Saturday, 16 December 2017

S.H.I.E.L.D. "Life Earned' - Dec 16

Heading back to AoS, things don’t look so good for our heroes: the episode before this one, ‘Life Spent’, has the lowest numbers ever of an AoS episode – and the show is doing all it can do everything right.

The villains are completely unsympathetic; Kasius is a pretentious brute that probably not other Kree can stomach, while his ‘girl Friday’, Synera, is a heartless bitch. (Well, she is). In this week’s episode – ‘Life Earned’ – she has defeated May, (who had a handicap: arriving in the future hurt her leg…in a manner reminiscent of how Grant had shot Bobbi in the leg at the end of S2, remember?). Unlike Ward and Kara Palamas, no one is sympathetic to the Kree, and-

And no one cares for them anymore; there is no fan party for the sake of Kree, no controversy, no anything. On one hand, this is good; AoS does not really need more of the above after the entire Grant (& Kara) mess, on top of the Hydra definition mess, on top of Cap vs. Tony mess. On the other, there is no excitement, no conflict of interest; right now, AoS is very heavy on the dystopia drama, to a point where Coulson, (well, Gregg) breaks the fourth wall, (sort of), by claiming that all the dystopian clichés are complete: by now humans aren’t even able to reproduce by themselves anymore, and have to have cloned babies, (produced by the Kree) to propagate their species.

This is very horrible…and does not quite mesh with the human-Kree interaction in the GotG movies, (which really are the only MCU movies that featured Kree, seriously). There were some Kree in the previous seasons of AoS, but they were only episodal characters, though generally unpleasant. In particular, in S2, one of them was able to overpower lady Sif of Asgard and give her temporary amnesia, but S.H.I.E.L.D.’s plucky and determined heroes put everything right – and lady Sif, or rather Jamie Alexander, left MCU to be the female lead in ‘Blindspot’, which is a better, more realistic take on S.H.I.E.L.D. and especially on Grant and Skye’s relationship; the fact that Luke Mitchell, (Lincoln Campbell of AoS) is playing the main villain on ‘Blindspot’ now only adds to that realization; right now, ‘Blindspot’ is in its’ third season…

Here is the punchline: MCU in general is going through a reboot fuelled by real life: Disney, (which already owns the main Marvel franchise), just bought 21st Century Fox, getting itself the rights to the X-Men and co. corner of MCU (‘Gifted’, ‘Legion’, etc.), and it has, conversely, severed ties with Netflix, so it’s anyone’s guess as to what will happen to the ‘Defenders’-related shows; the only holdout left, (so far), is Hulu – (‘Runaways’, 2018 – ‘Cloak and Dagger’). So?

So on the other hand we got ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ movie. It is a reboot of ‘Thor’ franchise of MCU, as most of the characters starring in the previous ‘Thor’ movies are gone. Sif is gone, (see above), Jane Foster, Darcy and Dr. Selvig are gone, Odin is gone, the Warriors Three – ditto… These characters – and the actors who played them – are not coming back to MCU in a hurry, one bets. Things are getting shuffled and reshuffled at Marvel’s corner of Disney…and where does it leave AoS?

Nowhere good, apparently, as ‘Life Earned’ has even lower numbers than ‘Life Spent’ had. AoS has learned how to do things ‘right’, but it might be coming too late for the show, and with its’ ‘fall finale’ coming up next week, things won’t improve soon, most likely.


…That is it for now, see you soon!

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