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[seekingferret]

The past 3 episodes of Agents of SHIELD have been the best of the season. Which doesn't mean they're anywhere near what I'd hoped for from this show, but I think three is enough to call it a positive trend.

Finally, we're getting stories that are interested in Fitz and Simmons as people. Finally we're getting stories that crack Ward open a little to examine what's inside. Finally we're moving away from Skye as the show's only POV character- Simmons delivered the opening monologue this week! Finally we're getting stories that actually do grapple with the wonder of being an ordinary person in a world of aliens and superheroes, like the Peter MacNicol guest appearance this week (Peter MacNicol!!!) that for the first time in my memory put people like Simmons and Ward in the position of gaping in awe. Finally, the writers are figuring out Melinda May's relationships with Ward and with Coulson.

The more this show becomes an ensemble piece, the happier I'll be. The less it is about beating up arbitrary terrorists, the happier I'll be. The closer we get to putting Coulson's mystery behind us, the happier I'll be.

But I should note the fatal flaws still plaguing the show. The Level 7 stuff from the premiere has been mashed up at this point into absolute nonsense, with the introduction of Level 8, which made it incredibly glaring that Skye and Fitz and Simmons SHOULD NOT KNOW THAT COULSON LIVES. I don't think I'm alone in wanting this show to be about the tension between the office politics and bureaucracy of a top secret government agency and the comic book physics they are grappling with, and the meager offerings of 'The Hub' did nothing to satiate that desire. The position of Coulson's team as a red-tape cutting machine makes the writing easier, but doesn't make the stories more interesting, especially when we don't see them actually cutting the red tape. There are ways to embed meaning consequences into the narrative that the writers of Agents of SHIELD are ignoring. And SHIELD as an actual secure agency is a joke by this point. It's hard to be sold on their competence when they keep Skye walking around, and when they act like Ward is a bad guy for taking a little while to forgive her. Not to mention the Sitwell thing: I think the writers just have no idea when to go for the joke and when to go for the serious moment, and it's a major tonal problem for the show.

But eh, I'll keep watching and hoping they figure out more of the problems.

Comments

[morbane]

I agree with your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter! ... Wait.

The more this show becomes an ensemble piece, the happier I'll be. The less it is about beating up arbitrary terrorists, the happier I'll be. The closer we get to putting Coulson's mystery behind us, the happier I'll be. - These things will also make me happier. I was honestly expecting Coulson's mystery to have been resolved within the first three or four episodes - I suppose what we've been given is the slow development of his suspicions, followed by furtive action, then, eventually, resolution, but the suspicion part seemed oddly drawn out, and I don't feel we've had any insight in to Coulson's character because of it. He seems like a nice guy. His outer face is benevolent. I'd really like there to be something under that benevolence.

I was mixed on episode 6. I was thrilled that there was a mainly internal problem, that it was about Simmons working on a high-stakes technological problem and making hard decisions, and I enjoyed the by-play that led to saving her. And then I thought about how cliched the science part of the plot was, and how foregone the conclusion, and felt annoyed again. Seven was better. I have not yet seen eight; your review makes me hopeful.

I too am puzzled by what Skye is doing in this narrative. I feel as though the writers are trying to have their cake and eat it too. We are meant to see Skye's idealism as flawed and dangerous - I hope - but somehow also relevant and raising useful questions? What she seems to bring to the team is a sense of teenage drama. Her character seems so much emotionally younger than anyone else.

I think I'd like the AU where...

Say, after Coulson's team encounters Skye, some different Hub-affiliated arm of S.H.I.E.L.D. gets in contact with her, and manipulates her into using her hacker skills for them in the name of freedom, democracy, buzzword whatever. She's so easy to manipulate. Maybe they'd let her realise who they were from the very start - and control her outside contacts as well. Lots of shell games. We'd probably start with Skye being fed lots and lots of fake information, realising that it's fake information, and stepping up to the challenge of sorting through it. There would be lots of complete cynicism from S.H.I.E.L.D. towards her. As viewers/readers, we'd get interesting snippets of international policy.

