Agents of Shield - Joss Whedon, Marvel, and ABC

That’s DC.

anyway, fun season finale. Although I also found Cal’s transformation silly lookimg.

Yeah, I know, it’s a joke…

What a show, what a season finale.

Really glad they didn’t kill off Ward. I like him way too much. He’s a mesmerizingly fun ball o’ bad-ass hate to watch.

I love Game of Thrones, but SHIELD is easily my 2nd fave show. I look forward to Season 3!

Man, that was good. Genre TV in general has been excellent this year, but that SHIELD episode was even better than I expected. They needed to CG Cal into a more hulking figure, but otherwise I liked everything about it.

They have really created an excellent nemesis character in Ward, especially for a network TV series (much less production value than GOT). He got more complex this season.

Then my hat’s off to you, sir. You don’t find many folks nowadays who know of the Legion of Superheroes.

This was alright, but I’m not quite as over the moon as the rest of you. I did really like Ward and Agent 33’s resolution though.

Strong end to a strong season. Good to great fight choreography and reasonable/enjoyable resolutions to the story arcs (unless you’re Simmons).

Didn’t have much of a problem with Cal’s Hulk makeup, though I can see where some would. He just seems more ‘deformed’ big than ‘good’ big like Hulk or Strong Guy…or any other hero type really.

Ward is pretty great and one of the better villains I can remember on TV. May awesome as always. Fun show that is getting better.

The more I think of it the more frustrated I am at the lack of crossover with the movies. I thought Winter Soldier was the beginning of something bigger, but instead that’s the high point and now we’re approaching the uncanny-valley of shared universe plotting.

Daredevil is great, you offer a couple throw away lines about the invasion of New York, and then it does its own thing, and it feels totally natural because there’s no reason (yet) that Daredevil should connect to Agents of SHIELD, or Age of Ultron, or anything else.

Agents of SHIELD, on the other hand, is looking increasingly like something that will never truly tie into the movies despite how obviously SHIELD (the agency) should. After Winter Soldier, with Hydra exposed, Hydra became the show’s problem, which makes total sense and I expected, but I thought it would come back and continue to affect the movies. Instead, Age of Ultron reveals Hydra to be almost completely done for already and they finish it off with capturing Strucker and moving on to the “real” plot of the movie. The show paid lip service to leading into Ultron with the tidbits about Loki’s staff and Theta protocols, but none of that knowledge was necessary to watching Age of Ultron. Those pieces are entirely unimportant to the movie.

The Coulson problem remains the most obvious issue; whoever decided to bring him back and whether they wish they had or hadn’t, it’s absurd that they haven’t resolved his status with the Avengers yet.

I understand the tricky problem of making meaningful connections when you can’t rely on moviegoers to watch the show. And your chances are much better in the other direction, most of the show viewers will watch the movie, but even then you can’t be sure they’ll watch it opening weekend to slot it correctly into the narrative’s timeline.

So maybe it’s not fair to expect more, but if that’s the case, then I guess the current trajectory of the show will never work for me. Instead of getting invested in all the Inhumans events this season, I’m seeing through the story to the careful machinery underneath that’s keeping the narrative only superficially connected to the future of the movies. I’m watching them set things up and then clean the slate so nothing truly important will happen on the show that can’t be explained (or explained away) in a single line of dialog in some upcoming movie. These Inhumans will never be The Inhumans, or even meaningfully connected.

Maybe season 3 will surprise me. Maybe it will be Daisy running her covert Secret Warriors team, giving us a smart, self contained arc that doesn’t keep posturing itself as important to the movie events, and the show will be better for it. I hope so. But I think the above is why I’m disappointed with the end of season 2.

And to balance, I will again say nice things:

Ward is great, glad he’s still around. I didn’t quite buy why he was helping Agent 33, I thought there was going to be another reveal at a bigger motive or reason he was using her, but it was still very effective when she died.

Skye/Daisy is much better than she used to be, can’t emphasize how much they’ve improved her character through both seasons.

Cal stole every scene (even if his makeup was dumb), and I will miss him a lot.

They should move heaven and earth to secure Kevin Tancharoen to direct as many episodes as possible next season. Face My Enemy (that first May/Agent 33 fight) and Dirty Half Dozen (Skye’s awesome single-take gunfight) were high points not just for the show but for TV in general this year.

