By: Maurissa Tancharoen & Jed Whedon (story)
The Story: If you think oil and water don’t mix, try romance, religion, and science.
The Review: Each time I watch an episode of this show, I can’t help imagining what the pitch meeting was like. I see a generic executive’s office, all mahogany, plush carpet, and glass, a pristine city skyline in the background. An unnamed businessman, with excellent hair and a gray suit from Brooks Brothers, reclines in his leather spinny chair, his fingertips pressed together. In front of his desk, a member of the Whedon family, perched eagerly on the edge of his seat.
“It’s a tie-in,” Whedon says, “a ‘spin-off,’ if you want it in TV talk—to the Marvel movies. You know, Iron Man, Thor, Captain America…”
“Oh, right,” says the exec, checking his gold-plated iPhone for texts from his hooker.
“Well, anyway, it’s about a group of people with special abilities who come together to save the world from crazy, superpowered threats.”
“The Avengers?”
“No—S.H.I.E.L.D.” Upon the exec’s unblinking stare, Whedon goes on, “It’s that group of government agents who help the Avengers. See, they won’t have superpowers, but they’re pretty good at fighting and shooting things and sometimes doing science. Most of the episodes will be about them flying around in a giant plane investigating things that might have something to do with superheroes but mostly won’t. When they’re not doing that, they’ll pretend that they’re a cross between Firefly and Mission: Impossible—not the movie, but the show. And Clark Gregg will kind of be like the Peter Graves character, only with less impressive hair.”
I grant you that the pitch probably didn’t sound like that, but that’s the show we got anyway. It’s as if every episode goes out of its way to underwhelm. Last night’s plot, for instance, goes through a rapid devolution from initially seeming like the team finally stumbled onto a superhero case, to clarifying itself as a more generic supernatural encounter with a denizen from Hell, to finally becoming an even more generic melodrama with a sci-fi twist. Basically, the episode starts out like Smallville and eventually becomes The Twilight Zone.
It is virtually impossible to care about the featured characters, given their utter triteness. Hannah, the woman who turns out not to have telekinetic powers despite a couple Carrie-like displays to the contrary, is so normal that she’s almost abnormal (“She’s nice,” Skye describes, “like, overly nice; she never misses a birthday post to her friends, runs the youth program at her church, rescues dogs.”), and Tobias Ford, the man who turns out not to be a supervillain or demon, has such a pathetically obvious motivation that you can’t even summon the energy to root for his defeat.
The episode attempts to supplement this thoroughly disappointing premise with some team drama, but nearly every plotline falls flat somewhere along the way. Of all the cast members the episode could highlight, May is probably the one who needs it most but can carry it least. She’s so centered and neutral a character that whether you fling her into a one-night stand,* embroil her in a stand-off with a tortured soul, or investigate her past exploits, she still comes across a little bland and unflappable. Besides that, the episode is based on a completely false perception of her personality even within its own continuity; we’ve already seen May demonstrate clear moments of compassion and even dry humor** in past episodes, so why does Coulson mention May’s warmth in the past tense?
The remaining sub-stories have a little more integrity, but come across no less like they’re trying too hard to make their points. Trancheon-Whedon could not possibly have taken greater pains to depict Skye as the most human of the team, if only by having Skye insist on playing counselor to the distraught Hannah, and everyone else shutting her down. Meanwhile, Fitz and Simmons, perhaps believing themselves to be characters on How I Met Your Mother, suddenly decide that now’s the best time to fulfill a missed collegiate opportunity to haze the underclassman, which they then proceed to do in the lamest way possible. The most amusing part of that whole fiasco is that Skye, despite her doubts, actually falls for it.
Conclusion: Not unlike the banana variation of the knock-knock joke, the episode’s attempts to keep you guessing only lead you to the most unsatisfactory revelations and twists.
Grade: C-
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: * Last week, I mentioned how I’ve started to see May as “rather asexual, as if she couldn’t be bothered to get it on with anybody except perhaps a highly efficient robot designed for that very purpose”? Ward fits that profile pretty well, doesn’t he? I mean, his jaw alone should be enough of an indicator that he was brought into the show as a sex machine who sometimes punches bad guys.
** Remember how she very cheekily corrected Coulson about how “dreamy” Thor was? What’s that, if not warmth?