Quite often - maybe from episode 2 or so - Skye would be asked to spy on teams just like Coulson's - those dangerous, gun-happy interventionist lunatics who give the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D. a bad name, amirite, Skye.

Quite possibly Skye would become enamoured of Coulson's team and disenchanted with her own role in which everyone she deals with already expects her to betray them. (For example: imagine Skye processing reports about how Coulson's team was ordered to destroy that alien virus and then they didn't, shame on them, oh and all their team survived, how about that...) Possibly S.H.I.E.L.D. hub hold some bigger and bigger threats over her head as she becomes less useful to them. Possibly she contacts Coulson's team who swoop in to save her.

... TL;DR, the version where Skye gets involved with the Hub rather than with Coulson's team, and we get a narration of Coulson's team's adventures channelled through a bureaucratic view.

I just hate Skye more and more as the show tries to tell me she's a cute lovable puppy who just wants to know about her parents. I think I'd like her more as a character who acts as an observer on the audience's behalf - as a parallel to her self-appointed role as radical distributor of information - in which she becomes more and more self-aware and active about her relation to what she sees and transmits.

[morbane]

And in some ways I'd just like the story in which Melinda May stays behind a wall of staplers. And kicks ass that way.

I hope someone is writing the story about Melinda May in the months just before Coulson recruited her.

[seekingferret]

Her character seems so much emotionally younger than anyone else.

Yes, I think this is a great assessment of the problems with her. I understood Simmons's reluctant participation in her scheme during The Hub, but I didn't understand her participation... either it was intended to give her enough time in the system to look up her parent's file, or it was genuine anger at not being allowed to sit at the big boy table. If it's the former, it's immensely childish in that she is at a moment of maximum surveillance and if she could show patience she will unquestionably get a better opportunity to more safely hack the system. If it's the latter, it is immensely childish because in any organization you need to observe the protocols of hierarchy until you know the system well enough to know when you can violate them, and nothing she has done has earned her a place at the big boy table.

She's just not a thoughtful enough character to be our perspective character on a system as complicated and ethically murky as SHIELD, and her positioning as the perspective character indicates that the writers aren't interested in treating SHIELD as being as complicated and ethically murky as it has been in past iterations.

I love your idea of Skye at the Hub. I agree that would be a much better place for both her talents and her storytelling function, and the only way I could be convinced to change my opinion is if the show lasts long enough for her to become combat-useful. Skye as an enfant terrible broken down and refashioned in Ward's image is kind of fascinating as a concept to me.

I'm extraordinarily tempted by your Melinda May bunny. But... but that would require me to come up with a plot! I can't do that! Yeah, there's something very frustrating about how Coulson's recruitment worked there, as if it there was no possible way to argue with Coulson's assertion that red tape is an evil manufactured at desks and the only worthwhile agents are field agents... Coulson in previous films was the ultimate bureaucrat, patiently scheduling corporate meetings and preferring to fade into the background. I think most of the audience for this show both expected and wanted there to be red tape mixed in with the action.

tl;dr, you can subscribe to my newsletter, but only if I can subscribe to yours... wait!

[morbane]

I am sure other people are writing the kind of Melinda May fic we are discussing here. We may rest easy there. It may even turn up in Yuletide! (That is not a hint that I'm writing SHIELD treats, because I'm not.)

I doubt you will get your wish about Skye, simply because I doubt the show is willing to do much breaking of Skye. One does not kick puppies. Were she treated less sentimentally, the story of Skye's shifts in frameworks and functions might be interesting. (I am now caught up - I thought Phil's mentorship angle on Skye in the last episode was interesting, but not very satisfying. It feels like wayyy too much carrot and too little stick. Callous as that is.)

[seekingferret]

I should also say that I would find the show a lot more appealing if it were actually interested in the radical distribution of information and what it meant. What value does SHIELD actually have as a top secret agency in a world where everyone knows who Thor and Iron Man are?

