“Beginning of the End”
Directed by David Straiton
Written by Maurissa Tancharoen & Jed Whedon
They threw everything at us in this excellent, if a bit too overstuffed, final episode of the first season. Enemies are vanquished, questions are answered, new questions are asked, heroes are saved, surprise appearances are made.
The episode starts at CyberTek’s offices where a new hire is being shown around on his first day as a handler by the guy who started the company. (Nice to see even evil tech firms start in basements with one computer.) It’s an exciting day to start, since the remote controlled soldiers have just encountered Coulson and the gang. (We saw that last week.) Unfortunate for CyberTek, these handlers were not the best. May easily takes the Berserker stick away from a soldier who was fond of her nickname, while Skye is uploading her special software to the Hydra computer. May uses her special beserker powers to take the whole building down. Really, the only good guy worse for the fight is Trip who got punched across the room. It just seemed like a bad fight, until they turned the lights on.
Apparently, the life saving alien fluid also turns people into graffittiing universe seeing geniuses. Garrett is ranting and raving about he can see souls, and sees the whole picture, and asking for nails so he can draw his theories on glass. (When, clearly, there is perfectly good chalkboards somewhere on that plane. Not as permanent, I guess.) It seems like betraying his friends, living out in the woods, having to get rid of his dog, killing compatriots, alligning himself with Hyrda none of those were bad enough for Ward to reconsider hanging with Garrett. But, once Garrett starts getting philosophical and saying he can see the unvierse. That’s when Ward starts having doubts. A man can only go so far, you know.
Fitz saved Simmons as the pod slowly went down to the bottom of the ocean. He also figured out that they had no way out. And, quickly took any hope she had of escape. He also noticed that he broke the same two bones he had broken in second grade. That pod even had a great sling for him to use.
Let’s take a moment to, yet again, admire Raina. Not only is Ruth Negga magnificent in the part, but the character’s skills in playing people to get her way are without equal. She butters Garrett up to get the gravitonium, and then tells Ward exactly what he needs to hear to be able to leave with it later on. I don’t know what she wants with the stuff, but there’s not much she can’t do. And, she hasn’t even used her powers, yet. Oh also. She found Skye’s bloody (in the descriptive sense, not the British one. Although, that fits, too.) and showed him a picture of Skye.
“Grab the dealer. Force his hand. He’ll give us the ace in the hole and Bob’s your Uncle.”
That’s the basic plan the team has to beat Garrett, Ward, and all of the evil guys. And, that’s pretty much what they did. (bob’s your uncle, was meant in the British way.)
Fitz and Simmons are having sad, sweet conversations about death, and what happens in the afterlife. Fitz talks about being about the same as prelife, and Simmons quotes the first law of thermodynamics. As these conversations are wont to do on television, it leads directly to Simmons figuring a way out of the pod. Involving explosions, and windows and swimming. I’m not exactly sure how it all worked. Here’s what I know. The explosion worked. Fitz heroically gave Simmons the use of the oxygen, and Simmons heroically swam up with Fitz, and god damn Nick Fury saved them both from their almost certain watery graves. Someone WAS listening on the SHIELD frequency. Something is up with Fitz, we never find out what. But, Simmons is under glass, and fine. She leads Fury to find out where Coulson and the team went.
While Coulson and Triplett are setting off really funny noisemakers Skye and May are breaking into that tech firm. And, Quinn has a bunch of prospective military brass customers in the lab. Needless to say Cybertek headquarters was a busy place. Oh, and Garett showed up and ripped out some dude’s spine. Ward wasn’t liking that. And, when he asked what was going on Garret replied with the name of the episode. Later Ward doesn’t know what to do, and Garrett gives him the order he wanted to hear. Go get Skye.
Skye and May have kicked all of the handlers out, which has lead directly to the remote soldiers changing their directive from beating up Coulson, to protecting Garrett. Which is what the team wants. Trip runs away to get some military help, and Coulson runs right into the middle of things to fight Garrett.
Coulson is pretty bad ass running in there to fight. But, he doesn’t have a bersker stick, or special Deathlok powers, so with one punch he’s thrown across the room behind some equipment. And. Hey! Look it’s Fury.
