And that’s annoying - May is certainly a trained and experienced killed. Ward was a killer when he worked for SHIELD and nobody minded too much. Simmons is turning homicidal (if she isn’t the one to eventually take out Ward, I’ll be very disappointed) and for some reason that’s upsetting? Under the circumstances, having Fitz kill Gordon on purpose instead of just by fluke is perfectly justifiable.
Heck, Skye shot Ward repeatedly and if anything, she and the team seemed somewhat disappointed that he didn’t die as a result. You can’t play for these kinds of lethal stakes and yet cling to a cartoonish “good guys don’t kill” mentality.
Well, you can, and the relatively lighthearted fare of The Flash is an example, but I’d argue it’s not as adult a show as AoS, though I enjoy them both.
Agreed. Gordon was actively trying to kill every SHIELD agent still on the ship. Killing him to prevent him from doing so is what a Good Guy does. Though it was too bad Mac didn’t get to keep his promise - “I’m the guy who kills Gordon.”
And heck, Coulson shot Whitehall in the back. In the cartoony “good guy” moralism, good guys never do that - they always give the bad guy a chance to surrender first.
More of a death by tele porter malfunction? I thought Fitz was written off after the awkward scene with Simmons. I can thank the writers of The Walking Dead for that.
This episode had a larger-than-average amount of TV-character-stupidity… so Cal has threatened he’s going to kill you all, and you have him trapped in a nice secure cell, and then he appears to die, so you take him out to the hospital and give him adrenalin, all totally unsecured?
And then you are Ward and you have Bobbi trapped, and you are using her cell phone as a lure, but you don’t bother actually killing her? And how did she escape from those shackles? (Arguably leaving her alive is so that she can see someone she loves get killed, but if you’re Ward you could have, I dunno, opened up a vein first or something.)
And, wow, a gun pointed at the head-height region in a door. THAT can’t be avoided.
There was a fair bit of fun stuff, and as others have pointed out, Cal was an all-star. I didn’t know what to make of him for much of the season, but he was fantastic here.
Good riddance to Reyna, who was both evil and an uninteresting character.
The shackles were bolted down to an old and worn table top.
At the beginning of the Ward/Bobbi fight scene, Ward returns to the room after having been away (I was under the impression that he had been away as long as overnight). Bobbi had been alone in the room for some time. As Ward enters the room, we see Bobbi has been forcibly rocking the shackles back and forth pulling the bolts up out of the wood. She stops right away when Ward enters the room and the implication is that she has been doing this non-stop when she’s been alone in the room. We’re shown in the quick shot of her wrists rocking the shackles back and forth that she already at this point has gotten the shackles quite loose.
Now, we can add to the “Ward Dumb” column that he would leave her alone at all and that he’s only secured her against an old wooden table. We can also argue about her ability to wobble out the bolts from the table. But, it is clearly shown that getting out of the shackles was not an easy or quick thing for her. She doesn’t simply Hulk out and tear the shackle out of the table. She had been working on it a long time.
So, far they’ve been keeping the movies more or less in real time. Some people have claimed that Iron Man 2 is partially concurrent with The Incredible Hulk because the T.V. news footage of Hulk at Culver University is visible on one of Fury’s screens during his final meeting with Stark at the end of Iron Man 2- this may be the case or it may be that it’s just a S.H.I.E.D. file running an archived recording of the incident. (If it’s correct that these two movies are on an overlapping timeline then that means New York City saw Queens ripped apart by the events at the Stark Expo and Harlem get torn apart by the climactic fight between Hulk and Abomination all within less than a week! New York should really hate superheroes!!!)
The other minor exceptions are that Thor takes place within a week (and probable overlap) with Iron Man 2 yet the movies came out a year apart and Iron Man 3 takes place around Christmas but it was released in spring/early summer.
So, it would be weird if Ant-Man takes place before Age of Ultron even if they did plan to release it first (was it ever planned to be released first? It seems crazy to release Ultron in August rather than have it kick off the summer movie season).
What I am really wondering about in terms of timelines is the fact that two movies will be released in between Infinity Wars parts 1 and 2.
How are those timelines going to work?
Yes, that was undeniably stupid. So was the scene where they pinned Cal to the wall with the car.
They wanted to make her suffer. Torturing her directly wasn’t doing it so they set up a situation where she’d have to see Hunter dying. Killing her first would have eliminated the whole point of the trap.
Again, that was stupid. Real professionals, like SWAT team members and Special Forces soldiers, are training to open a door from the side and go through it low so they don’t get shot by somebody inside the room.
Evil, yes. But I disagree on uninteresting. I found Raina to be one of the most interesting characters on the show.
