Posts from elsewhere: Captain America, Constantine, and Agents of SHIELD.

I hope to have enough time for another costume design post by the end of the year, but in the meantime, here are some other things you may enjoy!

End-of-year guest post at the Book Smugglers blog.

Each year the Book Smugglers invite various authors and bloggers to write guests posts during the holiday period, and this year I was one of them! Most people discuss and recommend books from the past year (it's a book blog, after all), but I decided to talk about a single movie: Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Obvs.

While CATWS wasn't the best film I saw in 2014 -- or even my "favorite," technically speaking -- it's certainly the one I wrote about the most. I love this movie and its fandom, and this post explains why (along with a bunch of fanfic and art recommendations).

Why NBC's Constantine failed to live up to its comic book origins

I haven't decided yet whether to continue writing about Constantine here. It doesn't feel particularly constructive to keep writing negative reviews of a mediocre show, so I may just leave it until the season finale. Constantine has improved a little over the past couple of episodes, but not enough that I actually care about it being renewed or not. Hellblazer is one of my favourite comics, and this show is just... disappointing.

"Previously on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." podcast

I co-host a weekly Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. podcast over at Film Divider! We're now up to season 2, episode 8. Catch up here!

A Hero at the End of the World, by Erin Claiborne

Reminder that this book is awesome and you ought to be reading it! Find out more here.

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Article link roundup + BBC radio tomorrow!

Sorry I haven't posted the final part of my Captain America: The Winter Soldier costume review! I've been too busy for the past couple of weeks, but I should have time to write it soon. In the meantime, here's some other stuff.

BBC Radio: I'm going to be on BBC Radio Scotland's Culture Studio show on Thursday afternoon, talking about fan culture. I'll be live on air at about 3.30pm GMT+1, but if you tune in from the start of the show you'll hear some discussion of X-Men: Days of Future Past, and an interview with screenwriter Simon Kinberg. You can find the episode here on the BBC website, and I think you can listen online elsewhere with sites like Tunein.

Recent articles: A few of my recent Daily Dot articles may be of interest to you guys. First, the Ultimate Guide to Sebastian Stan. Second, my post-mortem of the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season finale. Finally, my thoughts on the ultra-gothic new TV series Penny Dreadful, which I loved.

Fanfic: This is something of a departure from the kind of stuff I usually post on this blog, but I recently co-wrote a Captain America fanfic that takes the form of discussion, reviews and commentary on the various (fictional) Captain America movies that might actually have been made in the Marvel Cinematic Universe itself.

It's called "Steve Rogers at 100: Celebrating Captain America on Film," and I don't think it's too odious for me to say I LOVE THIS THING because 90% of it was written by other (much funnier) people. In particular, I love the parody of a slightly pretentious Sight & Sound article about a purposefully tragic French art film about Steve Rogers and the Howling Commandos. Personally, I stuck to my strengths and wrote a HelloTailor-style review of a terrible 1980s action movie called Captain America and the Red Skull: a hilarious fiasco from start to finish. You can see the poster above, created by the very talented Neenya.

X-Men: I'll write about X-Men: Days of Future Past once I've seen it, but until then, here's a link to my costume reviews of X-Men: First Class.

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Agents of SHIELD: It's actually good now!?

Previously on Agents of SHIELD.

Since there's no episode of Agents of SHIELD this week, I thought now would be to catch up with my reviews. Sorry I haven't posted in a while! I've been busy launching a publishing press that prints and publicises original novels by talented fanfic authors. You should check us out! There are book excerpts on our website (young adult satire! queer romance lit! urban fantasy noir!), alongside cover art and info about why a project like this is such a good idea for people in fandom.

If you don't watch AoS, or if you (understandably) lost interest after a few episodes, then you really need to reevaluate your decision because this show has improved A LOT. I have no idea what happened between episodes 5 and 6, but if you read any of my earlier reviews, you'll know that I was very critical of the first half of the season. Now I'm wondering just what the hell was going on, because a switch flipped during episode 6 and the show has been steadily improving ever since. Here's my rundown of the season so far:

