Agents of SHIELD. Season 1 Discussion Thread
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All this speculation about who's going to turn out to be a HYDRA agent next just reminds me of how paranoia works. You get betrayed by one person and you start mistrusting everyone, waiting for the next enemy to leap out of the shadows. It's not based on reason, just fear.
If anything, I think the lie-detector sequence was meant to drive home that Ward was the only one with secrets anymore. It did reveal that Ward was hiding something, but Ward was able to fool Koenig about what he was hiding. But Koenig didn't get suspicious about any of the others. I think the intended utility of that sequence, in the writers' minds, was at least in part to allay our suspicions about the rest of the team.
I will concede, just for the sake of fairness, that Coulson wasn't put in the chair. But given how extensively his brain was analyzed and deconstructed during his resurrection, I think that if he'd had anything to hide, Fury would've already found it out then. And of course the movie made it clear that Fury didn't know about HYDRA. So the idea that Coulson was a HYDRA sleeper before his death just does not work.
If anything, I think the lie-detector sequence was meant to drive home that Ward was the only one with secrets anymore. It did reveal that Ward was hiding something, but Ward was able to fool Koenig about what he was hiding. But Koenig didn't get suspicious about any of the others. I think the intended utility of that sequence, in the writers' minds, was at least in part to allay our suspicions about the rest of the team.
I will concede, just for the sake of fairness, that Coulson wasn't put in the chair. But given how extensively his brain was analyzed and deconstructed during his resurrection, I think that if he'd had anything to hide, Fury would've already found it out then. And of course the movie made it clear that Fury didn't know about HYDRA. So the idea that Coulson was a HYDRA sleeper before his death just does not work.
The show itself is a little bit responsible for this. You put in those two twists, with Garrett and Ward, the Ward one being HUGE and you're essentially conditioning viewers to now suspect this type of thing. What it really reminds me of is the credits scene of the Lost finale when they closed out of those shots of an empty beach with nothing but wreckage from the flight on it. The producers couldn't just do some quiet closing shots without creating massive fan theories about what it "meant" because fans had been so conditioned to over analyze everything on the show.
My thought as well, I think having one memeber of the team be a Hydra agent is fine, but any more is just pushing the limits of reasonability.
I wonder if Tripplett is going to become a regular member of the team or if he will eventually scarafice himself to save the team.
NCIS may have taken down, at least from ABC the Agents of SHIELD
I don't follow that. Why would viewers expect a show's writers to repeat the exact same twist they've already used? If anything, the fact that they've already done it should make us expect them to try to surprise us in a different way next time.
Well, maybe Battlestar Galactica is to blame. That whole show started to get boring when its entire storyline got reduced to "Which character will be a Cylon sleeper next?" over and over again.
Where was her license plate from?
When you introduce a concept like HYDRA, yes you should expect this. Like I said everybody is a possible HYDRA agent until proven otherwise. They've infiltrated SHIELD possibly other government agencies. Besides it doesn't make the show repetitive, it makes it unpredictable. Double and Triple agents are staple of spy stories.
In general, I think shows teach their audience how to watch them. I agree that viewers should NOT expect a writer to use the same exact twist twice, which I why I've argued that it'll be lazy writing if that's the direction they go. However, once a show employs a big twist, it starts conditioning it's audiences to expect other big twists. That's why I said the show is a little bit to blame, not for conditioning people to expect another HYDRA reveal, but for conditioning people to expect some kind of big twist coming again soon, which I think people are wrong to guess is another HYDRA reveal.
Good Grief, Christopher this is not about fear. It's fun trying to out guess the writers and the writers have an equal amount of fun trying to fool us. What exactly is there to fear, there are no stakes worth thinking about. As you mentioned in BSG trying to guess who the next Cylon was as fun as watching the show. People came up with all kind of crazy theories and we all had fun picking them apart or finding evidence.
Actually it's the opposite, it was never made clear WHAT Fury knew. He always hold information close to his chest and only releases information that we need to know.
I think it should be kept in mind that the show does not exist in a vacuum, but is a secondary component of a universe driven by feature films. So I think that its plotting is bound to be somewhat constrained by that, and big twists or swerves are likely to be in response to the films, while what goes on between the films will probably be constrained by the need not to disrupt the universe's status quo too greatly. So no, this big twist that happened as a direct result of the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier has not conditioned me to expect similar twists to keep happening again -- at least, not until the next time a new Marvel movie comes out during an AoS season.
I didn't find it fun at all. As I said, I found it boring. They had so many possible directions they could've gone, but they just dumbed the whole thing down to "Hunt the next sleeper." It diminished the series profoundly.
If Fury had known what was coming, he wouldn't have been taken so off guard by it and it wouldn't have come so close to fruition. He knew there was something going on, and he was trying to unearth it, but he didn't know the whole story.
I didn't find it fun at all. As I said, I found it boring. They had so many possible directions they could've gone, but they just dumbed the whole thing down to "Hunt the next sleeper." It diminished the series profoundly.
If Fury had known what was coming, he wouldn't have been taken so off guard by it and it wouldn't have come so close to fruition. He knew there was something going on, and he was trying to unearth it, but he didn't know the whole story.
Just to play Devil's advocate, the fact that Fury did know something was going on, even though he didn't know fully what, is consistent with the theory that he could have been first tipped off to it, by "abnormalities" with Coulson's loyalties when they were reconstructing his brain or whatever, which could be one reason May was assigned to keep an eye on him.
I still think it's ludicrous based on everything we know about Coulson's character from The Avengers and previous movies, but technically nothing in Winter Soldier precludes the theory from being correct.
