Last night ’s Agents of SHIELD focused on the newest member of the team . Skye is the Gwen Cooper to this show ’s Torchwood , having joined the organisation in the very first installment , and last nighttime ’s episode was all about whether she was SHIELD cloth . lamentably , the installment served to play up some of this show ’s pitfall .
spoiler out front …
There ’s nothing wrong , in theory , with the cloth that SHIELD tried to serve up last night . Skye , the supertough hacker , volunteer for a solo mission into the malign Ian Quinn ’s private compound to rescue kidnapped scientist Franklin Hall . There are two bragging questions in that scenario : 1 ) Can Skye really be trusted to be loyal to SHIELD ? 2 ) Is she quick for fieldwork , when she ’s not taking her training with Mr. Grant seriously ?
( Sidenote : I ’ve just make up one’s mind to start calling Grant Ward “ Mr. Grant ” — because this show is so much better if I imagine Ed Asner giving Chloe Bennett box preparation and tangle at her about how hehates spunk . )
And in the end of the episode , the show offers us the same solvent to both dubiousness : Skye is loyal to SHIELD because they ’ve proved that they manage about her safety with all of Mr. Grant ’s objurgation . And because Mr. Grant was so knotty on her , she ’s able to disarm Ian Quinn when he pulls a gun on her , and make her escape .
The textile is fine , it ’s just the execution that ’s lacking — and a luck of the problems have to do with the graphic symbol of Skye , who ( thus far ) has been the principal person we ’ve see changing and growing among this crew . So Skye , as a character reference , is doing almost all the profound lifting on this show , and arguably the serial is about her journey from outsider to agent . And at this pointedness , her range is essentially from “ smirk ” to “ pout . ” I do n’t mean that ’s player Chloe Bennett ’s fault — I think that ’s how the fibre is being pen .
( To be clean , other characters are changing as well . Coulson is also learning to be a team leader , and is probably a LMD given that his “ muscle memory ” is shot . Mr. Grant is learning to be more sensitive . And Melinda May announce out of the blue that she wants to be back on combat duty , the thing she adamantly did n’t need in the two and a half previous instalment . )
It ’s kind of sad , but the character I liked the most in this episode was the truck driver in the opening moments , who turned out to be a SHIELD factor make Agent Mack . ( Because he drives a truck ? ) He has a world - weary “ underdog ” spirit to him , and just in his brief scene you get a sensation that it must absorb to be the guy rope who drives the covert motortruck instead of flying around in the fancy jet plane . More of him , please .
So why does n’t this textile employment ? A few reasons propose themselves :
1 ) The show does n’t need to include Quinn may be correct
The crux of the matter of the episode really depends on us thinking that Skye might be about to defect to the side of Ian Quinn , the sexypants libertarian quadrillionaire who possess Malta . Quinn create a strong character that governmental entities like SHIELD should n’t be keeping super - awesome discoveries a secret , and the secret sphere could do a lot more with Chitauri applied science .
The problem is , the show ’s writers intelligibly do n’t believe Quinn ’s distributor point of view is valid — even though it ’s not that unlike from Skye ’s viewpoint in the first episode — and thus he very rapidly seems to turn into standard Ranty McVillain . He also has a really weirdly scary hairpiece , which make it hard to take anything he says seriously . And meanwhile , the instalment ’s swelled plot bend ( more on that in a minute ) hinges on Franklin Hall believing Ian Quinn is too vicious to be trust .
2 ) The character reference maturation is very infirm tea
Agents of SHIELD has the misfortune to be render to flog a “ Skye is emotionally marred because she was an orphan ” storyline in the same week that Sleepy empty and Once Upon a Time did interchangeable stories — and both of those shows lean on theirs agency hard , with arguably well effect . In Sleepy Hollow , we in reality see the horrible foster attention where Jenny Mills was immobilize . It ’s possible that Skye is making up the news report about how she was living with a foster family , and called the foster ma “ Mom ” and then was send off — but it almost does n’t matter , since it ’s the only musical composition of fiber development we get for her .
Meanwhile , Mr. Grant say his defining second as a SHIELD agent was when he was a little kid and his heavy brother tried to beat up him and his little buddy for take a piece of music of birthday cake . ( I need an exalt GIF of Mary Tyler Moore saying , “ Ohhhh , Mr. Grant . ” )
Oh , and this episode made a swelled point of stepping on one of the coolest bits from the pilot — the scene where Coulson give Mr. Grant the truth blood serum instead of Skye , so she can interrogate him and find out that SHIELD is to be trusted , after all . Now Mr. Grant is claim that SHIELD has no the true serum , and Coulson chooses to be quirky and cabalistic rather of just offer to lease Skye seek the truth blood serum for herself .
3 ) I am losing a bit of respect for SHIELD as a privy organization
Both because their logo is being used in corporate force - point intro , and because they seem kind of incompetent in this episode . In particular , their architectural plan to get Franklin Hall out of Malta is kind of nut , even with the over - reliance on someone who just unite the organisation a week or two ago . The fleck where Phil Coulson says that they have no option to abort the mission seems weird . Their design was to go up to the deathly radiation fencing and promise that Skye gets it get down — and if that failed , they were just going to stand around with no hope of abort ? Also , how were they croak to get out again , if the deadly fencing was put back up while they were in the chemical compound ?
The thing is , I do like Phil Coulson ’s “ Zen Buddhism leadership ” number , with his sunny disposition and his riding habit of dispensing nugget of Wisdom of Solomon like , “ Do n’t think like an operative , think like a human being , ” so that Skye can , in act , learn to intend like an PI . Coulson ’s efforts to brawl his troubled team would be capital television , if the turbulent squad did n’t feel so much like a collection of clichés at this power point .
And meanwhile , there ’s the big Franklin Hall bring out — it turns out he deliberately leak his own secret tape transport route so that Quinn would come up and find him , because he ’d heard rumors that Quinn was building a giant reactor that uses a secret ultra - rare element with anti - gravity property . Instead of give notice his superiors and encouraging them to take out Quinn ’s installation , Hall fuck off himself captured so he can sour on the Graviton machine , and countermine it , driving it into the center of the Earth .
That actually seems like a really ripe plan , even if it need Hall to sacrifice himself . Because of SHIELD ’s meddling , however , Hall himself winds up being commingle with the Graviton goop , and lock in in a SHIELD vault — until he reemerges as a supervillain , plausibly in prison term for sweeps week .
All in all , an episode that works really well in hypothesis but wholly does n’t mousse as an factual opus of television . On Joss Whedon ’s previous show , Firefly , we rooted for the crew of the Serenity , in part , because they were scrappy underdogs who had fought a big warfare and lost . The SHIELD crew , meanwhile , are flying around in a shining jet and constantly reminding us that they help win the Battle of New York .
Honestly , if this show has a “ Coulson ’s team goes rogue and has to fight against SHIELD ” storyline up its arm — and I ’d be surprised if it did n’t — then the sooner we get to that stuff , the estimable , really .
To be fair , though , when you equate the first few episode of this show with the teethe trouble that Whedon ’s Dollhouse had in its opening five or six episodes , it ’s really not that bad .
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