I’m still liking the show. Coulson is definitely…something. The inability to work his pistol seals the deal for me. That’s pretty much an instinctual move. Not something a trained agent would actually have to think about…
I feel the part about truth serum was foreshadowing. Ward and Coulson both messed with Skye about whether or not the truth serum was real and whether Ward was telling the truth or faking it in the pilot episode. Then later in the same episode, we have both Ward and Skye reveal secrets about their childhood. So I think the implication is we shouldn’t take these revelations at face value. Like the truth serum scene, we’re supposed to see that just because a character says something and sounds sincere, we’re not necessarily supposed to buy it. Which also applies to Skye’s ultimate loyalty - there’s nothing we’ve seen yet that tells us whether she’s really committed herself to Shield or whether she’s infiltrating Shield for the Rising Tide.
I liked the Hall character. He also played into the overall theme of questionable loyalties. But when he got thrown into the machine, my immediate thought was "supervillain origin - so this week’s stinger was no surprise.
A-Ha! If Quinn had taken off his shirt or gotten shot, I probably would have gotten it. 
Hmm… wonder if Penikett was taken already? I would have loved to see him in a short little (possibly repeated) role as a bad guy.
I think they should have gotten Penikett to play Ward. He would have been better than the generic guy they found for the role.
Heh. So the gag is, he’s not figuratively rusty; he’s literally rusty?
The idea that his muscle memory disappeared offers support for the clone theory and evidence against the zombie theory.
I just got around to watching it on Hulu. Definitely a big improvement from last episode. Last week I complained that the MacGuffin machine was too boring and not “comic-booky” enough, and that they weren’t using the Marvel Universe beyond the movies. This week they went after a gravity-generator and we saw the origin of an actual comic book super-villain. So they get a gold star for addressing my complaints. 
Something about the chemistry between the actors still kind of needs to gel for me, but I’m definitely feeling more encouraged about where the series is going.
I’m basically here - I’m not looking for deep craft; I’d like to see cool, comic-booky entertainment. As I watched the truck get lifted up and dropped, or the shot where The Team walk, in shadow, in a line of six - it struck me that I could see these visuals drawn, blocked out, in a comic book. That was a good thing to me. It’s a start.
It needs work - the characters really don’t work yet on a few levels - but I am open to giving it a long ramp-up. Loved Ian Hart - aka, John Lennon (BackBeat) and Professor Quirrel (Harry Potter #1) - he did a great job as Franklin…
In fact, it took me most of the episode to convince myself that he wasn’t Tahmoh Pinikett with a weird toupee.
I thought the ep was probably the best yet. Cheesy CGI aside, I liked the story, I’m starting to warm to Skye, I chuckled out loud here and there, and the antigrav bits in the lab with Coulson and Hall were neat. Even the science and tech, while blatantly wrong, had at least an attempt at truth in there. (I was pleased, for example, when they gave the atomic number of their fictitious element, for example, and it wasn’t one that’s taken) Didn’t know Hall was an established Marvel villain, but that couldn’t have been a more perfect origin scene. (Well, with better CGI, maybe)
I like that we’re getting call-backs to the earlier episodes already (like the truth serum) and I like the character snippets we’re getting too.
It’s still not a great show, (PLEASE find a way to distinguish Fitz-Simmons other than by gender, or kill one off) but I’m still enjoying it.
I somewhat suspect one will end up being killed off, both because they’re redundant and for the opportunity to show one of them dealing with the loss of their other half.
Or they could have one of them get mortally wounded, and techno-babble their “soul” into the other one to preserve it, ala Spock-Bones. That would give us a few episodes of one actor playing both personalities, and let the general audience know about LMDs as they explain what it will take to restore the dead one. Then everybody can start putting the pieces together for the big reveal about Coulson.
I really liked this episode.
A couple of things seemed a little over-simplified, as mentioned by others, but I’m trying to not be too hard-to-please. Just glad that a Marvel TV series in on air, so long as they don’t screw it up too badly.
And as someone stated in an earlier thread, it is important to have a super-powered being element in the series, and a super-powered villain at that.
Cool origin scene at the end.
The entire Coulson resurrection storyline is intriguing, and I hope the show continues to give tiny allusions to it, as they did this week.
You know, “for example.” :smack:
But how could you tell?
I haven’t finished reading this thread yet, but I want to correct something, at least how I understand it. Coulson wasn’t trying to cock the gun. He was trying to take it apart. Racking the slide is incredibly easy and isn’t something you would forget. How to grab the gun and REMOVE the slide, thus taking the gun apart, IS something that would take dexterity and skill and could be forgotten.
At least, this is my understanding of what he was trying to do.
J.
This is a decent assessment of this ep and how the series is progressing overall:
A quote from it:
That’s how I saw it too. Twice at least he failed to dismantle a pistol that he should have done without thinking. That’s what’s bugging him. It’s not like it’s a complex task, but it takes practice to do smoothly.
What’s even more interesting to me is less that he can’t dismantle the gun smoothly, but that apparently this is the first time it’s come up, and he’s been re-instated to active duty after having had a violent bodily trauma and presumably (or at least to his mind) on extended medical leave.
Why is NOW the first time he’s noticing this?
Very odd for me. Surely they have some sort of fitness tests or ability checks before approving someone for active duty again. If so, maybe he didn’t get those tests or checks, because they would have revealed something that wasn’t supposed to be known.
I’m thinking that FitzSimmons might not get half killed off immediately, but I do think that a kidnapping or some other way to temporarily “lose” one or the other of them could very well be in the cards. We still don’t even know what their relationship is, other than they are NOT siblings.
I’m not surprised that “quickly dismantling a hand gun” is a specific skill that he hasn’t needed to use since coming back from Tahiti, and that they wouldn’t necessarily include that specific skill in his fitness testing.
As for not noticing other physical awkwardness, I suspect that some portion of his recovery in Tahiti actually happened. Let’s assume that he’s an LMD. He comes online in Tahiti, in a hospital, with false memories of a long recovery, and a difficult physical rehabilitation that’s almost over. His reflexes are off, but he thinks that’s due to the fact that he’s still recovering from the side-effects of major surgery. He finishes the “rest” of his physical therapy program (which has really just started), and in the process re-learns the muscle memory for most things. But this isn’t a full-on, rookie-to-field-agent training course, so there’s little things (like dismantling a handgun) that they didn’t cover. This is probably not the first hole he’s found, just the first one we’ve seen on camera.
The show is making progress, but if HYDRA or A.I.M. isn’t introduced soon, I’ll be disappointed.
So what exactly on earth did they accomplish by the end of this episode? Rich dude can just mine some more unobtanium.