[The following post contains major spoilers for the ongoing series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.; however, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it if you haven’t caught up with the show yet.]
I quit watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in frustration after five episodes, when it was utterly failing to engage me—and only returned to it when a friend accidentally spoiled the plot of “Turn, Turn, Turn” in conversation. The revelation of Ward’s deception kept me going through the spotty Season 1 finale, but not through Trip’s death—until I accidentally stumbled upon a Tumblr post that informed me that all along I’d been watching a show about Daisy Johnson and just hadn’t known it. Now I’ve left the show again, and patiently await the summary of the Season 3 finale that will finally give me the information I need to watch the entire rest of the current season and actually enjoy it.
The primary problem with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as a television series is, only too appropriately, the exact same problem with the organization S.H.I.E.L.D. itself: there are so many secrets and levels of deception that it’s pretty much always impossible to figure out what the heck is going on with any given character at any given moment in time. (The secondary problem with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is the equally-apropos one of it portraying morally questionable behavior as justifiable in the name of the greater good, but I’ll leave that one aside for the moment.) Each season and each major plotline starts out by giving the viewer not nearly enough information to appreciate what’s happening, and then doles out tiny bits of the truth until finally it pays off with yet another reveal of some previously-unseen secret plot that has been happening under the surface of this story the entire time.
Admittedly, this is a fairly new writing team standing on the shoulders of giants when it comes to the concepts, plotlines, and characters of the show. It cannot be easy to try and appeal to the Marvel Cinematic Universe fans, the Marvel 616 fans, the Marvel Ultimates fans, and the I-know-nothing-about-Marvel fans all at the same time, the way the show was asked to do. However, they’re also here to try and entertain viewers, and so far their ability to do so has proven to be spotty at best.
In an interview with MTV producers who expressed shock at the way Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 6 ended, Joss Whedon jokingly commented, “Yes, that’s a device I invented myself that no one had ever come up with before, called the ‘plot twist.’” Although a properly executed plot twist (like the reveal of what’s really going on in that very last scene of Buffy Season 6) can be the most memorable and best-written moment of a series, an improperly executed one can leave the audience feeling betrayed, frustrated, or lied to. Worse, improper build-up to a plot twist can be either confusing or boring. Enormous frustrating chunks of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. have proven time and again to be just that: excruciatingly long build-up to plot twists that usually aren’t worth the amount of lead-in they were given.
An early review of the Marvel television show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. predicted, as of the Season 1 hiatus, that the show would not be reviewed for a second season, and even expressed the hope that producers would kill it before it got any further. The reviewer (whose article I have lost and therefore sadly cannot credit) expressed what many viewers, including myself, felt about the show at the time: that it relied entirely too much on its spottily-written and uninteresting protagonists Skye and Ward for emotional weight, while failing to individuate its supporting cast enough to make them engaging.
If only that reviewer had known then, and if only we had all known then, that the reason Ward was so recalcitrant was that he was a sociopathic Hydra mole. If only we’d known that the reason Skye had such a mysterious backstory was because she was Daisy Johnson, daughter of Mr. Hyde and Inhuman with earthquake powers. If only we’d known that the reason Coulson was acting so strange was that he’d been brought back from the dead and had his memory altered on his own orders so that he never remembered dying. If only we’d known why Agent May was so stoic and why she never wanted to talk about Bahrain. If only we’d been able to figure out at the time what the heck the FitzSimmons relationship was actually about. If only Trip had been introduced to us right from the start as Gabe Jones’s grandson (and if only he’d lived... but oh well).
The first several episodes are a confusing, often boring mess because the viewer doesn’t have enough information to make any sense of the character actions. Grant Ward is introduced as having such a stoic demeanor that Maria Hill compares him to a porcupine (and Phil Coulson extrapolates that to compare him to a poop with knives sticking out), but he tearfully tells Skye about his rough family history within days of knowing her. When the series reveals that he is (a) deliberately manipulating Skye’s emotions and (b) a narcissistic martyr who deliberately misconstrues his own childhood to excuse his current machiavellianism, this scene takes on chilling new meaning. It also takes on meaning, period. Almost three months after we all had to sit through it with our mouths hanging open wondering what the heck was going on with the writing on this show.
Worse still, Skye’s backstory is a melodramatic mess that makes Ward’s practically look sensible by comparison. She comes in as a rebellious computer hacker who joins a giant government organization she professes to hate for no logical reason... until eventually we find out that her no logical reason is actually a search for the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who sheltered her as a baby. Which itself leads to a long string of mysteries that ends in the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent being long dead, which then leads to the discovery that an entire village died to protect Skye, which continues not to make sense until we find out that her father is some kind of steroid-popping supervillain, which itself doesn’t explain much of anything until eventually we find out Skye’s real name and finally have an ah-hah moment of recognizing Mr. Hyde... But the full puzzle doesn’t fit together until we know about Skye’s mother being different from the relatively innocent prostitute of the comics.
Probably the most excruciating moment at the nadir of that whole mess was when the show itself joked about Skye being a Mary Sue in “The Only Light in the Darkness.” Frankly, by the definition of a Mary Sue as “a character... who is given or expected to be given unwarranted preferential treatment and unearned respect, thereby compromising the integrity and believability of the story and/or its characters” (X), Skye fits the bill... as of that point in the series. She has Coulson’s admiration even though she has yet to show the mentorship canniness she demonstrates in “Laws of Nature,” the selflessness she shows in “What They Become,” or the toughness that gets her through “One of Us.” She appears to have the sort of nearly-angelic backstory that was already cliche back when Homer was writing about half-human people getting delivered to Earth in mysterious disasters. The viewer doesn’t have nearly enough information about her to know why anyone, much less stoic fighters like Ward and May or aloof geniuses like Coulson and Simmons, should care what the heck happens to her next.
The show’s failure to give the viewer enough information to appreciate emotional moments persists to this day. The most recent episode, “4,722 Hours,” reveals that Simmons was not alone on the alien planet the way everyone assumed she had to be; she instead had a lover who Fitz inadvertently tore her away from when he rescued her. Imagine instead if the show had told Simmons’s full story in order from start to finish, informing the viewer about Will’s presence before the moment when Fitz rescues Simmons. We could have experienced the heartbreaking dissonance of Simmons struggling with her loss as everyone hastened to congratulate her on her return, appreciating the dramatic irony of Fitz’s well-intentioned but tone-deaf attempt to cheer her up with that dinner they missed the night she disappeared. Instead we can only assume what these moments must have been like for Simmons. While that plot is actually playing out, she comes off as whiny and ungrateful.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. remains so very concerned with preserving its plot twists at all costs that it continues to play its cards too close to its chest where its plot arcs are concerned, and the show continues to pay the price. If someone had told me right from the start that I would be watching a show about a newly-resurrected Agent Coulson recruiting Agent Johnson while struggling to incorporate Kree DNA into his makeup and mentoring a team that included a Hydra agent, a trauma-scarred fighter fearful of loving again, and two best friends who would be torn apart by romance, I think I probably would have actually enjoyed those first ten or so episodes that turned me so thoroughly off the show. Instead, the show’s failure to establish what the heck is going on at any given moment in time makes its moments of foreshadowing come off as character inconsistency, its hints of character motivation appear to be shoddy writing, and its build-up for future plots appear to be a series of nonsensical asides. Like a joke whose twenty-minute setup leads in to a weak punchline, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. demonstrates time and again that insufficient transparency is just as bad in television shows as it is in government organizations.
—Bug
—Bug
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