New season is up and running, and I didn’t see a thread on the first page of Cafe Society, so I guess it’s a big MEH to most folks. I enjoyed the show up until last season, and last season wasnt’ that bad either -it’s just that I don’t like dream sequences/holodeck shows, and The Framework was a holodeck in all but name.
Now they grabbed everyone and dumped them hundreds of years in the future, on a space station orbiting a destroyed Earth. Gah. Now I’m watching, “Sliders.”
I’ll watch it. Might even like it. But if I were gambling, I’d put money on this being the last season.
The show peaked with the Captain America tie in and Wards heel turn on season 1. They should have focused the show on the remnants of SHIELD fighting the remnants of Hydra, thats what i wanted to see. Not a series of “why are the Avengers not dealing with this” super bad guys.
Shield has always changed up things every season and come away with a lot of respect compared to other shows that have gone the distance and maybe jumped the shark. With regards to the last season, yeah this could be it. ABC was all about set to cancel last year, but not for Disney leaning on the network to renew. So far its only two episodes in , and I think this is the arc that ties in with the infinity war movie. But there have always been three major story arc’s for shield, and unlike other years, this time there is no hiatus to screw with gaps in viewership.
Another arc with them off Earth and not having to explain how they tie in to MCU continuity. Good from their point of view, but it negates any purpose for having SHIELD in the first place. Whether it might tie in to the movies is irrelevant. It could be any brand new show at this point. I might continue, but the show is over.
**
“It could be any brand new show at this point.”**
This, right here. We know the characters, that’s it. It’s essentially a reboot, with nothing but the characters and their history remaining. No previous sets/settings or peripheral characters, they’re in a different location hundreds of years in the future, and possibly in another timeline. They’re interacting with aliens daily now, so the tech level is different (though that’s always been flexible) but we don’t even have a baseline on it.
I hope I get something out of it and they go out well, but they did something similar with The Framework last season (alters their base reality, all the old rules are out the window, etc), and I think two seasons in a row is at LEAST one too many. Damn shame, I was looking forward to the new season.
Reintroducing the Framework has to be a critical plot point so I need to wait to see why they did it. In the meantime it took me totally out of the show. Humans have lost basic medical techniques like cauterizing (known in antiquity) but one guy recreates supercomputer software from nothingness? And if it’s so useful in making humans docile, why the hell don’t they put all humans under? Turn it into the Matrix. Humans have no use to the Kree and have costs. Just annihilate them or shove them into stasis. Literally almost anything would make more sense than the current setup.
Checkov’s Framework wasn’t lost on me. It will be a plot point going forward, no question. I’m still trying to figure out why the Kree are doing this at all. Why the space station? Why keep and enslave the humans to work on the station? Why not bug out to some non-destroyed place? Earth done blowed up! I’m not getting their motivation at all.
Look, when I watch SHIELD, I want to watch “I Spy” or “Mission Impossible” or “The Man From UNCLE” genre stuff, not crappy Matrix rip-offs like last season, or boring Inhumans politics/drama like the season before that or whatever the hell crappy sci-fi schlock this was. I get that this is in the Marvel universe so there’s always going to be some genre crossover, but geezus–make it an episode or two, not a whole damned season.
I want to see Jim Steranko '60s gimmicky spy stuff, not this.
It is absolutely not a “big MEH” for me. I am still loving it; last season was, IMHO, the best show on television last year**, and I thought that the premiere was outstanding. I’m just averse to starting new threads on this message board, so I wait for someone else to do it, and then I participate.
IIRC, he said he left it behind because he was anticipating being arrested, and didn’t want it to be confiscated.
Boy, do you and I want different things out of this television show…
** Full disclosure, there are a lot of critically acclaimed/“prestige” shows that I don’t watch, because they aren’t relevant to my interests. It might be more accurate to say that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was the best show, out of the shows that I watch, that came on last season.
Between last season and this, it feels like the show’s writers/creators are just rebelling in a “malicious compliance” kind of way against the restrictions placed on them by the movie studios.
When all of this started, the most exciting thing to me about it was the crossovers, the interlinking between the movie universe and the TV show. That’s never really been done before, and that made the concept behind the show so much more exciting than any standalone project. We all knew we weren’t going to have Downey or one of the Chrises on the show every week, but it was awesome to have references and tie-ins when we did have them. That excitement faded as subsequent seasons had less and less relevance to the ongoing movie universe. Too bad.
The more recent seasons have been downright hamstrung by not being allowed to reference the movieverse, or really do or say anything of any potential relevance to the movieverse. I feel like the show is being forced into this hermetically sealed bubble where it is prevented from connecting in any way to its own universe.
Hence last season’s “it was all just a dream” holodeck bullshit, and this season’s “none of this even matters” ultimate, and unavoidable, time-loop resolution to the storyline.
I mean, I’ll still watch, of course. Coulson is cool, and Daisy’s hot, and FitzSimmons is interesting, and May is all of the above. So it’s still entertaining enough not to fall completely off the list of things to watch. But, look, any fan of tv and movie scifi has long grown used to disappointment, but still. It kinda hurts to see “what if” become “what could have been”.
I don’t watch Agents of Shield for the “setting.” I watch it because I love the characters. I’ve loved Coulson ever since a funny thing happened to him on the way to Thor’s hammer. And it took a while but I’ve grown to love the rest of the characters as well. I’m happy to watch these characters in an action spy drama or running around in a simulation, I could happily watch them in a historical drama, heck I would love to watch them just sit around a diner and shoot the breeze. So Agents of Shield in space? Hell yeah. (Although I know I’m in the minority, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this was the final year. )
I’m with Banquet Bear. The team is tight, the show’s peripheral characters were never that interesting anyway, and the plot seems to be serving comic-book realness. They want to do this season in space? Sure, why not. Let’s see where they go with it.
Besides, the premiere had a real *Doctor Who *vibe to it, and that’s a good thing.
The driving force behind the first half of last season was the Sokovia Accords from Civil War.
Anyway, I agree with the other posters who are really excited about this new season. The interaction between the characters has always been the best part of the show. More snarky Coulson is always better. “This is the coolest we’ve ever looked.”
Only thing that’s missing is Fitz. Hopefully we’ll see him in the past soon. Is the actor busy with something else? The end of last season had him on the verge of a mental breakdown, learning that just a small change in his past was enough to make him a supervillain. I don’t want them to drop that plot.
Count me as another one who’s totally on board with the new premise. Mac’s dialogue alone during the first ten minutes or so (“What? I hit him as hard as I possibly could.”) was pure gold.
Yes, at the moment there seem to be some logical lapses where we don’t know the full backstory (so far it’s unclear, as someone said, why the Kree are even bothering with the humans) but I like plots where one doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, and the show has always, IMO, been quite good at tying up loose plot ends.
Also, great new henchperson: silent Kree woman with the assassination balls.
)