Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S01E20 – Review

By: Paul Zbyszewski & DJ Doyle (story)

The Story: Ward and Skye attempt to work through their trust issues.

The Review: Okay, it’s official: I don’t care what happens to Ward. Other than an admiration for his godlike chin, which, honestly, will never die, it really doesn’t matter to me on which side of the moral coin he lands. If he comes back to the good guys, fine—we can spend half the second season with everyone as bitter and angry with him as they have been with Skye or May’s betrayals at other points of this show. If he stays bad, that’s fine with me, too; I wouldn’t mind seeing him dead or locked up.

I say all this because revealing Ward as Hydra hasn’t been the magic trick that suddenly made him interesting, as many of us hoped. His sob story about how Garrett saved him from his brother problems is right now still too abstract for us to justify his alliance with (as Skye accurately calls Hydra) a neo-Nazi group bent on ruining a lot of people’s lives for no reason other than their differences in ideology. He can repeatedly say that he owes Garrett all he wants; you’re not going to buy it, not until you see exactly how this rescue worked and probably not even then.

As for his stubborn crush on Skye, you could care even less. As far as chemistry goes, Skye and Ward hit it off okay, but at no point this season have you ever been so taken by their romance that you see it as a game-changer, although the show certainly wants to treat it that way. If anything, Ward insisting to Skye that his feelings for her are real, even after confirming that he’s the worst, shows how emotionally screwed up he is, which actually would be a fruitful direction for his character. But his twistedness is undercut by the fact that to some degree, Skye is moved enough by his feelings for her to decrypt the hard drive after all, once she sees his life in danger. Perhaps the least convincing part of that scene is him clutching his heart (which Mike has stopped) and gasping, “Skye.”*

I will say, however, that this episode probably does feature the best Ward-Skye interaction of the season, both in their dance of manipulation as Skye tries to devise circumstances for her escape and in her blistering rants at him once all is exposed. She really is at her best when she’s puncturing the gravity of the moment with snarkiness. Remarking on his Hydra affiliation, she says, “You always had that Hitler youth look—it’s really not that surprising.”

The episode also grants one of my wishes in that the discovery of Ward’s double-agent status sets off a chain of events that pushes the team out of the comfort of Providence into entirely unknown territory. Like the death of Koenig, the compromise of their new base is strangely sudden, making you wonder why the show even bothered to introduce either in the first place. But the sight of the team catching their breath around the pool of a dingy motel, grabbing dinner from the vending machine, is exciting because they really have lost everything—including the claustrophobic Bus.

They can’t go back to the way things were, either. So says none other than Maria Hill, whose seeming purpose in the episode is to crush any hopes of a S.H.I.E.L.D. resurgence. And if that doesn’t do it, we have May giving Coulson the biggest blow of all—spoiler alert—the revelation that it was Coulson himself who oversaw T.A.H.I.T.I. in its early stages and resigned from the project in protest of its psychological damage. This latest twist is designed to finally break his loyalty to Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D., to make him seriously consider breaking the team up so that they can refuse to. There’s no way S.H.I.E.L.D. actually dies; otherwise, there’s no show. But clearly it needs to play by new rules, and right now, Coulson’s the only man you’re expected to trust to set them.

I rarely remark on action sequences on the show because I usually have nothing more evaluative to say than, “It was cool-looking,” but this time, I can say that this episode boasts one of the least seamless uses of green screen I have ever seen. As great as it is to see Skye and Coulson using Lola to escape from the Bus, it’s hard not to notice the highly artificial lighting and the shiny/shadowy edges of their bodies against the false sky. I’m sure the show’s doing its best on a tight budget; it just requires a little more effort on your part to make these kinds of sequences convincing.

Conclusion: A change in allegiance doesn’t change the nature of Ward’s character much, but it does lead to some strong reactions from the rest of the cast.

Grade: B-

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: * I don’t know about you, but my reaction to his desperate plea for help was something along the lines of, Eh, f— him. If that makes me a cold, heartless bastard, then I guess that means Ward and I have something in common.

– Anytime Maria Hill makes a joke, e.g., “Imposter homeless man—mildly offensive,” I just hear the voice of Robin Scherbatsky. It’s a little sad.