“One of Us”
Directed by: Kevin Tancharoen
Written by: Monica Owusu-Breen
Going by the title I am thinking this a special episode of Agents of SHIELD where they go undercover at an Inhumans circus only to find out that the nonInhuman strong man has been plotting against them and it is up to Skye to Quake it all right.
I’ll admit I had one moment where the show threw me off. The second scene with Fitz and Simmons. After Simmons had rebuffed Fitz earlier but then was talking to him I thought the reveal was going to be that he was alone in the lab and had reverted to imagining conversations with Simmons.
Assuming Mac isn’t just lying to Hunter, I’m wondering who’s behind this alternative version of Shield. Presumably not Fury - he appointed Coulson as his successor. Maria Hill seems to be out of the game. Virginia Hand is dead.
The likeliest person seems to be Felix Blake. He was injured but alive when last seen and he was a high level Shield agent who wasn’t part of Hydra. He was part of Hand’s team and argued they shouldn’t trust Coulson’s team. She overruled him then but with Hand’s death, he may have taken her spot and decided Coulson was guilty after all.
Those stars in the Shield logo at the end…do they mean anything in particular?
Also a little perplexed at how easily Coulson took out the Blackbolt wannabe guy. All he had to do was get off any sort of vocalization, but he couldn’t because Son of Coul is just that awesome?
Mob enforcer and that computer hacker, I can see getting life in prison
Lady fingers, if it was only the blades attaced, one wonders why they just were not amputated at the first joint and let her live some sembalance of a normal life.
The voice, should have been terminated period.
What are we going to do with skye. Hmm lets telegraph it so that she goes somewhere out of shield.
The real shield, if you look real closely at the eagle ,it has BSG 75 embossed.
Not bad, not great, but cleared up or clarified story lines to date, and preps the board for the civil war.
One thing, dont know if coulson called that guy broyle or broyles, neat idea for fringe and shield to cross over.
I felt the episode was a bit uneven. Kal’s Scooby gang never meshed, I didn’t care about any of them, especially the razor finger lady who had no personality. Why was she able to fight Bobbie for more than 10 seconds? Bobbie fought a Kree last week and this week she can’t just drop a tired recluse with 1" razors on her fingers? That was bad writing.
Kal’s motivation is getting a bit tired and boring. Hopefully Gordon’s (is that the name of the eyeless guy?) friends will spice up that storyline.
Didn’t much care for Blair Underwood’s character, but I liked the outside view of SHIELD. Most folks would look at their history and current track record and come to similar conclusions - it’s not an organization that looks good from the outside. Too many people being held for their own safety. But somehow Skye is different because she’s a friend and agent. Even Simmons seems to have come around quickly.
I’m interested in the intramural SHIELD wars but pitting friends against each other in a battle to do good can get boring. Bring back Ward.
It was a freak-of-the-week episode which consisted of nothing but setups that never paid off.
Skye is set up as working on getting a handle on her powers. Turns out she didn’t.
Cal is set up collecting some Masters of Evil to threaten Coulson and SHIELD. They don’t actually threaten Coulson or SHIELD. In fact, they kind of go down like chumps.
Angar is set up as a scary superpowered threat. His power is trotted out for an establishing scene, then never used again – in particular, not used at all to threaten Coulson or SHIELD. (really, I think someone wanted to get in the cool visual of all the birds falling out of the sky, but then had no idea where to go with it after that. they uppowered Angar from the comics to such an extent that he was too powerful to use without derailing their plot.)
The Cal vs. Coulson confrontation has been set up since the midseason ender. It’s cockblocked by the teleporter showing up.
There’s a scene setting up Hunter trying to escape. No escape happens. All the setup of what Mack and Bobbi are up to leads to… a different SHIELD logo.
The high school students threatened by the Masters of Evil end up as no more than props. Blair Underwood is touted as Special Guest Star, and turns out to basically be waltzing through with less impact than Lucy Lawless had.
Even the suggestion we might see more about the Inhuman enclave leads to us seeing nothing more than a red room and the hint that someone other than eyeless teleporter is in charge (which we knew, already).
The glimpses they gave us into Melinda’s character were good.
On the other hand they continued with Gemma’s hamfisted “She needs to be sedated! Should we sedate her? Is he sedating her?” characterization continues with little justification – particularly since at the end she’s back to being solicitous of Skye.
This episode was all over the place, a bunch of random setups without resolutions. It was a hot mess.
I was with you until the last 3 words. The only way I want Ward back is in a plot where Skye gets to shoot him again, correctly this time.
I had the same thought about Edwina Scissorhands - just get her to a decent orthopedic surgeon and everything is cool.
Cal is confirmed to be chemically enhanced. May’s mother gets a shout-out. The lab nerds get a chance to re-connect over gossip. A very disconnected show, but one that still advances the over-all plot.
It’s a good thing Gordon showed up, because the voice guy was about to belt something out through a microphone and no one was wearing hearing protection. They’d have all gone down. Also interesting how Gordon looked right at Skye, but left her there.
The source of Cal’s abilities was a mystery I was looking forward to learning about but they kinda breezed right past it. But now we know. We also know he’s still tweaking the formula.
I kept wondering why the heck they didn’t let The Screamer have his comic-book schtick, where his voice induces hallucinations: you thus get more interesting storytelling possibilities than They All Just Fall Down, and a plausible way for the Son of Coul to get the win by awesomeness (the guy gets off a scream, and Phil can – by playacting his way through whatever strange Wizard-of-Oz fantasy he’s now living out – clobber him anyway).
Yes, that was a big problem with this version of Angar: they overpowered him. If he opens his mouth, everything around or flying overhead drops unconscious (unless you’re in the broadcast booth of a high school stadium). That doesn’t leave any room for main character heroics; it’s too binary.
Comics Angar with his deafening scream and ability to cause hallucinations, leaves the main characters still able to act.
I did like the touch of baiting Skye with gossip potential to get her to talk to the shrink. And Blair finally having to give her some to make any progress.