I think there was potential to be interesting there… the human who is fascinated by powers and wants to get them. I guess what bothered me about her the most (which I expressed poorly earlier) is that back in season 1 she killed a whole bunch of people and caused massive suffering, and then expressed no remorse, and no one ever mentioned it and I think we were just supposed to forget about it.
(Or am I misremembering? Wasn’t she actively involved in the experiments which kept making people explode?)
If she’s just sociopathic and evil that’s fine, but acknowledge it. And if the SHIELD team has to make the tough choice to temporarily work with someone who is evil and has committed many murders (as they do with Ward), that’s fine, but acknowledge it. The fact that she’s a theoretically interesting character played by an attractive woman shouldn’t excuse her for past actions.
I’m not so sure that was Ward’s stupidity in that scene; it may have been Bobbi’s. The unsecured chair she was tied up in was placed suspiciously close in front of the gun, such that it could be wobbled over in front of the gun fairly easily.
Bobbi had been tortured for a while, so not too surprising she panicked. But, regardless, Ward needs to read the Evil Overlord List ASAP. And SHIELD needs to review and update their infiltration protocols – in addition to Hunter barging in without checking for boobytraps, they keep splitting their agents up and sending them out solo to track down dangerous killers.
I think Bobbi wiggled the bolts loose but I’m also willing to believe she brute forced them the rest of the way. She’s a superhero after all, and the adrenaline must have been pumping. Ward aiming the weapon head high and firing a single shot was dumb, but I guess he’s a super villain now and they do dumb things, don’t they? The whole kidnapping and closure thing shows us he’s unhinged and not completely rational. Super villains get themselves defeated all the time because they’re too interested in being eeeeeevil.
Raina was interesting and entertaining and I agree the makeup would have been expensive and burdensome. Also, she didn’t get a free pass for all the killing and torture she’d done. Skye called it out as soon as she found out she was there in Afterlife. Jiaying & Gordon didn’t care but we know why - they were evil too. And of course, Raina paid for her sins in the end.
Cal was different. He admitted killing but it was mostly Hydra agents and/or “they had it coming” which was kinda true. He was planning on killing as many Shield agents as he could but once Coulson got through to him it turned out he never really liked killing but the drugs and his obsession with Skye & Jiaying screwed him up pretty good.
The first time we saw Cal he was naked and covered in blood though. I wonder what that was all about? He didn’t seem quite that murderous later. Maybe he just likes his steaks really rare. A lot.
Wasn’t that where he was doing doctoring for criminals, and IIRC he lost a patient or something, and they were going to kill him for it, so… self defence? Or something like that.
Her role wasn’t clear. She wasn’t a leader in Hydra. She joined up with Hydra and worked for them because she felt they would give her access to the superpowers research she wanted. And Whitehall had already begun these programs long before Raina showed up.
That said, Raina was a master manipulator. She might have persuaded Whitehall and other Hydra leaders to push their programs in certain directions. And she certainly was willing to kill people when it suited her purposes, even if it was just to maintain her value to Hydra.
Raina wasn’t working for Hydra when we first saw her – she was working for “Centipede”, overseen by “the Clairvoyant”. When that turned out to be a front for Hydra and Garrett, she wasn’t terribly pleased. Whitehall wasn’t involved at that point; he was still in prison or tracking down Jiaying as far as we know.
Correct that Centipede was Garrett’s pet project administered under the pseudonym The Clairvoyant, probably off the books as far as Hydra was concerned.
Correct also that we have no reason to believe that Whitehall was involved in that particular project. But Whitehall had long been out of prison. He got out of prison in the late 80s and tracked down Jiaying when Skye was just an infant.
The very first time we saw Cal was at the end of the first season finale, when Raina walked into a room with someone sitting in a chair, blood dripping off his hands, handed him a picture of Skye and said “I think we’ve found your daughter.” The next time we saw him was episode 2 of this season, he was walking into a room with Raina, rubbing blood off his hands. That’s when we found he was a backroom surgeon.
Don’t know where the naked came from though - first time all we could see was his head and arm, second time he was fully clothed.
The thing that pisses me off most about what happened with Cal was that a medical degree does not translate to a veterinary degree. Just because some body systems and medicines are similar does not mean a doctor can also work as a vet (or visa versa). So maybe that means the Tahiti treatment can give you new skills and knowledge, if that’s the case you’d think SHIELD would be using that all the time for training purposes, or it doesn’t and Coulson doesn’t give a shit that they just set Cal up for malpractice and it doesn’t bother him because it’s only animals that he’ll kill. Lost a little respect for Phil.
Well, yeah, but I can fanwank it to say that back when Cal was working for Doctors Without Borders he trained in veterinary medicine so he could treat the random water buffalo and such. Unrealistic, but it could have happened.