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beccaelizabethHrmmm...
Okay, so, more than any episode before it, I was spoiled for this via tumblr. I'm glad so many people liked it so much, but it did mean that as soon as it finished broadcasting in America, every scene was on tumblr in gif form. So, I think I had most of my initial reaction a piece at a time, and while that reaction tended to be :-D , it... diluted the impact of the episode this time.
So, this episode was cool.
Could have been cooler.
Before next season, I either need to get off tumblr or discover some magic way to block spoiler posts which haven't been tagged.
That said, my thoughts:
The other reason I'm not all :-D about that episode was the ending. The last couple of scenes. One of them because I love Coulson and worry, the other because I love Coulson but... *sigh*
I know the writers love Coulson best. I know that he's gone from being a background dude to being Fury's one good eye and the heart of SHIELD. They've actually given him good meaty story to show us how he earned that, though there's been times I thought he was being stupid, cruel, selfish, or stroppy simply because what he usually did to others was aimed at him this time. That's okay in a story, give a guy flaws, he's more interesting. But structurally, what all that does? When you show Fury's way led to SHIELD's downfall, and put Maria Hill in mistaken opposition to Coulson? Where the black guy was too cruel and the white woman lacked faith, don't worry, here's a white man to make it all better again.
I have a problem with that. I have a really big problem with that.
Especially since Maria is going to be second to Stark, even if she's working the same save the world gig. And here May is second to Coulson, having stated that people like her need people like Coulson, pretty much to do the being a decent person stuff. Women are right there supporting men. However central their role in other media. Got their backs. Standing right behind them. Taking their orders.
It's one thing having Hill mock Ward for referring to her and Widow as eye candy, that's great as far as it goes, but when the story makes sure women don't get the drivers seat?
The ending thinks it's all about putting integrity, courage, and compassion at the heart of SHIELD.
But mostly it's replacing the diversity in power with the most uncontroversial choice, straight white average middle age middle class man.
So the ending, despite me loving Phil, and the lovely moment where Fury of course thinks of him as an Avenger, it just kind of leaves me tired. We had better than this, and oh look, there it goes again.
... so now I have structural reasons to wish for Clint/Coulson. Because bi guy in charge hasn't happened since Torchwood, and y'all know I loved Torchwood even though I was pretty sure it was the story of the bad guys screwing up repeatedly and failing a lot.
(ETA: It didn't even occur to me, but others are saying Coulson's group are still vigilantes at the end? That wasn't Fury giving them the keys to a new government backed organisation, that was just a non existent man giving them a secret base to hide from governments in. No oversight, no authority, not even a tiny figleaf of giving a damn about democratic process and law? Oh great, it's worse than I thought then. Rebuild SHIELD the right way: anarchist! *sigh* /ETA)
So, anyway, backing up a bit: things I loved about this episode: Winning!
Team!
May!
... May breaking Ward's voice so we don't have to listen to that whiny ... man. Yaays!
... I read a thing where it said Ward is intensely meta, where he's the guy with all the manpain who thinks everything is about his sacrifices and the show is totally using him to skewer that tendency in the woobie white hero men of other shows. http://stormingtheivorytower.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/everybody-hates-grant-ward-woobie.html . Excellent theory, evidence supports it. He's so much more fun now I know the writers aren't on his side. His pain excuses nothing, his anger is misguided, his actions useless.
And at the end Coulson's standing there with his SO (which in this show means something other than Significant Other, but come on), and he's just pointing out that Ward wasted his whole life trailing after some narcissist, and it's delicious comeuppance.
... though references to torture? No. Just no.
If SHIELD still does that then SHIELD are still the bad guys.
And that right there is the other thing I'm dissatisfied with in this ending: it shuffles the parts around until the ideological screw up highlighted in Captain America is no longer the issue, until the thing where SHIELD served HYDRA's agenda isn't relevant, because hey look, those guys aren't even proper HYDRA, just selfish, and our guys are doing it to protect people!
