Agents of Shield

“Heavy Is the Head” picks up right where “Shadows” left off, with Carl Creel on the run from SHIELD and Hartley presumed dead in the car accident. Hunter, Hartley’s right-hand man (pun unintentional), is picked up by Talbott, who tries to convince Hunter to sell out Coulson in exchange for two million dollars and a proper funeral for Hartley. Hunter decides that Coulson’s team has a better chance of finding Creel, however, and after getting away from Talbott, he rejoins Coulson and the team’s hunt for Creel. Creel has more to worry about than SHIELD agents, though, as he is facing some nasty side effects from touching the dangerous artifact from “Shadows.”

Season one of Agents of SHIELD ends with Fitz recovering from nearly drowning, Coulson taking on the task of rebuilding SHIELD, and the remaining agents loyal to SHIELD on the run from the over-zealous Brigadier General Glenn Talbot. It only stands to reason that season two would open in Austria, 1945, with Agent Peggy Carter and the Howling Commandos taking out the final Hydra base. The scene is an obvious tie-in with the upcoming Agent Carter, but it also acts as a solid connecting story thread between the two shows. All of these artifacts that Peggy helped bring in will be in play, adding a potential Warehouse 13 element to the show that fans of that show would really love. Plus a World War II-era Hydra leader, who is still alive and inexplicably young in present day, is set up as a season-long villain for Agents of SHIELD. The Agent Carter opening seems a bit gimmicky at first, but by the end of the premiere, it is actually a smart tie-in.

“Beginning of the End” picks up minutes after “Ragtag” left off: Fitz and Simmons are stuck in a metal box on the bottom of the ocean; Coulson, Triplett, and Skye are being held at gunpoint in the secret Hydra base under the barber shop; Garrett has been revived by the formula that saved Coulson and Skye. All seems lost for Coulson’s team, and the season one finale of Agents of SHIELD has just begun.

Here’s the scorecard of recently announced TV cancellations and renewals, as we all bite our fingernails waiting for those final few verdicts to trickle in, particularly (I’m guessing), Nashville, Hannibal, and Community. UPDATE:  Hannibal just renewed. ABC CANCELLED: Trophy Wife, Mixology, and Neighbors. (Comment: Trophy Wife was superbly cast and sweet and funny, if slight, …

Season one’s penultimate episode “Ragtag” looks back again into the past when Ward and Garrett first met, and it sets up a mean cliffhanger leading into the finale. In the opening scene, Garrett visits a young Ward in a juvenile detention facility. Ward is facing a hefty sentence for lighting his family’s house on fire with his brother inside, and Garrett is offering a way out with a secret organization that is always looking for young men like Ward. After breaking him out, Garrett abandons Ward in the woods with only a bag of clothes and a hunting dog named Buddy for companionship. If Ward can survive for a few months, Garrett will be back. Ward survives, and Garrett molds him in his own image with the mantra that any emotional attachment is a weakness.

“Nothing Personal” opens with Maria Hill taking an evening stroll and chatting on her phone with Pepper Potts, but May is waiting around the corner for her with questions about Nick Fury and the T.A.H.I.T.I. project. Meanwhile, Coulson is back at Fury’s secret base with Triplett, Fitz, and Simmons, and they are trying to figure out why Skye and Ward left the base, taking their plane with them. Thanks to a bit of cleverness from Skye, they uncover Ward’s secret, but Fitz is unable to accept that Ward is a Hydra agent. Unfortunately, they have very little time to process these revelations as Colonel Glenn Talbot (Adrian Pasdar) has found their base and brought Maria Hill and a team of Special Forces along with him. As Coulson tries to convince Hill to help them, Skye is traveling with Ward back to where it all began for her, in a small diner where she met Mike Peterson for the first time.

“The Only Light in the Darkness” opens with Ward getting patched up by Simmons as he feeds false information to Coulson and the gang. Ward claims that he was too late to stop Hydra from taking over the Fridge and releasing super-villains previously captured by SHIELD, including a villain Coulson captured personally, Marcus Daniels (Patrick Brennan). Hearing this news, Coulson decides to take part of the team to protect Audrey Nathan (Amy Acker), Marcus Daniels’ last target and the woman he called “the only light in the darkness.” She is also Coulson’s mysterious cellist, the last woman he was romantically involved with before the attacks in New York. Agent Koenig (Patton Oswalt) isn’t keen on anyone leaving the secret hide-out, so he forces everyone to submit to a lie-detector test before allowing anyone to leave.

