S.H.I.E.L.D., Maveth - Dec 8

And so, AoS mid-S3 finale had come to a conclusion. Was it shuttering? Yes and no. Not unlike “Purpose...” (ep 3x02), AoS aimed to depict the agents as a well-oiled team, a machine, and now, since the finale of S2, it has done it. Lincoln is with Daisy, Mel is going to be with Phil, and the FitzSimmons are the FitzSimmons. For further drama, Andrew/Lash is out there, acting the villain not unlike how Ward had done it before, since the beginning of S3, Simmons is going to be mad at Fitz over Will, and, well, Brett is going to be now playing some sort of a space monster, now that Grant is dead (as a canon character). It is simple, straightforward, and predictable.

Boring, basically.

The greatest strength of AoS was the unpredictability of its’ characters, the breaking of the comic-book canon in S1. By making Grant a villain with a chance of redemption, they made it interesting. Then S2 happened, and the show’s script writers went all over places, fiddling with Grant’s redemption (until the last 3 eps of S2), trying temporarily to pair Skye/Daisy with Lance, trying to figure out where Raina fit in, etc.

Then the S2 finale occurred, Grant finally became purely a villain, the rest of the team – purely heroes, and S3 rolled in. Predictability rolled in. The characters got settled into their roles as people, not just as agents. Marvel™, backed by Disney™, is a powerhouse in terms of the finances, which allows them to play out their films (MCU), as well as AoS, on an epic scale, if by ‘epic’ you mean ‘expansive’, ‘extensive’, and ‘large’. The TV-medium does not allow the same mass media depictions as the movie screen does, so even “Maveth” did not have the same impact as any of the MCU movies would. The music delivered, the actors delivered, but the old, unpredictable S.H.I.E.L.D. of S1 died. What is left, what will appear for the rest of S3 and beyond is predictability; in fact, given the ‘grand musical number’ at the conclusion of “Maveth”, AoS could’ve ended right here, with a bang – the Earth is saved, the agents are (mostly) happy, etc.

...Oh wait, Grant Ward had been resurrected by the alien horror. Of course he was – Brett’s from the main cast, so he cannot disappear the same way that Trip did, for example. He has to remain on the show, even with a new role, driving forth the agents as the antagonist to their happiness and family values. Hooray!

...This had been done before, in ‘Primeval’, made by Impossible Pictures™. There, Helen Cutter, too had evolved from an ambiguous, and even helpful, character into a pure villain...that proved to be the main driving force of the show: she was killed at the end of S3 (Ward made it barely to the middle), but she still had to be brought back post-mortem by the end of S5 as she almost destroyed the world even from beyond the grave. Remind you of anyone?

As for the other Ward scion, Thomas...AoS was always about killing off the guest stars. So far we see no sign of him joining the main cast, so odds are is that he will die by the end of S3 if not sooner – Grant’s resurrected corpse is going to get him, most likely, or perhaps Lash/Andrew will. His showdown with May was very reminiscent of Grant’s showdown with Skye back in S1, and AoS showed that it isn’t above ‘recycling’ the old characters into new – Rosalind was reminiscent of S1 Raina, Lash was clearly based on her S2 second half, etc. Thomas is going to be the redeemed Ward, most likely, which is sad – couldn’t they have found a way to redeem Grant? Ah well, it was obvious that he was going to die since the end of S2, when Kara died. His heart died with her, after all.

So, from now on, it is going to be a completely different ball game. AoS has put behind the chaotic and ill-defined S2, the embarrassing episode 3x01 and has become solid, powerful, predictable. The critics say that S3 had revitalized the show...yet the ratings still are nowhere high enough to what they were in S1, and now there is a big break – until March – so odds are that the ratings will go down, as they did in S2. So for now we will wave farewell to AoS and wait for March with more reviews.

(Or not, if the show will prove to be too predictable at that time.)

S.H.I.E.L.D., Closure - Dec 1

And so, the mid-winter mid-season AoS finale has come upon us, and once more there are twists. More precisely, ATCU was taken out; both Price and Banks are gone. The fusion of the plotlines – Hydra, InHuman, alien – is coming to a head, with both S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra boasting gifted people among them, while Coulson is going after Ward (and, unknowingly, Fitz) through another portal to planet/dimension X. It is only a matter of time until Thanos gets involved, as the final shots at the Age of Ultron had indicated.

Anything else? The writing team put their best effort into this, this is no hackfest as it was at the season finale of S2, this time everything makes sense, the plot is solid, as is the action...pardon me, the acting of the actors, it is also solid, without any gaps as it was in S2, especially in the beginning of that season, and even the setting, the scenery is very well done – but it had been so since the “Purpose...” episode and yet the ratings have continued to fall.

Now, we’ve talked about this; the problem is in repetition (the mid-season finale, for all of its good points, is very reminiscent of the finale of S1 – even John Garrett was mentioned), as well as in recycling – Price was based on S1 Raina, while Lash was more of a second-half S2 Raina; and then there are all of those ‘imitations’ – “Killjoys”, “Dark Matter”, “Blindspot”, perhaps even “Supergirl”, some of which are quite successful in their own right, especially “Blindspot”, with Kurt being a Ward-like character, and Jane/Taylor being a Skye-like character, and now their mid-winter finale introduced Oscar, a Lincoln-like character – someone on “Blindspot” is clearly an AoS fan, who wants it done right – never mind that those are all TV characters; anyone remember their 50^th episode featurette? Brett and Chloe did their best to point out that they were not Skye/Daisy and Grant, while trying to give ‘SkyeWard’ fans a bone – got to appease the viewers somehow, but we talked about this in a previous installment. This relationship is obviously finished, we got StaticQuake here now, but this is not the point.

Well, ok, the other fact is that the ship Philinda is back on – Price is dead, and so’s Andrew, but considering that Andrew, for one, had killed plenty of innocent people in his own right, as Lash, yeah, May is better off with Coulson anyways. The FitzSimmons? The show is clearly referencing back to S1, when Fitz and Simmons were underwater – sometimes Ward acts like a crazy, messed-up Cupid – but speaking of messed-up? There is the show’s site that is updated relatively irregularly; there are the comics, which have nothing to do with MCU; and then there the upcoming “Civil War” movie – AoS is trying to tie itself to it: the FitzSimmons got captured in an abandoned Stark facility.

That probably is not good – ‘Laws’ did its best to tie itself into the greater MCU, and as a result the writers delivered a very hackneyed, clichéd episode that they tried to bury themselves in the following episodes very successfully, so hopefully they won’t try to do that in ‘Maveth’ (does this word even mean anything or is it just a name) or in post “Agent Carter” S2 episodes. (That is right, Carter is coming back in January, so yay!) That sort of cliché can kill a show, you know?

But the upcoming “Civil War” movie (in May 2016)? Yes, that is something else. So far MCU had delivered beautifully, and this trailer promises this to be just as good. So let us buckle our loins, hanker down and wait – for the next week for AoS mid-S3 finale, for January for ‘Carter’, and for May for “Civil War”. Until then – peace out!