Sure Coulson sent people to the Fridge without trial so they'd be 'rehabilitated' and sure he's shocked that SHIELD instead experimented on them, but the important bit was back at the step Coulson deliberately did, the send them to the Fridge without trial part. If trials are part of SHIELD procedure, we never hear about it. There's no lawyers here. And that there is the problem.
SHIELD ignores freedom in the name of safety. Nothing we've seen Coulson do contradicts that. He's just cuddlier about it.
So, what I want to see next season is people calling them on it. Maybe former friends of Skye. She's totally on board with the whole law breaking in the name of 'doing the right thing' now, so we need a different perspective.
On the plus side, it's going to be really difficult to disappear people when all they've got is the Bus and whatever this 'Playground' facility turns out to be.
On the minus side that doesn't exactly confront the thing with them wanting to.
SHIELD was a problem. Hand, misused as the character was according to people who read the comics, was a problem. Coulson and his smiles as he leaves someone without computer access is in fact a problem.
I want to follow that up.
What we seem likely to get? Skye's parents the monsters, the monsters within, evolution, change, people with special powers. Aliens, blue skin varieties. Whatever it was getting carved into the walls.
Coulson carving things into walls :-(
I like his mind! It's no fun if it falls out!
... Coulson is their super special best favourite fanboy, he'll be okay, so it's the fun sort of worried about him really.
The Incentives program was stupidly executed. I mean, you don't need to keep people locked up like that, it's not even what they were doing earlier in the season. Ace was free range, they had just demonstrated their ability and willingness to mess him up anyway. If Ward could take out a drug lord from a couple kilometers away with a single bullet, how much simpler to do that to people's loved ones? Putting them in adjacent rooms in the same building as the controllers, who unlike earlier in the season are themselves free from brain bombs and easy to take out, is like noticing you've painted yourself into a corner and therefore painting a door. The door should not be there. It should not work.
I like that Mike got a chance to switch sides again, that he's allowed to go free, or as free as someone with Skye spying through him ever can get. He didn't break their hold himself, but he told someone what the problem was and they fixed it, which is that 'team' bit Ace was talking about.
I just think the writers made it too easy on themselves, having simple cells to open. That was a bit cheap.
The actual problem was what Hydra push all the time, controlling people through fear, having them give up their own freedom to try and buy safety. Having SHIELD protect their loved ones and therefore give them room to be free, fair enough, that's how society is meant to work. But that's not actually what has happened, on account of SHIELD not being big enough to do that all day every day and whoever decided on the Incentives in the first place still knowing enough to harm them.
And to defuse that threat? They made Garrett be his own personal fiefdom, and never really HYDRA at all. HYDRA as a means to an end rather than the actual threat simply came out of nowhere when Ward said it, however relaxed about his allegiance Garrett had seemed. That was only there to make killing Garrett equal an end to that set of problems. If he actually was HYDRA then the other heads would take up the salvageable pieces of the plan.
Although in the movie tag scene the other head we saw was just getting ready to throw other bits of HYDRA to SHIELD to save itself, and infighting is a classic bad guy error, so, okay, the bad guys are just being disappointing.
Also, having human controllers reporting to Garrett as the top of the threat feels... small. I mean, in the movies AI within SHIELD was a serious problem, so it feels like dropping a thread to have the humans be only human controlled. But if you have them be AI controlled you're kind of screwed and AI becomes what the show is about, so it's a reasonable writer choice to not go there.
I'm spending a lot of paragraphs on why I feel vaguely disappointed. But that's not really fair. I liked lots of bits. I loved Coulson getting his big gun back and then the last bit with the 084 particle beam and the bad guy going splat. That was great. And lots of running around with super spy gadgets.
Oh, and Fitz and Simmons, and how his big grand confession only leads to her kissing him on the forehead, not big romance smooches, because hey, she doesn't feel that way, yaays! ... I'm sorry, I'm so damn tired of women's feelings being the reward for grand gestures. This way she has her own feelings.
And they saved each other pretty great. That was excellent.
