Last night’s episode of Agents
of SHIELD was sort of weird. Like, tonally weird. I wasn’t sure what I was
supposed to be feeling — until the end, which was pleasingly creeptastic and
jacked up. Most of all, I was wondering if these guys are really supposed to be
heroes, given how they behave.
Spoilers ahead…
So the main plot of “TAHITI”
revolves around saving Skye from her fatal bullet wounds, inflicted in the
previous episode. And saving Skye, in turn, requires figuring out how Coulson
was really brought back from the dead. We already saw the weird surgery they
did on Coulson’s brain and the tons of procedures they performed to resuscitate
him, but now it turns out there was some miracle drug that restored his
perforated heart.
And that miracle drug turns out to be the product of a weird
creature kept in a tank with tubes coming out of it, in the basement of a
secret facility in the middle of nowhere. This creature is so weird and
exploited, seeing it freaks out Coulson to the point where he suddenly decides
it’s not a good idea to inject Skye with the miracle drug after all.
The weird creature is a neat moment, and definitely lends a
bit of insane gravitas to this episode — plus score yet another notch on the
“SHIELD is an evil organization” side of the ledger.
But like I said, this episode is tonally weird. Like, the
story is supposed to be about our heroes getting pushed to their limits by
grief, to the point where they go off the rails and do something crazy to save
Skye. It should be full of misery and desperation — but after a somewhat sad
opening, the actual tone of the rest of the episode is laid-back, jocular and
even breezy. Mostly, this is because the show somehow managed to score Bill
Paxton as a recurring guest star, playing Agent John Garrett, and Paxton brings
such a friendly, easy-going vibe that everybody else just falls into it.
The end result of this is that we wind up watching Coulson’s
team acting in an utterly unconscionable manner, while seeming kind of mellow
and happy about it — it’s hard to reconcile their actions with the tone of
this episode.
What are the non-heroic things in this episode?
Nobody thinks beating
up an unarmed prisoner is excessive
It’s not just that Melinda May goes into the interrogation
room and beats Ian Quinn to a bloody pulp — it’s that nobody seems to think
that was crossing a line. There’s even a weird scene where Grant Ward tells
Melinda that he liked seeing her brutalize an unarmed, immobilized man, because
she doesn’t show her emotions that often. And I guess any show of emotion,
however brutal and inappropriate, is better than just acting in a professional
manner. I know Quinn shot Skye, but that doesn’t excuse violating the Geneva Convention
on him.
Or making explicit
plans to murder the prisoner if your agent dies
That’s just weird. So Garrett shows up with three planes,
because Coulson was supposed to hand Quinn over to SHIELD for interrogation.
But once Coulson tells Garrett that he has a dying agent on board, and they’re
rushing to try and save her, Garrett totally changes his tune and decides to go
along for the ride — because of course, if Skye dies, Coulson will be totally
justified in murdering his prisoner. That just goes without saying. Of course,
at the end of the episode, Coulson tries to pretend he never said he would
throw Quinn out of the plane if Skye died. But he and Garrett share a knowing
look when Garrett agrees to let Coulson keep Quinn. And there’s no other reason
to keep Quinn on Coulson’s plane. Even apart from the morality of murdering an
unarmed prisoner in cold blood — doing what Quinn did to Skye — there’s also
the stupidity of killing a valuable source of intel. If Coulson had some
plot-related reason for wanting to keep Quinn, that would be one thing. But he
literally just hangs on to Quinn so he can possibly take revenge.
Or threatening to rip
that prisoner’s tongue out
But then Garrett decides he can interrogate Quinn on board
Coulson’s jet — something he does kind of a bad job of. Like, Quinn starts
telling them about Deathlok, and they don’t follow up on it at all. But also,
Garrett makes a big deal of telling Quinn he has no rights and no lawyer, and
they can rip his tongue out and stuff. The threats of torture may be idle ones,
but they still haven’t disciplined the agent who beat up this same prisoner,
and Garrett seems pretty excited about the idea of torturing his prisoner.
They’re playing into
the Clairvoyant’s hands
This is sort of the crux of the episode. The Clairvoyant
really, really wants toknow how Coulson
came back from the dead — so much so, that he kidnapped and tortured Coulson a
while back. This is supposedly the one piece of information the Clairvoyant
can’t simply see. And Quinn comes out and admits that he shot Skye to force
Coulson to dig into the mechanics of his own resurrection — so Coulson is
playing into the Clairvoyant’s hands with his mission to save Skye. Nobody
stops to consider that saving Skye’s life could wind up causing thousands or
millions more deaths down the line.
They murder two
innocent soldiers to save Skye’s life
Maybe I missed it in all the excitement, but does anybody
comment on this at all? Those soldiers that Coulson, Garrett and the others
slaughter are not enemy combatants — they’re SHIELD’s own people. Or at least,
they’re connected to SHIELD. They are just trying to guard a facility that
Coulson doesn’t have authorization to get inside. And Garrett seems downright
gleeful about doing this the hard way, letting his gun speak for him. Not to
mention, when the facility is blown up in a final failsafe, there’s no
guarantee it was totally empty apart from those two guards. Coulson is willing
tomurder two of his own people in cold
blood to save Skye’s life.
On the plus side though, I really like Agent Triplett (BJ
Britt) and hope he and Simmons do get together — their scenes together were
really cute.