AoS will fail if it just become a 42 minute commercial for the MCU. It needs to tell it's own stories with it's own characters. Eventually AoS has to influence MCU. Honestly this is my biggest problem with AoS, I want it to be it's own show and not some TV version of the MCU.
Dumbed it down. The paranoia added to the hothouse atmosphere. It was post 9/11 and we didn't know where the next terrorist attack will occur. It was catharthic and honestly "hunting the next sleeper agent" was more entertaining than watching a bunch of people who I wanted to shove out of an airlock bumble around and screw.
It's amazing the human capacity to assume the worse but not be able to deal with it when it happens. Fury made some bad assumptions on who he could trust (namely Pierce) and that's why he got caught off guard.
That is absolutely not what I'm saying. Of course, obviously, it needs to tell its own stories; but it still has to coexist with other works that have precedence over it, and so it has to balance its own needs with the need to grant the right of way to the movies. You can see the same dynamic in other franchises, like in Marvel comics themselves when the storylines in individual monthly series get wrenched off-course by big universe-wide crossover events.
No, it doesn't, because they're not aimed at the exact same audience. A lot of people who go to the movies won't be viewers of the show. It's a given that works in different media are going to have different audiences, even if they're in the same franchise. Heck, that's the whole point of expanding a franchise into different media: to draw in multiple audiences rather than just one. And each distinct iteration has to be able to stand on its own, and it's logical to expect that the most widely viewed iteration is going to need to be independent of a less widely viewed one. As a rule, the influence trickles down from the larger work to the smaller ones. This is why we're probably not going to see references to The Clone Wars or Rebels in the new Star Wars movies, or to see references to Dragons: Defenders of Berk in How to Train Your Dragon 2. (Indeed, Defenders wrapped up its season by bringing a definitive end to all its major story arcs in order to leave a clean slate for the sequel. It even had Stoick give up the dragon he'd acquired during the series, which I'm guessing is because he has a different dragon in the sequel.)
The creators of the biggest, most lucrative work need to be free to do whatever they want, whatever serves that work best. So they can't be shackled by what the smaller-scale works are doing. Any influence from smaller to larger has to be subtle, and as a rule it's best for the smaller work to follow the larger work's lead and try to stay out of its way. Which is no doubt part of the reason that the TV series was built around a character who's now officially dead where the movies are concerned. Indeed, sometimes I suspect that part of the reason Marvel wanted Coulson killed off in the movies was to free him up for use on TV without impinging on what the movies were doing.
Christopher,
The flaw in your argument is the creator have stated themselves that AoS, the one shots, the new series on Netflix are all part of one continuity. Being part of one continuity means they have to influence each other. Of course it won't be in a major way since the movies take precedent but for instance if they wanted to add Daredevil to the Avengers it would have to be the one from the Netflix series. They've already established that there is a REAL Mandarin in one of the one shots so now they are free to bring a new Mandarin (though Trevor may be coming back to). Eventually the Avengers have to find out that Coulson is alive. It's no different if they find out he's a former HYDRA agent.
The flaw in your argument is the creator have stated themselves that AoS, the one shots, the new series on Netflix are all part of one continuity. Being part of one continuity means they have to influence each other. Of course it won't be in a major way since the movies take precedent but for instance if they wanted to add Daredevil to the Avengers it would have to be the one from the Netflix series. They've already established that there is a REAL Mandarin in one of the one shots so now they are free to bring a new Mandarin (though Trevor may be coming back to). Eventually the Avengers have to find out that Coulson is alive. It's no different if they find out he's a former HYDRA agent.
You're still misunderstanding what my argument is. Of course they're part of one continuity. I never said they weren't. I specifically compared them to the Marvel Comics series, which are in the same continuity. Also the various Star Wars TV shows are presumed to be in the same continuity as the movies. But just because two things are in the same continuity, that does not mean they are of equal importance or equal prominence, and it does not mean they will all be watched by the same audience. The movies make far more money for Marvel and Disney, so of course they are going to lead and the shows will follow.
The trick is to make them compatible as part of the same continuity while still making the TV series an optional part of it, designing it so that moviegoers can follow the films without needing to know about the show.
Sure, but that doesn't mean they will. As you say, any references from the shows to the movies would have to be subtle. And the point is that it's still going to be the movies that set the course. If Daredevil or Luke Cage or Melinda May or whoever does show up in the movies, that's going to be planned out months or years in advance and it's going to be at the discretion of the moviemakers, with the shows being structured in such a way as to accommodate what the movies are doing. For all we know, Marvel may already have plans to incorporate the Netflix-show characters into cameo roles in future movies -- or they may already have plans to keep them well apart from future movies. Either way, they've surely already been making plans about these questions for far longer than we've even been aware the questions existed. Anything that happens in the shows is only going to affect the movies if the moviemakers have already decided that's what they want. And if that's not what the moviemakers want, then the job of the shows will be to fit their stuff in around the movie stuff without conflicting with it. And they'll have enough advance notice of what the movies are doing that they'll be able to avoid major inconsistencies.
Maybe, but it's not going to happen on the show's terms. It would have to be something that could work as part of a self-contained movie story, that would be clear and comprehensible to that segment of the film audience that doesn't watch the show. Even when different works do share a common reality, they still need to be accessible individually. It's not a binary choice between being separate and being connected. The goal is to balance both conflicting needs, to have them be both independent and interconnected at the same time. And that is not a simple thing to achieve.
Except that that would be really stupid and would destroy a fan-favorite character and would make bunnies cry.
It's bad enough that we already know what it's like when doves cry, let's not bring bunnies into it.
Off topic - this makes me super sad about Dragons...
Pennsylvania I believe.
Yep.
When the caption gave the location as Ontario I looked to see if the vehicle had ON plates.
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