• Episode 1: Entertaining, for a pilot episode (and I usually hate pilots).
• Episodes 2-5: Increasingly frustrating, both in terms of general quality (dialogue, characterisation, episodic storylines, etc) and as a sci-fi/genre show. Almost no worldbuilding, character development, or emotionally compelling scenes. There is no way I would've kept watching, if not for Clark Gregg + the Marvel connection.
• Episode 6: Suddenly?? Actual emotions are happening?? Agent Ward almost does something interesting enough for me to stop hoping he'll drop dead, and FitzSimmons are brilliant.
• Episode 7: Super fun. Simmons and Skye get to be hilarious together. SHIELD Agent Victoria Hand is introduced, and I greatly enjoy the fact that she is much taller than Coulson. We FINALLY get two of the main things I was hoping for: a real look at SHIELD's unethical behaviour as a quasi-governmental organisation, and some details of the inner workings of SHIELD HQ.
• Episode 8: Directed by Jonathan Frakes (!?) AKA Commander Riker from Star Trek: TNG, and director of two Star Trek movies. Real, solid links to the Marvel movie universe, played out in an interesting and reasonably unpredictable way. Ward and May hook up, to my utter astonishment. More on that later.

Which brings us to the most recent episode, "Repairs," a ghost story that finally makes good on the expectations I had for Agents of SHIELD in the first place. I'm actually quite stunned by how quickly this show transformed from being almost unwatchable (unless you're a seriously involved Marvel fan or a small child) to being smart and entertaining. And that's down to a sudden change in not just one, but multiple aspects of the show.

Team Building
Even though Joss Whedon is only distantly attached to AoS, it was definitely marketed as a Whedonverse show. As a result, people had certain expectations. Whedonverse shows have snappy dialogue and a smart balance between geeky humour and depth of emotion, but most importantly, they always focus on groups of misfits coming together to form an extraordinary team or family. On a superficial level, the first episode of Agents of SHIELD really did look like it was heading in this direction. Coulson brought together the team like Ocean's Eleven, there was an interesting mix of personality types, and everyone was just as photogenic as your average Whedon show.

However, for the next four episodes they stalled out. Either the team relationships didn't develop at all, or the characters were put in scenarios where they acted like they'd known each other for months, even when we'd seen little to no believable bonding onscreen. They were stuck in limbo between "too close" and "too distant," with few human touches no social middle-ground. With the exception of May and Coulson, most of the team interactions for the first five episodes felt oddly false, so I was surprised by the number of people I saw posting on the Tumblr tag about how much they loved the relationships in AoS. That is, until I realised that most of those fans were either a) very young, or b) not really talking about canon.

We all love found-family stories, and we're so used to reading fanfic or watching TV shows about snarkily affectionate teams that sometimes, we end up extrapolating that dynamic onto relationships that haven't yet been formed in canon. Two recent examples are Teen Wolf and The Avengers. A lot of Teen Wolf fanfic has the main cast of characters acting like a wolf pack full of affectionate, familial relationships, whereas the canonical characters are all split into antagonistic factions who only grudgingly trust each other for short periods of time. The Avengers is slightly different because in many of the comic books, they are really close as a team. But at the time of the 2012 movie, the team are all essentially strangers to each other, and are yet to move in together at Stark Tower. As a result, there was always a pretty big gap between the Avengers team I wanted, and the one that actually existed in "reality".
Obviously I have zero problem with this happening in fanfic because, you know, that's the whole point of fanfic. I just find it kind of baffling to see people reinterpreting canon to fit in with those ideas, but IDK, each to their own. The result with AoS was that until the last handful of episodes, there was a significant divide between the "real" character relationships, and the alternate versions that existed e inside many people's minds. (An imaginary show that I personally would've preferred to be watching, because it sounded way better than the one onscreen.) Luckily, after nine episodes we've finally reached that point in canon. The team now have a believably casual rapport, and they've been through enough perilous situations together that they've had a chance to bond in a realistic way.

