Last night’s Agents of
SHIELD was billed as being a quasi-sequel to Thor: the Dark World. As if Coulson’s squad would be spending the
whole episode cleaning up the aftermath of Thor’s fight with Malekith. In fact,
it was much more a standalone affair — which pointed to one problem with the
shared continuity.
Spoilers ahead…
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be another anti-Agents of SHIELD rant or anything. It’s
a perfectly serviceable show, that’s getting slowly more watchable as the cast
gels a bit, and last night’s episode was pretty watchable.
But by hanging a sign out that says “movie
tie-in,” this episode pointed out one of the main pitfalls of having a TV
show that has to dart between the ankles of big movies: the worldbuilding. The
show couldn’t tell a definitive story about Asgard or Asgardians, or really
stretch our understanding of Norse mythology in the Marvel Universe, because it
was stuck trying to avoid competing with Thor
2.
And this is kind of an odd episode, in that we get a lot of
talk about Asgard and how much everybody wants tomeet Thor (except for Coulson, who’s met
Thor) — but nothing particularly new gets said about any of it, and the
episode’s McGuffin could be the product of any random alien civilization.
There’s nothing about the Berserker Staff which requires it to be Asgardian,
per se.
And I started to wonder at some point, watching this
episode, if it wouldn’t have been more interesting if the Berserker Staff had
been the product of the Globdonian race instead of the Asgardians — because
then we could have learned something about the Globdonians, or gotten some
interesting worldbuilding.
The biggest problem with this episode, actually, is the two
white supremacist-y black-metal fiends who want the Berserker Staff — for
reasons that remain somewhat unclear. Are they actual white supremacists? Or
just scary Norwegians? They say something about “taking back the
power” at one point, but they’re honestly the most nondescript villains
this show has given us. (Which is actually saying something.)
So in our team’s pursuit of the Asgardian Staff, we do meet
one an Asgardian deserter, who’s disguised himself as a college professor (just
like James Marsters on Warehouse 13
not long ago.) He mentions that he had a shit job (literally) in Asgard, so he
volunteered for the army, but didn’t enjoy the Asgardian Army life, so he snuck
off and hid his magicky staff in three places.
Agents of SHIELD
should maybe get away from doing stories about Asgardians and Extremis zombies
and Chitauri for a bit, and instead do something about Lemurians or whatever.
Wouldn’t it be cool if we met our first Atlanteans on this show? The Marvel
Universe is jam-packed with corners that the movies haven’t touched yet — or
the writers could just do what Stan and Jack would have done, and make up a
whole new race during their afternoon sandwich break.
The larger problem with being tied in with the movies, of
course, is the Captain America: The
Winter Soldier thing. We know, from the trailers, that Cap 2 is going to be all about SHIELD being evil — which is the
most interesting story you can tell about SHIELD, really. So as long as that
plot is teed up for an upcoming movie, Agents
of SHIELD can hint that SHIELD is a flawed organization (as the show did
last week, with the “no extraction” mission) but can’t just go to
full-on “Nick Fury Vs. SHIELD” territory.
I asked
showrunner Jeff Bell about the Winter
Soldier issue a while back, and he basically said that they have their
own plans, which Marvel has okayed.
https://gizmodo.com/how-agents-of-shields-ragtag-crew-will-become-a-family-1450091586
Anyway, like I said, this was a perfectly decent episode,
with some funny moments. And we’re starting to see the human side of Grant
Ward, which is a plus.
To some extent, the real theme of last night’s episode has
to do with repression — Grant Ward touches the Berserker Staff, and it causes
him to become more aggressive, but also to relive a childhood trauma that he’d
suppressed in the name of efficiency. (Grant’s kid brother was stuck down a
well, and Grant was forbidden to rescue him by some mean kid, and you sense
that it ended badly.)
Grant struggles with his supercharged anger, but also with
his returning memories, and actually shows some real vulnerability. The best
scene of the episode is when he goes to see Coulson to confess that he might be
a liability because of his uncontrolled emotion. And they share something like
intimacy for a moment, before Coulson says that Grant raising the issue proves
he can be trusted.
And yet, when Melinda May touches the staff, she seems fine
— and she tells Grant that she doesn’t repress her trauma, she sees it all the
time. Is this why May is so cold and withdrawn? And which one of them has the
right approach? Does repression make you more efficient, or does just facing
your trauma, over and over? This is the first time we’ve really been encouraged
to think of Grant and May as opposites, rather than two of a kind.
And on the theme of repression, we get more hints that
Coulson is repressing something awful that happened — he’s increasingly
dissatisfied with the explanation that he was revived and sent to Tahiti. And his fake-idyllic memories of Tahiti seem to slip away, to reveal something awful.
And at one point during the Tahiti
flashback, Coulson asks, “Did I fall asleep?” “For alittle while,” replies his masseuse.
That’s right — this isn’t a Thor 2
sequel at all. It’s a Dollhouse
sequel. (And in terms of dealing with the issues of memory and ethics that this
show is flirting with a little bit, especially this week, it’s hard not to remember
how much more audaciously Dollhouse approached
them. I still miss Dollhouse.)
