I would imagine Whedon and co. all know this already and may spin this mystery into a different, funny, dramatic, or interesting direction.
Hmm. Stark’s a celebrity, and Thor doesn’t use a mask – but would someone like the new guy ever have seen the face of Steve Rogers? Just imagine Captain America briefly showing up to go unrecognized in civvies: square-jawed and built like an NFL safety, sure, but only ever meeting folks who can’t recall what they never knew…
That would have been AWESOME!!! 
I reject his review as missing the point.
“He must never know” followed by his finding out one episode later - I have enough faith in Joss to think that he won’t go that clichéd route, but he is on network tv, and they do love to spell things out and highlight them and put flashing neon signs around things for the audience that they so completely underestimate.
First off, many thanks to ABC for making it possible for me to catch a Whedon pilot in the same week that it acually piloted! And the online version doesn’t even have commercials!!! That was classy.
Wild and crazy Whedon fan-girl dancing ensues.
Ok. Now some actual thoughts.
I think FitzSimmons are the Merry and Pippen of the group = purposefully young and slightly idiotic, very earnest, but totally clueless. That makes the “older” (god I wish I could look like that in 20-odd years) team-members more accessible, because we feel for them babysitting the younguns. I see Skye ending up in the young and naive camp also.
Ming Na was awesome. I like her a lot. I also hope Shepard gets a little more to do in the future (is he even a regular?)
Coulson is marvelous, but he needs a few more “point” expressions than the cheesy-yet-knowing grin. Not that it’s a bad expression, mind, just that he used it approximately a bajillion times in that pilot.
I think swordy-poo has great potential for the straight-man. His expressions during the truth-serum scene were really good. “blah blah blah revelation revelation and damn this stuff works fast!”
I have no opinions on Luke Cage, but I do hope that the Hooded Hero comes back after he’s been appropriately stabilized and rehabilitated. He’s a really good actor, and I thought he did a great job in a role that could have gone really melodramatic and cheesy really quickly.
I see a lot of Dollhouse here, and a good bit of Dr Horrible, just in the pacing and the staging, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
I do think they had a pretty good budget and used it well - there weren’t any great amazing bits, but it was a tech-and-effects heavy pilot, and I thought all the visuals were very solid.
Does anyone know if ABC will continue to show episodes on the internet as they come out?
I got scolded for calling out, “You already have the van in a big metal box. Why don’t you just use a simulator to spoof the signals.” Even I have access to the equipment to do it.
And that’s assuming you can’t just fake the communication between the GPS receiver and the computer because she built the receiver herself or something.
Heh. Not so much a truth-serum as an exposition-serum.
That is exactly who I thought of immediately, and I haven’t played the game in ages.
I don’t think this is going to happen. I’m reminded of the pilot episode of My Name Is Earl. There was a character named Sonny in the episode. And viewers assumed he would be a regular ongoing character in the show because he had a relatively significant part in that episode - as much as Catalina or Crabman did. But as it turned out, he was not intended as a regular character. Two years later, they did bring him back for another episode and lampshaded the fact that his first appearance had confused viewers.
My point is that I don’t think they were introducing J. August Richards as a regular character. He was a guest star of the week who happened to appear in the first week.
The big problem with the guy part of the duo was that his Welsh (? Scottish? Irish?) accent was utterly incomprehensible to me.
Am I the only one that thought the British girl looked exactly like a young Jennifer Garner, and the hacker girl looked exactly like a young Alyssa Milano? I mean, exactly.
I trust Joss to play the long game. Pilots are, by necessity, flesh-out TV. They can’t imagine that viewers will know backstory. It’s introducing the characters, the setting, the universe. I trust Joss to tell his story.
StG
Does anyone else follow Clark Gregg on Twitter? He says the second episode will be “siick.” 
Ditto to both of the above.
I don’t get a “slightly idiotic” vibe at all: I get a “young genuises with underdeveloped social skills” vibe. 
Scottish: the actor (Iain De Casetecker) was born in Scotland.
…when I was in high school. :smack:
Overall I liked it, though it was mostly a plot-less cast introduction, but that’s high praise for any pilot episode.
Is this the first time that Joss Whedon has ever cast an older female character? A real character I mean–Buffy’s mom was obligatory window trimming. I have good feelings for the turning the “I’m getting too old for this shit” trope into a kick-ass female role.
Mac 'n Tosh didn’t grab me. The overtalk bantering was nonsensical and there wasn’t the slightest bit of character to the two. But I can forgive this for now as just playing the ‘pilot’ card to get the obligatory stage walk-ons out of the way.
Agent Hunky-O-7 has promise. Joss is able to bring character and acting range forth from the bland Sears catalog models that casting agents foist on us (i.e. Angel) and he was already showing signs of character.
Giada Dela-hacker wasn’t believable to me so far, I’m hoping there’s a back-story for how a Stark-level genius is living…in a van…down by the river…maybe she’s Doctor Octopus’ orphaned daughter or something.
Agent Coulson is a great centerpiece to pivot around, I can’t wait to see his development.
Well, Darla and Dru were both several hundred years old. 
This. I almost wriggled in my seat, just knowing they were going to continue that line all the way. Ah well.
And I’m old for this wriggling shite.
That’s sad. I knew he was a guest, but he was REALLY solid - I think he’d be a very good recurring guest… like Q on Star Trek Next Generation was. Maybe if fans are vocal enough, he might come back every once and again.
its weird how characters come and go. When I was collecting comics back in the 90’s, they were constantly reviving characters like Ghost Rider and Deathlok, who had been dormant for a number of years, and they were really popular. Characters like Luke Cage, Iron Fist and Spider Woman were all very much second string.
Now, Cage, Iron Fist and Spider Woman seem to be massive in Marvel again, where as several characters invented or massive in the 90’s seem to have mostly disappeared (Although the 90’s was a bit of a weird decade for comic books, so maybe this doesn’t happen all the time)
It’s happened about 8 million times in comics. A writer creates a character. The next writer to come along isn’t interested, and the character suffers. After a few years another writer comes along with a crush on that character. The character gets invigorated, maybe even a total remake. But writers never stay and the next umpteen writers don’t have the same take. Rinse, repeat, repeat again. Comics may be a visual medium but the characters are always writer-driven.
Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is a good source for such stories.
Because writers want to write the characters they read as kids. That’s why the terrible ideas of the 90s are coming back. That generation are now the editors, writers and artists.
I’d edit that to “then the writer gets bumped up.” It’s sort of a farm system - unproven writers are dumped on weak-selling characters/titles, and if/when they reinvigorate them they’re moved to one of the flagship books, or go to DC. The X-men were given to Claremont and Byrne after the book was dropped to bi-monthly due to poor sales; Daredevil was in similar straits before Miller.
But yeah, sometimes you get a writer that wants an obscure character, and does great things. The only comics I still own are Denny O’Neil’s three-year run on “The Question” and Grell’s stint on “Green Arrow.”