By: Brandon Wolfe
If “Face My Enemy” is about anything - beyond ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s usual “Find Object X before Bad Guy Y does” gobbledygook - it’s about Agent May. May has been a frustrating character on a show that doesn’t really have another kind. The show has painted her from the start as the stoic warrior-woman, an agent so focused on her duties that she doesn’t have much left over for anything like a personal level. This is a workable character type provided you build upon it over time, finding cracks and hidden layers in the character’s façade. With May, ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ has never really done that because the show doesn’t appear to know how to build upon anything in any sort of skillful manner. It can insert its characters into the requisite dramatic moments that shows like this require, but enhancing and nurturing basic character-building? There’s no evidence as of yet that such a skill is in this show’s toolbox.
The episode opens with the discovery of a centuries-old painting that inexplicably has the same alien markings that Coulson has taken to carving into walls like a nutter. This painting becomes the Object X that the team goes after this week, because pursuing Object X’s is all this show really knows how to do. May and Coulson infiltrate the fancy ball where the painting is being held, dressed to the nines and posing as husband and wife. The sequence has a heavy ‘True Lies’ influence, as the duo takes to the dance floor to cut a rug while simultaneously performing reconnaissance. It’s also notable for how far May gets into character, becoming a giggly, flirtatious, entirely personable human being, rather than the robo-ninja we’ve grown accustomed to. Ming-Na Wen seems to savor being allowed to break free from her icy confines and play a person for once (she also looks fantastic in her sleek silver dress, and about 20 years younger than her age), and the episode mines a lot of humor from the rest of the team listening in to this utterly foreign version of May on coms. After a lengthy exchange with a fellow partygoer, Skye aptly comments “She just said more words than I heard her say in a year,” which is cute, but underlines the issue with the character because of how true it is. May is barely a character after more than an entire season, and while it’s easy to conjure up some humor from the stark contrast of her suddenly showcasing a personality, that doesn’t solve the problem that the character’s default state is steely blankness.
Coulson and May have their cover blown by a HYDRA agent posing as the team’s professional adversary of late, the mustachioed General Talbot, using the same holographical mask that Black Widow wore in the climax of ‘The Winter Soldier.’ May is knocked out and her identity and visage are assumed by a HYDRA henchwoman to infiltrate Team Coulson’s ranks. This entire development solely exists for its denouement, which is when May has to essentially fight herself in a protracted smackdown. And I’ll say this, for a show as perpetually all-thumbs as this, the action choreography here is uncharacteristically sharp. The two Mays trade kicks and throw each other around and it actually looks pretty cool. Though, again, the takeaway from the scene is that the show is less interested in developing May in any way than it is in basking in her tough-chick glory. She even tells her doppelganger “If you were really me, you wouldn’t talk so much,” as if expecting the audience to cheer for the dominance of this personality-scrubbed action figure. The show is so drunk off the legend of May’s fearsomeness that it’s content to leave her character at that.
The rest of the cast is basically left to hang around headquarters this week while May and Coulson do all the work. The show attempts to use this time to develop its newbies, particularly the wholly unlikable new recruit Hunter, whose douchy boasting about his prowess with women leads to a group discussion about the team members’ exes that is awash with the sort of flat banter this show toils in. The main takeaway from this scene is how Fitz longs to join in the rest of the team’s reindeer games, but can’t, because of his sentence-ending head trauma and also because the closest thing he has to an ex is Simmons. Fortunately for him, he’s still hallucinating Simmons (and, again, that this brain-damaged crazy person is still on-staff as the team’s sole technical expert shows once more that Coulson shouldn’t be trusted to run a Popeye’s Chicken much less an intelligence agency), who builds Fitz up enough to come forward and have an astoundingly awkward exchange with the group. Even putting the brain issues aside, that the show continues to write Fitz as a shy seven-year-old rather than an adult is a continuing irritation, as is this tedious device of Simmons appearing to Fitz as a brain-ghost.
“Face My Enemy” feels like a Season 1 time-waster, the type of episode that ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ should really have gotten out of its system by now. A big development this week is that wild-card Raina is fitted with a lethal device by a HYDRA official named Daniel Whitehall - an apparently ageless man frustratingly cut from the same Bond-villain cloth the show has used far too often rather than the more visually interesting superpowered bad guys we had been given in recent weeks – and told she has 48 hours to retrieve the Obelisk, the previous Object X the show was focused on before it switched to this painting like a dog capriciously deciding it wants to play with a different toy. The other big development is that Coulson is asking May to kill him, so fearful is he that the alien wall-carving components in his brain will turn him bad. The show won’t kill Coulson, obviously, so this is clearly a blind alley. If ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ wants to try to drum up some drama over the potential deaths of some of these stiffs, then don’t tease us. Let’s see some follow-through.
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