Okay episode, I guess, but slightly marred for me by the constant assertion that Coulson would do anything at all to save his agent.
Sure, I get it. Do they (the writers, the characters themselves as well) get that most people losing a loved one in the entire history of the human race have felt that way? It just seemed so “special snowflake” to me.
Including becoming a murderer and killing two innocent guards? Pretty much defines 'villain". This was bad writing- heroes don’t kill good guys on purpose.
I agree. I thought it was the beginning of whatever show comes on after S.H.I.E.L.D. If it wasn’t for TiVo telling me there was a few minutes left, I might have turned it off completely.
I’m not buying the whole “innocent guards” thing. We don’t know who owned/operated the lab that was raided. We were led to believe it was not a S.H.E.I.L.D. facility. It could have been A.I.M, Hydra, or some other criminal outfit. The guards themselves were obviously trained for combat, and knew they were in a high risk line of work.
I believe it was strongly inferred, if not outright stated, that this was the very facility that Coulson had been in when he was being revived from the dead.
Showing the T.A.H.I.T.I. door all but confirms exactly this.
Then the question is: If not SHIELD, then who? And what kind of deal did Fury have to cut to get Coulson treated there? Obviously Hill knows about the facility. Who else?
From what I’ve been able to glean
[spoiler]“It’s all connected.”
What is happening on this show is directly related to what is going to appear in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Setting up the different factions within SHIELD, in fact.[/spoiler]
March 18th there is a big Marvel special on that will show some new material and knit everything a little closer together.
So was Skye.
There was a symbol on the outside that flashed by too fast for me to see, and I deleted the recording. If somebody still has it, it was shown just before they rang the doorbell. That may be a clue. Or maybe not, but I hope somebody can check it out.
The question of whose side the facility was on is a bit of a red herring.* All we saw was Coulson proclaiming that his team member had to live no matter how many others he had to kill to do so. That may be refreshingly realistic and true-to-life but it goes against everything that Marvel superhero comics have been preaching for 50 years. Nor did he do it as a rogue unit; he had at least an equally high level SHIELD insider pulling the trigger alongside him. (Not to mention their willingness to torture a prisoner for information.) This changes everything - or should change everything. They either have to be soldiers or superheroes. It’s simply too convenient for them to want to be both. That gives them the high moral ground no matter what they do and allows the writers to pull any ending out of their asses and justify it. Lazy writing soon becomes stupid writing. AoS:U can’t afford that. It’s already walking on the edge.
*Coulson certainly was treated there. Fury sent him. Morally, that puts the onus for the guards’ deaths on Fury. You can’t fall back on saying that anything Fury does is moral because he’s the king good guy. “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” Fury’s only better than SHIELD if he’s BETTER than SHIELD. If SHIELD compromised its morals - and in the comics it always does - out-eviling them isn’t a solution. Especially given that this is a lead-in to a tie-in movie with the ultimate moralist, Captain America, the good guys can’t also be compromised. IOW, it’s a mess and I’m curious to know how much they realize that.
I’m torn between Coulson really caring about Skye living or dieing and using it as a way to get more info on what happened to him.
In either case - the entire episode was a call back to what happened to him - we have no idea how many folks Fury ‘took care of’ to make that happen either. (of course, when Fury did it - the place didn’t get all blowed up)
At the end of the next ep preview, when the voiceover said “Marvel’s Agents of Shield - Uprising”, the SHIELD logo turned into Cap’s shield (with most of the paint gone) for about .5 sec, then back into the logo.
On the panel Fitz opened to get inside? It was a standard biohazard symbol - I just watched it again. There was a biohazard symbol on the TAHITI door too.
Also as soon as they landed, Coulson said “The Guest House is not a SHIELD facility.” True, it may be, but it’s classified way past anything he or Garrett knows.
And the bisected alien guy was definitely blue. Not just lighting - the parts where his skin was missing and his internal organs were hanging out were the reddish you’d expect from a human, so the blue skin really is some non-human color.
A lot of this. I don’t care about the characters too much and forgot Skye was shot too. And just before we saw the blue(?) guy I suddenly realized that they might just end the episode there and make us wait to see what was inside.
But I enjoyed this episode a lot. I think I was just in exactly the right kind of mood (and with the right amount of beer inside me) to really get into it. The medical facility was pretty creepy and the weird-body-possibly-kept-alive-for-harvesting was a nice shocking reveal. Add Coulson’s reaction and the whole thing was unsettling.
As for the Lorelei part at the end, I wasn’t at all interested by it. It seemed kind of weak, given what was going on just before it.
Why hasn’t anyone discussed why there was only two guards there if this place held the answers to regenerating life? Seems to me that if this was truly a SHIELD facility then there may have been a better security system. Two guards don’t add up for something so important.
It seems like a big waste to blow up a facility like that because they were unable to defend it with two guys. IMO there must be another facility with the same tech, probably much more advance. I still don’t know why they would leave a seemingly important alien basically unprotected.
True, but Skye wasn’t guarding a chamber of horrors for alien creatures, either.
Yeah we have a super, super, super duper top secret facility holding really important mysteries, so if the guards run into trouble and don’t deactivate the self-destruct, we’ll put plenty of time on the countdown so whoever was able to breach security has time to find the secrets and get back out. Makes perfect sense.
And the two henchmen weren’t bad guys. Pisses me off they killed them just to save Annoying Girl.
Haven’t they been using some weird blue glowy tranq bullets lately? Too bad they didn’t use those on the guards.
To me it was quite obvious that Garret will show up later as either the Clairvoyant or its right hand (either way, the face of the enemy). He appears to take Quinn, but stays to help Coulson find the secret base, with no reason whatsoever that compelled him to disobey his orders (Coulson just said pretty please).
Also, Quinn is sure The Clairvoyant will save throughout the whole episode, including when Garret tells him that no one is saving him and that he is wrong, and then proceeds to “take him into custody”.
If he isn’t the bad guy, he’s definitely working for him/her.
BTW, first post in this forum. Just found it while looking for reviews on this episode and wondering what the hell that half body was.
They’d be dead anyway. Boom. Remember?
Random speculation–maybe Skye is responsible for the team doing whatever it takes to save her? Apparently most of a village and multiple agents died “protecting” her as a baby. Maybe she’s got some kind of latent ability to make nearby people want to protect her, and the ability went into overdrive while she’s nearly dying?
Hward asked Coulson if that was the room where… Coulson confirmed and cut him off.
