Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S01E13 – Review

By: Lauren LeFranc & Rafe Judkins (story)

The Story: S.H.I.E.L.D. on a train.

The Review: I don’t know about you, but my favorite part of any spy story is when everyone goes undercover.  Perhaps real spies will disagree—and if you do, feel free to tell us!—but I imagine this is the fun part of secret agent life: taking on new identities, exploring new settings, using low-key gadgets, etc.  From a fictional standpoint, all of these things afford characters the rare opportunity to improvise, which is always exciting, even when it doesn’t go so well.

It’s sad that it’s taken the show this long to deliver a fully committed undercover episode, where everyone is in the field, and it’s even sadder when you realize how much more fun it makes the show.  You can just tell there’s a lot more energy from the actors than usual, probably undercover stories are such an inherent acting challenge: you’re playing a character who is playing a different character, and you have to be committed to that secondary identity without subsuming the primary one underneath.

Without exception, all the cast members pull off this balance with aplomb.  You can actually see their characters’ personalities come through in the way they approach their cover stories.  Ward and May forego any cumbersome backstory to give them the most freedom to work.  Skye enthusiastically whips up a whole fictional romance between herself and Fitz on the spot to a confused train conductor, while Fitz gamely trots out an acceptable American accent to spare us from Skye’s horrible Scottish one.  In contrast, Simmons goes for a more method route in preparing the apparently dramatic history between herself and Coulson, who plays her dad.  In what is obviously her big scene, she accuses, “You never had any time for [Mum], but you made time for your work—and your prostitutes!”  (“Prostitutes?” Coulson hisses later.  “Plural?”)

All this activity would itself make for an entertaining hour of television, but LeFranc-Judkins go further, incorporating more of the fantastic elements that make you believe S.H.I.E.L.D. might actually take place in the same universe as Iron Man or Captain America.  The bizarre effects of the Night-Night technology and the appearance of a cyborg limb couched in Marvel continuity definitely set the episode apart from other procedurals, which the show had been struggling to do for the first half of the season.  If nothing else, these things give the team some novel obstacles to work around.

The structure of the episode also works in its favor, creating mini-mysteries in each segment which get resolved by a flashback in the next.  This way, LeFranc-Judkins not only avoid squeezing all the action into the top of the episode, but also sustain focus on each character or pair of characters without too many distracting cuts.  Even though have to do a little mental reset each time you come back from a commercial break, the episode gets a better flow out of it.

I suppose we should talk about the biggest moment of the episode, namely—spoiler alert—Skye getting shot and getting sealed into a hyperbaric chamber to save her life.  While the show hasn’t put in quite enough effort into the characters to make you torn up about what’s happened, their emotional reactions are sincere and believable.  While there’s little doubt that she’ll inevitably revive, her near-death experience is bound to send shockwaves through the group.  Fitz and Simmons will have to reevaluate their commitment to fieldwork on both the physical and emotional risks.  More importantly, Coulson must grapple with the guilt of bringing Skye onto the team in the first place, a guilt that Ward implicitly affirms.  With Coulson’s ties to S.H.I.E.L.D. already shaken, how will this latest tragedy set them back even further?

Conclusion: The strongest episode to date, drawing on classic spy elements and Marvel continuity in ways that the show should have done from the beginning.

Grade: B+

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: * I hope we get more undercover stories, just so we can see more of Simmons’ incredibly technical yet simultaneously inept style of acting.  I can’t tell which I find funnier, her absurd attention to detail (“I haven’t seen anything so beautiful since our family’s scuba diving trip to the island of Ko Tao in Southeastern Thailand.”) or her broad delivery (“Thanks, Dad!”).

– Oh, Stan Lee.  Let’s limit your acting appearances to one-line-max cameos, shall we?  And only if you can have a bimbo on each arm.

– Given the similarity of tech between the team’s Night-Night guns and their enemies’ grenades, and also how their enemies were ready and waiting for them on the train, it seems the Clairvoyant may be someone inside S.H.I.E.L.D.