By: Brandon Wolfe
‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ was one of the biggest disappointments of the previous year. Heading into the fall TV season last year, it seemed like the show to beat. Bringing Marvel’s cinematic hot streak to the small screen, under the (partial) guidance of brilliant TV impresario Joss Whedon and employing fan-favorite Clark Gregg to anchor the series as the beloved, revived Agent Coulson, ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ appeared to have everything going for it.
Then it aired and the balloon of hope immediately burst. In place of the intelligence and personality we had grown accustomed to with Marvel’s cinematic universe, ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ was a dull slog, less an expansion of the Marvel experience into broadcast television than some cheap junk-TV adventure show that seemed more at home airing on a Saturday afternoon in 1994. The chintzy production values, the blandly attractive leads, the plodding dialogue and the inert storytelling left the series dead on arrival, a mode it continued in throughout its first season, getting only a moderate boost (but one not nearly as substantial as its defenders would insist) from dovetailing with ‘Captain America: The Winter Solder’ late in the game. It was hard to muster up much enthusiasm for the continuation of ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ into another season without some serious overhauling.
That overhauling did not happen. “Shadows,” the second-season premiere, carries with it a distinct “ain’t broke/don’t fix” vibe. There is no evidence that the series’ creators (Joss’ apple-fell-7,000-miles-from-the-tree brother Jed Whedon and his wife, Maurissa Tancharoen) have learned anything over the summer hiatus. The whole gang is back, doing and saying the same sorts of tedious things that they were before. The series maintains its status as a mirthlessly uninteresting grind.
“Shadows” opens with some more Marvel symmetry, giving us a flashback to 1945 Austria where future spin-off headliner Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) and a squad of Howling Commandoes (including Neal McDonaugh’s Dum Dum Dugan) infiltrate a HYDRA camp and confiscate a weapons cache, including a mysterious object that we learn is the first documented 0-8-4 (the S.H.I.E.L.D. term for object of unknown origin). Flashing forward to the present, Coulson is now director of a reconceived shadow version of S.H.I.E.L.D., which contains all the stiffs he worked with last year supplemented by a team of mercenaries headed up by Isabelle Hartley (erstwhile Xena, Lucy Lawless). When an operation goes south after a seemingly invincible third party intervenes, the team is ordered to go dark and reconvene to figure out who this mystery man was.
The man’s name is Carl Creel, known to comic fans as the Absorbing Man, a fellow who, as his title suggests, can absorb the essence of anything he touches to contour his body to match its texture (for comic know-nothings, think Nick Nolte in the last act of Ang Lee’s ‘Hulk’). Creel is out to obtain the original 0-8-4, and after he makes an attempt on the life of noted S.H.I.E.L.D. opponent Gen. Glenn Talbot (Adrian Pasdar, with a less hilarious mustache than last year), the military apprehends Creel and takes him to a secure location. Come to find out that this location also houses the ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’-esque storage facilty that contains the 0-8-4 and Creel got himself nabbed just so he could be taken directly there. This leads the team on a secret mission to infiltrate the facility and obtain the 0-8-4 before Creel can, a mission that ultimately does not succeed.
It bears mentioning that the Absorbing Man effects are a notch above the usual anti-eye-candy (eye vegetables?) that this notoriously cheap-looking series offered us a steady diet of last year. But that just about ends the list of things that “Shadows” does well. As with last year, we are given a storyline that insists upon an urgency that simply isn’t there. The characters remain another crucial problem. They are still amazingly dull. May remains a framework upon which to hang a scowl. Skye has more of a boots-on-the-ground role this year, but she’s still merely a pretty face with nothing underneath it (she’s also now saddled with some seriously unflattering bangs). And Coulson, more aloof and businesslike in this premiere, is still an exposition-spouting windbag without any of the playful spirit of the guy we loved in the movies. The great Patton Oswalt is back as Billy Koenig, the clone (?) of the departed Eric Koenig from last year, but the series doesn’t use Oswalt’s gifts any better than it did before. Only B.J. Britt as the returning Agent Triplett seems at all close to potentially being an engaging presence going forward.
‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s’ frustrating inability to cut off any of its considerable fat manifests itself in the form of a couple of other returning characters. Fitz, one half of the insufferably cutesy tech duo FitzSimmons, is back in his lab after the injuries he sustained in the season finale, but now suffers from temporal lobe damage that makes him forget every fifth word he attempts to speak. He seems to be watched over by a concerned Simmons, but by episode’s end, we are told that Simmons actually left the team some time ago, and Fitz is in such a state of disrepair that he has begun to hallucinate her presence. Personally, I say you can keep FitzSimmons, whose irksome adorability gave them the notable distinction of being among the series’ most irritating elements, but clearly the creators aren’t willing to make that sacrifice, as they aren’t willing to make any sacrifices at all. But what makes Fitz’s return so insane is that he’s brain-damaged and possibly insane, and yet Coulson STILL HAS HIM WORKING IN THEIR LAB. Analyzing crucial evidence and everything. You want to hold onto him out of affection, fine, but surely S.H.I.E.L.D. has a mail room where the drooling mess can Xerox stuff instead of fine-tuning highly-detailed cloaking technology.
The other, somehow even more astoundingly ill-conceived return appearance belongs to Agent Ward, the blank slab of beefsteak whose surprise turn to the dark side is the only specific thing anyone will remember having happened in Season 1. Coulson has opted to keep Ward locked up on-site in a high-tech Hannibal Lecter cell as a constant source of HYDRA intel, but really so the show can continue to pretend that the dance it’s crafted between comely nonentities Ward and Skye has any weight at all, as Coulson uses Skye as the go-between with Ward so we can watch the sparks not fly. The show appears to be setting Ward on the path to a quasi-redemption, making him an uneasy ally of the team, similar to how Whedon’s ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ used the character of Spike. But Spike was a hugely entertaining and charismatic presence and Ward is the guy you see modeling Dockers for Kohl’s in the Sunday ads. Not exactly the same thing.
Look, somewhere in the back of my head, I still foolishly want to believe that it’s possible for ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ to become something. It really should be something, given its bona fides. But the parts it contains are irreparably broken and the show doesn’t seem to be aware of this. As such, all we can do is document the dysfunction while we wait for this particular Helicarrier to collapse out of the sky.
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