In the aftermath of SHIELD’s destruction, Agents of SHIELD splits “Providence” between the remaining members of Coulson’s team trying to figure out what is next and Ward and Garrett heading off to the Fridge for evil plotting and mustache-twirling. At first, Coulson wants to go completely off the grid, but he rethinks this plan when he discovers glowing coordinates on his SHIELD badge. He believes the coordinates are a clue from Fury himself as to where to go and how to find him. May, however, thinks that Coulson isn’t thinking clearly in the aftermath of SHIELD’s demise, and she worries that his decisions are putting everyone else in danger.

(Warning: After the jump, this review will contain spoilers for the film Captain America: The Winter Soldier.)

“Turn, Turn, Turn” is the first episode of Agents of SHIELD to directly tie in its full story with the events of a Marvel film, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Unlike its last supposed tie-in with Thor: The Dark World in “The Well”, which takes place after the events of the film, the events of “Turn, Turn, Turn” take place in the same timeline of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Without spoiling too much of the film or the episode, it is revealed that SHIELD is full of double-agents, and Coulson no longer trusts that May is on his side. Victoria Hand sends drones to take out Garrett, but Coulson takes out the drones with his sharp-shooting skills. After saving Garrett, Coulson makes his way back to the Hub with Garrett, Ward, Skye, Fitz, and May. Together, they formulate a plan to save Simmons and Triplett and then stop Victoria Hand, who they believe is the real Clairvoyant. As the saying goes, however, the best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry, and in Coulson’s team, there is at least one friend working with the enemy.

“The End of the Beginning” wastes no time with pleasantries but jumps right into action with Deathlok (J. August Richards) breaking into a SHIELD safehouse. He is nearly taken down by Agent Garrett (Bill Paxton) and Antoine (B.J. Britt), prompting Coulson, Agent Garrett, and the gang to call up Victoria Hand (Saffron Burrows) and bring SHIELD into the fold on their newest mission. Together, Coulson hopes they can search through a list of potential suspects, people that SHIELD is aware of with ESP abilities, and find the Clairvoyant once and for all.

In “Yes Men”, Thor’s Lady Sif (Jaimie Alexander) joins the gang on Agents of SHIELD to track down Lorelei (Elena Satine), an evil enchantress from Asgard. Lorelei has a nasty habit of hypnotizing men and using these love-sick slaves to build armies and conquer worlds. Lady Sif is more than happy to bring her to justice, considering that Lorelei enslaved someone Sif cared for during one of Lorelei’s failed attempts to conquer Asgard. When Ward is brought under Lorelei’s spell, May and Sif have to work together to stop Lorelei from taking over Earth and stop Ward from hurting May. Meanwhile, Skye is recovering remarkably quickly, thanks to the mysterious GH-325 recovered from the SHIELD base, but Coulson is losing his patience as Director Fury refuses to take his calls or answer questions about GH-325.

“The Bridge” is the first season’s hastily-constructed bridge from the pilot episode to the end of the season. It gives the illusion that the season has been building to a confrontation with Project Centipede when it has really meandered with single episode story arcs and false trails. Mike Peterson (J. August Richards) returns for the first time since the pilot and gives the team what it has been sorely lacking, which is a superhero. Coulson and his team have encountered super-human abilities and even tangled with an Asgardian, but the point of SHIELD as an organization is to protect mankind and provide superheroes like Captain America with what they need to save the world. Without a central figure to rally around, the team lacks a strong direction, even if they have an interesting villain like Centipede. Like Coulson said in The Avengers, people need a little old fashioned heroics, and Agents of SHIELD might need a caped superhero or two at its center to keep it focused.

The most consistently frustrating thing about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is its absolute refusal to be anything other than a vanilla, middle-of-the-road piece of disposable entertainment. It’s not a show that’s necessarily terrible enough to hate (although some will try) and it’s not anywhere near good enough to like it. The most common response to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has to be a shrug of the shoulders and moving on from there. There’s nothing particularly memorable about anything that it has to work with. Here’s a question for the ages: if this show didn’t have the association with the Marvel universe, would people even be tuning in to watch it? You can ponder that amongst yourselves.