I’ll give them 3, maybe 4 seasons to hook me, but that’s it!
Didn’t care for it. It was pretty routine 60s spy stuff with only a few good lines of dialog. The method of moving the diamonds looked great on screen, but made no sense except if it were a decoy to hide the real courier. Brett Dalton has zero charisma – a pretty face but nothing more. Fitz and Simmons are the only characters who have much going for them, but not enough to carry a show.
I haven’t seen anything yet that makes me want to keep watching, so I’ll stop.
6 seasons and a movie?
Oh yeah. Well, she still needs to get over it.
I did like the ruthless enemy - they shouldn’t be pushovers.
I thought this was much better than eps 2 & 3… not so much because it was massively different in any way, but just because it was generally more fun and engaging. If this is the average episode quality, I’m definitely in, although I do hope for some larger stuff to start going on at some point, and random enigmatic clues like the weird blackboard don’t count.
I’m out. The emperor has no clothes. This show is simplistic, paint-by-numbers dreck with the faintest veneer of Whedon-sauce and conveniently placed Marvel logos.
In the Movie continuity, however, Hydra was originally the Nazi super-science group, headed by the Red Skull, yes.
Actually, at the end of the previous episode, Coulson did give her a chance to quit the group, but she had decided she was willing to get back into combat ops instead.
Anybody else cringe when, immediately after cutting the wires and tossing the bionic eye into the bombproof container with milliseconds to spare, Simmons lifted the cover to let out all the vaporous residue? I was half hoping whoever installed the eye included a contact poison on the failsafe, to kill anyone who tried to remove it.
That’s quite an evil thought. You might want to contact Skald about job opportunities. 
I thought that was meant to be liquid nitrogen, which would mean the vapour is not coming from the failsafe.
She’s a spy, talking about a spy, with another spy. She saw something with her x-ray vision that (she’s assuming) is super-classified, and apparently Mai isn’t cleared for it, so she shut up right away.
They did a great job of misdirection in the opening sequence. The red-mask guys with mysterious, identical briefcases looked like a great terrorist threat. And misdirecting the audience away from the x-ray vision by having it activate when she closes her eyes was very clever - I was convinced it was telepathy, and was all ready to call bullshit on her being able to find the right briefcase with it. The sfx were a bit of a cheat, but I’m willing to fanwank that away as the sound the bionic eye makes when it switches over to x-ray mode.
The show’s still not up to where it should be, but I think it’s showing steady improvement. Even if it levels off about here, I’m in for at least the rest of the season.
And nuts to the people calling for the death of some portion of FitzSimmons! I think they’re adorable.
Which strikes me as perhaps not the greatest thing to be tossing a bomb into…
I was bugged that they went to the trouble to hire all the guys in the masks so they could evade capture, and then they all get on the same train…
That’s a good point, Miller. If Coulson is different on the inside because he’s a Life Model Decoy, then only certain people have clearance to know that, and Amador knows that. Here’s my question - is Skye’s x-ray vision able to see through him as well? If so, has she looked? What did she see? etc.
I like the little funny touches - Short Bus and the cheating at cards especially. Not as many wisecracks as I hoped for. I liked the story, and am still not expecting much in the way of original plots. Looks like I won’t be disappointed.
Characters I like best = Coulson, Skye (!). I didn’t think I’d warm up to Skye, actually. It helps that she’s cute, but I don’t usually go for the Dumb Noob Becoming a Veteran trope. Some of the little touches were fun - checking out Ward with X-ray specs, calling Agent Phil “AC…” But Chloe Bennet is currently out of her league, competing with Clark Gregg and Ming-Na (and hopefully Samuel Jackson, Scarlett Johansen, Robert Downey Jr - a guy can hope). Maybe she’ll get better.
I didn’t like the use of Mai. She’s an intriguing foxy lady/martial arts badass who has lots of (cliched) back story to explore. But this week, she’s just a mean and cold rebel who didn’t have the sense to get out of the suddenly dark room when Amador cut the lights. I like how Skye called her “Mom” to Agent Coulson’s “Dad.”
