Agents of SHIELD. Season 1 Discussion Thread

[Reverend]

... it just seems SHIELD could just scoop them up as they're heading to the bases nearest neighbor (which I imagine isn't close).

What SHIELD?

Coulson (and/or Skye) said there were four (or five) bases still with SHIELD while they were at the Hub. If whoever's left scrambling to claim items for SHIELD's side (not to mention Talbot's forces) see a bunch of convicts escaping from the Fridge, they'd presumably have weapons and vehicles against those on foot.

That would pre-suppose that 1) Anyone outside the Fridge even knew what was going on. 2) Weren't too busy dealing with the armed forces of various world governments coming to kick down their doors. And 3) anyone outside of SHIELD even knows the Fridge exists, let alone it's location. Hell even the guy that dose the super-imposed text isn't cleared for that info.

The chain of command has disintegrated, the infrastructure is in tatters and there are probably Hydra moles popping up everywhere, at all levels. It's pandemonium and Hydra are taking full advantage of the chaos and confusion while they can. Indeed that's clearly one of the reasons for the prison break, to keep what remains of SHIELD pre-occupied chasing down escaped super villains while they buy time to...do whatever it is they have planned.

 

[DEWLine]

Now all they need is a fugitive fleet!

If they do get that second season...well, there's the matter of the non-Insight Helicarriers not as yet dealt with. But that's a story idea that's going to be seriously pricey in the VFX and set reconstruction departments, isn't it? It'd be fun to watch, but expensive by TV standards.

 

[DEWLine]

Reverend: the Infodump took care of the secrecy of the Fridge's location, surely?

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I would like to think whichever sovereign the Fridge is located in knows its existence. It's hard to miss otherwise.

That still doesn't mean anyone can necessarily respond at a moment's notice to stop HYDRA, though.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

I wonder if they saved the helicarrier sets from Avengers for the Show to use later. At least parts of it.

 

[Aldo]

The problem with all of the honorable mentions is that the MCU is too big. What is one more agent in a civil war?

This is probably me reading too much into it, but he seems like he's Coulson's go to guy who's not part of his team. Barton is the first one Coulson calls when Thor is causing trouble at the SHIELD facility. Granted it's because he wants eyes in the sky, but I like to think Barton was there because Coulson requested him.

I don't think it's an accident that Coulson was also the one to call Widow to tell her that Barton was compromised. Yes I realize it's mostly assumptions on my part, but there does seem to be some evidence that they are on friendly terms. Even if we didn't see it in the films.

 

[Turtletrekker]

So is the shield team absolved from killing those two guards for Skye? Garrett and Ward shot them (a Ward shot the cameras).

Oh, good catch. Maybe that was another clue that they were really not nice people. It'll be fun to go back through the season and look for such clues.

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

And then in "Seeds," there's a really nice moment where Skye is standing at the wall of valor, and we hear Coulson's voice off-camera saying that the world is full of evil, pain, lies and death -- and the camera pans and lands on Ward when he says "lies" and "evil."

Here is another one from "End of the Beginning", when Coulson is confronting Thomas Nash, the faux "Clairvoyant"...

Spoiler: spoiler coded for space reasons

...and then...

...Re-watching the whole season on disk will be very interesting indeed.

 

[DEWLine]

No doubt. Binge-watching the whole season is going to repay the time investment handsomely for a number of us.

 

[Yminale]

The problem is that Captain America: The First Avenger explicitly described Hydra as a wing of the Nazi Party. Schmidt may have eventually rejected Hitler, but that just means he wanted to be führer; nothing about this implies a rejection of Nazi or fascist ideology per se.

Nor does it preclude it. It's certainly possible for a single party to have ideological schisms within it -- even for one party to split into two rival parties, as with the evolution of the 18th-century Democratic-Republican Party into the modern Democratic Party and Republican Party.

I think you are over-thinking this. HYDRA agents are Nazis because they are associated with Nazis. You may state that is illogical or unfair but good grief MCU isn't meant to be deep or complex. Any group that strives for world domination will be compared to the Nazis because people associate Nazism with world domination. The fact that the Nazis had a bizarre and perverse ideology is ignored by the average person.

 

[FPAlpha]

I wonder if they saved the helicarrier sets from Avengers for the Show to use later. At least parts of it.

It's a huge set and i don't believe they store something big like this without plans to actually use it regularly in some capacity.

They might have known by that point how Cap 2 will change Shield so i believe they scuttled the set for good and it wouldn't fit into the TV show either because now that Shield is gone how would they operate something that big and costly?

 

[Avalon]

BTW, the thought just occurred to me that Triplett had a second knife on him when he gave one to Simmons since he pulled it on one of Hand's agents. Kind of devalues the trust he showed a bit...

No, it's the same knife he gave her.

It's a little hard to see, but Simmons tosses the knife to him as he takes down the other agent. (Note the little nod she makes to him just before he starts that move.)

 

[Mr Light]

They could just green-screen the characters onto pre-shot frames of the Helicarrier bridge.

 

[Christopher]

I think you are over-thinking this. HYDRA agents are Nazis because they are associated with Nazis. You may state that is illogical or unfair but good grief MCU isn't meant to be deep or complex.

