Does it bug anyone else that the team seems painfully understaffed? No red shirts, no help from the main SHIELD force. No sense, other than a giant plane and gadgetry, that they’re running a unit from a powerful agency. Their pilot has to double as an assassin badass. Their desk job leader has to go on missions because they apparently only have one operative. It just seems weird that they only have a handful of people at all times running this well funded, important operation.
Kind of the opposite of The Blacklist, where they just have dozens of FBI guys in full body armor with assault rifles standing around all the time for no reason.
However, there are psychics like Moondragon that exist in The Avengers part of that Universe that Fox doesn’t have the rights to. I find it odd that the show went the “no such thing as psychics” route when the next cinematic bad guy seems to be Thanos. Moodragon was a pivotal character in the Avengers first battle with Thanos, so she and her psychic powers are probably going to pop up in the next movie. Hell, in the comics, she was even a member of the Avengers at one point after that.
Re my post above: :smack: The next Avengers bad guy is going to be Ultron, not Thanos. Moondragon isn’t absolutely necessary to do a story about Ultron, although she was killed by the guy. Comics being comics, however, she got better.
I don’t. It makes perfect sense to me if this show is planning on being around a while (and why would they plan NOT to be around?). You set up everyone as being *certain *that psy abilities don’t exist, and then up come enemies who DO have psy abilities, making the crew (and possibly by extension, other parts of SHIELD or the Avengers themselves (ie, the presumed set up for the movies that this show is supposed to be doing…) ) unaware and less prepared to deal with that eventuality. That makes the stakes higher and more dramatic, AND lets the audience have their moment of screaming at the TV screen “Ahhhhghhh!!! I TOLD YOU SO!!! Watch out for…!!!” which (strangely enough) makes people MORE invested in what and who they’re watching, rather than less invested.
Makes total cinematic sense, all for a couple of throwaway lines.
Yeah, the thing is, if your reaction to the question is “who cares?,” I’m surprised you’ve ever liked any of the Whedon things. That sort of intrusion of everyday banalities and real-life logic into stock genre characters and situations is pretty much the main defining characteristic of all of his work.
It’s why Buffy spots a vampire by his outdated clothes. It’s why Angel Investigations has money troubles because they keep doing good-hearted work for people who can’t or don’t pay. It’s why Mal kicks that dude into the spaceship engine, and why the Hulk beats the crap out of Loki instead of having an epic battle scene.
That stakeout scene is pretty much the reason I’m watching this show at all, summed up in a few seconds of screen time.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking as well. “There’s no such thing as psychics” pretty much clinched it in my mind that we’ll see a psychic before the end of the season.
ETA: I’m reminded of the ill-fated “Star Trek: Enterprise” where T’Pol kept saying “The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.” Of course, time travel ended up being a major plot point.
I’m speculating this might be intentional. The team seems to be deliberately set up to be isolated from the rest of SHIELD. It’s being run by a guy everyone thinks is dead, staffed by two security people who worked alone, two naive scientists, and an outsider who’s not even officially an employee of SHIELD.
We’ve seen that Nick Fury and Maria Hill know about this unit. But I’m wondering is they’ve set up this unit to do things they don’t want the rest of SHIELD (or their bosses) to know about. And the people in the unit may not realize they’ve dropped off the grid.
She started directing when she was doing Voyager. She now has a substantial number of credits. According to IMDB, this SHIELD episode was the 73rd show she’s directed.
Okay, so I’m a few weeks behind in my viewings. But Holy Wertham! Was that an “Injury to the Eye” motif straight out of Seduction of the Innocent, or am I just too Comics Code oriented?