Yuppers still watching it. And it has to be the most unique season to date.
Bit annoyed I cant watch it this friday, cause its getting pre empted for some fucking basketball game
The Fear and Loathing episode was fun, despite only using half the crew. But the latest episode, Code Yellow, was just terrible writing. It really felt like the writers just came up with a couple of scenes that they wanted to have happen and then… just had them happen, without laying any of the necessary groundwork or having the situations arise naturally from the characters. That’s kind of the essence of bad writing.
I’m willing to overlook a lot of logic in order to get to the “cool parts”, but there’s a limit. I just couldn’t buy most of what happened here.
- Deke being allowed to develop and market future technology for a year without SHIELD or anyone else caring, despite (twist) there being a SHIELD agent embedded with him.
- YoYo not using her powers to handily defeat the alien parasite, just to set up the alien scene and take TallGuy out of the picture.
- May charging off alone to take out the female member of Coulson’s gang, despite having no real connection with her, just to get another woman v. woman martial arts fight.
- New scientist guy being used solely for speculative exposition rather than actually doing anything to address the problem. A stethoscope? An EKG? Having the containment unit located conveniently down the hall rather than in the medical lab?
- Deke heading back into the building to rescue Sequoia, unarmed, rather than informing the rest of the team what’s going on. And the SHIELD agent who was watching him letting it happen, and then not even following.
- Deke emptying his weapon into the bad guy who’s already down, as an obvious joke, just to set up the ‘click, your gun’s empty’ moment with the next bad guy, so that we get a flight scene instead of a fight scene, despite there being at least one other agent there with a loaded weapon.
- Coulson’s team being experts on eliminating these anomalies, but not knowing that extracting the knife from the body would allow the thing to regenerate and live again. Even if SHIELD wasn’t a thing, normal law enforcement would have removed the knife sooner or later.
On a larger level, they’re obviously trying to steer things so that Coulson and team have a noble purpose, or at least are the lesser of two evils. Presumably as a way to maneuver into having NewCoulson rejoin the show as a team member. I don’t have much confidence that they’re going to be able to support that kind of heel-face turn, though, given how casual the bad guys have been about killing innocent people along the way. There’s only so far you can go with ‘the ends justify the means’ and still have a sympathetic character. Unless it turns out that NewCoulson isn’t really the one in charge, or he’s been brainwashed, or some other handwavium, that’s going to ring pretty false.
Just getting caught up…
- The stare down Mac gave Deke when he saw video Daisy was worth the poor setup.
- YoYo is the worst speedster ever! As soon as weird contortionist parasitic chest bat started twitching she should have used superspeed to put the damn knife back in and ended the threat - or - used superspeed to stab it after it flew out of dead body - or - done something/anything smart
- They needed to isolate May so she and not-Coulson could get some one-on-one so they can fall in love. At the end of the season they will be together and either he will stay and join Shield or she will leave and join the Not-Coulson Sliders to fight the weird contortionist parasitic chest bats across the multiverse.
- If the early seasons of the show didn’t use those isolation pods so damn effectively I could give new science guy a break. Alas, they did use them well thus I cannot overlook the general purpose stupidity new science guy brings to the job.
- Sequoia was hilarious and I approve of every scene she was in. Especially the little blurb at the end
For those that didn’t catch, that was Maurissa Tancharoen, co-creator of the show (and Jed Whedon’s wife).
I was fully prepared to hate her character on general purpose alone but her comedic timing was superb and I just couldn’t stop laughing. The end blurb with secret agent thirst trap still has me chuckling today.
Does she write or act for any other shows?
I practically cheered when Deke emptied the gun into the bad guy. Finally, somebody who is NOT going to just assume that the bad guy is down for the count simply because it looks like he is. How many times in fiction in general do the heroes get bitten in the ass because they didn’t take a couple of extra seconds to DEFINITELY take care of business like that?
