By: Brandon Wolfe
‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ needs all the help it can get at this point, so it wastes no time this week bringing in a secret weapon in the form of Maria Hill, the agent played by Cobie Smulders in the films. Because we associate Hill with two good films instead of with this show, she is a sight for bored eyes. Now working for Stark Industries in the wake of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s implosion -- and the purpose of her new employment was left vague in ‘The Winter Soldier’, but is explained here as a means of personal protection behind Stark’s crack team of lawyers, making this the show’s first-ever instance of being useful – Hill is cornered on the street by May, who asks for help with Coulson, whom she worries might have been compromised by HYDRA during his resurrection. Hill, however, is resistant, so May strikes out on her own.
Back at Providence, Coulson and the team are trying to piece together what happened using surveillance footage. Fitz and Simmons decide that the team could use some cheering up with some pancakes, a task that somehow manages to be the exact thing that points them to two pieces of crucial evidence: Koenig’s body and a note carved quickly by Skye reading “Ward is HYDRA”. When Simmons determines that Koenig was definitely killed by Ward, Fitz has a tantrum wherein many items are thrown. He is ordered to snap out of his ‘six-year-old told to clean his room’ fit of rage and track the Bus to find out where Ward has taken Skye.
Before the team can set out to rescue Skye, Col. Talbot and his mustache show up at Providence to take them into custody, with the assistance of Hill, who advises Coulson to work with the military to save himself and his team now that S.H.I.E.L.D. is deemed corrupt in the eyes of the world. But after some vague words from Coulson about loyalty or something, Hill inexplicably does a complete 180 and helps him knock out the soldiers and escape to retrieve Skye.
Skye continues to try to play it cool around Ward despite knowing the truth, which she is astoundingly awful at, as she can’t seem to help but bring up as many analogous instances of duplicity as she can to him. Ward needs the S.H.I.E.L.D. hard drive decrypted and Skye claims that she can only do so at a predetermined set of coordinates – the diner in L.A. where she met the pre-Deathlok Mike Peterson in the pilot. At the diner, Skye stalls for as long as she can, which somehow doesn’t raise a single red flag for Ward. It turns out that she has alerted the authorities to Ward’s presence, which only succeeds in getting several cops shot before Skye herself is abducted by Deathlok as she attempts to flee.
What follows is a drawn-out scene where Skye expresses her outrage to Ward while Ward proclaims that his feelings for her are real, and the show still is under the impression that some sort of interesting dynamic exists between these characters, and that the actors playing them are capable of conveying strong emotions (outraged Skye, in particular, is just the worst). Skye then tries to appeal to the version of Mike she once knew, that she believes still exists somewhere beneath the metallic exterior of his 1987 laser tag costume. Deathlok responds by inducing a heart attack in Ward, whom he promises to kill unless Skye gives him the coordinates to decrypt the hard drive. Amazingly, this ploy somehow works, as Skye reveals the actual coordinates can only be reached in the air and ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ reveals that it just can’t avoid being stupid at all times.
Before Ward can lift off in the Bus, Hill intercepts him and some stern words are exchanged. But it’s just a stalling tactic for Coulson to Passenger 57 his way onto the Bus via the landing gear. He manages to grab Skye and the two of them escape from Ward and Deathlok via Lola, the ‘Back to the Future’-esque flying convertible that has been collecting dust since the pilot. And we soon see why Lola is so infrequently used, as the entire sequence of Coulson piloting the car tumultuously but safely to the ground looks like it was shot in 1968 by the effects wizards behind ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’. The astounding shoddiness of the effects on this presumably not cheap show continues to be baffling.
At a motel, the team regroups. Coulson wants to continue to pursue Ward and Hill has to remind him yet again that there is no more S.H.I.E.L.D. and that he should move on, perhaps following her lead and working for Stark. But Coulson isn’t about to let us off that easy and promises to keep the fight going. He then is visited by May, who has found a flash drive buried in Coulson’s empty grave (which, huh?) that she says explains all about the T.A.H.I.T.I. project. It of course doesn’t do this at all, and is just footage of Coulson admitting that the project has many ethical concerns that he can’t live with, and only works if the subject’s memory is wiped. All of which we already knew, so really this scene exists just to remind us of that one scene in ‘Total Recall’ where Arnold gets the transmission from himself, and how much less annoyed we’d be if we were watching ‘Total Recall’.
Smulders is the big takeaway from ‘Nothing Personal’. Her performance and her way with the show’s flat dialogue is a huge help. Witness how much she brings to that opening scene, particularly when set against the anti-charisma generated by Ming-Na Wen. Now that ‘How I Met Your Mother’ has ended, the show would do well to add her to the cast next season. If anything, she should replace Coulson as the team leader. It occurs to me that, for as much as we all loved Coulson in the movies, constructing a show around the character was probably a bad idea, even if the writing hadn’t been this awful. He worked in the movies the way Tommy Lee Jones did in ‘Men In Black’, as the straightforward professional not fazed by all the weirdness around him. This show wants him to be this tortured, dramatic figure and it doesn't play to the character's strengths nor to Clark Gregg's strengths as an actor. Hill would almost certainly make for a more charismatic lead, and Smulders has the ability to elevate the material just enough to make it hurt less. It’s far from the only change ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ should make, but it would be a good start.
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