I would love it if the SHIELD of the show were under a high level review of its operational procedures, with auditors and policy analysts asking whether the information they were uncovering was really beneficial to be classified, or if it was better for SHIELD to tell their story publicly before Rising Tide released it indiscriminately. So that when Skye came inside, what she found wasn't an agency whose actions confirmed every conspiracy theory she ever had, but an agency whose identity crisis she found herself smack in the middle of, because she still was a hacker who knew that it was almost impossible for SHIELD to really keep secrets in a digital age, and on the other hand she saw that sometimes there was justification for keeping secrets, if you could actually manage to do it.

[morbane]

Interesting! I'm having a hard time imagining how that would work from a storytelling perspective - the changes that I can imagine happen gradually, and circulation of policy documents is only interesting when one is already invested - and yet, indeed, this the way the real world deals with an issue that S.H.I.E.L.D. has teased at from the start.

I tossed over the issue in my recent days of GLAM-sector conference; because of this, the facet of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s, well, shielding, that I find easiest to imagine is the footage and imagery of the Avengers Chitauri attack. S.H.I.E.L.D./the government, citing its obsolescent mandate, might try to corral the images and footage captured of the invaders, confiscating them, demanding those that have been offloaded be pulled offline. But these specific images - as well as being entangled with the news reports of the moment - would be entangled with shock, destruction, valuable human memorial. There would be various protests. There might, perhaps, be an artistic presentation, unsubtly titled "Monster", in which the Chitauri attack is represented with the same combination of helplessness and coyness as the monster attack in Cloverfield - nothing but shakeycam and destruction just outside of frame. The discussion would move forward.

How do you see your Skye reacting to a genuine crisis of identity in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s heart?

[seekingferret]

I'm having a hard time imagining how that would work from a storytelling perspective -

Much as I am loath to praise Babylon 5 for anything (I tried watching it on the strength of 'It gets better later' promises but after struggling through the whole first season and the first half of the second season, I decided that any show that took this long to get good wasn't worth my patience), they managed a metanarrative something like this in their first season.

But yeah, things worth bringing out to develop this theme include:

-as you mention, footage of the Battle of New York, with its complicated mixture of security value and memorial value. After the battle, everyone knows that aliens invaded New York and that SHIELD had a superhero team to fight back. Those facts are no longer classified. But the specific nature of Chitauri tech obviously has security value in being kept secret afterward. The fire company episode flirted with this stuff, but didn't go far enough. Wrestling with putting that genie back in the bottle ought to be a primary concern for SHIELD- and here is a place where the nonsensical 'international' nature of the agency is a big problem. French or Chinese or Iranian or British etc. government spies operating in New York trying to smuggle out Chitauri artifacts could be a great premise for an episode on SHIELD and its secrecy mandate, except for the nebulous international oversight that the show would have to retcon to make any such story work.

-any photos that SHIELD failed to acquire taken from the New Mexico site when people were trying to lift the hammer. I see this as an ideal throwaway reference, an object lesson the agency took about when it is and isn't possible to keep something secret... i.e. Coulson catches Ward yelling at Skye for letting a civilian who saw something magicky go free and tells Ward "Remember New Mexico... hundreds of people saw a legitimate Asgardian artifact, but we let them go and still kept that story down to a few crazy conspiracy theory bloggers"

-The US in the '90s, '00s, and '10s has declassified vast numbers of WWII documents as no longer secret. Are there documents about the Captain America program in declassified military archives, and what kind of people are now trying to read them/steal them/ hide them/reclassify them?

-An actual hacktivist with morals goes up against Skye and the team. He's not part of a terrorist group, he reads everything before he leaks it and redacts things to keep things safe when he judges it necessary, he has thought through the choice he made about leaking and is prepared to go to jail for his crime... and Skye therefore admires him and is tempted by his arguments, but at the same time she sees visible evidence that he is making her job harder.

I'd be interested in these kinds of SHIELD identity crisis questions leading Skye to renew her mistrust of SHIELD and investigate ways to bring her own brand of disinfectant to the agency, but I don't think that's an avenue this show would go down. A better combination of compelling and possible is for Skye to become more and more compromised by the organization's ethical failings... being part of the team forces her to perform actions that she in a past life would have considered evil, so that when the point comes for her when she was prearranged to rendezvous with her old hacker allies, she finds that they won't take her back.