Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S01E19 – Review

By: Monica Owusu-Breen (story)

The Story: In which the penny drops for Skye.

The Review: And here you thought that breaking up S.H.I.E.L.D. would take us away from the baddie-of-the-week procedural format that’s stifled the series since day one. Look, the team was always going to get back to tracking down superpowered threats eventually, but you would’ve thought we’d get a break on that while Hydra remains the outstanding threat. Unfortunately, the Fridge’s breach means the team has to worry about the newly freed criminals on top of everything else.

I should mention this excursion to take down Marcus Daniels* seems to be a momentary distraction. Thank goodness, because the purely formulaic qualities of the plotline remind you why S.H.I.E.L.D. suffered so much in the early episodes: Daniels’ total lack of development and the by-the-numbers tactic to defeat him. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired of seeing energy absorbers defeated by overloading, and the fact that the team uses the same exact same strategy that apparently brought him down before (only bigger!) makes the plot even more yawn-worthy.

Nearly as cliché is the treatment of Audrey Nathan, a.k.a. Coulson’s cellist girlfriend.** It’s not hard to understand why Coulson never got back together with her after the T.A.H.I.T.I. incident, and it was fairly predictable it would take a danger to her life for him to even consider getting close again. But the timing is lousy. Obliged as he is to stay on the D.L., Coulson can’t even consider restarting a relationship with her, so there’s little doubt as to whether he would reveal himself to her or whether he would gently caress her unconscious face before hurriedly taking off. Spoiler alert—it’s the second one.

I suspect that the sole reason Owusu-Breen dragged in this whole storyline was to find an excuse to send most of the team away from Providence, leaving Ward, Skye, and Koenig to their game of suspicion and betrayal, a game in which Koenig is the definite loser. I suppose it was inevitable that—spoiler alert—Koenig would end up dead. Skye has a point when she mocks him as the agent of playing video games while hiding in a bunker!” With no clear skills other than manipulating Fury’s custom-built lie detector, he’d be a vestigial organ in a body full of trained specialists. Much as you may enjoy the new levels of snarkiness he produces with Skye, this isn’t enough to make him worth keeping around.

Still, Koenig proves that S.H.I.E.L.D. is getting in the nasty habit of killing off characters before they gain any dimension, solely to prove a point, which in this case is that Ward is a very bad guy. I wonder, though: is the show willing to seal his fate as a villain? I don’t think so; the episode makes a point of indicating that Ward’s affection for Skye is real (the one thing that makes the initially suspicious Koenig get off Ward’s back during the lie detector test) and to remind us of Ward’s troubled childhood. Neither, however, seems enough to clear Ward of the remorseless acts he’s already committed.

Skye certainly doesn’t look like she’s in a very forgiving mood. Kudos for letting Skye catch on to Ward’s treachery, even if only by chance. Not only is Chloe Bennett’s mixture of horror and anguish an intensely convincing performance, Skye’s decision to play Ward even as he’s playing her gives us some actual suspense to dote on and it gives her the biggest challenge of her S.H.I.E.L.D. career. I’m also looking forward to the fact that Ward’s farce will be over soon, which will finally rock the team’s status quo in a way we’ve expected since S.H.I.E.L.D. fell.

It’s worth noting that this episode does some last-minute character building, the kind it should have been more heavily invested in at the start of the season instead of the end. While Koenig’s lie detector fails its essential purpose—rooting out the untrustworthy—it does give us a few valuable tidbits on our cast members, e.g., Triplett’s Howling Commando legacy, Skye’s childhood nickname (“Mary Sue Poots”). But May, who’s really broken out as a character lately, gets the lion’s share of development, as we learn of her previous marriage and see that strong government women run in her family.

Conclusion: Hopefully, this is not a return to form for the show as we get yet another so-so procedural episode interspersed with moments of real tension.

Grade: C+

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: * Blackout, for the Marvel aficionados.

** Which I find amusing/creepy since Clark Gregg played Amy Acker’s uncle in Joss Whedon’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing.

– I like that Fitz gets into some Jenna Maroney (of 30 Rock) levels of one-track-mindedness in his jealousy of the Triplett-Simmons relationship. Ward: “Trip? I think the guy’s okay.”

Fitz: “I know, he’s terrible. He’s a horrible person.”

– What’s the one thing Simmons would like to have if stranded on a deserted island? “The TARDIS.” Oh, you lovely, British nerd gal.