Unpredictability

I never had high expectations of AoS being a world-class thriller or boasting the same quality of dramatic writing as, say, Battlestar Galactica or The Good Wife. Still, the first five episodes were so predictable as to be actively frustrating, and that's despite the fact that I personally enjoy this sort of combination between sci-fi and heist caper story elements. The most frustrating episode was "The Girl in the Flower Dress," which focused on a storyline so ancient and stupidly sexist that it seemed like the kind of thing most Whedonverse shows are parodying in the first place. A 30-year-old "girl" acting as a honey trap to seduce an innocent everyman into a life of crime, only for him to be shot down by the Good Guys while she escapes to be sexy and evil another day. In a general sense I'm actually quite interested to see how the Project Centipede story arc pans out, but this was not a good way to introduce it. ("The Girl in the Flower Dress" was one of the only two episodes that was both written and directed exclusively by men, BTW.)
"F.Z.Z.T." (1x06) won me over because it convinced me that they might actually kill off Simmons. Because Fitz and Simmons are the only characters with a pre-existing relationship, they were the ideal choice for the first majorly dangerous scenario of the season. When this episode aired, I remember a friend and I basically being like, "Holy shit, I can't believe this crappy show actually made me tear up." The alien virus was a Chekov's Gun that had to endanger someone by the end of the episode, but the way the story unfolded was satisfyingly unpredictable and emotionally engaging.
My favourite recent development is the May/Ward fuckbuddy relationship, which pleases me on many, many different levels. First of all there's the fact that it makes sense. Neither of them has the time (or the inclination, I suspect) for a serious romantic relationship at the moment, which was one of the reasons why I was dreading the possibility of a Skye/Ward romance. Luckily, the May/Ward thing seriously limits the likelihood of Skye/Ward EVER happening, which frees up Skye to take on a role I've been hoping for from the start: the "kid" of the team, with Coulson as her surrogate dad. I really enjoyed the scene where Skye says that May needs to get laid, and Ward is just like, "..." Sometimes, Skye can be SUCH a tween.

AoS has a surprisingly great attitude toward casual sex, particularly when you remember that the first half of the season felt like a kids' show. May and Ward have an unspoken bond because they're a pair of trained killers in a team of relatively naiive young "civilian" agents, and because they went through the same experience with the Asgardian staff in episode 8. But it's not a romantic bond, and their interactions are never filmed in a ~sexy way, unlike with Skye and her hacker boyfriend, where it made more sense. Finally, it's nice to see such a mature and in-character depiction of a older woman/younger man dynamic. Good luck finding a TV relationship like this where it isn't either played for laughs and/or cougar-related drama, or accompanied by a ton of gratuitous sex scenes.

It took me a long time to warm to Ward because TV is already riddled with good-looking, angsty white male heroes. He's just so unbearably generic. The revelation that he'd had a ~bad childhood~ was the nail in the coffin for me, because it's Hollywood's go-to excuse for the shitty behaviour of every angsty white male action hero of the past bazillion years. It got to the point where I was actively annoyed whenever he came onscreen, because it felt like he was taking up a space that could've been given to a far more interesting type of character. He seemed like a typical example of that thing where family-friendly shows create a flippant, "safe" depiction of a character who, in reality, should be complex and horrifying and not particularly likeable. Ward is a trained killer who works for a morally ambiguous organisation, outside the civilian legal system. The show was treating him like he was a repressed-but-charming jock.

Links to Marvel movie canon

Marvel movieverse stuff in AoS was always going to be an optional extra, rather than a major component of the show. I understand that it's tricky to include many details without messing with canon that's being written by someone else, not to mention the legal issues involved with including anything from the comics. Still, I was hoping that AoS would at least give us a taste of how everyday people are reacting to the superheroic and/or alien additions to their world. Too bad there was probably more of that in the actual Avengers movie than in episodes 2-5 of this show.
I doubt you'll be surprised to learn that I loved the Thor: The Dark World episode. The Asgardian cult were relatively believable (given, you know, the ridiculous subject-matter), and the actual Asgardian guy was hilarious. Not only was he the polar opposite of warrior characters like Thor and Sif, but they added this brilliant detail of him just being this... gross old sex-pest professor who creepily hits on younger women all the time. I really hope he comes back at some point. And I'll be interested to see if Ward's anger issues end up being a recurring thing, because they're definitely the most interesting thing that's happened with him so far. The scene where shirtless Ward freaked out at Skye and FitzSimmons was especially good, because you could really feel the combination of masculine rage-panic (Ward) and fear (everyone else) in the enclosed space of the lab.

In future episodes, I'm hoping to see more of the outside world, and the way normal civilians are experiencing the supernatural (or at least, pseudo-scientifically supernatural) events of the Avengers franchise. I could do with more ~superhero fans~ for example, although the villagers-with-pitchforks scenario of episode 9 was great as well.