And I liked the speech about the laws of thermodynamics and the cosmic recycling system.
And Fury to the rescue! ... that's one scary looking rescue.
I'm not loving that they're setting up Fitz with brain damage, that's... disability isn't a story engine, neurological difference isn't something to be fixed inside a season, and I can't really see the show going another way with that. I mean they only said he's alive but not okay, and he was without oxygen for a long time (it didn't seem like a long time you know), but it seems like they're going to set up another team member to need some GH stuff to get back to how he was before. And they've taken the smart one and maybe they'll make him less smart. ... I have visions of him getting a service monkey. Finally the monkey of his dreams, at what cost? Okay I'm getting carried away there. But. *deep sigh for reals* I just... I can't see this going well at all. And maybe they'll only sleeping beauty him, I'd actually prefer that. But if they're going to do disability, I can't see them doing it well.
... the whole Deathlok story is about disability and I would not say they handled it well.
... also did you notice how the bad guys could be picked out by their scars? Only the guys, but by the end of the season Garrett, Quinn and Ward all had them, and Mike of course though he gets to switch back.
I like how Ward got his arse kicked and his self justifications crushed. I dislike the not very veiled threat of sexual violence he threw around right before his epic arse kicking, because a world where women don't get threatened with rape would be excellent, and also he's the only character they've shown being mind control raped, so it's creepy to deal with it that way. He acts like his feelings are her making him have a feeling, so he's going to do stuff to her for doing stuff to him. This would work better as an example of toxic masculinity if it hadn't been the literal truth earlier in the season. She got silenced too. I don't think they meant to build creepy parallels in there? But even if that's on purpose, it fits with the rest of what he does, choosing to do bad stuff in unforced situations because oh the pain he's suffered. He takes it all as justification, and the plot for once doesn't. Yaays.
Black guy got survival and a redemption arc. White guys got kaboomed and sent away.
I kind of hope for a redemption arc for Ward, a proper one, where he sits and thinks about how screwed up his world view has been, and gets over it. But it would be equally fun from a writing point of view if he goes the other way, if he decides that Garrett was the problem because he wasn't a true believer, and that made his life meaningless, so hey, belief! All that fuming and blaming everyone else, he could totally go find an evil organisation to call his own. That'd be fun to watch. Can always fix him later.
May is awesome, and she got and controlled and put down that berserker staff again.
Hate is always a bad thing though. Hate greed and ignorance, three poisons that cause suffering, and the source of it all is ignorance. So using hate to win? Kind of a problem. But it wasn't just hate the poison way, because she stopped. She could have taken him apart with power tools if she felt like it. But she restrained him instead, and stopped. So she's not being ruled by hate.
Like they showed us, she always puts it down again.
I like her.
I liked a lot about this episode. I realise it takes longer to write out the other sort of thing than to write squee, but that was a proper ending, a good win, a set up for next season, all the parts it needed to have. Bad guys were bad, though pushing them to cartoonish extremes was a bit boring. ... comic book extremes? Okay, that's true to their roots. Bad guy was plentiful bad before that, they were just setting stuff up. Good guys won. Yaay team Bus. Perfectly good ending for the kind of action thing this show has mostly been.
... I'm only getting *sighs* comparing it to the thing it could be, the threads still in it that could be played with next season, so, you know, that's an okay problem to have? Except for that structural thing first mentioned.
I'd like to love this show more, but I like it plenty.
Okay, so, more than any episode before it, I was spoiled for this via tumblr. I'm glad so many people liked it so much, but it did mean that as soon as it finished broadcasting in America, every scene was on tumblr in gif form. So, I think I had most of my initial reaction a piece at a time, and while that reaction tended to be :-D , it... diluted the impact of the episode this time.
So, this episode was cool.
Could have been cooler.
Before next season, I either need to get off tumblr or discover some magic way to block spoiler posts which haven't been tagged.
