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!