With the traffic we get I think it makes more sense to have a single thread for the whole season. We never started a thread for “The Good Samaritan” so I guess we can start there.
Nice swerve on Eli being the big bad, not Lucy or Joseph. Apparently he was a very patient man. I really didn’t see the point of the Robbie vs Mace showdown and the resolution seems to make no sense. OK, you nearly beat the director to death, but you stopped so we’re going to trust you? No word on Simmons new assignment that requires her to be blindfolded (but if you found the previews you can see what it’s about).
It comes back tomorrow night, right? Honestly I’m not sure I’m even going to continue watching it - I realized I haven’t missed it at all since the last episode 4 weeks ago. It just feels like they’re going through the motions at this point, and the whole Inhumans plot feels played out. And Ghost Rider has been a yawner as well.
As an aside though - I was watching “The Usual Suspects” last week, and was shocked to see Phil show up as a doctor treating the burned Hungarian who could identify Kaiser Soze.
I, OTOH, have found this season to be pretty good. Not good enough to be “must-see” TV, but enough that when I started binge-watching the season I did all 6 episodes in a fell swoop, not even thinking about stopping.
OK, fun episode - wrapped up a little too quickly but it planted a whole bunch of pretty cool seeds. Not sure I like all of them but I’ll have to think about it for a while. Next week is the winter finale, so I think we’ll have some resolutions and some cliffhangers.
Couple of things that bothered me about last night’s episode:
[ul]
[li]The entire treatment of Mack’s desire for vengeance is out of character. A photo of some random person and we’re supposed to accept that he’s willing to go against everything he’s stood for up till now?[/li][li]Why have Robbie negotiate a new deal with the spirit of Vengeance? It seemed unnecessary and convoluted.[/li][li]No one thought to have AIDA under observation after her exposure to the Darkhold? Or simply dismantled as a precaution?[/li][li]Daisy as the voice of reason and hope? That’s just asking too much from the audience. :)[/li][li]Not sure if Fitz’s anger towards the director is warranted, but I’ll let it pass since he’s quite emotional about Simmons[/li][li]The scene with Simmons and the senator’s brother didn’t make sense. They let her stay with him until they speak and then take her away right in front of the guy?[/li][/ul]
Not a bad episode - certainly advanced the plot in many ways and sets things up for a showdown with Eli in the winter finale. Aida’s secret is out but she now has another. We still don’t know the Mace’s secret that Simmons is holding over him. They’ve introduce a new Inhuman with unknowns powers who has possibly bonded with Simmons. Radcliffe is still one of the most interesting characters in the show.
But this is the first episode in a while that made me think the writers were taking shortcuts. Hopefully it’s just a blip.
It wasn’t Mack. It was the demon that had been inside Robbie and was now inside Mack.
In order to get the demon to leave Mack alone.
Good point. Too bad you’re not running things there.
Don’t forget, he knew that the director had sent her off without knowing where she was going, knowing what she would be doing, or being able to contact her. And then lied about it to his agents.
I’m not clear on this whole thing. You seem to know who the guy inside the terogenesis (sp?) cocoon is. Who is he? Have we seen him before?
Even the demon admitted the arrangement wasn’t “ideal”, but Mack had enough emotional baggage to make it work.
Of course, the demon also said he’d (?) been a “voice inside [Robbie’s] head, all these years”, when it’s been… what, less than two years since the crash that temporarily killed Robbie and crippled his brother?
I’m guessing this demon is not compulsively precise, like some of us here.
I don’t get the timeline here. The ghosting took place decades ago, before the Internet. Eli has been in jail all that time.
But Robbie snuck the car out as if he didn’t want his uncle to know, and his conversation with his brother made it sound like the uncle was still around. And the Fifth Avenue gang thought they were going after the uncle.
Anybody else confused by this? What am I getting wrong?
Husband-and-wife scientist duo find the Darkhold. Husband gradually corrupted by it.
Duo assembles a small team to exploit the Darkhold, eventually adding Eli to help with the engineering.
Eli begins making more and more demands to examine and use the Darkhold.
Eli ghost-zaps the other team members, including the wife.
At around the same time, the husband hires the 5th Street gang to kill Eli, they get his nephews instead.
Eli visits the husband scientist, beats him in an effort to find out where the Darkhold is hidden. Later on is convicted of assault and lets the authorities assume the beating was in revenge for the murder of the team, which the authorities blame on the comatose husband.
(steps 4-6 must have happened in very short order, and somehow nobody in authority connected them. They also happened fairly recently, since the nephews look very close to their current ages - likely not more than four or five years)
The ghost-zapped scientists are released, fuck shit up, they and Eli eventually head to an abandoned pre-internet facility where they can jerry-rig another apparatus.
I’m sure I’m missing some details. I don’t think the timeline was ever clearly specified.
If anyone wants to go back and check the episode, when Lucy Bauer releases her colleagues from the boxes she tells them how long it’s been. I don’t remember the number she gave but it was definitely years, plural.
I don’t think it was as much as 10. An expectation of suspension of disbelief could justify having the actor playing Robbie spanning a 10 year stretch (but that would be pushing it) but there’s no way they could expect us to accept the actor playing Gabe to cover a 10 year age difference from flashbacks to current day. Without going back to double check Lucy Bauer’s dialog, I’ve always been going with the assumption that it had been about three years.
Right. I forgot that the current power plant wasn’t one of theirs. My memory still tells me that Eli has been in prison for a very long time, more than a couple of years, but I’m not going back to check.
I did notice that Robbie has been added to the list of characters who died and then came back, along with Phil and May. My memory is obviously bad, but it seems to me that they may be others. Any candidates? Is this leading to a plot line in which all the people who suffered the true death can visit Hell along with the Ghost Rider?
It was identified as a Roxxon facility, Roxxon being a long-established evil corporation in Marvel comics (and in the related Agent Carter series). So far they’ve been just referenced as background, though in the short-film one-shot A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor’s Hammer, Coulson stops to gas up at a Roxxon filling station.
Dude, I’m so old I remember the first time that Roxxon was introduced in the comics in 1974, shortly after Esso became Exxon in 1973. I’m sure it helped that Nixxon [sic] was president at the time.
The ghost she released said “We could have been in there for hours.” Lucy replied “It’s been years.” Plural, but no number. I’ve been assuming 4 years or so the whole time - I swear someone said 4 years at one point, but I’m not going back to check either.
In Iron Man 3, the Mandarin talked about the Roxxon oil spill off Pensacola, the guy he “killed” on camera was supposed to be a Roxxon accountant (resulting in an unnecessary plot hole), and the final fight was on a Roxxon tanker.