. The tag scenes in the MCU movies have all been about setting up future films -- except for the shawarma gag, but that served the purpose of hilariously subverting our expectations about post-credits scenes, as well as being a great brick joke and a meaningful character moment in its own way. This one just felt forced. I hope later ones get better.

 

I don't think F & S are interchangeable. Fitz is the more neurotic, sensitive, timid one while Simmons is more upbeat and reassuring. As we heard here, she's the one who prodded him to go into the field, while his preference would've been to stay in the lab. And she was friendly and welcoming to Skye while he was rolling his eyes and barely seemed to tolerate her. Aside from both being technobabble-spewing science nerds, they're pretty much polar opposites. Which is no doubt why they make a good team -- they complement each other.

 

Agreed that Ward was more likable this time.
Good catch on the plane's 616 number, I must've looked away cause I don't recall that moment at all.
It was clear from the pilot that Sky is going to be a layered character, telegraphed as it is, I'm curious to see where they go with it all.
Leonor Varela is now in her second Marvel Comics role as she was the love interest in Blade II as well. She hardly looks to have aged over the past decade.
"The Calvary" is going to get lots of great scenes like she got tonight. "You guys talk too much"
The SLJ as Fury cameo was great. While it can be said it added "nothing" and I wouldn't fully dispute that it does show that Fury is keeping tabs on Coulson's new assignment. So two missions in and the plane gets damaged is good subterfuge for "checking up" on not only Coulson (whose mystery is still hanging), but the team as well. Since Fury specifically mentions Skye it's worth noting he's aware of her presence and what danger(s) that poses, but is aware of what possible benefit she may also be.

 

Think you missed Coulson's "more like an afterlife" comment this episode. The line definitely hints that he has some idea of what he's been through.

Also, are we going to have to wade through 6 pages each week of comments in response to people posting as they watch the episode? ugh.

 

I did not miss that line. Of course he knows that he was briefly dead and brought back; there was that whole exchange last week where he said he'd been clinically dead for eight seconds. But the point is that there's clearly some secret about how he was brought back; we know from Ron Glass's doctor character's exchange with Maria Hill that the Tahiti vacation Coulson believes he had didn't really happen, and "he can never know" what really did. Clearly his memories of Tahiti are false, and the parroting of "It's a magical place" every time he hears Tahiti mentioned is suggestive of a post-hypnotic suggestion or -- if you like the LMD hypothesis -- a programmed response.

And who knows? Maybe "magical" is itself a clue to how he was brought back. They do have a Doctor Strange movie in development, don't they?

Granted, but it was better integrated with the story. If you think about it, it was set up in the very first line of the film. The movie opened with Tony narrating about the film's events, which just seemed like an unusual stylistic approach; and then at the end we discovered that it had been something entirely literal, that Tony had, in fact, been narrating this story to Bruce Banner. So it's arguably an integral part of the narrative frame of the film.

Which means that, in a sense, the entire film takes place within the post-credits scene!

 

Yes, we all get that it's a conditioned response of some kind. We got that from the moment he first said it. However, there seemed to be something more in the way he said the afterlife line. There was a bit of sadness in the delivery. He may know more about what happened to him than the others think.

 

Nice 2nd episode, and I don't mean the action. It sets up how the show is going to operate. Its going to be a much smarter show than I had anticipated.

The Shield agents obviously have their own lingo and have a set of operating procedures that allow them to anticipate each other's action without having to communicate. So Skye fills in the companion's role in Doctor Who, acting as the audience's guide into the world of these secretive agents and serves as exposition, explain things to the audience. Which kinda means that from a writer's perspective, she would never betray Shield... or at least this team of Shield agents. Yet she's being set up as an infiltrator. I'm not sure if I'm reading too much into this but her hesitation at replying "I'm in." suggests she's decided to switch teams and the message serves to temporarily protect her new found Shield friends from whoever her master is.

 

Well that was a whole lot better. These still don't seem like the greatest Whedon characters we've ever seen, but they at least show a bit more promise than they did before-- particularly the hacker girl and the badass pilot who can seemingly (and hilariously) kick anybody's ass on a moment's notice.

And I liked that they actually took the time to establish the setting and mood properly this time, and introduce the characters in a more natural way. Unlike before where it felt like they were just throwing a bunch of random stuff at the screen all at once.

And I admit it was pretty cool seeing Jackson again as well. I expected it would be just a quick glimpse of him on a computer screen or something, not the kind of extended scene we got where he was commenting on the story and other characters the way he did. So that was a nice surprise.

 

The show really does feel like a comic book come to life, even more-so than the movies have, but pretty much the whole thing was them just reacting to the crisis of the week and if that is the formula going forward it is going to get old real quick.

 

One of several things I liked about the film, and its playful subversion.