That said, my thoughts:
The other reason I'm not all :-D about that episode was the ending. The last couple of scenes. One of them because I love Coulson and worry, the other because I love Coulson but... *sigh*
I know the writers love Coulson best. I know that he's gone from being a background dude to being Fury's one good eye and the heart of SHIELD. They've actually given him good meaty story to show us how he earned that, though there's been times I thought he was being stupid, cruel, selfish, or stroppy simply because what he usually did to others was aimed at him this time. That's okay in a story, give a guy flaws, he's more interesting. But structurally, what all that does? When you show Fury's way led to SHIELD's downfall, and put Maria Hill in mistaken opposition to Coulson? Where the black guy was too cruel and the white woman lacked faith, don't worry, here's a white man to make it all better again.
I have a problem with that. I have a really big problem with that.
Especially since Maria is going to be second to Stark, even if she's working the same save the world gig. And here May is second to Coulson, having stated that people like her need people like Coulson, pretty much to do the being a decent person stuff. Women are right there supporting men. However central their role in other media. Got their backs. Standing right behind them. Taking their orders.
It's one thing having Hill mock Ward for referring to her and Widow as eye candy, that's great as far as it goes, but when the story makes sure women don't get the drivers seat?
The ending thinks it's all about putting integrity, courage, and compassion at the heart of SHIELD.
But mostly it's replacing the diversity in power with the most uncontroversial choice, straight white average middle age middle class man.
So the ending, despite me loving Phil, and the lovely moment where Fury of course thinks of him as an Avenger, it just kind of leaves me tired. We had better than this, and oh look, there it goes again.
... so now I have structural reasons to wish for Clint/Coulson. Because bi guy in charge hasn't happened since Torchwood, and y'all know I loved Torchwood even though I was pretty sure it was the story of the bad guys screwing up repeatedly and failing a lot.
(ETA: It didn't even occur to me, but others are saying Coulson's group are still vigilantes at the end? That wasn't Fury giving them the keys to a new government backed organisation, that was just a non existent man giving them a secret base to hide from governments in. No oversight, no authority, not even a tiny figleaf of giving a damn about democratic process and law? Oh great, it's worse than I thought then. Rebuild SHIELD the right way: anarchist! *sigh* /ETA)
So, anyway, backing up a bit: things I loved about this episode: Winning!
Team!
May!
... May breaking Ward's voice so we don't have to listen to that whiny ... man. Yaays!
... I read a thing where it said Ward is intensely meta, where he's the guy with all the manpain who thinks everything is about his sacrifices and the show is totally using him to skewer that tendency in the woobie white hero men of other shows. http://stormingtheivorytower.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/everybody-hates-grant-ward-woobie.html . Excellent theory, evidence supports it. He's so much more fun now I know the writers aren't on his side. His pain excuses nothing, his anger is misguided, his actions useless.
And at the end Coulson's standing there with his SO (which in this show means something other than Significant Other, but come on), and he's just pointing out that Ward wasted his whole life trailing after some narcissist, and it's delicious comeuppance.
... though references to torture? No. Just no.
If SHIELD still does that then SHIELD are still the bad guys.
And that right there is the other thing I'm dissatisfied with in this ending: it shuffles the parts around until the ideological screw up highlighted in Captain America is no longer the issue, until the thing where SHIELD served HYDRA's agenda isn't relevant, because hey look, those guys aren't even proper HYDRA, just selfish, and our guys are doing it to protect people!
Sure Coulson sent people to the Fridge without trial so they'd be 'rehabilitated' and sure he's shocked that SHIELD instead experimented on them, but the important bit was back at the step Coulson deliberately did, the send them to the Fridge without trial part. If trials are part of SHIELD procedure, we never hear about it. There's no lawyers here. And that there is the problem.
SHIELD ignores freedom in the name of safety. Nothing we've seen Coulson do contradicts that. He's just cuddlier about it.
So, what I want to see next season is people calling them on it. Maybe former friends of Skye. She's totally on board with the whole law breaking in the name of 'doing the right thing' now, so we need a different perspective.
On the plus side, it's going to be really difficult to disappear people when all they've got is the Bus and whatever this 'Playground' facility turns out to be.
