Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S01E17 – Review

By: Jed Whedon & Maurissa Tancharoen (story)

The Story: The team discovers who has a Hand in the destruction of S.H.I.E.L.D.

The Review: At the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, with S.H.I.E.LD. in ruins, I wondered what this would mean for Coulson and Co. My theory was since Hydra hadn’t been eradicated along with S.H.I.E.L.D—”Cut off one head,” and all that—Coulson’s team would be left to clean up the mess the Avenger left behind. They’ve done it before, but there’s much more glory to their janitorial role this time around. The show’s needed a big, overarching threat, and Hydra goes right up that alley.

For that matter, the fallout of Winter Soldier addresses a lot of what the show’s needed, most crucially in enlivening several of the core characters. Never will you complain about May being relentlessly cold again, as she emotionally lets herself go to an almost alarming degree, allowing Ming Na to marshal all those acting chops she usually has to keep under wraps within May’s frosty exterior. But this level of passion is necessary to keep her from looking totally callous once the extent of her deception comes to light. Winter Soldier showed firsthand the destructive nature of secrets, or “compartmentalization,” even when the purpose is good, and May suffers that lesson quite bitterly.

But obviously, the character who experiences the biggest shake-up after this episode is Ward—spoiler alert—now revealed to be a Hydra agent working for the Clairvoyant, as Coulson earlier suspected. It’s a great twist, all the more so because there really was very little hint of it, and because it redefines Ward to make him interesting without conflicting too much with any of his earlier characterization. It’s true, of course, that Ward’s never had much character to begin with; no matter what angle the writers come at him, they all seem to slip off his unyielding flatness.

Associating him with Hydra works because it turns his usual fixation with the rules from something that makes him seem wooden and one-dimensional to something far more sinister. The modern Hydra is obsessed with imposing total order, which truthfully is only possible through complete domination. That might explain Ward’s motivation for joining up, but how far does that motivation go? Supposing his anguish about killing Nash isn’t faked, but exaggerated, and his unemotional silence after—spoiler alert—killing Hand is a sign of his conscience rather than a lack of one. It’s not impossible that he’ll return to the fold; all that romantic tension with Skye will just go to waste, otherwise.

Oh, yeah, about the killing of Hand. I’m not too proud to admit that I was as successfully misdirected as anyone else into believing Hand was the baddie here.* That said, the actual identity of the Clairvoyant has never been all that pressing an issue for the series, and in a way is kind of irrelevant. So Garrett’s the Clairvoyant. So what? For most viewers, the revelation isn’t all that surprising, and with the Clairvoyant merely one of Hydra’s many heads anyway, Garrett’s diminished from S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s big boss to prep for someone bigger.

The bottom line, however, is this S.H.I.E.L.D. and S.H.I.E.L.D. are getting a major and much-needed shake-up. The Avengers have pretty much stolen the organization’s purpose and thunder as the world’s premier peace-keeping force, and it doesn’t help when movies like Winter Soldier show that it only takes a few superheroes to do the job that a massive league of agents can’t. The only kind of threat the Avengers can’t handle are the ones that slip beneath the radar, but clearly, S.H.I.E.L.D. hasn’t been too great at handling that kind either. A stripped-down organization dedicated to tracking and eliminating those threats seems like a great way to push Coulson’s team to greater heights of ingenuity and skill. We shall see.

Conclusion: There’s no denying that most of the episode’s material is the dregs of a much bigger storyline, but that storyline is still big enough to make this one of the best episodes S.H.I.E.L.D. has put out yet.

Grade: B+

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: * Although given her comic book counterpart has turned triple-agent at one time, the possibility is still out there.

– And the award for Lowest Blow goes to May’s rebuke to Ward for shooting Nash: “It was to protect her—which would be okay, if you hadn’t shot the wrong guy.” Ouch. Well-delivered, though.