Miscellaneous

• This didn't really fit into any of my categories, but I SUPER LOVE Melinda May now. LOVE HER. Also, her interactions with Coulson are hilarious. He just... talks and talks. And talks. While she stands there and twitches like 0.5 of her facial muscles in long-suffering bemusement. They have such great chemistry.
• I got WAY too into the "Did I fall asleep?"/"For a little while," exchange in Coulson's dream sequence last week. Realistically I know ths was just a bit of fan-pandering rather than a hint of a serious link to Dollhouse, but I loved it anyway. Whenever someone on TV asks, "Did I fall asleep?" I always expect the answer to be "For a little while," so it was gratifying to see it actually happen, for once.
• Not to be a raving misandrist or anything, but I note that episodes 7-9, the best so far, were all written or co-written by women, and the upcoming 10th episode is written and directed by women. Good. Very good.
• Actually, I'd recommend taking a look at the Wikipedia list of writers and directors on this show, it's a really interesting selection. Obviously most of them have worked on vaguely similar shows (Torchwood, X-Files, Whedonverse, etc.) but did you know episode 4 was directed by B'Elanna Torres from Star Trek: Voyager??
• I can't tell if Skye's dobule-agent hacker status has been resolved yet. I guess maybe they're saving something for the finale?
• Did I mention how much I loved "Repairs"? Some of the scenes in that episode were seriously creepy. I wonder if Tobias the Stalker Ghost was ending up in Svartalfheim, or what?
• I think I already said this in one of my reviews, but I'd really appreciate a scene where we see one of the female characters fixing their hair and makeup. May and Skye both wear at least two shades of eyeshadow at all times, and Skye's hair looks incredibly high-maintenance. It would be refreshing to see a show like this acknowledge the work that goes into looking that good, instead of tacitly implying that women find it incredibly easy to look perpetually gorgeous while hacking into the Pentagon or flying a spy plane or whatever.
• Next week's episode involves Mike Peterson (J. August Richards' character in the pilot episode) in some kind of black leather superhero jumpsuit. You're welcome.

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Captain America vs. Agents of SHIELD.

I love the new trailer for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but I get the distinct impression that it's going to kick Agents of SHIELD in the balls. Without going into too much detail, AoS is suffering from a bizarre problem of portraying SHIELD agents as "the good guys" while having them do objectively terrible stuff like wiretapping, kidnapping and shooting civilians, and dumping American prisoners overseas with no money or ID. In most episodes so far, the antagonists have seemed more sympathetic (from a real-world standpoint) than the ostensibly likeable heroes, which is actually more confusing than the way SHIELD was depicted in The Avengers: ie, as an ethically ambiguous government agency, run by a decidedly shady individual. CA:TWS seems to be going the Avengers route with regards to SHIELD and Nick Fury, which is seriously going to screw with AoS's weirdly happy-go-lucky attitude towards acting like assholes in the name of homeland security.
This trailer is really promising on so many levels. Captain America has one of the few origin stories that I actually enjoy on its own merits, unlike Batman, Superman and Spider-Man, whose origin stories are all very overplayed. Cap appeals to me as a hero for the oppressed and downtrodden, in a way that I don't think is really covered by the other classic superheroes. A lot of his power is tied up in marketing and patriotism, which has the potential to be very subversive because he looks like this all-American cheerleader dude but Steve Rogers' own principles are a lot more liberal/socialist/anti-establishment than you might expect. There's a reason why there's a whole subgenre of fanfic dedicated to Steve Rogers in the 21st century, making public media statements in favour of LGBT rights and feminism, you know? So I'm really psyched to any possible hints of this in the trailer, including Cap walking past a giant banner of his own face. WHAT WAS THE PUBLIC REACTION TO AN AMERICAN ICON RETURNING FROM THE DEAD?

I didn't actually think much of Captain America as a film in itself. It's a great origin story and I loved the casting, but the central supervillain story is pretty dull, and the final third of the film is weak as a result. Overall I don't really rate it as highly as Iron Man or Thor, which is odd because I do love the concept. Which I guess is why I'm more prone to reading Captain America fic than Iron Man. The Iron Man movies basically give me what I want to see in Tony Stark's story, but what I wanted from a Captain America movie was way more focus on his pre-serum life in 1930s Brooklyn, his relationship with Bucky and the Howling Commandos, and the way he tackles becoming a public figure. For me, the most exciting moment in this trailer is when someone tells Cap that he "shaped this century". That line has a real ring of epic superheroism to it, in a way that the first Captain America movie never really managed.
The other main thing I'm looking forward to is the way this movie links to the aftermath of The Avengers. Iron Man 3 did this to a certain extent, but it was definitely focusing inwards on Tony Stark's own problems, whereas this movie is an ensemble cast featuring Black Widow and Nick Fury in fairly prominent roles. Also Falcon, who I am looking forward to SO MUCH, oh my god. Falcon!! I was surprised to realise that after watching this trailer, I was actually more excited by the appearance of Falcon than the hints of the Bucky/Cap storyline? I don't even know why. I guess Anthony Mackie is just that charming.