On the minus side that doesn't exactly confront the thing with them wanting to.
SHIELD was a problem. Hand, misused as the character was according to people who read the comics, was a problem. Coulson and his smiles as he leaves someone without computer access is in fact a problem.
I want to follow that up.
What we seem likely to get? Skye's parents the monsters, the monsters within, evolution, change, people with special powers. Aliens, blue skin varieties. Whatever it was getting carved into the walls.
Coulson carving things into walls :-(
I like his mind! It's no fun if it falls out!
... Coulson is their super special best favourite fanboy, he'll be okay, so it's the fun sort of worried about him really.
The Incentives program was stupidly executed. I mean, you don't need to keep people locked up like that, it's not even what they were doing earlier in the season. Ace was free range, they had just demonstrated their ability and willingness to mess him up anyway. If Ward could take out a drug lord from a couple kilometers away with a single bullet, how much simpler to do that to people's loved ones? Putting them in adjacent rooms in the same building as the controllers, who unlike earlier in the season are themselves free from brain bombs and easy to take out, is like noticing you've painted yourself into a corner and therefore painting a door. The door should not be there. It should not work.
I like that Mike got a chance to switch sides again, that he's allowed to go free, or as free as someone with Skye spying through him ever can get. He didn't break their hold himself, but he told someone what the problem was and they fixed it, which is that 'team' bit Ace was talking about.
I just think the writers made it too easy on themselves, having simple cells to open. That was a bit cheap.
The actual problem was what Hydra push all the time, controlling people through fear, having them give up their own freedom to try and buy safety. Having SHIELD protect their loved ones and therefore give them room to be free, fair enough, that's how society is meant to work. But that's not actually what has happened, on account of SHIELD not being big enough to do that all day every day and whoever decided on the Incentives in the first place still knowing enough to harm them.
And to defuse that threat? They made Garrett be his own personal fiefdom, and never really HYDRA at all. HYDRA as a means to an end rather than the actual threat simply came out of nowhere when Ward said it, however relaxed about his allegiance Garrett had seemed. That was only there to make killing Garrett equal an end to that set of problems. If he actually was HYDRA then the other heads would take up the salvageable pieces of the plan.
Although in the movie tag scene the other head we saw was just getting ready to throw other bits of HYDRA to SHIELD to save itself, and infighting is a classic bad guy error, so, okay, the bad guys are just being disappointing.
Also, having human controllers reporting to Garrett as the top of the threat feels... small. I mean, in the movies AI within SHIELD was a serious problem, so it feels like dropping a thread to have the humans be only human controlled. But if you have them be AI controlled you're kind of screwed and AI becomes what the show is about, so it's a reasonable writer choice to not go there.
I'm spending a lot of paragraphs on why I feel vaguely disappointed. But that's not really fair. I liked lots of bits. I loved Coulson getting his big gun back and then the last bit with the 084 particle beam and the bad guy going splat. That was great. And lots of running around with super spy gadgets.
Oh, and Fitz and Simmons, and how his big grand confession only leads to her kissing him on the forehead, not big romance smooches, because hey, she doesn't feel that way, yaays! ... I'm sorry, I'm so damn tired of women's feelings being the reward for grand gestures. This way she has her own feelings.
And they saved each other pretty great. That was excellent.
And I liked the speech about the laws of thermodynamics and the cosmic recycling system.
And Fury to the rescue! ... that's one scary looking rescue.
I'm not loving that they're setting up Fitz with brain damage, that's... disability isn't a story engine, neurological difference isn't something to be fixed inside a season, and I can't really see the show going another way with that. I mean they only said he's alive but not okay, and he was without oxygen for a long time (it didn't seem like a long time you know), but it seems like they're going to set up another team member to need some GH stuff to get back to how he was before. And they've taken the smart one and maybe they'll make him less smart. ... I have visions of him getting a service monkey. Finally the monkey of his dreams, at what cost? Okay I'm getting carried away there. But. *deep sigh for reals* I just... I can't see this going well at all. And maybe they'll only sleeping beauty him, I'd actually prefer that. But if they're going to do disability, I can't see them doing it well.
