Has Martin Sheen ever played a Hispanic character? His ancestry is Spanish, not Mexican, BTW.
Agents of SHIELD: Season 3 - Discussion (SPOILERS LIKELY)
- Thread starter Trekker4747
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Which never made any sense, because the Triskelion was already under construction in 1989. What, did the public just think it was the new post office?
Others have said this already, but I think it bears repeating that what Simmons went through was extraordinarily traumatic even if she managed to find some equilibrium on Planet Hell. Comparing this to people who live in a war zone is fairly accurate -- there may be an equilibrium, but you're living in constant fear of imminent death. Finding some comfort from a relationship does not negate this trauma.
For the record, here is a brief timeline (taken from the MCU Wiki) of "4,722 Hours"'s key emotional moments:
3.29 Days: Jemma realizes she needs to find food and water to survive
4.13 Days: Jemma is climbing the ridge and suffers the first sandstorm; two hours later, she discovers the pond and has her first drink of water on Planet Hell. A few hours later, she is attacked by the tentacle creature; after holding the severed limb of the creature for two hours, she gives in to hunger and eats it.
20.5 Days: Jemma grows hungry enough that she decides to hunt the tentacle creature; this is apparently her first full meal since arriving
31.33 Days: Jemma falls into Will's trap. Nine hours later, Jemma is awake and encounters Will for the first time.
32.63 Days: Will realizes Jemma is real.
34.33 Days: Jemma introduces herself to Will.
35.05 Days: Jemma escapes from captivity, but is then rescued by Will from the Monster. Total time spent in captivity by Will: 4 days.
62.08 Days (2 Months): Jemma shows Will the video of Fitz.
125.42 (4.18 Months): Jemma goes to the "No-Fly Zone" and encounters the Monster. She observes the stars and develops a hypothesis for how to predict the next portal opening.
148.96 Days (4.96 Months): Jemma and Will are unable to reach the portal due to the presence of a previously-nonexistent canyon, and their attempt to send a "message in a bottle" fails. Jemma loses hope of ever leaving Planet Hell; Will comforts her and the two become intimate.
196.66 Days (6.55 Months): Jemma and Will plan to see the only sunrise on Planet Hell for 18 years. Two hours later, Jemma is rescued by Fitz.
So, Jemma spent six and a half months on an alien planet, suffering from constant malnutrition, living in constant fear of death. She only became intimate with Will after losing all hope that there was any way off of Planet Hell (and, by inference, of being with Fitz again), and this did not happen until she had been stranded for damn near 5 months. She was intimate with Will for 47.7 days, or about a month and a half, after having known him for almost 4 months beforehand.
So, in other words, Jemma displayed extraordinary endurance and resilience in a deadly alien environment, and was very reluctant to begin a relationship with Will while she still held out any hope of returning home.
I did find myself wondering if this "small group" might not have been Hydra.
You're looking at it the wrong way. "4,722 Hours" isn't about how Jemma survived, per se. The plot is not the story. "4,722 Hours" is about how Jemma Simmons is, at her core: Her history, how she constructs her self-identity, and about her relationship with Fitz as seen through her eyes. The story isn't "How did Jemma survive?," the story is, "How does Jemma construct herself and her relationships?"
... there literally was a scene with her saying to Will, "You're right. There is no hope on this planet." I don't what more they could have done to establish that she had given up hope.
And I don't think it was contrived. I mean, realistically, if you have two heterosexual people of compatible age stranded together for more than half a year, then it's almost inevitable that they will develop feelings for each other and become intimate. Human beings need to love and relationships. It's part of our psychology.
She was wasting battery power on her phone just to pull up a picture of Fitz she could say goodnight to. She was addressing all of her notes to Fitz. She was fantasizing about what Fitz would do at the restaurant. Will told her multiple times that "Fitz" was her favorite word and that he seemed like more than a best friend to him. Jemma never became intimate with him until she concluded that she was never going to see home -- and therefore Fitz -- again, and she immediately assumed it was Fitz and ran to him when she saw the flare.
