Is the much-maligned ABC show actually getting better? We pontificate after the jump.
TV Review: Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. “The Things We Bury”By: Brandon Wolfe
When did Agent Ward become the most interesting thing about ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.?’ The character spent the bulk of the first season as the walking, talking embodiment of everything that was wrong with the show. Bland, stiff, wholly uninteresting. The post-‘Winter Soldier’ revelation that he was a secret member of Hydra was where the shift began, but it felt short-lived, something too daring for a show this unremarkable to really run with. When Ward survived the first season and was kept on as a regular, it seemed to indicate that the show was going to backslide on the character, with him working his way back into the group’s good graces and atoning for his many crimes.
Yet every time ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ feels like it’s going in that direction, it catches itself and, surprisingly, recommits to Ward’s dastardliness. When he broke out of custody a couple episodes back, killing several guards in the process, it was refreshing. Yet in his pursuit of his brother, Sen. Christian Ward, in “The Things We Bury,” the show again hints that Ward is going rogue simply to stop his nefarious brother, not because he’s actually a bad guy. While taking his brother as a hostage to the site of a traumatic childhood event, Ward gets the man to confess to lying about the past, giving us the impression that the influence of his terrible older sibling, as well as the abuse inflicted upon him by his parents, made Ward flawed through no fault of his own, rubbing off some of the intriguing tarnish the show has applied to him.
So the revelation later in the episode, that Ward has then killed both his brother and parents, making it look like an apparent murder-suicide, registers as a shock, complemented by the character offering his services to current series Big Bad, Daniel Whitehall (Reed Diamond). This is ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ finally ceasing to flip-flop on Ward, officially coming down irreversibly on the side of the character being a monster. Good to see it finally commit to something interesting.
We learn a lot more about Whitehall this week. It seems he had a working relationship with the Red Skull back in the olden days, even crossing paths with Peggy Carter for a few scenes just in time for her upcoming spin-off (‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ is nothing if not a hub for Marvel to promote other things). After 44 years of imprisonment for Nazi war crimes, Whitehall is released in 1989 by Hydra factions operating within S.H.I.E.L.D. to experiment on a seemingly ageless woman (Dichan Lachman from ‘Dollhouse,’ where she co-starred with Diamond) who was able to safely touch the Obelisk all those years earlier (and whom, we learn, was Skye’s mother). Dissecting the woman in a shockingly graphic sequence for this show, Whitehall is able to harvest her organs and turn back the clock on his own aging.
Yet Whitehall is actually a fairly dull villain, despite Reed Diamond’s best efforts (though that effort does not include his dicey German accent). But never fear because Kyle MacLachlan is shoring up the difference by having a ball playing crazy as Skye’s father (who is still only credited as “The Doctor”). MacLachlan is going full-tilt nuts rather than building a nuanced character, but he’s enjoyable enough that it doesn’t matter, particularly on a show where characters very infrequently get to display anything other than dry recitations of expository technobabble. He also gets an actual funny line, a rarity on this show, when he responds to Coulson’s inquiry that the Obelisk has “Tesseract-level power” with an enthusiastic “Sure! I don’t know what that is.” Not everyone’s a Marvel expert, Phil.
So ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ isn’t doing terrible in the villain department of late, but, as always, its heroes leave much to be desired. Coulson’s crew remains a flat bunch of duds, none of whom stand out much at all this week. The best of the bunch continues to be newcomer Bobbi Morse, who has a more engaging presence than her colleagues, even if the show wants to use much of it in the service of bickering and flirting with her ex-husband and current teammate, Hunter. The show still desperately needs to find a way to make these people interesting, and they can’t make them all evil killers because that only works once.
“The Things We Bury” is a very busy episode, and feels overstuffed with both characters and story threads. The show could stand to prune a villain and maybe a hero or two to condense things down. As is often the case with ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,’ the most interesting aspect is the base-touching with other realms of the Marvel universe, as with going back to the timeline of the original ‘Captain America’ as well as looking into the future, possibly all the way to the far-off ‘Inhumans’ movie, given Whitehall’s mention of the “blue angels” visiting Earth long ago. But referencing will only get you so far. ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ will eventually need to develop its own distinct personality. Then maybe other things will reference IT.
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