Agents of Shield - Season 4
- Thread starter MarsWeeps
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Solid premiere with a lot of moving parts without feeling cluttered. We quickly caught up with each of the cast members (including new cast member, Radcliffle) and got a good feeling of the new dynamics. I particularly enjoyed the new Coulson/Mack partnership dynamic. Already feels more enjoyable than Daisy and Mack (or Ward) ever did and I'm loving Coulson as a field agent more than I ever did as the director.
As predicted by the season three finale's denouement, Radcliffe is experimenting with Life Model Decoys, ostentatiously not artificial intelligence, although I didn't the discriminatory implication that all artificial intelligence becomes the equivalent of Ultron. More so Radcliffe's and Fitz's discrimination than the show's, so I hope the storyline explores that avenue during this season.
I enjoyed this version of Ghost Rider although I'm still not sold on the car.
As predicted by the season three finale's denouement, Radcliffe is experimenting with Life Model Decoys, ostentatiously not artificial intelligence, although I didn't the discriminatory implication that all artificial intelligence becomes the equivalent of Ultron. More so Radcliffe's and Fitz's discrimination than the show's, so I hope the storyline explores that avenue during this season.
I enjoyed this version of Ghost Rider although I'm still not sold on the car.
Yeah, I suppose, but how many times have we had Spider-Man now? They never had to do fundamental changes with him or his costume or abilities to differentiate him from the previous incarnation.
No, the character is called AIDA, standing for Artificial Intelligence Data Analyzer. She was a character in the Squadron Supreme comic, although there she was a disembodied sentient AI. It's odd to me that the characters here pronounce her name like "Ada" instead of like the opera character Aida.
And the gynoid in Ex Machina is Ava, not Ada. Coincidentally, the very similar earlier film The Machine also used Ava as the name of Caity Lotz's human character who was the template for the nameless gynoid that was the film's title character.
Not exactly, because the movies rationalized Asgardian "magic" as Sufficiently Advanced Technology and extradimensional physics. "Your ancestors called it magic, but you call it science. I come from a land where they are one and the same." The Bifrost is explicitly an Einstein-Rosen bridge, aka a wormhole, which is how astrophysicist Jane Foster is able to detect it in the first place. So magic that's actually magic, rather than just indistinguishable from magic, is a new element in the MCU.
Pretty good season start.
The team has changed drastically since the events of the season 3 finale and it's a quite interesting change. Split up and scattered around they haven't been much if a time for a time now and it's starting to get irritating i guess, maybe because they are not used to a strict hierarchical organization anymore as was the case back when Shield was still present.
Coulson and Mack is a great team up and even though when he was Director he never was the desk type so there is not much change there but it's still nice to see the Son of Coul return being a street agent (on top of having a cool new gadget hand).
I'm only familiar with the Johnny Blaze Ghost Rider so i was a little disappointed first when the new Rider just had some flashy eyes and the ablity to light things on fire but i was happy when he went full Ghost Rider and got the burning skull.. pretty good effect and it looked awesome. I'd definitely like to see more of him and i wonder how long he'll be around and how much he will influence the season.. they made a pretty big deal in the marketing campaign for season 4 about him.
Daisy.. well, as nice as it looks i could have done without the softcore porn that the new 10pm timeslot allows. Maybe it's because i'm not a teenager anymore, maybe because there's much more explicit stuff on the internet but i don't think it serves any purpose on this show at all (and we already knew that Chloe Bennet has a great ass.. if that was her ass at all).
I don't like her Lone Wolf mentality storyline.. she knew that being a Shield agent was not a desk job where the biggest risk may be a papercut and she has lost friends and loved ones but so did everyone else and they didn't quit because they knew this happens in their line of work and that they still have friends who support each other. She just ran and cut them off which just doesn't click with me. I'll be glad as soon as she rejoins Shield and that storyline is over.
All considered it was a good setup episode giving us an overview where everybody is post season 3 and setting up new storylines at the same time. Looking forward to the season.
The team has changed drastically since the events of the season 3 finale and it's a quite interesting change. Split up and scattered around they haven't been much if a time for a time now and it's starting to get irritating i guess, maybe because they are not used to a strict hierarchical organization anymore as was the case back when Shield was still present.
Coulson and Mack is a great team up and even though when he was Director he never was the desk type so there is not much change there but it's still nice to see the Son of Coul return being a street agent (on top of having a cool new gadget hand).
I'm only familiar with the Johnny Blaze Ghost Rider so i was a little disappointed first when the new Rider just had some flashy eyes and the ablity to light things on fire but i was happy when he went full Ghost Rider and got the burning skull.. pretty good effect and it looked awesome. I'd definitely like to see more of him and i wonder how long he'll be around and how much he will influence the season.. they made a pretty big deal in the marketing campaign for season 4 about him.
