Don't read this post if you still haven't seen "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" yet. Not just because of the spoilers it's going to be full of, but because you are wasting critical minutes that you could be spending running off to see "Captain America: The Winter Soldier." From the loving characterization and thoughtful script to the visual design and the sound editing, it's the kind of movie that gets you excited about superheroes again, even if you were already pretty into them.
"Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." still doesn't seem to love superheroes. But it's upped its supervillain game for sure. The destruction and renewal of "Winter Soldier" brought new life to Marvel's spinoff show as well, transforming "Agents" in unexpected ways. Now the excitement's back as we head into the final episode of Season 1. Again, don't read on until you've seen the latest episodes, because after this point it's spoilers all the way down.
After seeing the SHIELD agency destroyed and all its secret files revealed to the world in "Winter Soldier," my first reaction was, "So that's a mercy killing for 'Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,' then."
Coulson's shadow team would be public knowledge. And just as SHIELD's function was to keep secrets from the regular world, so had the show been built on the slow revealing of those secrets to the characters and the viewer. What could possibly be left of it now? Why spend all that time on the mysteries of Coulson's resurrection and Skye's past if the answers were all now posted on 4chan? If The Clairvoyant could run rings around Coulson's team just because he'd read SHIELD's files, how pathetically outclassed would they be once every villain in the world -- and every bored high schooler -- had read the files too?
Esteemed CNET colleague Eric Franklin had a different reaction, saying he thought it could revitalize the show. People had been saying "Agents" could only be saved with major changes, he reminded me. These would be major changes.
Put that way, it did sound promising. I pictured Skye signing on the next morning and her jaw dropping as all the information she'd agitated for as a member of the Rising Tide suddenly became available to her, including the secrets of her own past. Like a hacker in a candy store. There'd be the worldwide scramble as every bad guy and every "sweaty cosplayer" learned the locations of every gifted person on SHIELD's Index -- and the rapid visual changes in society as every manufacturer in the world learned how to make flying cars and massive suborbital gunships. And, of course, we'd see the various Avengers reacting to the news that Coulson was alive, while the team was forced to hide from both sides of the law.
So... one of those things happened. The team is on the run because SHIELD was disbanded. (The show seems to believe only some of SHIELD's files were released, though I never caught so much as one little handwavey line about it.) The changes didn't stop there, though; the showrunners went farther and carried out the movie's "Hydra secretly operating within SHIELD" plot by revealing a trusted member of Coulson's team to be a Hydra plant. And a bad guy, or at least, a guy willing to do some very bad things.
Good-guy Grant Ward was actually one of my favorite characters, before. No, it's true. Definitely a minority opinion. It seems one viewer's "understated charm and wry humor" is another's "big block of wood." People had been calling for him to be killed off or revamped, and the writers went with it. (Oh, they say they were planning it all along, but it smells like retcon to me. Why wouldn't they have told the actor?)
Him turning out to be a traitor all along does embody the crisis of the movie perfectly, though. Ward's key character trait was protectiveness -- even his name means "shield." And just as SHIELD turned out to have Hydra lurking at its core, Ward is being controlled by a puppetmaster who's working for Hydra. Who in his turn had nothing at his core when he turned against SHIELD, having to literally stuff his intestines back in his body and rebuilding his philosophy on self-interest.
I'd originally thought (hoped!) Ward could be under some kind of mental whammy, like Hawkeye in "The Avengers," based on the crazy-person soundtrack playing during a closeup at the end of the episode where he breaks cover. But in the most recent episode, "Ragtag," it's made clear that he's the result of relentless psychological conditioning by his mentor, Agent John Garrett. (Aka Bill Paxton. Good to see you! GAME OVER, MAN, GAME OVER!)
The result is it's surprisingly unclear how far Ward will go to obey his master. When they interact, you can see some of the same traits Ward seemed to have before -- loyalty and compassion for his team -- just badly misdirected. It seems for the first part of the show he was in deep cover as a version of his real self, the person he could have been. But the show isn't messing around here: he's not that guy. Ward will commit murder on command, lots of it, possibly even of people he's fond of. Even Skye doesn't seem to be a guaranteed exception, although...you know she will be. (Yes, Skye's still special. Just playing a more passive role at the moment.)
