Tag Archives: Agent Coulson

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Agents of SHIELD – S2E4 – Face My Enemy – Recap

Man, compared to last season, this season of Agents of SHIELD is so good! I don’t know if it just takes a season for the writers and actors to really discover the characters, or if it’s the fact that Coulson and his team are the underdogs this season. Maybe it’s a combination of the two.

This episode focuses mainly on Coulson and May, as the two most experienced members of the team, crash a very fancy house party in order to retrieve a painting that on its backside has the same weird alien wingdings that Coulson has been drawing. There’s a small, but major complication to this when they show up and see that Talbot is at the same party. Oh, and did I mention that the party is at a Hydra house? And that Talbot seems to be in league with the Hydra guy whose party it is. Oh boy.

But the biggest problem really is just Talbot being there, whether or not he’s in league with Hydra. Coulson and May are at the party under assumed identities. If Talbot spots them, their cover is completely blown.

Before discovering Talbot is at the party, Coulson and May have one of the coolest scenes in the history of this show. They’re dancing together, but using every turn, dip and spin to scope out the room, taking notes of cameras and guards while reminiscing on past adventures together.

CLARK GREGG, MING-NA WEN

Coulson confronts Talbot, telling him that he’s on a mission at this party that could benefit them both. Talbot is surprisingly receptive to the idea.

Once the mission gets underway, we get some serious Mission: Impossible action going down. May flirts with a guy and tells Coulson to take their picture. But what Coulson is really doing is scanning his retinal patterns to bypass a lock later. Unfortunately, when they go for the painting, their cover is blown and the painting is nowhere to be found. Skye alerts them that the US government has the painting. Coulson meets with Talbot, and Talbot agrees to let Coulson see the painting…but only if they’ll meet him a secure location. Talbot also seems to be working with a bad guy here behind Coulson’s back. Uh-oh…

May checks out the secure location and is ambushed by the brainwashed Agent 33, who uses this digital mask thing to copy May’s face onto her own. Where does Hydra get these wonderful toys? The disguised-as-May Agent 33 arrives at the Bus, convinces Coulson to go to the secure location with her, and manages to install some nasty devise onto the Bus’s mainframe. 

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Agent 33’s device sends the Bus into lock down mode. Coulson’s entire team is trapped inside the Bus. Crap. Oh, and the Bus is going to explode. Double crap.

may fight

At the hotel that is the secure location, Coulson figures out May is an imposter when she agrees to get a cup of coffee with him when this is all over. The real May hates coffee. Real May frees herself and it’s a May on May fight to determine who may walk away.  It’s a fantastic fight scene. I hope they include a making of for this scene in the DVD release of season two. The real May wins the fight. Coulson recovers the painting.

may fight 2

On the Bus, Fitz manages to save the day. This gets both Fitz and the rest of the team to believe in Fitz a little more. Fitz had been standoffish around the others earlier in the episode. But once he saves the day, he is ready to interact with the team again on a personal level. They’re all bitching about exes. Fitz joins in to complain about a girl who left once she found out how her felt about her.

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So that was never Talbot. It was a Hydra guy in a Talbot mask all episode. When Coulson gets hold of the real Talbot, Talbot is amused that Coulson didn’t find it odd that he would just go along with this plan. Coulson’s team makes a discovery about the painting: it’s old, but the carvings aren’t. That means unless Garrett did this before he went completely Loony Toons, someone else is out there making these weirdo alien carvings too.

As the outro for the episode, Raina is taken by the Hydra silver fox from last week. He wants the obelisk, and wants her help retrieving it. To entice her to see things his way, he tortures her with some device and tells her she has 48 hours to bring it to him.

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Agents of SHIELD – S1E6 – F.Z.Z.T. – REVIEW

Spoilers abound! Read this only if you’ve already watched F.Z.Z.T!

Episode 6 of Agents of SHIELD, “F.Z.Z.T,” starts out normally. There’s a new super-powered mystery to be solved. This time, it’s a scout leader whose dead body is both electrically charged and hovering in the air. The good news is that it takes the team only half the episode to solve this one. The source of turns out a be a Chitauri helmet carrying some kind of space virus.

FZZT floaty

 

It was cool that the Agents of SHIELD TV show went beyond just passively referencing the Avengers movie here and brought in an actual prop that kickstarted this episode. It definitely helps the show feel like it’s securely grounded in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What was also cool about this plot was that there was no sinister villain hungry for power. The people who died thanks to the Chitauri helmet weren’t murdered. It was just wrong place, wrong time. Of course, it at first looks like one person is out to kill his friends, but when he dies and the SHIELD team recovers the helmet, everything is resolved and there’s no villain lurking in the shadows.