And, of course, last season, she freaked out after seeing that Hunter almost lost Bobbi and immediately ran to Fitz before telling him that maybe there was something to talk about with regards to him revealing he was in love with her.
They have made it very clear that Jemma has feelings for Fitz, too.
Five years without practice would be a very serious degredation in skills.
Further, I think you are underestimating how the stress of constant trauma can drive people together.
Yep!
Anyone trying to survive on Planet Hell would have needed someone. Human beings need love.
No. Works of art are not justified by other works of art; they are justified by themselves. Iron Man is not a good movie because of a short scene teasing the idea of the Avengers; it is a good movie because of the quality of the story and acting. Iron Man 2 does an awful lot to tie into other aspects of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it's still thoroughly mediocre.
"4,722 Hours" is a great episode because it brings us on an emotional journey with Jemma and helps us understand what kind of character she is outside of her normal relationships. As far as I'm concerned, the season's plot arcs can go fuck themselves if they get in the way of an episode like this.
Again, Jemma knew Will for almost four months before becoming intimate with him. She did this only after she had lost all hope of escaping Planet Hell. And she immediately thought (and ran to) Fitz when she saw the flare -- so she obviously was not over Fitz.
Was she in love with Will, too? Probably. Would that love survive back on Earth? We don't know. The human heart can love multiple people, but some relationships can only work in some circumstances.
But Jemma took a very long time to fall for Will, and she never lost her love for Fitz in the process.
Right, because it's not like she'd want to rescue an innocent man or something.
And for that matter, she may feel as though she abandoned Will... and on some level, she may feel as though she abandoned Will for Fitz. And, of course, she heard a gunshot but does not know if Will survived. She's probably got a lot of contradictory emotions going on, and it probably took her some time to process anything.
Also a possibility!
Neither of them were "mentally fine" even before they saw the flare.
Are you seriously asking what was traumatizing about being separated from the man she had come to love, who told her to save herself, after encountering the Monster they had been fearing for months, and then hearing a gunshot and not knowing if he had survived or possibly even killed himself? And all of this happening because you're running to a portal and trying to get rescued by the man you had loved before him?
'Cos that's a pretty traumatic experience, right there. On top of the constant trauma of living in an environment where you can only barely survive and are always in fear of attack from an unnamed monster.
There was no indication that she had been "barking for weeks and mostly shut down." She shut down when she returned to Earth.
Yes! Thank you!
This.
This does raise the question of how Jemma would have avoided becoming pregnant if she spent a month and a half with Will after being away from any birth control medication for four months. Unless she has an IUD, in which case I suppose birth control would not be an issue.
(Alternately, it is also possible that Will and Jemma deliberately avoided vaginal intercourse in order to avoid the risk of pregnancy. They were always short on food; I imagine there really wasn't enough to raise a child.)
I think that this interpretation requires that you ignore a great deal of of Season Two, particularly from "S.O.S., Part II."
I was more surprised that Boothe's character was still at large and apparently still rich and powerful. One would have thought that a Hydra infiltrator on the WSC would have been exposed during the uprising. But maybe Boothe's character had been booted from the WSC after order the nuclear strike on Manhattan? That might explain how he avoided being exposed as Hydra.
He also tortured a prisoner, nearly to death. And may have deliberately plotted to pre-emptively kill half a dozen men in order to find the Hebrew manuscript he needed to rescue Jemma.
I think Fitz is a bit more psychologically complex than Steve Rogers. Steve is an aspirational figure -- he's the guy we would want to be if we could. Fitz is a bit closer to reality.
Gideon Malick ordered a nuclear strike on the Avengers because he knew they were a threat to HYDRA. The alien invasion occurring at the time was just a convenient reason. I'm not sure how he got from that point to this one, but I'm more interested in that story that WARDRA. Or from last season should that be Ward! HYDRA?
Ward seems too much like a lieutenant in search of a master than a master himself to stay on top for long.
Ward seems too much like a lieutenant in search of a master than a master himself to stay on top for long.