The story's definitely more challenging with Ward being willingly on the wrong team. Like SHIELD in "Winter Soldier," he's making bad decisions with a lot of momentum behind them, trusting a charismatic leader, and "Agents" wants him to learn the same lesson Coulson did earlier in the season -- and that May may not have -- to stop justifying himself with "just following orders." Skye even points out that Hydra was founded by Nazis, in case anyone had forgotten why that phrase automatically renders your point of view invalid on TV.
In other words, the writers of "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." see SHIELD as a fascist organization that needed to die. Could that be part of why the show never quite worked? It's always been clear in the Marvel movies that SHIELD was kind of creepy -- that was the humor of it, that this was the scary government organization that's on our side; Agent Coulson comes in and steals your life's work and you'll never know why, but he's so gosh-darned pleasant about it. So I'm sure some people feel that in "Winter Soldier" it was a cop-out to blame everything on a secret Hydra cell within the organization. To say that SHIELD went bad because of Hydra seems like ignoring what's wrong with the SHIELD concept itself.
Ward's key character trait was protectiveness -- even his name means "shield."
Actually, though, I think displacing the criticism onto Hydra achieves exactly the same thing in the end. Directly saying, "SHIELD is evil! You were stupid to ever root for it!" would have come across as contempt for fans. But the hidden-Hydra plot leads to the same conclusions: too much power without oversight is dangerous. If Hydra could infiltrate SHIELD to do evil, so could another group -- or so could SHIELD's rightful leaders choose to do something that you don't agree with, perhaps following the orders of a World Security Council you didn't elect. And no matter how much you trust Director Nick Fury, he won't be in charge forever -- he won't even be on top of things in his own organization forever. A benevolent dictatorship isn't long-term viable.
SHIELD and Hydra are two sides of the same coin, we're told, and the boss Hydra villain in the movie, who wants to destroy the world to build it again, chose Fury to run SHIELD because he admired his willingness to ignore orders and do what he thought was right. Like a vigilante. Like a superhero. Like Hydra.
Brett Dalton, the actor who plays Grant Ward, said it himself in an interview: citing The Punisher as a favorite, he says, "The world today seems so divided, and there's so much debate, bickering and politics over everything [...] That's what you will always get in superhero films, people actually making things happen in very big ways. They don't talk about it; they do it."
Superheroes aren't hampered by things like due process and search warrants. And that element of their appeal is something that "Winter Soldier" portrayed as a fundamentally corrupt philosophy. So while providing the coolest super-characters I've seen in ages -- Falcon and the Winter Soldier himself -- the movie subtly calls into question the superhero story itself. (Yes, this is the kind of thing I start ranting about after the third cocktail. Sorry about that, Eric!)
But where the movie makes the point that the line between right and wrong can erode before you know it, "Agents" doesn't take the idea that far. Hydra is a dark mirror for SHIELD, but there's a clear dividing line. Garrett says compassion is weakness, Coulson says compassion takes more strength. Garrett sneers at loyalty, Coulson offers it. Ward embodies the struggle, but his choices are clearly wrong -- so far.
In "Ragtag," Fitz finally says the word -- by operating after the official demise of SHIELD, they've become vigilantes. Coulson replies that they're doing the right thing and ends with a classic maverick-hero announcement, "I want my plane back."
Basically "Agents" doesn't have a problem with independent heroes, it just doesn't seem to like superheroes that much. From the start it felt strange that for a show in the Marvel universe, "Agents" has very little sense of wonder to it. The characters keep saying "psychic powers" don't exist. Asgardian demigods are just aliens, there's a scientific explanation for everything, and almost anyone with powers is a villain or a victim or both, like poor deluded Mike Peterson.
"Agents" doesn't have a problem with lone heroes, it just doesn't seem to like superheroes that much.
We're told Skye's a superhero groupie, but her excitement about that doesn't show up much and seems out of place when it does. Coulson does describe Lady Sif's solo fight in "Thor" as "badass," but it's nothing compared to his happy geeking out over Triplett's collection of vintage SHIELD equipment. (That was very nice to see, by the way -- several episodes of being told Coulson likes antiques were nothing compared to being shown that he does. A common complaint about the writing on this show.)
