Marvel's Agents of SHIELD 1x01: Pilot

After the events of The Avengers (and Iron Man 3) the world now knows that there are super-powered dudes out there, running around doing super stuff. J. August Richards is one such super dude, with the amazing power to climb the side of a building in an incredibly slow and unconvincing manner. When the top floor of a building in East Los Angeles inexplicably explodes (as they are wont to do), he gets to put his worthless power to use. He climbs the building, saves a woman from the fire, then jumps out a window and poses heroically while people take videos of him on their phones.

They don't have the proper angle to get the heroic pan around shot, but that's okay because the TV show gets it for us.

Even though he's a black guy in a hoodie in LA, a young woman looks him in the eye and figures out who he is before he runs off. We'll get back to that later.

Meanwhile, in Paris, SHIELD agent Grant Ward is using fancy technology to retrieve something from a secret vault in some guy's apartment before members of the Rising Tide can get to it. His skill in kicking the crap out of two generic goons proves to us that he is, indeed, a badass. Which is something they need to get out of the way early, because this is the pilot and it's heavy on character exposition.

Meanwhile, this random model proves to us that she does, indeed, have boobs.

Back at Agent Hill's field office, Ward delivers some SHIELD-based exposition, and is introduced to the presumed dead agent Coulson. After spending a few weeks as a corpse, Coulson decided the Rising Tide was a good enough reason to come back, and he's putting together a team to work out of a mobile command unit.

Each team member is delightfully quirky in some way. Coulson may be a zombie or a Life Model Decoy, but doesn't know it. Ward doesn't get along with anyone and has a shadowy family history. Fitz and Simmons are British tech weirdos who everyone calls Fitzsimmons. Melinda May is a pilot who doesn't want to go back into the field for some reason. And then there's Skye.

At a coffee shop in LA, the woman who locked eyes with J. August Richards tracks him down and introduces herself. Skye is totally not a superhero groupie, and she thinks he's in danger and wants to help him out. She lives in a van around the corner and is really super-good with computers. He's not impressed, so he blows her off. It turns out that she's the real deal, though, and possibly also the Rising Tide, although that's a little unclear. She's been posting superhero-related stuff on the internet for a while now, so the new team's first job is to find her van and put a black bag over her head.

Mission accomplished.

The SHIELD team wants Skye to lead them to the hooded hero so they can protect him from nefarious types. Naturally, she's a bit sceptical, what with all the head bagging. To earn her trust, Coulson gives Ward a dose of truth serum and then lets Skye interrogate him for a while. He basically spouts lines from True Lies.

At the same time, May and Fitzsimmons are looking for clues at the site of the explosion. And J. August Richards is trying to get his factory job back. His old boss is unsympathetic to his current plight, so he uses his super strength to beat him to half to death. When Skye sees the report of the beating on the news, she agrees to help and heads back to her van to get some data they need to repair a video they picked up from the site. The video shows that the explosion was caused when a man who had been injected with Extremis exploded, a la Iron Man 3. This is bad news, since J. August Richards has kidnapped Skye, and he's ready to blow, too.

He also has a nasty case of rosacea.

He gets her to drive him to the local train station and erase his identity. But she also sends a signal to SHIELD and the team arrives to take him in. Obviously, he's not going to go quietly, so he kicks the crap out of the van's door, then heads into the station to start busting heads. A thrilling fight/chase sequence ensues with the SHIELD agents trying not to kill him and the people who gave him the Extremis trying to shoot him in the face.

Fortunately, they have bad aim, and he takes it in the shoulder.

Eventually, Coulson uses the power of talking to distract J. August Richards while Ward shoots him with a tranquilizer that Fitzsimmons developed. The team takes him in to get the junk cleaned out of the system and Coulson offers Skye a job.

What I Liked
-Ward comments on the dumbass backronym. SHIELD has stood for a number of things over the years, all of which have had to really stretch to fit the letters.
-Agent Hill's assessment of Ward's people skills is a little poop with knives sticking out of it. Hee-hee.

What I Hated
-J. August Richards climbing the side of the building. It was seriously some of the worst wire work I've seen.

I can't really convey how bad it was with an image. But it was bad.

-J. August Richards (whose character name was unimportant) severely damaged the pavement when he landed. The window jumped from was maybe 15m in the air. He could've been made from solid steel and the pavement would've taken less of a hit in reality. I realize that it's not reality, but it just looked really stupid.
-The title screen is silly. You can see it at the top.
-Explaining storytelling tropes. It's all well and good to make fun of the fact that Coulson only died in The Avengers so the heroes would have a reason to work together, but this show uses enough tropes itself that the explanation makes it seem like it lacks self-awareness.
-Weird lighting.

Seriously, what the hell is that? Sideways lens flare?

-May beats up a man who's twice her size without taking a hit. Gee, a tiny woman who can beat up much larger men... that's something we haven't seen in a Joss Whedon show before.
-Brett Dalton, who plays Ward, is not a very good actor. There was a lot of not very good acting, but his was especially not good.
-Bad special effects. It's just a TV show, but Disney really should've coughed up a little more dough. Coulson's ridiculous flying car looked like it was straight out of Back to the Future.

Only not as cool.

Final Thoughts
There was a hell of a lot to hate about this episode and not all that much to like. All the hype told me that MASHIELD was going to be the best new show of the season, but if that's the case, the bar certainly wasn't set very high this year.

The script could've used a couple more drafts. There was far too much dialogue alluding to shadowy pasts and whatnot. It was a pilot, so there certainly needed to be some character exposition, but it was done very poorly.

Honestly, there wasn't very much to differentiate the show from others of its ilk, either. They had a super-hacker, a hard-nosed agent, a master of waif-fu, a couple tech nerds, and an avuncular head cheese. Take away the super powers and fancy gadgets (which barely featured in the show) and it was basically NCIS.

If this show's going to be a success, it needs to focus more on what makes it unique and draw more inspiration from the 50 years of backstory they have access to. They could be fighting Dr. Doom, but instead they're fighting generic shadowy organization #24127. That's no fun. What's more, it makes the Marvel licence completely superfluous to the show. They could've told the exact same story if this were a new IP called Agents of SWORD or something.

I'm going to give it a couple more episodes, since I've enjoyed some of the Marvel movies and some of the shows that have come out of the Whedon Enterprises conglomerate. But, based on this episode, I don't have high hopes.