... the whole Deathlok story is about disability and I would not say they handled it well.
... also did you notice how the bad guys could be picked out by their scars? Only the guys, but by the end of the season Garrett, Quinn and Ward all had them, and Mike of course though he gets to switch back.
I like how Ward got his arse kicked and his self justifications crushed. I dislike the not very veiled threat of sexual violence he threw around right before his epic arse kicking, because a world where women don't get threatened with rape would be excellent, and also he's the only character they've shown being mind control raped, so it's creepy to deal with it that way. He acts like his feelings are her making him have a feeling, so he's going to do stuff to her for doing stuff to him. This would work better as an example of toxic masculinity if it hadn't been the literal truth earlier in the season. She got silenced too. I don't think they meant to build creepy parallels in there? But even if that's on purpose, it fits with the rest of what he does, choosing to do bad stuff in unforced situations because oh the pain he's suffered. He takes it all as justification, and the plot for once doesn't. Yaays.
Black guy got survival and a redemption arc. White guys got kaboomed and sent away.
I kind of hope for a redemption arc for Ward, a proper one, where he sits and thinks about how screwed up his world view has been, and gets over it. But it would be equally fun from a writing point of view if he goes the other way, if he decides that Garrett was the problem because he wasn't a true believer, and that made his life meaningless, so hey, belief! All that fuming and blaming everyone else, he could totally go find an evil organisation to call his own. That'd be fun to watch. Can always fix him later.
May is awesome, and she got and controlled and put down that berserker staff again.
Hate is always a bad thing though. Hate greed and ignorance, three poisons that cause suffering, and the source of it all is ignorance. So using hate to win? Kind of a problem. But it wasn't just hate the poison way, because she stopped. She could have taken him apart with power tools if she felt like it. But she restrained him instead, and stopped. So she's not being ruled by hate.
Like they showed us, she always puts it down again.
I like her.
I liked a lot about this episode. I realise it takes longer to write out the other sort of thing than to write squee, but that was a proper ending, a good win, a set up for next season, all the parts it needed to have. Bad guys were bad, though pushing them to cartoonish extremes was a bit boring. ... comic book extremes? Okay, that's true to their roots. Bad guy was plentiful bad before that, they were just setting stuff up. Good guys won. Yaay team Bus. Perfectly good ending for the kind of action thing this show has mostly been.
... I'm only getting *sighs* comparing it to the thing it could be, the threads still in it that could be played with next season, so, you know, that's an okay problem to have? Except for that structural thing first mentioned.
I'd like to love this show more, but I like it plenty.
relevant remarks
Date: 2014-05-31 01:52 pm (UTC)Maria Hill should be treated better and is judged on a different standard than the white guys.
http://copperbadge.tumblr.com/post/86009220231/nothorse-replied-to-your-post-so-i-am-finally
different treatments of different comics canon, all do one thing: replace diversity with more straight white men.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-31 10:15 pm (UTC)As I said at the time, only in the weird political conventions of superhero comics, and their tormented efforts to suggest that individualistic vigilante power fantasy is somehow compatible with left-of-centre politics, could it be argued that a rogue vigilante organisation guided only by their own moral instincts is LESS scary than a technically government-controlled one.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 04:04 am (UTC)that's just... ugh.
I miss when the Justice League was a UN organisation. *sigh*
I thought the episode where Maria Hill was complaining about having to answer politician's questions was setting Maria up to fail as old SHIELD, like demonstration of problem. But on reflection they haven't shown any alternative attitude.
Not good.
And not smart either. If everyone is in the same relation to power then only one story can be told.
I keep fearing that they'll show the problem as being big organisations in and of themselves, rather than big organisations with no feedback mechanisms. I mean if the story decides that morals can only exist in groups of a dozen or so then that's society screwed. But that seems to be the subtext in a lot of stuff.