You can’t fool us. You’re one of them!
Look at his name! You’ll never get a straight answer out of that guy.
I enjoyed this episode but I think the time has come for them to kill off Dark Haired Boring Guy (they can even do the whole “He died to save the team and his death brings them all closer together” thing) and replace him with Super Gunn (who most certainly did not die in this episode).
But they seemed to regard Shield as a genuine threat. Their attitude was not “Let Shield come here and try to stop us.” Up until this episode, Shield was something they were hiding from. So you’d think they would have tightened up on security and restricted cell phone use from inside their secret lair.
Was that part of a HYDRA logo I saw in the next episode preview?
Please, let it be so.
My wife and I were saying this the entire time. Make Charles Gunn part of the cast. He should have been cast as the main agent anyway.
Dark Haired Boring Guy is growing on me. His conversation with Mae, in which he tells her that she’s a better fighter than he is, and mocks the idea of his being the savior, works against type. He’s not especially charismatic, as the cliched agent should be, and he seems to know it and be a little bitter about it, but not like wallow-in-self-pity bitter, just a little matter-of-factly bitter.
He was horribly bland at first, but I think that his role in the team, as something of a stunted-social-skills outsider (and this is compared to such gems of social skills as Mae and FitzSimmons), is getting interesting.
In most Whedon shows, this is a big red warning flag of imminent plot-related death. Whedon loves to make you love someone right before they die horribly and abruptly.
I agree, I hated parts of this episode. There were a couple times I thought they were going to do the patented Whedon “foreshadow a trope, then turn it on its head” thing, and then, nope, they just did the super-cliched trope straight. Like the “he’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?” bit. How hackneyed is that?
The question should be about “this” Marvel Universe. The real problem is that Marvel sold the rights to Spider-Man and Ghost Rider to Sony, and X-men, Daredevil and Fantastic Four to Fox - including all related characters and villains. Marvel/Disney owns the rest.
So… unless Disney forks out some dough to buy back the rights, you’re never going to see guest appearances cross these lines… Spider-Man and the X-Men will never team up with the Avengers, even though they’re all around New York. I hear the Skrulls go with the Fanstastic Four property, so they won’t appear in an Avengers movie (or will, with another name :smack:). And the term “Mutant” is apparently tied up with the X-Men franchise, so you’ll never hear it in the next Avengers movie… not sure how they’re doing Scarlett Witch, and she’s both a mutant, and Magneto’s daughter - but none of that can be mentioned.
There was that and Simmons confounding everyone by spelling aglet on scrabble and everyone else was all “WTF is an aglet? That’s some fancy English words.” Anyone who’s had access to the Internet for the past 10 years should not be taken aback by the word aglet.
I agree that was handled badly. I think the show was trying for irony but it failed. You have to demonstrate you can rise above cliches before you’re allowed to make fun of them.
Ming-Na Wen needs to take lessons from Tim Kang (who plays Cho on “The Mentalist”) on how to play a “just the facts, ma’am” kind of character without coming across as a total bitch.
They’re finally giving us a little bit of info on what happened to Coulson; somehow he is the link between super-soldiers blowing up and super-soldiers not blowing up. I’m still sticking with robot for now. 
Maybe. But we’ve seen the group uses the centipede/extremis technology and the eye implant technology - so they’ve got more than one trick. So they could be interested in finding out more about Coulson’s revival even if it has no connection to their current technology.
The episode was pretty slow and/or typical through most of it, but the last 10 minutes or so made up for it.
The real problem with this show is hidden right here in this thread.
In a really good show that people believed in, everybody would have said “forget about all those stupid things they did in this show; they’re just setting us up for next time.”
Instead, too many people - including me while watching - thought, “what a stupid show doing all those stupid things for the sake of a stupid cliffhanger.”
Maybe the January episodes will reveal that it was all a plan. That will help buy faith in the future of the show. But I bet a lot of people will never turn it on again after a several week gap to find out if it was worth bothering with. This episode had the lowest ratings yet, BTW. I predict at least a 10% additional drop in January.
And forget about all those references to Whedon shows. This is not a Whedon show. It’s not even a good show. A good show would have killed Ace and taken away any choice Mike needed to make about his future.
If this show does become great (and at this point it’s become an “if”) these are the episodes we’ll someday be telling people to skip over.
Actually, the motley fool had an article about the ratings - according to the “air+7” numbers, it’s doing damn good - just everyone’s catching it sometime other than when it’s actually ON (most likely because of NCIS, according to the article, but whatever).
Those ratings are actually pretty high at the moment.
Now, I DO agree with you that they’re going to drop because of the holidays - SHIELD will be losing a lot of traction because of the Dr Who Christmas Special (with a bonus regeneration to a new Doctor) and with Sherlock starting up the first part of January (at least for anyone who knows how to use the internet - which is essentially SHIELD’s base audience). Between those two, and it being fucking APRIL before another Marvel U Movie, they’re going to have a hard row to hoe at the beginning of next year.
I don’t dislike SHIELD. But I don’t really LOVE it yet. I am really hoping it finds its legs and in four or five seasons we’ll look back, happily content with characters and plots, and groan at that first season where Ward doesn’t have a beard yet.
When networks tout air+7 numbers, that’s just spin. Advertisers don’t care about those numbers so they don’t make the networks any money. Reality has forced the industry to at least give some weight to air+3 (begrudgingly) but beyond that, most of the time, the advertiser doesn’t care if you saw their message later than that and certainly won’t pay for it.
ETA: what ABC did learn a few weeks ago is when NCIS is a rerun, SHIELD’s numbers shot up. That tells me they should move it. Maybe to 9 pm. Somewhere away from the number one show on TV.
Then why even show the ad four or five or six or seven days later?