I'm fairly certain that happened after they got together. The whole hope/no hope dialogue was showing how she still had hope and he did not - only after her last predictive experiment where the portal opening was too far away did she say she had given up hope - that happened after they were shown together.
I think that's arguable, particularly if one or the other (or both) is previously attached.
I've gotten somewhat of a feeling it was, at least initially, a little unrequited. Could be wrong.
Sure, fair enough.
If I happen to be marooned on another planet with a woman who's not my wife I'll let you know.
Sexual fidelity is more a cultural ideal than a normal aspect of human behavior. Sexual choices tend to be situational. Heterosexual people in single-sex environments will frequently engage in homosexual behavior for the duration. And committed people who are separated from their partners for a long time -- especially with no expectation of ever seeing them again -- will be fairly likely to take other partners, even if they feel bad about it. Reality is more complex than ideals. Sure, some people will be loyal enough to resist temptation, but not everyone.
In this case, though, Simmons had never even been on a date with Fitz, so she had no reason to "save herself" for him.
Certainly a possibility, and an interesting interpretation! I'd be inclined to suspect that Councillor Malick would have viewed the Chitauri invasion as warranting a nuclear strike, too, though -- maybe he saw it as killing two birds with one stone?
This isn't aimed at you per se, but is just me whining a little bit:
I really hate putting "Hydra" in all caps. It makes no sense; "Hydra" is not an initialism the way "SHIELD" is. So while I know that Marvel prefers to call them "HYDRA," I object to this as ungrammatical. It's "al-Qaeda," not "AL-QAEDA;" it's "Boko Haram," not "BOKO HARAM;" "Hezbollah," not "HEZBOLLAH;" "Hamas," not "HAMAS." So I rather think it should be called "Hydra," not "HYDRA."
I dunno. I think maybe the death of his love-slave (I am not convinced Agent 33 ever recovered from her brainwashing; I think she merely transplanted the object of her devotion from Reinhardt to Ward) may have pushed Ward's nascant megalomania. I find it very intriguing that he's calling himself "Director" now.
Thank you!
You are completely mis-remembering the chronology. They did not have their first kiss until Jemma gave up hope -- in fact, the kiss was in part Will's attempt to comfort her after losing hope.
Looking over my previous statement, I'll concede that I overstated my case; different people will respond in different ways, and there's always going to be a bell curve of responses. But it is certainly very plausible, and would be very common, for people in this scenario to develop feelings and become intimate. It's certainly not contrived.
I think that if there were nothing on Jemma's side, there would have been far less tension between them in Season Two. If you look at the various Simmons scenes relating to their relationship, a lot of the tension comes from Simmons essentially not being ready to acknowledge her own feelings for Fitz yet. But they were clearly drawn to each other again by the end of the season -- and in the season finale, her first reaction to seeing Hunter almost loose Bobbi is to run to Fitz. She brings up the fact that they never talked about his confession to her at the bottom of the ocean; he replies that there is nothing to talk about, thinking that Jemma doesn't have feelings for him. And then Jemma replies, "Maybe there is."
Jemma has feelings for Fitz, but it took her a very long time to acknowledge this to herself and accept it.
Well, I do think she was unwilling to be with Will as long as she felt there was a possibility of being reunited with Fitz. I mean, Fitz became her entire point of fixation on Planet Hell -- she didn't focus so much on the idea of "home" or "safety" or "food." She focused on Fitz. She addressed her notes to Fitz. She stared at his photo to bring herself comfort, she fantasized about going on dates with him, she apparently talked about him all the time to Will. So I do think that in some ways, she already felt as though she and Fitz were -- if not together, then that she was unwilling to be with another man if she could be with Fitz.
And I also think it is very telling that her first reaction upon seeing the flare was to think of Fitz and go running to him.
Well if you're saying then that she gave Will some "crazy" sex, then okay I can see it. But I still think that if Jemma had held out for a year or more under these same circumstances, it would not have surprised me considering what we have been shown of this character.