Some more deep & meaningful thoughts

• This movie may as well be called Captain America: Blue Steel. Chris Evans' face is so ridiculously sculpted and pouty, what the hell. PLUS: snazzy new modern haircut. CAPTAIN AMERICA IS A SUPERMODEL. Or an action figure. A perfectly sculpted action figure with frosted tips and an unrealistically exaggerated waist-to-shoulder ratio.
• Actually, maybe a better title would be Captain America: Red, White and Blue Steel. But whatevs.
• I'm quite impressed by the way this trailer told us ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the actual plot, and yet still managed to be really intriguing and exciting? 
• TWO helicarriers? Steady on.
• God, I hope there's a A LOT of sassy, bitchy Cap in this movie. People keep thinking he's stolid because he's so moral and heroic, but Cap dialogue can totally be deadpan and hilarious.
• Cap and Black Widow are bros. This is giving me life.
• I'm not wild about Black Widow's straight hair but this doesn't matter at all because Black Widow is amazing and deserves twelve of her own movies, stat.
• Speaking of Black Widow, is Scarlett Johannson the only woman in this movie? IN THE WORLD? I counted 973 men in this trailer but only one gurl. Step it up, Marvel. 
• There's gonna be a scene where Steve tragically draws pictures of all his dead friends, right? Right?

PREVIOUSLY: If there's no such thing as a Captain America venereal disease PSA, I'm gonna be so disappointed.

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Agents of SHIELD: Eye Spy.

Previously on Agents of SHIELD: The Asset.

This week's episode didn't really have enough... content... to deserve a full review. So! Have some bullet points.

• Clark Gregg really was performing at maximum Cute Dad status in this one, wasn't he?
• I can't tell if Skye's incredibly awkward ~emotional bonding~ dialogue is just bad writing, or if she's purposefully trying to get on Coulson's good side in order to better infiltrate SHIELD. Either way, this show still appears to think that it's OK for characters to literally narrate their character development directly to the audience??
• If Skye is trying to infiltrate SHIELD by getting all friendly with Coulson, I assume that Coulson will see through it. Then, in the finale, there'll be a revelation scene where he's all, "I'm disappointed in you, Skye," and then she'll decide to side with SHIELD after all. Coulson always plays the long game.
• Agent Ward was marginally less dull than usual. Partly because the glasses gave him a distinguishing feature so he could avoid looking like a walking mannequin.

• I read some interview with the actor who plays Ward, where he said he'd been given advice by Nathan Fillion on how to navigate being a central actor in a Whedonverse TV show. As in, how to tackle being passionately loved by thousands of superfans. But seriously: this guy is NOT Nathan Fillion, and AoS is only barely a Whedonverse show. It's Whedon-adjacent, at best. And Agent Ward is the kind of square-jawed personality vaccuum that would only show up in shows like Buffy or Firefly so the main characters could make fun of them.
  
• When Ward was tying to talk about girls with the security guard guy, I think it would've been pretty funny if the guard had just looked at him, completely stone-faced, and said, "No, I'm gay." That's a good gay joke, not, "Haha, the straight guy has to ~seduce a man." It would've turned the tables on Skye's comment about the guard being straight because he looked like a slob -- particularly since Ward is the most clean-shaven and in-shape guy ever, and is almost certainly straight himself.

• Was anyone else really disappointed when the weird mask dudes turned out to just be transporting diamonds? Particularly since the crowds didn't seem to be reacting to them NEARLY as much as they should've been. Honestly, I thought the first couple of minutes of this episode were VERY Doctor Who, including the music. The revelation that it was all about diamonds made the whole thing seem totally banal, after that. Particularly since having a crowd of guys in masks walk through a major public thoroughfare is a completely stupid way of keeping your diamonds safe.
• That being said, I think the secret eyeball spy people are the first genuinely interesting antagonist we've had so far.
• Did anyone keep their eyes open during the eye surgery scene? Anyone? Anyone? 

Do they all go to the same SHIELD hairstylist, or what? They look like triplets.

• THANK GOD Melinda May finally got something to do in this episode. I could've done with more interactions between her and Akela, though. Obviously. I'd like to imagine that Akela will be back in later episodes, but TBH that seems pretty unlikely.
• Are they spending all the budget on location shoots, or what??
• I really hope they go a little further with the whole FitzSimmons business. Have you noticed that Coulson actually refers to them in the singular, as if FitzSimmons is one entity rather than a nickname given to two people? SHARED CONSCIOUSNESS, PLEASE.

