Saturday, 14 April 2018

S.H.I.E.L.D. 'Honeymoon' - April 14


‘The Honeymoon’ was aired last night. And…AoS continues to disappoint. Why? Because it is disjointed.

Let us try again. Firstly, AoS continues to disrespect its’ characters by constantly redesigning them. In this episode, general Hale – who still lacks a first name, but by now is taking her hair down, on occasion, making her look more like her daughter, Ruby – talks about ‘the chamber’ with her latest right-hand woman, how she wants Ivanov to go into it first, to learn what it will do to human flesh, etc. This does make her sound ruthless, as a Hydra head should be, but…

But Ivanov is a robot by now; in S4, AIDA has destroyed his old body completely and remade him into several LMDs. Whatever LMD of Ivanov survived, they would be completely inorganic as well, (save for the brain, maybe), and as such the chamber’s effect on Ivanov would be completely different from what it would be on Ruby, because the latter doesn’t appear to be an LMD or an android; so far she appears to be wholly organic. This will change in the next episode, but still a point must be made, beforehand.

The same goes for Yo-Yo. Poor NCB, (aka the actress). Clearly, AoS cannot afford to give her character special effects in regards to superspeed, so they made her a cyborg instead; Yo-Yo still has speed, she just cannot use it, because it hurts her very badly instead. This is a crummy thing to do a character; Yo-Yo was built around her speed and now she will be rebuilt from scratch just because – but we talked about how AoS disrespects its’ characters…without any good reason.

And now we have the disjunction on top of disrespect. Not so long ago, the Marvel comics ran a promo picture-collage for AoS: S1 promo on top, S5 on the bottom. The two pictures just did not match – not just because Ward is back, while Mack and Yo-Yo have toughed it out, but because the style, the layout, the depiction, the atmosphere, everything is different; from S1 to S5 AoS became a different show completely!

Now, this does not make AoS unique; ‘Primeval’ of ‘Impossible Pictures’ (IP) has done the same thing, with fewer episodes than AoS has…and it is gone now. IP tried to reboot the series with ‘Primeval: New World’ (P: NW), but it has died after just a single season, and yes, the Primeval series and the rest of IP had a bad break regarding their mother company the BBC and the entirety of ‘Walking with…’ franchise, but the fluidity of its’ acting cast – we’re still talking about the original ‘Primeval’ series here – didn’t help the situation either. At least AoS is constant in that each of its’ seasons was about 22 episodes long – ‘Primeval’ didn’t even had that; its’ various seasons had different amount of episodes, and thus ‘Primeval’ suffered…

Back to AoS? The title of this episode reflects the honeymoon of the FitzSimmons, but the episode itself didn’t do such a good job with it; the FitzSimmons’ plot line was only one of several featured in this episode, (and the entire episode feels rushed); at one moment, Simmons comments to Fitz about how they know now how to strap on a parachute correctly, but…

But the reference is of that S1 episode, when Simmons got infested with an alien virus, and while she did get cured, she did jumped out of the plane to prevent infesting the others…and Grant Ward, now forgotten, jumped out and caught her. Fitz did not. Ergo, this statement of Simmons is devalued and is meaningless, or even a lie. The way that the FitzSimmons fought Hydra’s robot soldiers in synchronisation again reflects how…Grant and May, (or maybe Coulson and May, I am not sure), fought a bunch of rebel soldiers in another S1 episode, so how does that relates to the FitzSimmons directly?

…And then, of course, there are the Star Wars elements; in particular, Jemma Simons is lately dressed – and wears her hair – in a style vaguely reminiscent of Ray from the new trilogy and of Jyn from the ‘Rogue One’ movie. What is up with that?

…SW references aside…this episode of AoS was a mess, and not even the FitzSimmons could save it. They, together with Yo-Yo, have tricked Mack, causing him to stay on the base, just in time save Deke, who had been shot helping Daisy, by being a doctor, right alongside agent Piper.

…Neither Mack nor Piper showed any signs of being medically savvy ever in AoS before; yes, Mack did help Simmons graft the cyborg arms onto Yo-Yo recently, but the key words here are ‘helping Simmons’. Ever since Piper appears in AoS in S4, she was shown to be only May’s protégé, nothing more, and May herself is not that medically savvy either.

So. AoS numbers continue to fall; they have come up, or rather – come upwards – in the last week’s episode, but if AoS continues to, well, disrespect itself, it’s doubtful that this streak will last for very long.

…That is it for this time; see you all soon!

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