Now Daisy, May, if either of them felt the urge, I could see them both diving in at even less than 6 months. But Jemma has been portrayed as about as "chaste as the driven snow", so giving it up after 6 months, granted, 6 months of hell, still seems out of character to me UNLESS, as I wrote, what we have seen of this woman has been misleading.
I don't know what you mean by "crazy" sex. I think she and Will had developed feelings for each other -- which I think is a perfectly natural and understandable development to living with someone and relying on them day in and day out for your survival and as your only source of companionship.
"Held out?" You speak as though sex is something she has some obligation to deny.
Where? Where, exactly, has Jemma been depicted as "chaste?" We saw her flirt with Mike in Season One, and then we saw her develop feelings for Tripp -- both seemed to be into each other, though apparently they never pursued this as a result of the Hydra uprising. Then she spends most of Season Two preoccupied with Fitz.
Also, there's this deleted scene from Season One's "Seeds:"
https://youtu.be/D-H7J6YW-tY
That scene establishes very clearly that Jemma has had boyfriends.
Bottom line: There is no reason to think that Jemma thinks of chastity as some kind of virtue or that she has never had a sexual partner. Jemma is a person, not an entry on the "madonna/whore" axis.
"Giving it up?"
Why the consistent use of degrading language to describe intimacy?
Your understanding of Simmons seems wholly unsupported by the canonical (AND apocryphal) evidence to me.
That's an interesting question. I do think that Fitz, if placed in a comparable situation, would at some point have fallen for a female companion and become intimate.
But, your question -- combined with my references to Simmons's sex life above -- causes me to realize something: While Fitz was clearly flirting with Skye/Daisy in some early Season One episodes, he seems to have stopped after "FZZT." That episode, of course, is the one in which Jemma almost died of a Chitauri virus -- and in which I think Fitz first consciously realized just how much Jemma meant to him.* And to the best of my knowledge, even while Jemma has been interested in no less than four men since "FZZT" -- Mike, Tripp, Fitz, and Will -- I cannot think of a single woman other than Jemma who has caught Fitz's eye.
ETA: * Side-note: I think it is very telling that, in Season Two, when Fitz was stuck in the Playground while Jemma was infiltrating Hydra, Fitz's mental image of Jemma was dressed in the same clothes that she was wearing in "FZZT."
Yes. I think it's pretty clear that she has very real feelings for both Will and Fitz. If Will is successfully rescued, she'll have a very unpleasant choice to make. (Unless all three of them are a bit more non-traditional in their lifestyle choices than we've seen reason to think so far, anyway.)
The idea that Will is HYDRA is intriguing.
I see no evidence to support this. I did wonder if the group that persuaded NASA to send an expedition through the Monolith might be Hydra, but I don't think the expedition members themselves were.
Really? You mean none at all?
There you go.
If HYDRA was responsible for sending them through, the question is, why wouldn't they be HYDRA, or at least some of them. Also, the man with the gun is the obvious HYDRA suspect in a team whose existence could be due to HYDRA or HYDRA's influence.
Of course Will is HYDRA.
None. He hasn't said anything fascistic, he hasn't espoused loyalty to any organization other than NASA and the U.S. Armed Forces. His shelter still prominently displays a U.S. flag years after he's been left alone. And if he were Hydra, why would he tell Jemma about an ominous-sounding "small group?"
Of course, wondering that doesn't mean it is; there's no evidence for this speculation, either.
Simple: If the expedition members don't survive, then you haven't lost any of your own people. Remember, Hydra in 2001 was still laying low, keeping itself secret, and infiltrating SHIELD and the U.S. and other governments. They weren't in the risk-taking business yet.
Which could happen.
Noting also, by way of additional evidence, that Fitz's imaginary Simmons pointed out something about how Fitz saw Mac during real-Simmons' absence...and Fitz noted that (1) "she" was part of his own subconsciousness to begin with, and (2) "she" wasn't wrong in pointing out the attraction.
Did they make any reference in-show about whether PB was playing the same character as he was in Avengers? I thought I saw some interview earlier indicating he was not.
