Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D S01E22:Beginning of the End (open spoilers)

I’d say the guy in charge seemed to enjoy his job a lot. The others not so much. When I become a megalomaniacal overlord, I’m not keeping my minions next door to their captive loved ones. See what happens when heroes show up and set them free?

Depending on the laws of Marvel Universe 616, they may be able to raise Duress as a partial defense, or argue it in mitigation for sentencing purposes.

As much as I love Samuel L. Jackson, I really miss this guy:

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lhqcg2fFsA1qgrbyao1_500.jpg

(And as a disclaimer, this has nothing to do with making Fury black, I’m a-okay with that. I just prefer Nick Fury, and S.H.I.E.L.D in general, a bit more dubious and with way bigger guns.)

They made multiple mentions of the fact that the (actual, ha) Avengers should not be told that Coulson is alive. I’m betting there is going to be a reveal in Avengers 2 that he’s alive (after all, it was a major plot point that he “died” in the first one). They probably already had the script for Avengers 2 in hand before filiming the 2nd half of the season. We know they already had Captain America 2 completely filmed before even starting to film the season. Makes it a lot easier to integrate a show into a related movie when the movie has already been made (or at least written) and you have the release date planned out.

n/m, there was a mix-up in my head between Coulson and Fury

I’m betting there won’t be. It’ll be too complicated to explain to non-series watchers, it’ll undermine the impact of his death in the first movie, and won’t move the plot forward. My money is that the name “Coulson” will never again be spoken in any major Marvel motion picture.

Nah, they’ll mention it. It will be one of the sticking points (although a minor one) that interferes with the Avengers getting together again.

How will they explain his resurrection without confusing the hell out of audiences?

Why couldn’t they simply do exactly what they did in the first episode? “By the way, I’m alive…welcome to level [whatever].” I mean, I know there technically aren’t levels anymore, but I don’t see how his resurrection would necessarily be any more complicated/confusing to movie-watchers than it was to us. We just might know a bit more of the backstory.

All they would have to do is reveal that Fury lied about Coulson being dead. They wouldn’t even have to explain that he did die for a few days; just that he pulled through but Fury didn’t want the team to know.

Exactly.

“I don’t want to be a part of this. Fury lied about what’s for dinner, he lied about Coulson being dead, he lied about liking my haircut…”

“I was dead… but I got better.”

The jury is still out on that one, but we can hope.

yeah, “better”… plus a little Kree “genetic knowledge” that seemingly came along with the serum - looking like alien formulas, coordinates, a language, or a good borscht recipe.

I’m wondering about the timeline of the “drawings” tho… Garrett got his shot and was drawing within a day or two. Coulson has had the serum for months (or however long real-time this season has taken), and only starts drawing after he sees Garrett’s. Maybe seeing it acted as a trigger of some sort? Skye’s also has had the serum for a while too, so we’ll see if she starts drawing in the same script. But with her, there’s also the added variable of her own (seemingly alien/super) physiology interaction with the drug that could change the outcome.

Everyone else who took the serum went insane - Fury et. al. thought they could get around this by wiping Coulson’s memory of what happened while he took the formula, which presumably included all the diagrams and stuff that Garret was drawing. Apparently, though, seeing the diagrams Garret made reactivated some of the memories that were supposed to have been wiped, thus the scene of him drawing his own diagrams. The unfortunate implication here is that Coulson may be about to go off the deep end himself, if the memory patch isn’t holding any more.

Interesting possibility: the scenes of Coulson begging them to stop rewriting his brain may not have been because it was painful, per se. Instead, Coulson might have been in the grip of serum-mania, and was upset that they were taking away his “perfect clarity of vision.”

Skye’s reaction is totally different from what’s happened to, apparently, every other human who’s taken it. Someone in one of these threads theorized that it was because she wasn’t dead when she took it, just badly wounded, but the same would appear to apply to Garret. I don’t think he’d quite kicked off when he got the dose, but I could be misremembering.

Coulson was begging them to let him die, not to stop.

Ah. Well, never mind that part, then.

And Garrett didn’t take the same serum as Coulson or Skye - he took a synthetic “bootleg” version. I assumed that the was the cause of the different effects on Garrett, but I suppose in comic book land a “best guess” at some magical serum could just as likely turn out to have exactly the same properties as the real thing.

There’s going insane and then there’s going insane. Maybe the serum just amps the previously existing matrix of the subject. If that is true, Coulson will just get more and more competent and loyal.

That whole scene, complete with Coulsonism, made the whole slog to the midpoint of the season worthwhile. SO unexpected, twice over.

Well… step one, he shouldn’t have been in the front credits; it should have been more of a shock when he showed up. Second, his dialogue kind of reminded me of Avery Brooks’ in *Captains *- a tad stoned, a tad “here for the check” and a tad “are we done yet?” Also just a bit of “how long can I fuck with the fanboys here?” Just rushed and phoned in when it didn’t need to be.