Ward rushes into take out Skye. Only problem, May is there. May isn’t happy with Ward. A fight happens. Lots of punching. Plus, circular saws, and double entendres. Finally, May nails his feet to the floor and punches him out. (Also, breaks his larynx, so he can’t give an annoying end of episode speech.)
Fury gives Coulson a big gun. This gun is used to take out all of the remote controlled soldiers. Fury jumps out of hiding and shoots Garrett a bunch of times. But, he doesn’t die. Instead, he stands up and mangles Fury’s quote. He then tells Mike Peterson to shoot rockets at Fury and Coulson, or something deadly like that.
Meanwhile, while May and Wards are fighting. Skye is looking for their ace in the hole. Finally, she finds Mike Peterson’s kid, and has him tell her something only he and his dad could know. She also shows that the bomb she was threatening with was actually the kid’s Hulk doll.
Mike Peterson gets that info, and he shoots Garrett a couple of times. Ending the conflict.
For a little while, anyway. Inexplicably, Garrett stands back up a few scenes later and gets into the chair to turn himself into an unstoppable robot of death. I can’t be the only one to groan about how stupid they were to leave his body there, and how I hate this show, and how it was jumping the shark very quickly. Then Coulson disintegrated him instantly, and I got a chance to laugh and laugh.
Skye talks to Deathlok. He’s going off to make amends for all the bad he did, and doesn’t want his son to see him like that. If I didn’t know Agent Carter was coming next year, I’d almost think we had a Deathlok show to look forward to!
Coulson gets a chance to scream at Fury. Fury tells Coulson he was an Avenger, and now he wants him to rebuild SHIELD from scratch. He gives him some sort of high tech cube to do the job. The first information he gets from it is a new secret base. Hey look! Patton Oswalt is back! Is he playing a twin, a clone, a LMD, a distant cousin who looks exactly like the other guy? Who knows? But, I am glad he is back, and just as funny.
Finally. Coulson wakes up in the middle of the night and starts drawing the same weirdo alien schematics that Garrett was working on. He does it the right way with a box cutter. Who ever heard of using a nail?!
What happened to Fitz? What did Ward want to say to May before she broke his larynx. What’s up with Skye’s dad? What is this evolution Raina kept talking about? Where did Quinn go? What will the new SHIELD look like? What’s the deal with Patton Oswalt? What’s Deathlok up to? Will there be any Guardians of the Galaxy tie ins? What else is in that cube? All this and more will (might?) be answered next season!
I was kind of disappointed by the start of this episode. It felt like they were trying to do too much all at once. Everything seemed scattered, and there was no tightness to the story. And, then Nick Fury showed up. The story got tighter, the lines got funnier, and everything they set up in the first half of the episode started to fall into place in the last half. I really liked this episode. It served both as a finale to the season, but also as a terrific entry point into next year.
Samuel L. Jackson did an excellent job in a part that was much bigger than I expected. I thought he would show up for five minutes, and then disappear. (I know, he was probably on screen less than 5 minutes. But, it felt like more!)
All of the main characters had great scenes in this episode. Skye used her tech skills to track things down, and she tricked that Cybertek dude, while being able to talk to Mike Peterson and kid and help them out. May kicked ass in all sorts of ways. Coulson is always awesome. FitzSimmons made people cry and laugh. Trip… Well, Trip did have one line that was his best line of the season, and in the top ten of every line of the season.
I had fun writing these recaps this year and even more fun reading everyone’s guesses for what was going to happen. Hopefully, I’m able to do it next year, too and these threads continue to be just as busy (and fun!) with speculation. And, the show continues to be just as fun. Plus, Agent Carter? Man on man. Oh, and those Netflix shows? LOTS OF MARVEL ON TV! Yay!
Favorite quotes:
[ul]
[li]“Who do we talk to about getting a haircut?”[/li][li]“I bring the noise and the funk whereever I go!”[/li][li]Everything that Coulson and Fury did was worth it’s weight in gold. Especially, the stuff with Fury’s a part of something bigger quote. And, I like that they had Coulson say it earlier in the episode.[/li][/ul]