This episode was reasonably entertaining overall, but the dialogue is still weak, and the worldbuilding/character backstory is still nonexistent. NOT WEIRD ENOUGH. NOT INTERESTING ENOUGH. More detail, for the love of god.

The pitch for Agents of SHIELD was a show about the ordinary background humans of the Marvel movie universe. The normal folks like Coulson, who get the job done, but don't get much credit or media attention. The general expectation was that we were getting a slice-of-life show, but in a slightly weirder world than our own. Instead, Coulson's team are (STILL) a collection of overly simplistic cliche characters, who we barely ever see doing anything more "normal" than eating a snack and playing poker on their zillion-dollar secret airplane. The scientists have multiple PhDs before the age of 25! There's a cute young hacker! Both the agents are stoic and badass! Please. Rather than going for the personal angle, AoS is relying on single-episode storylines that just aren't smart enough to measure up to shows like Torchwood, The Middleman, or even the X-Files. To put it bluntly: it's bland.

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Agents of SHIELD: The Asset.

PREVIOUSLY: Agents of SHIELD, 0-8-4.

This episode was super important because it guest-starred our first Harry Potter crossover actor, future supervillain Professor Quirrell. Definitely a step up from last week, because the science maguffin was way more central to the overall plot. Last week's gamma bomb was kind of embarrassing because they made it out to be this catastrophically big deal, but in the end Fitz just used it to blow a six-foot hole in the side of the plane. Sure, "Gravitonium" is a silly name, but the whole Big Whirring Gadget/evil Tony Stark-alike idea is a classic sci-fi plot, and this show works best when it's playing around with familiar genre cliches. "The Asset" managed a decent balance between sci-fi ridiculousness, heist shenanigans, and character development. Way better than last week's decidedly transparent excuse to get the team to bond during their first mission.

The only problem with the underground bunker/pseudoscience schtick is that I end up comparing Agents of SHIELD to The Middleman... and AoS does not measure up. Which is kind of a bummer, because Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen are good writers, and AoS has the whole weight of Marvel behind it. Meanwhile, The Middleman had about a fraction of the audience, no well-known actors in the main cast, and was still snappier, funnier, and more consciously genre-savvy -- while still being goofy and child-friendly. I'm still enjoying AoS, but the backstory development and worldbuilding is disappointingly slow-paced and lacking in detail. Plus, they need to dial back Ward's screentime by about 90% and replace him with more Melinda May, for real.
Skye is becoming more and more likeable with each episode, mostly because they seem to be emphasising how young she is. The one thing I really DON'T want is for her and Ward to end up as a couple, particularly since he's now taking on a mentor role. Wouldn't it be great if Skye was just characterised as the immature teenager of the group, and Ward continued to be her mentor with no sexual tension whatsoever? Of course, it's possible that there's no romantic tension whatsoever, and I'm just reading into this because we're trained to expect ~romance between two characters like Skye and Ward. Sadly, I don't know if this show is smart enough to buck that trend. Unless they make some seriously shocking changes (ie, Ward turning out to be evil; Skye going full-on Rising Tide terrorist halfway through the season), any kind of Skye/Ward romance plotline will be a heteronormative yawnfest.

I was glad to see this episode focusing on one of my favourite topics: the unethical nature of SHIELD itself. It's just too bad that I can't tell which side the writers are trying to get us to support. In the Skye/Quinn scenes, they did the thing where the villain points out a bunch of completely true and accurate criticisms of the "good guys", but we're meant to discredit him because he's evil. A bit of ambiguity is a good thing, but it felt a lot like the scene went slightly too far and ended up characterising SHIELD as the bad guys.
If you look at the events surrounding Quinn, Dr Hall and the gravity device, SHIELD does not come out looking like a force for good. First of all, Dr Hall is functionally a prisoner when he's working for SHIELD: miserable, lonely, and transported around like dangerous cargo. Quinn is amoral and greedy, and frees Dr Hall for his own ends, but all Dr Hall wants is to do the right thing. He wants to destroy the gravity device, and save the world from further screw-ups -- from both Quinn and SHIELD. Dr Hall distrusts SHIELD so much that after years of working for them, he's willing to sacrifice his own life to avoid them getting their hands on dangerous technology.
Dr Hall aimed to sacrifice himself and Quinn's lackeys/shareholders in order to prevent more disastrous consequences. In turn, Coulson sacrificed Dr Hall in order to save his own team and everyone else in the building. The end result is that SHIELD now has another hugely dangerous secret weapon under its control, and has just helped create a new supervillain (even if they don't know abuot it yet). I'm not saying that SHIELD are 100% bad, or that they don't save people's lives... but they're doing some massively unethical stuff, and I don't think the show is working very hard at discussing this in an intelligen way. Plus, everything Quinn said about SHIELD targeting Skye's weaknesses is true. SHIELD is not the nice Big Brother: it's creepy as fuck.