Chitauri Helmet

What follows is without a doubt the most intense half an episode we’ve had so far this season. I honestly had no idea if Simmons was going to make it out of this one alive. When she and Fitz failed in their final attempt at creating a cure, I was ready to yell at my TV, “You can’t kill Simmons!” But this is Whedon we’re talking about. He totally could.

Part of the reason that I love this episode so much is for the amount of screen time that Fitz and Simmons get. There is definitely chemistry between the two of them. We’re treated to their back story, which is great,except that it’s given to us in this frame that Simmons is about to die. If this was Lost, she’d definitely be dead for all the back story we got on the two of them.

When it’s revealed that the EM pulse from Simmons as she dies will blow the whole plane out of the sky, killing the entire SHIELD team, I breathed a sigh of relief. They can’t kill the whole team. There’d be no show. Then Simmons jumped from the plane…just as Fitz realizes they figured out a cure. It’s like a nerd version of Romeo and Juliet.

IAIN DE CAESTECKER, ELIZABETH HENSTRIDGE

If Simmons dies, we riot!

I literally cheered when Fitz tried to get that parachute on and Ward jumped out of the plane to save Simmons. This episode was INTENSE. At the end of the day, Ward saves Simmons and I don’t throw my remote at my TV over her death. Whedon, you played with my emotions like an episode of Parenthood here, and I thank you for it.

In Agent Coulson news, we get a BIG reveal tonight. Coulson undoes his shirt and shows off the massive scar where Loki blasted him in The Avengers. Someone told me that this is proof that Coulson is not a Life Model Decoy. I still think he’s a LMD, and that whoever designed the Coulson LMD went into very good detail. I’m guessing we won’t find out until the end of this season at the earliest.

Coulson Scar

Agents of SHIELD is crossing over with Thor: The Dark World in two weeks. In other words, make sure you see Thor: The Dark World. See you next week!

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Agents of SHIELD S1E4 – Eye Spy

The episode begins with a group of men all wearing matching suits and red masks and all carrying steel briefcases boarding a train. A woman observes them and follows. This was a nice set-up. I feel like we, as an audience, are more likely to be suspicious of the men in the red masks. They definitely set off my inner “If you see something, say something.” But as it turns out, it was the lone, silent woman who we should have been on the look out for. Well played, SHIELD screenwriters.

I do question the sanity of the passengers who boarded the train with those masked men. Is there anything more suspicious than a group of men in asks carrying steel briefcases? I would definitely wait for the next train. Actually, I think I would go upstairs and hail a cab.

agents of shield red masks

For the love of God, if you see something, say something!

Once SHIELD is assigned to the case, Agent Melinda May is given another compliment that further increases her bad ass quotient (She seems to average about one of these per episode). Coulson says he knew it had to be Akela behind these robberies. When May asks how he knew, he says he can think of only two people who can pull this off, and other one is on the plane with him. I’m really hoping we get to see May in full-on ass-kicking mode soon. I’m talking Wolverine in Uncanny X-Men #133.

xmen 132 final panel

I want Agent May to recreate the final panel of Uncanny X-Men #132 on an upcoming episode.

It’s interesting how adamant almost everyone on the SHIELD team is that telepathy and ESP don’t exist. I know Marvel’s merry mutant movies aren’t handled by Marvel Studios, but you would think even in a world where the X-Men don’t exist, the existence of beings like Thor and Loki would cause people to have an open mind about what powers are possible.

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Pascale Armand has mastered “The Michonne Stare Down” for her portrayal of Akela Amador on Agents of SHIELD.

We get more in the “How did they resurrect Coulson?” mystery. Akela asks Agent May, “What did they do to him?” and going by her tone of voice, she’s not talking about Coulson’s personality. Akela’s surgically replaced eye has a back scatter function that basically allows it to function as an x-ray camera. Did she something not quite human in Coulson’s insides? My guess is yes.

Skye and Ward look like they’re developing feelings for each other that extend beyond being coworkers. There’s a lot of subtext and subtle flirting in their dialogue. Whatever. Give me more FitzSimmons!

The list of the SHIELD team’s enemies continues to grow. Whoever the mysterious bad guys are behind this series of break-ins, could they be part of the same group supplying the power brokers in the first episode? If so, I think we’re going to see the emergence of Hydra or AIM by the end of this season.

Agents of SHIELD continues to be a solid show. I think this might be my favorite episode since the season opener.