Daisy.. well, as nice as it looks i could have done without the softcore porn that the new 10pm timeslot allows. Maybe it's because i'm not a teenager anymore, maybe because there's much more explicit stuff on the internet but i don't think it serves any purpose on this show at all (and we already knew that Chloe Bennet has a great ass.. if that was her ass at all).
I don't like her Lone Wolf mentality storyline.. she knew that being a Shield agent was not a desk job where the biggest risk may be a papercut and she has lost friends and loved ones but so did everyone else and they didn't quit because they knew this happens in their line of work and that they still have friends who support each other. She just ran and cut them off which just doesn't click with me. I'll be glad as soon as she rejoins Shield and that storyline is over.
All considered it was a good setup episode giving us an overview where everybody is post season 3 and setting up new storylines at the same time. Looking forward to the season.
Um, did you miss the part where they made it very clear that Simmons is deliberately cozying up to the new Director in order to protect the team? That she's just pretending to be on the Director's side in order to be in a position to look out for her friends?
She's playing a long game here. May understood that . .. eventually.
You may be letting your grudge against the character predispose you to assuming the worst of her at all times, even when she has very explicitly NOT "joined the evil side."
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I know nothing about the Ghost Rider character, but I thought that morphing scene and the resultant flaming skull was damn cool looking.
I think thus season's conflict coming from within, X-Files style, rather than without, seems organic and believable. That Coulson's actions were finally noticed by the higher ups and changes made as a result seems quite natural -- assuming that is what happened. It's at least possible he stepped down voluntarily.
For a moment there I thought the Fitz/Simmons romance had already been "Whedoned" during the off season, then that shot of them in bed together.
Gemma as May's "boss", love it. Man, regular lie detector testing -- shades of Wolfram and Hart.
I think thus season's conflict coming from within, X-Files style, rather than without, seems organic and believable. That Coulson's actions were finally noticed by the higher ups and changes made as a result seems quite natural -- assuming that is what happened. It's at least possible he stepped down voluntarily.
For a moment there I thought the Fitz/Simmons romance had already been "Whedoned" during the off season, then that shot of them in bed together.
Gemma as May's "boss", love it. Man, regular lie detector testing -- shades of Wolfram and Hart.
Yes, he did, because he based that whole post on a review of the episode. He hasn't seen the episode.
Don't hold your breath. He's been promising that for at least the last two seasons.
One advantage to using the newer version of Ghost Rider, with the car instead of the motorcycle, is that it avoids any possible confusion with the Nicholas Cage movies. You have a nice clean break that makes it immediately obvious, even to the most casual or uninformed viewer, that this is a brand-new Ghost Rider that has nothing to do with the movies. Probably a smart move.
(And I say that as the guy who novelized the first movie.)
This isn't the Ghost Rider I read back in the seventies, but that's cool. It's not the 1970s anymore. Things change.
As to the new ep: was it just me or was there a bit more skin and blood than usual. Guess they're taking full advantage of their new 10 o'clock time slot.
Definitely more gore than normal. And spines...don't remember as many spines in the previous seasons.
I wonder how much of the decision to go with the car instead of the bike was influenced by the budget. One assumes it's at least a bit cheaper to add some flames to a car's wheels than it would be to render the full flaming skull getup on a bike, since in the car you don't always see him as clearly.
Either way I agree it was a smart move, just from the PoV of being visually distinct from the Cage movies. Also, bonus points if there's a Lola vs. Hell Charger scene at any point in the season.
Random thought: did anyone else get and Ark of the Covenant vibe from the mystery box?
Random thought the second: am I the only one wondering if Mike Peterson is going to benefit from these new advanced non-weaponized prosthetics that can pass for real limbs..and possibly his face? I get the actor might not be available anymore, but it would be nice if they dropped a line in there somewhere to this effect. I don't think we've seen nor heard of him since the pre-AoU episode.
True, but Spider-Man is infinitely better known to the general public than Ghost Rider, by several orders of magnitude. Spidey was a household name, with Saturday morning cartoons and toys and Underoos and lunchboxes and beach towels and other merchandise long before the first Tobey Maguire movie came along, so it's not like the public only knows him from the movies. They understand that Spider-Man has been around forever, in lots of different adaptations.
But the average tv viewer may only know GHOST RIDER from the Nicholas Cage movies.
"Ghost Rider? Oh yeah, I remember that movie. He used to be Nicholas Cage, right? What happened to his girlfriend . . you know, the one played by Eva Mendes . . . ?"
^It's yet to be seen if it's really *magic* magic or *even more advanced science* magic. Given that there's already an implicit link between what was seen in Ant-Man and what it looks like they're doing with Doctor Strange that seems likely.
Not sure how that could translate into burning souls and spirits of vengeance, but there are some possibilities. Maybe such things come from other universes where our rules of physics don't apply. This could conceivably tie-in to that season 1 episode with the bloke who kept disappearing to what he was convinced was Hell (possibly/maybe not to be confused with Hel.)