Ward’s kind of boring. I suppose he fills a few roles - love interest for Skye, tough guy, sound board for exposition, etc.
FitzSimmons are kind of necessary, too, but I still don’t like them. I’ve changed. I no longer want them both dead.
Count me in to the fanboy legion who wants to see more Marvel Universe stuff. Maybe some movie tie-ins later on. I’ve got lots of requests!
Did I see an ad for Iron Fist or am I remembering wrong?
The episodes have been getting better and better, which gives me hope that this could turn into a great show. Favorite moment:
Ward: “Meet me on the south side of the building.”
Skye: “Got it. [Getting out of the car]Which way is south…”
That would be the undoing of my spy career as well.
That’s actually a real-world bomb disposal technique.
The guys on the train are only a few of the couriers. Coulsen mentions “fifty guys and twenty-five different routes.” We only see about a dozen of them on the train, which is still a pretty big grouping, but presumably some of the routes overlap each other, at least at the beginning, before they can fan out into the city.
Good question. I’m assuming she hasn’t had the opportunity to use them on Coulsen, since I’d think they’d show that scene. The tech in Amador’s eye was significantly advanced over what SHIELD had, though, so it might not be able to pick up what Amador saw.
Yeah, I like FitzSimmons, too. What’s hilarious are the people calling for one to be killed off. Like, they recognize the need for a nerdy science tech (for the gadgets and stuff), but all fields in science are essentially the same, right? That’s why all major universities offer a single degree in “science”. So obviously whenever there’s two nerds in a room, one is always redundant.
I’ll have to go back and re-watch to see if there’s a scene with Amador looking in Coulson’s direction with her eyes closed.
Count me in the camp that has her shutting her trap because she realized that she noticed something that May doesn’t have clearance to know, and she’s trying to minimize the damage she may have done by being confused. She probably thought that they were all aware, since they were his team, but once she realized that wasn’t the case, she would have wanted to minimize her oops.
Ward looks good with Clark Kent glasses, but I’m surprised they let him go off with only Skye as backup. That seems ill-advised, given her directional challenges and difficulties with magazine releases.
I thought May was ok as the hard-ass here. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Coulson is a big huge softie (now?), and he’s actively picking up assignments that he feels he can soft-touch or salvage due to personal attachments. That means SOMEONE has to be the hardass, and Ward doesn’t seem to have the seniority or the balls to do it. That leaves May, and I think she’s a good choice. I also like that makes “Mom” the tough nut, and “Dad” the big softie.
The “short bus” crack got me. I hate to admit it, but it did.
I also liked that Fitz got a bit more play in this episode. Him being squicky about the eyeball business was a nice touch, and the poker teaser at the end was cute. Hopefully Simmons will get hers too. I’m waiting for her reveal to be that she smokes pot or something - girl is WAY too chipper all the damn time.
Well, that’s the way they’ve mostly been handled so far. They are always together in the same lab, bouncing ideas off each other and executing them together. They had the same mentor, who seemed to be an expert in a third field entirely. We’ve been told she’s the biologist and he’s the gadget guy, but if you cut those couple lines in the pilot, I wouldn’t be able to tell from their behavior until the eyeball extraction scene. show, don’t tell, and all that…
In any case, they annoyed me less this episode, and on the whole the episode was probably the best yet. Very solid. I’m glad Akela didn’t get killed off, I expect to see more of her down the line if the show lasts.
I think they’ve actually averted that trope. The show’s made it clear that Fitz is the mechanical expert and Simmons is the biology expert. This episode highlighted this when it had Simmons performing the surgery up to the point where the eye was exposed and then telling Fitz it was his job to figure out how to deactivate it. Now granted, having somebody being an expert in everything mechanical or everything biological is still quite a stretch but at least they’ve taken a step in the direction of specialization.