Marvel's Agents of SHIELD 1x05: Girl In the Flower Dress.

A dude in Hong Kong has fire powers that he uses to impress a girl... who then has guys in fire-resistant suits kidnap him.

SHIELD suspects the Rising Tide, so everyone suspects Skye had something to do with it. She starts trying to track whoever hacked into their data stream so she can clear her name.

Meanwhile, the fire guy is being seduced with offers of power and fame... and a new name: Scorch.

The hacker is a guy named Miles Lydon, who makes Ward right away, then bolts in his product placement Jetta. He uses some hacker trickery to cause gridlock and gets away. As it turns out, Skye used to date him, and warned him so he could escape.

They meet up, and she castigates him for hacking SHIELD while she's on the inside. Then they need an excuse for Chloe Bennet to take her clothes off, so they have sex. But Coulson had May follow her, and they get busted before Skye even gets her clothes back on.

Miles was paid $1 million by what he thought was an eco-research company to hack a Chinese SHIELD data stream. That got them Scorch, who they juice up with the super serum from the pilot. Then they start sucking him dry. His blood platelets are fire-resistant, so they'll help stop the soldiers from exploding in the future.

SHIELD agents manage to save him before he dies, but he's not happy to see them, since they were his former oppressors. He doses himself with super soldier serum and starts tossing fireballs.

May tries to reason with him, but he's not interested, and eventually they have to just dose him with more serum until he explodes.

Miles gets kicked out of the plane in Hong Kong with a magic bracelet that does whatever SHIELD wants on his wrist. Skye tells Coulson that she hacked into SHIELD to find out what happened to her parents. She gets a bracelet, too. Then the titular girl goes to see some guy in prison. She needs him to get in touch with "The clairvoyant" whoever that is.

What I Liked
-Giving the guy a nickname makes him more dangerous. That's true in real life, too.

What I Hated
-Fitzsimmons spouts more trolltastic technobabble. This is a show for nerds. We know what things like TCP, hyper-text and mob mean, assholes.
-As Miles is escaping, he hits something on his phone called Gridlock.mp4, which is contained in Act 1 Video Playlist.

It's a damned smart phone. It can do anything they want, and their fancy hacker thing is a goddamn video playlist. And they didn't even bother to change the name to something inconspicuous. How lazy can you get? Did the graphics department not have twenty free minutes to whip something up?

-Coulson has a flying car, and yet he goes after Miles in a regular SUV. I know the plot required it, but the plot is dumb, so that's no excuse.
-They knock Scorch out with some gas so they can restrain him, then leave him awake while they suck out his blood platelets. That seems needlessly cruel. Sure, they're an evil organization bent on world domination or something, but they don't have to be dicks about it.
-SHIELD kidnaps a guy, dumps him in Hong Kong, and robs him. I realize that he was a bad guy, and if he hadn't haxored SHIELD's Gibson, things would've been better, but it wasn't exactly his fault that Scorch went nuts. It wasn't his fault that the guy died, either: May killed him. Not even in self-defense, either. She and Coulson decided he needed to die, so they extra-judicially murdered him. SHIELD's full of assholes.
-Skye is storing the data on her parents on a mini-SIM card. That makes very little sense. An SD card is about the same size and holds far more data.

Final Thoughts
So Skye's an orphan, and the only info she has on her parents was redacted by SHIELD. I still don't care. She's a bland character with a hackneyed backstory, who seems like she was designed by committee. All the new characters on the show seem that way, in fact. They got together in a room, chose some standard character types, and then decided they didn't need to do any more character development: Super nerds, master of waif-fu, Agent Hardchin, and the oddly attractive hacker who grew up in an orphanage. That's what we got from this show, and we're not getting anything else. The really big problem is that I'm not even sure it's possible to care about most of them. Fitzsimmons are disposable scientists and Ward is a disposable agent. Based on what they've done so far, you could kill them all and replace them with with similar characters, and almost no one would give a damn. They're completely generic and have no personalities. It's like they brought three bottles of store brand cola to life and dressed them up as humans.

Which would be forgiveable if the plots were interesting. They're not, though. Some guy we've never seen before had super flame powers. He used them for fives seconds and then exploded. The end. Not exactly compelling stuff. Sure, there's a long-running plot about the CENTIPEDE people, but they've only shown up twice so far, and they seem to be comically inept. Twice now, they've had their plans messed with by a ragtag group of misfits. If the Bad News Bears were a spy agency, they'd give SHIELD a run for its money.

Still, this was better than the previous episode, which admittedly is not saying much. They fought a lower-tier super-powered guy, which is at least sort of comic booky. Of course, most of the episode was focused on the too-pretty hacker and her personal issues, but at this point I'll take what I can get.

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD 1x04: Eye Spy

A bunch of guys in red masks with briefcases chained to their arms ride the subway in Stockholm. A girl knocks out the lights, kicks all their asses and steals one briefcase. Inside are a bunch of diamonds.