The old DC animated universe took a similar tack (which I'm pretty sure didn't come from the comics) by attributing all magic in this world to beings, artefacts and "energies" from another universe populated by decidedly Lovecraftian horrors.
Not sure how that could translate into burning souls and spirits of vengeance, but there are some possibilities. Maybe such things come from other universes where our rules of physics don't apply. This could conceivably tie-in to that season 1 episode with the bloke who kept disappearing to what he was convinced was Hell (possibly/maybe not to be confused with Hel.)
The old DC animated universe took a similar tack (which I'm pretty sure didn't come from the comics) by attributing all magic in this world to beings, artefacts and "energies" from another universe populated by decidedly Lovecraftian horrors.
Also, recall how Jane immediately recognized the Asgardian "Soul Forge" as an advanced Quantum Field Generator.
Simmons was one of my favorite characters, and the only thing I didn't like with her on the show was that I hated the story of her and the astronaut on that planet and thought the episode with her stranded on the planet with him was the most boring episode of the show by far. Besides that, her and Fitz were always near the top when it comes to AoS characters, right under Coulson, Daisy and May.
So, no, I'm not predisposed to think the worst of Simmons. At this point, I think the worst of the shows "writers" though, and with Mockingbird gone and Ward totally dead they need another traitor to Coulson on the main cast to go with Mack and her new role fits. Plus, if she wanted to help Coulson she'd be finding a way to get rid of the new director, which doesn't seem to be the way it was going from what I read (although its inevitable Coulson will have to depose the new director at some point, and hopefully Simmons will be on Coulson's side for that).
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So, Thor's hammer is alien technology? I find that hard to believe, let alone Frigga and Loki's use of "magic". I don't even know why Marvel even bothered trying to explain all of this as science. Heimdall's ability to see other worlds without a machine or anything else is alien technology?
Hm, good points.
I guess we'll see if the car grows on me, but I miss the motorcycle. It's such an iconic image for Ghost Rider. Well, for comic book readers anyways.
Ahaha. No Kirk55555, going by your posts during the second season you'd had her ready to be put in front of firing squad for joining Hydra and being an obviously evil triple spy who just hated any superpowered people.
You are doing the exact same thing here... again.
You also had Mack and Bobby declared obvious evil traitors despite being proven wrong at every turn.
It really is just bias on your side.
Maybe there will be a traitor, but it's no one of the main cast or likely anyone introduced yet.
Possibly the new director, but if so there probably will be a twist that is more original than him being just evil and or Hydra.
Or he might turn out to be an actual good guy. We don't know.
Point is, don't make any unsupported assumptions and state them as fact.
Speculation is fine, but state ot as such.
You are doing the exact same thing here... again.
You also had Mack and Bobby declared obvious evil traitors despite being proven wrong at every turn.
It really is just bias on your side.
Maybe there will be a traitor, but it's no one of the main cast or likely anyone introduced yet.
Possibly the new director, but if so there probably will be a twist that is more original than him being just evil and or Hydra.
Or he might turn out to be an actual good guy. We don't know.
Point is, don't make any unsupported assumptions and state them as fact.
Speculation is fine, but state ot as such.
The same reason they started with Iron Man and waited years to bring in Thor -- because they were aiming at a general audience that wasn't necessarily comfortable with these crazy, fanciful ideas and needed to be eased into it. They started with the more grounded, Earthbound stuff before starting to ease the audience into the more fanciful elements, and they justified those fanciful elements by rationalizing them as alien technology.
Also, some religious types might raise a fuss if the Asgardians were declared to be actual gods, so calling them aliens that were just mistaken for gods by the ancients is a way to avoid that controversy.
Alien science far more advanced than ours and using different principles. Maybe the Asgardians engineered themselves with special abilities. Is it really any more implausible than the idea that human science could transform a person into a huge green rage monster or give them the proportional strength, agility, and senses of a spider? Or that mutation could produce humans who can teleport or read minds?
I like that they actually name dropped both the 'Fast and the Furious' movies and the 'Dukes of Hazard' in the same sentence.
Aside from the Cage movies (of which I only saw half of the first one) I think my only real exposure to Ghost Rider was a guest appearance on one of the 90's Marvel cartoons...and not one of the two good ones.
Probably also how I was first introduced to the likes of Punisher, Blade and Daredevil. Ghost Rider is probably just slightly below the likes of those in terms of household awareness (which isn't terribly much.)
He's one of those who's design is distinctive enough for people to recognise, even name but probably know bugger all about the actual character and stories. Whereas most people could at least muster up "Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider" in regards to Spider-man.
All that said, up until the last few years I would have also lumped the likes of Iron Man and Captain America in with those others. So who knows? This version of Ghost Rider could end up being *the* definitive version for most people.
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