Miscellaneous

• The agent that Coulson speaks to at the end of the episode was in The Avengers! Agent Tyler.
• But why, in a show where half the main castmembers are white men, are they airing episodes where all the main guest actors (Quinn; Dr Hall; the SHIELD agent trucker) are also white men?
• We're three episodes in, and Melinda May has still not really been given anything to do??
• More scenes where Coulson picks out suits, please.
• Agent Fitz eating popcorn! Luv FitzSimmons. LUV THEM.
• IDK about you guys, but I was totally fine with the line where Fitz suggests that Skye distracted Quinn with her boobs? I don't really feel like it devalued her, particularly since one of the main reasons she probably blended into the Malta party was because she's a hot girl, and hot girls are essentially invisible in a lot of situations because people assume they're just there for decorative purposes.
• Skye's hair and makeup are gorgeous, but I'd feel happier if we actually saw her working on them, rather than her just being another effortlessly gorgeous TV beauty queen.
• Ward has got to be one of the blandest characters I have ever seen. He's so bland I don't even dislike him as much as I did last week. I can't muster the energy. (Commentary from @queerly_it_is: "I can't decide if it's a sad accident or some kind of meta statement about white male hero characters." WORD.)
• Coulson continues to be the main highlight. The whole ~muscle memory~ thing was about 30 miles away from subtlety, but I don't really give ashit. Clark Gregg is awesome in this role, and right now his performance is saving the show from tipping over into sheer stupidity.
• I really enjoyed the opening scene. The trucker-guy agent gave us a fun look into the variety of jobs SHIELD has to offer.
• Let's watch Chloe Bennet's music video from when she was a minor pop star in China, and still went by Chloe Wang!

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Agents of SHIELD: 0-8-4.

Previously: Marvel's Agents of O.M.G.

Ah, the second episode. The one where the shine begins to wear off the frenetic energy of the pilot’s introductory scenes, and we must get down to the dirty work of establishing a believable character dynamic. The one where they spent all their budget on Samuel L. Jackson, so 90% of the story has to take place inside the plane. The one where Clark Gregg wears a really nice suit.

I already suspect that Coulson's superpower is removing skeeviness from situations that I'd ordinarily find stupid or gross. In this episode it was the old ~seductive latina~ thing, merged with the ever-popular "evil ex-girlfriend" trope. The only reason they got away with this is because it made sense within the narrative, and the Camilla Reyes/Agent Coulson interactions were just... really good, basically. The hot ex-girlfriend is a staple of episodic TV, because it's an easy way to introduce a single-use love interest without the hassle of building up a new relationship. If she's attacked to a manly hero dude, then she's usually there to reinforce his hetero cred and inject some romance into his character arc. If she's the ex-girlfriend of an unappealing or socially maladjusted male character, then she's a hilarious punchline.

The only show that springs to mind as being good at this is Starsky & Hutch, because it was the 1970s and everyone was dating like five people at once. Bizarrely, I get way fewer douchebag vibes from Starsky & Hutch than most mainstream cop/adventure shows airing in the 21st century.
I found it quite easy to buy into the fact that Coulson has a history with Camilla Reyes. Not because Clark Gregg is Dreamboat #1 and therefore prime Peruvian secret agent affair material, but because of the characterisation points I mentioned in last week's review. Phil Coulson's defining traits are all tied into his kindness and reliability. He is nice, sensible, and respectful. In other words, he's the ideal character for a casual ex-girlfriend storyline. He obviously doesn't have time for a relationship, he's pragmatic and mature enough to have short-term flings with no hard feelings afterwards, and when we get to the actual ex-girlfriend episode itself... Coulson's not gonna wind up looking like a douchebag.