A negative attitude toward superpowers makes sense given that SHIELD's job was to track down and control superpowered threats. But it means the show spends little time on the types of characters that most viewers probably want to see.
And it seemed at first as if the changes brought by "Winter Soldier" were going to turn the show into pure action-adventure. So much of the mood and plot of the first half of the series seemed to have been swept aside, T-boned off course by Garrett and his crass, pragmatic military schtick. Coulson's possible semi-humanity, Skye's possible 0-8-4 powers, the Clairvoyant, and Raina's drawling, posing mysticism all became irrelevant.
However, in "Ragtag" it all started to come back together, more or less. Or so Coulson claims, and can you argue with that face when he's staring earnestly at you next to a whiteboard literally diagramming the plot?
Everything we've seen was Garrett's efforts to create Centipede serum powerful enough to save his own life, a motivation that actually makes sense. And Raina is back in the picture, manipulating events so as to further her own "interest in transformation" -- injecting the dying Garrett with the last of the enhanced alien blood to create a bona fide supervillain, and bringing Skye back into the story as more than the object of Ward's unreliable affections. (Even then, her special nature is presented negatively: Skye's parents became "monsters," or Skye may herself.)
As Skye and Ward play out the love-hate SHIELD-superpower relationship, presumably they'll teach each other something about compassion and teamwork and thinking for yourself or...something. We've seen Ward notice that Garrett pulled the same move remote-bullying move that his hated older brother did, which could be the crack that the lever of his feelings for Skye pries open.
So we're going into the finale with a lot on the show's plate -- or sticking to the wall. The nation's in shambles, full of roaming "gifted" villains armed with alien gadgets, and sub-villain Ian Quinn's playing with gravitonium again, pursuing the Hydra strategy of getting people to trade freedom for order, and maybe planning to kidnap the top US military brass. There still may be consequences from those uploaded files -- all that scary alien knowledge injected into the world in one go, like the serum into Garrett. SHIELD can't help anymore and the Avengers don't seem to be around.
There's a lot of just mowing-the-lawn type work that needs to be done to even get near the final drama: Coulson, May, and Trip fighting their way out of the nest of supersoldiers, someone rescuing Fitz and Simmons from their watery coffin, everyone ending up in the same part of the world.
After that we're booked for several confrontations: Coulson and Garrett, May and Ward, Skye and Ward, probably Ward and Garrett. And maybe Coulson and Fury -- who revived Coulson with measures he already knew Coulson found horrific. Speaking of which, there might be a last-minute revelation about Coulson, since this alien blood is supposed to cause everything from catatonia to psychosis to "hypergraphia" (compulsive writing is a really weird choice, but that's what it sounded like!)
Mike Peterson, aka Deathlok, might do something interesting instead of just being tedious and whiny and hard to kill. Ward seems likely to be redeemed, but dead or alive? We should get a solid idea of Raina's end game and what the deal is with Skye being an 0-8-4. And of course the climax of the series, what we're told it's all been building up to, is seeing what kind of crazy megapowerful supervillain Garrett's become.
That's a lot to take care of in less than an hour and I doubt it'll all work, but I'm excited to watch and find out. And that makes a nice change.
So they tried to jolt "Agents" back to life and mostly succeeded. They did a lot of what people wanted: raised the stakes, sped up the action, did some character development, and are probably bringing in more superhero-supervillain action. Is that enough? Now that the show's been renewed for season 2, what do they still need to do to make it really good?
We've seen suggestions from Jim Steranko and Stan Lee. I still say the most important thing is to replace most of whoever's been writing their dialogue. What do you want to see? What do you think is going to happen? Will Skye and Ward ever get together? Just kidding, I don't care about that at all. But did Ward actually mean to kill Fitz and Simmons or did he know Fitz had a tracker? Does Garrett seem like he's turning into a specific character from the comics? What's your favorite Mayism (since she's clearly the new Chuck Norris)? Do you, like esteemed CNET colleague Eric Franklin, suspect another member of the team of being Hydra?? That one blew my mind when he told me, but now it's all I can see. Come. Sit. Talk.
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