In the second episode of “Agents”, the titular heroes have
discovered the power of teamwork. More precisely, when working together, they
were able to outmaneuver and defeat a team of Peruvian soldiers, after a question
of the ownership of an alien device turned ugly.
What can be said of the episode “0-8-4”? On the plus side
there is the great acting from all of the characters, main and minor. Any
similarities between this episode’s script and “Snakes on a Plane” movie are
minor and mostly circumstantial, mostly in regards to the hole in the side of
the airplanes. We actually get some prehistory of agent Coulson with Camilla
Rais (the main antagonist of this episode) and Whedon generally distances his
show from the real-life world (and the States) by making S.H.I.E.L.D. an
international agency rather than a national one. Fair enough and this did not
stop the agents at the end of the episode from watching NASA launching another
rocket (presumably this occurred before President Obama launched the government
shutdown, right?).
The agents themselves proved to be capable of being a team in
face of adversity as it was said before: May and Ward (and to a lesser extent
Coulson himself) kicked ass of their adversaries as they did in the pilot
episode; Fitz and Simmons have chemistry that is ridiculous; and Skye... spoiler
alert. Skye is a plant of the Rising Tide, the main adversary of S.H.I.E.L.D.
in this season at least. Of course, stories being what they are, Skye will
eventually repent of her miscreant past probably just in time to save the team
at the season’s finale, and if she doesn’t (on an off chance) agent Coulson
will have a back-up plan for just such an occasion.
This brings me to the negative aspects of this episode at
least: it was lackluster in special effects. Yes, realism is an important part
of the series, but here... the Inca temple, for example. There were supposed to
be other artefacts besides the alien one, but there were not. Whedon and co. could
not go to eBay and find bunch of imitation Inca art there? Yes, they probably
could – it did not have to be good – but they did not. Instead the temple could
as well had been a warehouse – it was just featureless with some bars across
the walls near the ceiling (do temples even have them?) – boring.
The alien-German device itself was rather underwhelming itself.
The FitzSimmons duo suggested that it was more German than alien, but in the
Avengers-verse the two often go hand-in-hand, especially in Captain America so
that, and the mention Hydra (organization, not mythical monster) by Rais was
more like a tie to the official comic-verse than anything else. I rather expected
more than that, maybe some cough German cough symbology on the
device? Plus what does it actually do other than blow holes in planes? Well,
maybe we will learn in the following episodes...
So. Great acting work, lackluster special effects – Marvel’s
“Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” are shaping up to be a very unusual sci-fi series
indeed.
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