The most noticeable thing in this episode was just how simple everything was. I'm getting the impression that Agents of SHIELD is aiming to be child-friendly, but unfortunately this is translating into the character exposition being kinda patronising. The main purpose of this episode was team-building, but they didn't need to have Coulson literally narrating his team's developing relationship when we could see it happening onscreen. Show, don't tell! Jeez. Avatar: The Last Airbender is suitable for eight-year-olds, and still contains some of the most sensitive and interesting characterisation I've seen on TV. If they can do it, so can SHIELD. Not to mention the fact that plenty of little kids watch Marvel movies like Iron Man and The Avengers, which are full of adult concepts and complex relationships between the main characters.

I'm really, really enjoying every appearance from Fitz and Simmons, but Ward is definitely still the weak link for me. Most of the team are still pretty two-dimensional, but that's OK. Coulson is good enough to keep the show ticking over until we get some more character development, and it's only episode 2. Unfortunately, dedicating this much screentime to Ward is not helping the situation. He's just another well-meaning white male soldier character in his late twenties, and he's really too banal to provide much of a foil to Skye's stick-it-to-the-man outsider attitude. I'd be more into Ward if he was gay, or explicitly very conservative/Republican/pro-surveillance (as a counterpoint to Skye's anti-government streak, and Coulson's benevolence), or even if he was just more of an asshole. But as it stands, I'm not watching SHIELD for another vaguely angsty young white male hero: we have the rest of the Marvel universe for that.

Aside from FitzSimmons (who I would happily see remain in their science-BFFs holding pattern ad infinitum), I'm most impressed by Skye. Not because I find her particularly likeable, but because her characterisation is by far the most solid in the team. Rather than being the outsider/audience-viewpoint character she was in the pilot episode, she now seems very... young. Which is kind of tricky to define, because TV tends to divide characters into either teenagers (Teen Wolf) or adults (Torchwood; X-Files) without much middle ground. And it's often very difficult to tell just how old the "adults" are meant to be, because any character between the age of 17 and 27 can potentially be played by a 25-year-old actor.

Even though Skye, Ward, and FitzSimmons all look about the same age, I think Skye is meant to be about 19 or 20. College-age, anyway. Whereas Ward is a military professional in his late 20s, FitzSimmons are both old enough to hold multiple PhDs, and May and Coulson are both around 50. Skye may be a brat, but she's brattish in a way that makes sense.
I loved the maguffinish nature of the maguffin. VERY X-Filesl. Nonspecific alien bomb threat! Gamma radiation! Science things! Who cares, as long as it all ends with everyone drinking Friendship Beer and watching a rocket launch. However, I did have a problem with the whole jock vs nerd schtick, which is the only thing I've seriously disliked about SHIELD so far. Maurissa Tancharoen and Jed Whedon are awesome, and I thought they were above writing well-trod cliches like an irritable jock character yelling "TELL IT TO ME IN REAL ENGLISH!" while a dorky scientist spouts technobabble and waves his arms around. There's a fine line between affectionate parody and just playing into old stereotypes, and somewhere in between the first two episodes, they crossed it. Here's hoping it's a one-off incident. 

Miscellaneous

• Sorry I didn't have much to say about Melinda May this week. I really like her, but right now I feel like we're still waiting for a May-centric episode? Mostly I'm just psyched to see a middle-aged female character onscreen. If they could move Ward into a background role and give May the rest of his screentime, that'd be great, thanks.
• LOVE the little cubby-hole beds on the plane.
• They had some pretty cool camerawork on the plane, just during the everyday walk-and-talk scenes. I think they're tilting or moving the camera somehow to give the illusion of movement, even though the plan is, you know... obviously a set.
• When Coulson told Skye to use a coaster, I was kind of hoping it would be a ~tech coaster~ that would make the bottle stick to the table when the plane turned upside down, or something.
• A couple of commenters mentioned the Tahiti/"It's a magical place," thing last week, and yeah, it's definitely... something.
• Simmons' costumes are still definitely my favourite. Ward and Skye are still just variations on generically bland TV clothes. Fitz is OK, but his clothes suffer from the fact that they don't look worn-in (to me, at least) so he looks like he just bought an entirely new wardrobe. Coulson, obviously, is Professionally Handsome as always.
• Skye/Ward is a terrible pairing. I anti-ship it. Nope nope nope. 
• This week on "stupid opinions I saw on Tumblr", I noticed someone describing the yellow inflatable life-raft as an inflatable pool. Dude. Dude. Why would they have an emergency inflatable pool on the plane??
• Skye has really great hair.

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