I think we have another new episode tonight. Wow, they’re really spoiling the fans: we only had to wait a FULL YEAR between the last episode last season and the first episode this season, and they gave us four episodes before taking a well-earned two-week hiatus.
Sure, but if you’re still in proximity to enemies, you should really reload after emptying the gun. Otherwise you’ll just get bitten in the ass a scene or two later. Like Deke did.
I can’t argue with any of this. My point, though, is that the episode felt like they just wrote the payoffs and then phoned in the work that you’re supposed to do to get to those payoffs. Getting May isolated with Coulson is great, and will lead to some great scenes next episode. But as a writer you have to arrange the parts so that that naturally happens without violating common sense or characterization. Figuring out the cool payoffs is only half the job, and probably not the hardest half.
If you want to have the cool body-horror scene of the guy turning into dark crystal tower and the angst from YoYo that she couldn’t save him, then that’s great! Now figure out a way to get there that makes sense. Maybe the bat things send out a hypersonic pulse that disables Inhuman abilities. Maybe Coulson gets interrupted after stabbing the bat before he can do the S.O.P. of disintegrating it after it’s disabled. Maybe the bat takes partial control of Agent Gonnadie and begs YoYo not to stab him, and that tugs at her heartstrings and makes her delay.
I’m not the guy who yells “plot hole” every time there’s a little bit of effort required to bridge a gap or elide over a rough spot. But usually the writers of this show at least make things plausible enough to keep the fun train going. For me this particular episode just failed utterly at that job.
Still looking forward to tonight’s, though.
Yeah, Yo-Yo was terrible in that episode. It’s not like she’s a brand new agent and is new to all the monsters and magic - this is something she’s been trained for. Yet she stood frozen for seconds while the bat was flapping around the lab when she could have easily grabbed it and thrown it into a box or something. Then a scene later, she stood and watched while the damn thing crawled down her boyfriend’s mouth.
It was obvious that as soon as he tried to tell Mack about him and Yo-Yo that he was dying soon, but man, they could have done that better.
Letting it crawl down his mouth as YoYo watched was unforgivable- for the writers, not the character YoYo.
So let’s see if I’m following:
The zombie chest birds (ZCBs) are inter-dimensional beings that destroy worlds. Alt-Coulson and his team are hunting them from world to world for whatever reason - although probably not with any hope of actually stopping them - arriving just before the world is destroyed. They track them using a device that detects creatures from alternate universes, which is how they reached Zeke. ZCBs come in two types: the regular silent type, like the one who killed Yo-Yo’s beau, and a type that can speak, which is what they assumed Zeke was. Alt-Coulson tortures the talkers, either for information or for other reasons.
Alt-Coulson’s team consists of individuals he recruited in the various destroyed worlds. He kidnapped May because he wants her to join his team when they move on.
Have I missed anything?
What the heck was the deal with the soundtrack in tonight’s episode? During the first ten minutes or so, and at a couple of points later on. the spoken dialogue was either completely silent or mostly drowned out by the background music.
Not sure if it was a problem with the network feed or the local (Houston-area) cable provider.
Looks to be something on your end.
Haven’t watched in awhile. Is SHIELD the good guys again? Spoiler-box it for me, if you prefer.
This is from the latest episode, which aired (for me) a few hours after your post:
The ZBC’s are actually called the Shrike. Sarge said they came “from another world”, not another dimension. They just look for anything that doesn’t belong on that world, which Zeke doesn’t, because he’s from the future (and is exhausting). At some point, right before the world is destroyed, the Shrike’s creator shows up, and presumably, triggers the world’s destruction. On Earth, Sarge is planning on waiting around until the creator shows up, then he’ll “burn it all down”.
So I was pretty close.
BTW, “Shrike”? Are we just stealing names from better science fiction stories now?
Hmm?
When exactly did you stop watching? Because I wouldn’t have ever called SHIELD (particularly the group we watch) the bad guys. They were just infiltrated by Hydra.
Also, they destroyed the Chronicon’s world, so they want to go back in time and stop it.