Agents of Shield was never going to tie into the movies in any big way. From day one of this show their problem has been that we knew they wouldn’t tie into the movies. They can’t. None of those actors, in the movies, is going to do tv. They’re lucky they got Fury to show up. I think that’s why the show sucked at first, they had no idea what to do with their characters if the MCU was off limits to them. Once they figured out the Inhumans could be their thing the show got drastically better.

But anyone paying attention knows Inhumans are where the movies are going too (and if you’re not aware of that, you’ll just be disappointed later instead of now), and it’s frustrating to know both the TV show and the movies will be tackling the topic, and never the twain shall meet. Agents of SHIELD should play to their strengths and deal with stories the movies won’t, so it won’t be weird when they’re not connected.

I agree Ward and Cal stole the show. Disappointed they wiped Cal’s mind, they need someone very unpredictable in the mix.

I also agree that the cross linking with Avengers was quite lame in both directions. A missed opportunity there I believe.

The Inhumans won’t part of the movies for years, YEARS! Agents of Shield might not even be on the air anymore at that point. The Inhuman movie stars won’t turn up their nose at doing a tv show because there are no Inhuman movie stars yet. So this show has that territory all to itself. You can’t say that about anything with Avengers in it.

Black Bolt and friends may not show up until the actual Inhumans movie, but inhumans as a race—as MCU’s mutants—could be showing up as early as Civil War next year. And if that happens, I’ll be surprised if anything from this season SHIELD will be referenced at all. And that disappoints me.

Maybe all my predictions are wrong, but what I’m trying to say is I thought the Hydra arc throughout the Marvel properties would involve more integration between this show and the movies than we got. Winter Soldier looked like a promising start but it turns out there wasn’t any meaningful crossover from there.

Despite that, for a little while here mid-season, I thought the inhuman presence in this season would be another opportunity, but by the end of the season I’m convinced again that there will be zero meaningful integration between the show and films, and at this point, I’m tired of the show paying lip service to the idea that they’re related. They not only killed off the main show inhumans, but they effectively removed their whole story—afterlife is no more, the threat of escalating conflict has been squelched, so even if these actors were never crossing between formats, the show ended on a note where the movies could throw out almost everything they established this season with very little disruption.

That kind of integration may have always been an unrealistic fantasy, I might have been foolish to get my hopes up, but either way, SHIELD needs to just lean into being its own separate corner of the world, but I don’t have any faith that they will.

They can’t really tie in too much to the movies because the last thing they want is a requirement to watch either to know what is going on in the other. It’s a fine line of references without it being required. The setup to Ultron is probably as much as they can really do.

You can’t have any meaningful integration without the characters, and the associated actors, crossing over between tv show and movies. That won’t happen with people like Downey/Johansson/etc. You’ll never see Ruffalo playing Banner on Agents of Shield. Samuel “Snakes on a Plane” Jackson is obviously open to doing things for fun but not all those actors are going to be like that. That’s why it’s pure fantasy to think that has a chance of happening. If they can’t count on everyone playing along, they aren’t going to plan their tv show around it.

That’s not even considering other practical issues such as these are billion dollar movies we are talking about. Why would they want to tie in, or limit, their movies in any way for the sake of nickel and dime tv shows? No matter what the tv show does with Inhumans, their movie will do it’s own thing, because there’s too much money at stake to worry about making sure it’s integrated with the tv show.

I can’t wait until Infinity War Part II when they pull out all the stops, and you have the Avengers fighting alongside the Guardians of the Galaxy, and then Coulson’s Inhumans come flying in, and Fury is fighting The Mandarin, and Skye is quaking Green Goblin’s glider, and the Daredevil starts fighting with Batman, and Black Panther and Bishop team up against Galactus, and Roger Rabbit is battling an army of Stan Lee cameos, and everyone who has ever appeared in anything Marvel ever is all on the screen at once like some giant epic Alex Ross cover.

And then they all cross over with Star Wars.

edit: removed comment where I was being a dick, if you already saw it, I apologize. Well I apologize either way, point is I was short tempered and rude.

Agree that it’s a drag that the show doesn’t tie into the movies better - I came back to it because of Winter Soldier, which tied in so well, but I guess that was partly because they had no choice. At least the show has gotten much better than it started, so I don’t feel too burned for hanging around, and the season finale was first rate. I’m still not convinced I’ll stick with it long-term, but it was a good season.