They search the interbutts and find a picture of the thief. Her name is Akela Amador, and she was a SHIELD agent who Coulson trained, and who everyone thought was dead. Also she has mind-powers. She sells the diamonds to a guy in Belarus, who gives her a key card.

The team tracks her down, but while Coulson and Ward go searching, she finds the van with Fitzsimmons and Skye and rams them over a ledge. They discover a video feed coming from an implant in her head. They also discover that someone's controlling her. May wants to call in and get a tac team, but Coulson won't let her.

May finds Amador via the video feed, and after the two of them fight, Coulson arrives and knocks her out with a tranquilizer dart. Then they use some Mission Impossible glasses to mimic the signal and send in Ward to finish Amador's mission.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that neither one is a surgeon, Fitzsimmons remove Amador's implant so the failsafe inside can't kill her.

Things go awry for Ward when Amador's orders come in.

Instead of seducing him, Ward knocks out the guard, then completes the mission, which was to look at something. On his way out of the building, an alarm goes off, but he handles the guards pretty easily. Coulson tracks down Amador's handler, but when he tries to stop him, the guy's eye explodes. He was a redundant safety, and the real bad guy is still out there.

The implant is safely removed, Amador is arrested by SHIELD agents, and Coulson promises she'll get a fair trial. For the first time in years, she goes to sleep without anyone watching her.

What I Liked
-Amador hides the diamonds in phony golf balls that dissolve when she pours water on them. That's kinda neat.
-Skye calls Coulson AC because it's cooler. Slater agrees.

What I Hated
-Some people took pictures with their phones, but mainly, everyone ignores the guys in the red masks. In this case, they were transporting diamonds, but in general, they would've been terrorists or bank robbers. If I see a bunch of guys in similar outfits get on a subway and they're not a sports team, I'm getting off and waiting for the next train. But maybe that's just me.
-There are aliens from other dimensions, super soldiers of various types, and a giant green rage monster, but everyone thinks ESP is ridiculous. I'm guessing mutants don't exist in this chunk of the Marvel universe because Fox still has the rights to the X-Men. It still makes no sense that no one would even consider it, though.
-Fitzsimmons are still ridiculous nerds. No real nerd, no matter how nerdy would care about visiting a town near the birthplace of a Nobel prize-winning physicist. That's just stupid.
-Amador and Coulson share a very touching, emotional conversation. Except we just met her, and the dialogue was terrible, so I don't care.
-More crap about Coulson being a zombie or a robot or something. It's really not all that interesting a mystery.
-Someone paid $30 million to get access to a room filled with strange, possibly alien writing, and SHIELD isn't sending in 100 guys to subdue and interrogate everyone? Why the hell not?
-They don't have a medic onboard. They've needed minor medical attention before, but this is the first time where it's been really obvious that they need a surgeon on the team. Ron Glass played a doctor in the pilot; they should bring him back.

Final Thoughts
Directed by Roxann Dawson. I wondered what she'd been up to lately. Not very hard, but I wondered.

This was not a good episode. After the previous one where they did some minor fancy science stuff and created a supervillain, I was hopeful. Then this week they just became bad NCIS again. Or actually, I suppose it's kind of a cross between NCIS and Fringe or maybe The X-Files. Of course, it's not as good as any of those shows. Regardless, why even bother having the Marvel licence if they're not going to use it?

This episode also really showed off how bad some of the acting is. They should probably kill off half the characters and find better actors to replace them.

The show in general hasn't really given me any reason to watch it thus far. The plots are dull, the action is poor, and the characters aren't very compelling. It's still early, but they're mainly ridiculous caricatures. I also don't care about the long-running plots. Skye isn't an interesting character, so I don't care what shadowy business she's up to, and the frequent allusions to the fact that Coulson's a clone or whatever are more annoying than mysterious. Yes, he's somehow different after Loki stabbed him. BFD.

I'm still going to watch a few more episodes, but after the next one, I'm not sure I'll review any more unless the show gets a lot better.

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.

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD 1x02: 0-8-4

The team is just flying around, minding their own business when a huge hole is blown in the side of their plane for no apparent reason. Coulson struggles not to get sucked out. Then it's 19 hours earlier, and I guess we'll have to wait to see what happens.

Against May and Ward's objections, and with Fitzsimmons(especially Fitz's) approval, Skye is coming on board as a consultant. Since she lives in her van, she doesn't have a lot of stuff, which is good, because there isn't as much storage space on the plane as you'd think. Her first assignment will be to join the team on a trip to Peru to check out the titular 0-8-4, which is an object of unknown origin. The last one SHIELD found was Mjölnir, so whatever it is could be pretty neat.

When they get to Peru, an archaeologist shows them a thingy embedded in the wall of a pre-Incan temple. It's at least 1000 years older than the temple itself. While Coulson, Skye, and Fitzsimmons take a look at it, May and Ward try to secure the area.

