Marvel's Agents of SHIELD 1x03: The Asset

Some dudes hijack a SHIELD truck carrying this guy: Franklin Hall, aka Graviton

Skye gets some training, but no montage... booooooo!

Coulson finds a thingy at the scene of the crime.

Billionaire Ian Quinn kidnapped Hall and took him to Malta.

Fitzsimmons explain gravitonium.

It's time to send in the diversionary boobs.

Extraction team.

Hall leaked his location so he could be kidnapped and destroy Quinn's gravitonium generator.

The world goes all fiddle-faddle-foo!

Coulson dumps Hall into the generator and creates a supervillain.

What I Liked
-Fitz recognizes the fact that Skye has boobs and knows how to use 'em. Men like boobs, so the make for a good distraction. It's not rocket science. Later in the episode, they get Chloe Bennet soaking wet and have her run around with her boobs bouncing all over.

Men like boobs.

-After Hall sets the generator to overload, he just hangs out, resigned to his fate, and starts getting drunk. If you're gonna go out, it's not a bad way to go.

What I Hated
-May hands Skye a list of communications she has to read, and it's a giant stack of paper. I know it's a great visual gag, but it's 2013, not 1987: She'd be reading through all that crap on a computer or a tablet. Plus, they work for a super-secret shadowy organization that has future tech. Some fancy algorithm could probably dig out the pertinent details without anyone having to actually read anything. Not that she wound up reading it, anyway.
-Really bad ADR. Like atrociously bad.
-SHIELD agents can't go to Malta for some reason. This may have come from the comics -I don't know- but it's stupid either way. They're shadowy agents with future tech: They can go anywhere they want.
-The laser mesh protecting Quinn's compound is not only wavy for some reason, it has vertical lines that come from nowhere.

Also, throwing a small rock at it makes it visible in a ten-metre radius of the impact for some reason.

-May decides she really does want to do field work. Why bother having her reject it in the first place if they were just going to ignore that aspect of her personality three episodes in? My guess is that they probably found it to be too restrictive, and having her accidentally get into combat situations every week would've seemed ridiculous after a while.

Final Thoughts
They finally got around to mining some of the decades of backstory they have to work with... sort of. From what I understand, Graviton's sort of a mid-level supervillain, who could be a good foe for a season-long arc. Unfortunately, they didn't actually fight Graviton. Franklin Hall is basically an amorphous blob of black goo at this point, and there's no indication that he'll actually show up any time in the near future. Beyond that, I'm not sure the team could even put up a realistic fight against him. Fitzsimmons may have fancy future technology, but it's not combat-related. There are only three combat-ready team members and aside from Ward's stupid repulser wave thing, the only weapons they have are guns. I don't see how they could possibly fight anyone, really.

Quinn will probably be back as an antagonist. He's a crazy billionaire, and the team seems to be a less-capable squad of Pierce Brosnan-era James Bonds, so he'd make a good recurring enemy.

All the hints about how Coulson is a robot or something need to end. It's not all that interesting a mystery.

This was a better episode than last week's. They were actually doing something that seemed like it might require SHIELD to get involved, rather than just fighting South American rebels. It was more fun and interesting and felt more like a comic book show than a bad ripoff of NCIS. They got a full-season pickup a day or two ago, so if they can maintain this level of quality, I'll keep watching it at least until the end of the season.