By: Brandon Wolfe
‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ continues to exhibit surprising sparks of life as its second season inches to the halfway point. The series is finally starting to work out some of its kinks. It’s now possible to get through a full episode without the risk of collapsing into a catatonic stupor. This is progress.
The series has found a measure of success in creating a more involving narrative thrust. Last year, it was more of a limp procedural until it began to focus on whatever it was that Bill Paxton’s character was up to. This season, however, the show has cast off the case-of-the-week format entirely and committed itself to an ongoing story thread with several moving parts, some of which are genuinely interesting. The show has also taken some agency with regard to embracing Marvel mythology. Where before ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ functioned as a bottom-feeder, making do with whatever table scraps the current Marvel film release would toss it, it’s now staking out its own claim on the Marvel universe, centering on a lost Kree city hidden on Earth, terrain the films haven’t really touched on apart from some cursory elements introduced in ‘Guardians of the Galaxy.’ By taking on material that the films might not get to until the ‘Inhumans’ film all the way out in 2018, the series is actually emerging for the first time as a vital cog in the Marvel machine.
"...Ye Who Enter Here" presents a race against time with S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra each vying to locate the hidden city first, a race Team Coulson gets the upper hand in when they pinpoint the city’s location as lying beneath San Juan, Puerto Rico. The heroes also edge out the villains by getting to tertiary villain Raina first, as she is revealed to be a major component in unlocking the city’s secrets due to her ability to touch the deadly Obelisk without turning to stone, a quality she suggests she shares with Skye. With Raina in tow, the group heads to San Juan and the away team of Coulson, Bobbi, Mack and Simmons locate an entry point into the lost city, lowering Mack down into its depths while the rest of the team hovers above in a cloaked jet.
Matters are complicated when Hydra surrounds the jet and Ward boards it in midair under the threat of deadly force in order to take Raina and Skye into his possession. Meanwhile, down below, Mack is mysteriously infected by touching the surface of the city and attacks the rest of the team, necessitating Bobbi to knock him back down into the pit. Finally, though Ward leaves with the promise that he will not order the jet shot out of the sky, a promise he actually keeps, lead baddie Daniel Whitehall does not cotton to that decision and countermands Ward’s order. Dun-dun-dun!
Much of this stuff makes for decent television, which sounds like a low bar to clear, but is actually a remarkable feat for ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,’ which toiled for so long in deathly dull, go-nowhere nonsense. What’s further impressive is how much this notoriously chintzy show has stepped up its game visually. A fight between Skye and facially damaged May doppelganger Agent 33 continues the show’s increasing aptitude with fight choreography, and the show actually does a commendable job faking Puerto Rico. For a series that often looked like it was shot in someone’s garage last year, this is a big leap forward.
An area where the show continues to suffer is with its characters. For one, there’s just too damn many of them. Coulson’s roster now contains a whopping nine agents, an overcorrection to the frequent complaint last year that the team seemed too insubstantial (and that’s not even factoring in the stable of Patton Oswalt clones the show keeps popping out like Gremlins). There is also a surplus of villains, with Whitehall, Skye’s father, Ward, Raina and Agent 33 to keep tabs on, the first two on that list seeming to cancel each other out. The show could stand to do some major pruning right now. It may have already begun with the murky fate of Agent Mack, which seems to be a bad place to start as he’s actually one of the more likable members of the team. That Mack could be discarded as an expendable third wheel to the intolerable FitzSimmons will be a major miscalculation if it turns out to be the case.
The show also struggles with its character interactions. “…Ye Who Enter Here” is chock-full of dramatically tone-deaf one-on-ones between characters that simply don’t work. Raina and Skye discussing their potentially entwined fates just shines a light on how iffy Ruth Negga and Chloe Bennet are as actresses. And the show still expects some audience investment in the relationship between Fitz and Simmons, as evidenced by an interminable back-and-forth between the two, investment which I’m sure some pockets of the viewership have, though I couldn’t begin to fathom why. Generally, character-driven asides are the lifeblood of television shows, but this crop of characters is so thin that they should perhaps just stick to finding alien cities and not worry so much about trying to date each other.
But the big takeaway is that ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ is starting to become actually functional. In spite of the flaws still in place, this is huge. Let’s continue to chart its progress together.
Discuss this review with fellow SJF fans on Facebook. On Twitter, follow us at @SandwichJFilms, and follow author Brandon Wolfe on Twitter at @BrandonTheWolfe
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