They don't do a very good job.

The guys in camouflage are Peruvian military police and their leader, Camilla Reyes, is conveniently an old pal of Coulson's. She gives him a peck on the cheek, and everyone puts their guns down. As they head off to chat about old times, some rebels attack and start blowing things up. There isn't enough time for proper examination and excavation, so Ward just rips the thing out of the wall and puts it in a bag. Coulson and Reyes put up a decent fight, but most of the team is pinned down inside the temple. So, Ward pulls out some kind of technological force projection thing and it shoots out a wave of energy that knocks the rebels down... for about three seconds.

Even so, they manage to make it to their vehicle, and everyone beats a hasty retreat to the mobile command unit. When they take off, they're heavy four Peruvian MPs, but that's better than leaving someone behind. As they're getting airborne, Fitz explains that the thingy is powered by tesseract technology and is spitting out a bunch of gamma radiation.

Probably not the best idea to keep it in a bag on the floor.

On the trip home, the team gets into a fight because, quite frankly, they don't like each other very much. But Coulson plays daddy and tells them to sort it out. Skye takes the wise approach and uses booze to try to smooth things over with Ward. At the same time, Reyes is in Coulson's office trying to seduce him.

It's a good try.

Fortunately, Coulson has seen TV, so he knows that she's just trying to distract him while the rest of her guys take over the plane. He manages to fight her off, and Ward disables two other guys, but one of the MPs gets into the lab and holds a scalpel to Fitz's throat, so they're forced to surrender.

Reyes sticks the team in the cargo hold and threatens to open the doors unless Coulson gives the authorization codes to SHIELD when they call and ask about the course change. May is hardcore, so she dislocates her wrist to slip out of her restrains and then knocks out the guard. Then it's action time. They bust through the door to the lab, grab their gear, and then strap themselves to the wall. Fitz uses one of his little drones to remotely activate the thingy, and it blows the hole in the wall.

So, I guess it's been 19 hours.

The sudden change in pressure allows the team to get the drop on the MPs, and gives Coulson the opportunity to tie up Reyes in a non-sexy manner. May retakes the cockpit, Ward beats up some dudes, Fitzsimmons and Skye retrieve the thingy, and then Skye uses an emergency life raft to seal the hole.

When they finally land at the secret base where they were headed, SHIELD launches the thingy into the sun, the team drinks beer, and Skye gets a secret message from the Rising Tide people. She tells them she's in.

Whatever that means.

Then Nick Fury shows up to tear Coulson a new one for blowing a hole in a brand new plane. And tries not to call him a motherfucker.

He's trying really hard. You can see it in his eye.

What I Liked
-Reyes explains to Coulson that he's having a mid-life crisis. If more people would just straight-up tell middle-aged men what's going on, the world would be a better place.
-Nick Fury talks about how nice the bar is on the plane. They really should've tried to get Samuel L. Jackson as a regular character, or at least a frequently recurring guest star. He's so much fun.

What I Hated
-19 hours earlier. Create the tension normally, dammit! Not with flashforwards.
-Bad ADR. I hear it so often on TV that apparently it is freakin' rocket science.
-Skye claims to have searched every data stream for evidence of the thing. What does that even mean? As fast as SHIELD's wireless network probably is, I can't imagine it's possible to search the entire internet in less than a minute. This show totally is NCIS.
-Ward's fancy force blaster is practically worthless. Seriously, it takes him longer to use it than it keeps the rebels down.
-Fitzsimmons spout pointless tech babble that makes no sense. I know they're supposed to be nerds, but I know nerds, and no nerds are actually that nerdy. They also say things that actually make sense.

Final Thoughts
This was better than last week's episode. The ADR was worse, but the acting and special effects were very much improved. Which is weird, because this is a marquee show, so I would've thought that Disney would've sunk a tonne of dough into the pilot to get people interested in the series.

The script was better, too, although they're still not really mining the source material. This week they fought the Peruvian military. That's not exactly something that requires fancy space technology or a specially-outfitted airplane. There are hundreds of obscure supervillains in the Marvel universe that they could be fighting, and instead they're dealing with South American rebels. That's not even really something you need a secret organization to do; you can just use the actual military for that. Sure, there was a fancy blaster thing, but a normal bomb-disposal unit could've handled it just as well and as easily. The show could still be Image Comics' Agents of SHEATH (I found out that SWORD is a real thing in Marvel), and there would be no difference. Why have a licence and source material if you're not going to use them?

All in all, I liked this episode more than last week's, but I'm really not seeing much reason to continue watching the show. Most of the characters aren't terribly compelling and the plots aren't that interesting. I'm still willing to give it a couple more weeks to find its footing, but there just needs to be more to it than what we've seen so far if I'm going to stick around for the long haul.

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.