No, I think Sci's the one who's overthinking it by approaching it as if it were something real. HYDRA works however the writers want it to work. And CA:TFA made a point of separating HYDRA from Hitler and the Nazis as much as possible so that they could tell stories about HYDRA without having to wade into the issues of Nazi ideology, which would make things too serious and troubling for the kind of adventure stories they wanted to tell -- and so that they wouldn't have to try to market children's toys adorned with Nazi insignias. This was discussed widely in the media even before the first Cap film came out -- it's old news that Marvel Studios has been consciously distancing its portrayal of HYDRA from the Nazi Party.

Which is only further reinforced given that in CA:TWS and AoS this past month, the references to HYDRA have been almost completely devoid of any references to the Nazis. It's clear that the producers have no interest in addressing that.

No, it's the same knife he gave her.

It's a little hard to see, but Simmons tosses the knife to him as he takes down the other agent. (Note the little nod she makes to him just before he starts that move.)

Yes, exactly. Simmons throwing the knife back to Triplett was an important story/character beat, because it shows that she trusts him. It's the payoff for the earlier scene with the knife both on an action level and a character level.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

OK, I missed that. Good catch everyone.

I've been obviously disagreeing with Sci, so it seems odd to defend him, but I will say that Marvel seems to want to eat their cake and still have it with HYDRA and Nazis. They want to distance themselves from Nazis to a significant degree with the organization, but they like making "cute" Nazi references like Operation Paperclip and HYDRA fleeing to Latin America to still evoke the feelings of Nazi Germany in the organization. That being said, because of their deliberate distancing, I do agree it isn't fair to criticize the plot by suggesting people wouldn't join an organization with an ideology of which HYDRA has not been shown to have.

 

[Star Wolf]

OK, I missed that. Good catch everyone.

I've been obviously disagreeing with Sci, so it seems odd to defend him, but I will say that Marvel seems to want to eat their cake and still have it with HYDRA and Nazis. They want to distance themselves from Nazis to a significant degree with the organization, but they like making "cute" Nazi references like Operation Paperclip and HYDRA fleeing to Latin America to still evoke the feelings of Nazi Germany in the organization. That being said, because of their deliberate distancing, I do agree it isn't fair to criticize the plot by suggesting people wouldn't join an organization with an ideology of which HYDRA has not been shown to have.

It is still a secret organization and when characters went to their Smithsonian they saw the only super hero fighting the super Nazi's. Jump to the present when everyone thinks Hydra was destroyed 70 years before here is a gunman throwing the double Nazi salute what is a Raina supposed to think?

 

[bbjeg]

OK, I missed that. Good catch everyone.

I've been obviously disagreeing with Sci, so it seems odd to defend him, but I will say that Marvel seems to want to eat their cake and still have it with HYDRA and Nazis. They want to distance themselves from Nazis to a significant degree with the organization, but they like making "cute" Nazi references like Operation Paperclip and HYDRA fleeing to Latin America to still evoke the feelings of Nazi Germany in the organization. That being said, because of their deliberate distancing, I do agree it isn't fair to criticize the plot by suggesting people wouldn't join an organization with an ideology of which HYDRA has not been shown to have.

It is still a secret organization and when characters went to their Smithsonian they saw the only super hero fighting the super Nazi's. Jump to the present when everyone thinks Hydra was destroyed 70 years before here is a gunman throwing the double Nazi salute what is a Raina supposed to think?

Spoiler: CA:TWS Spoiler.

If the helicarriers targeted all "inferior species" at the end of the movie, I would have believed they were Nazis.

A lion isn't a house cat because they're related.

 

[Star Wolf]

OK, I missed that. Good catch everyone.

I've been obviously disagreeing with Sci, so it seems odd to defend him, but I will say that Marvel seems to want to eat their cake and still have it with HYDRA and Nazis. They want to distance themselves from Nazis to a significant degree with the organization, but they like making "cute" Nazi references like Operation Paperclip and HYDRA fleeing to Latin America to still evoke the feelings of Nazi Germany in the organization. That being said, because of their deliberate distancing, I do agree it isn't fair to criticize the plot by suggesting people wouldn't join an organization with an ideology of which HYDRA has not been shown to have.

It is still a secret organization and when characters went to their Smithsonian they saw the only super hero fighting the super Nazi's. Jump to the present when everyone thinks Hydra was destroyed 70 years before here is a gunman throwing the double Nazi salute what is a Raina supposed to think?

Spoiler: CA:TWS Spoiler.

If the helicarriers targeted all "inferior species" at the end of the movie, I would have believed they were Nazis.

A lion isn't a house cat because they're related.

Lebensunwertes Leben

 

[Reverend]

I think it's a fair assumption that as far as the general public are concerned, Hydra were essentially Nazis with fancier weapons. At the very least I doubt the propaganda of the day bothered to make the distinction.

Still, yes, I agree that they are indeed not Nazis...they're worse. I think Zola said it best: "The sanity of the plan is of no consequence...because he can do it!"
An enemy bent on total world domination is much worse in my books if they actually have the capability to pull it off. By contrast the real world Nazi party would never have been able to achieve their stated goals over the long term.

 

[DEWLine]

Hence the "Out of the shadows..." order. Once the mass killings by Helicarrier artillery began, the HYDRA "cat" was going to be out of the bag anyway, right?

 

[Christopher]

Hence the "Out of the shadows..." order. Once the mass killings by Helicarrier artillery began, the HYDRA "cat" was going to be out of the bag anyway, right?

Yes, especially considering that

Spoiler: do we still need to spoiler-box CA:TWS info?

the target list included the President of the United States. Firing a missile into the White House is not exactly a stealth operation.