Yesterday I finished catching up with the last two episodes of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (From now on referred to as AoS) and I thought I'd weigh in on the show and it's current trajectory. When AoS was announced back in May last year I was super excited. Then in September when it came, I liked the first episode a lot. The second episode I liked a little less...then the third one I liked less than that and so on for a few more and I dropped it. After seeing Captain America: The Winter Soldier however, (you can read my review here) I was excited to see how the events in that film would effect the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which includes AoS. Plus, once Cap came out, Clark Gregg started posting about how everyone was missing out by not watching AoS too. So, I picked it back up this month and caught up to the finale, which aired this last week.
I really enjoyed AoS, once it figured out what it wanted to do. One of the big problems with TV culture these days is that nothing gets a chance. If it's not good right off the bat it's dropped like a bad habit. But a first season of a tv show is rarely great, and even if it is, you can almost guarantee the writers and directors don't have a handle on what it should be like until about half a season in. This for me was the problem with AoS. That first episode directed by Joss Whedon set up a good tone for the show, and the dialogue was okay, the next set of episodes were nowhere near that level. The best written character on the show is by far Agent Coulson, and that's because he's been in the MCU since the first Iron Man film, so his character is the most fleshed out, they knew how to write for him. Everyone else in the main cast was brand new and they weren't sure how to handle them and the situations they might be in. Between having to find it's footing and the ridiculous scheduling that ABC put it through (It started in September 2013 and just finished up this week, and 8 month first season) the ratings plummeted rather quickly. While AoS is still doing solid at around 5 1/2 million people per episode, the first episode had over 12 million, they lost over half the original audience of the first episode.
AoS really picked up for me around episode 9, named "Repairs." By episode 9, AoS stopped fiddling around with extraneous one-off stories and started answering the question a lot of people wanted to know, how did Coulson survive his death in Avengers? And then soon after, they unleash the tie-in episodes based around The Winter Soldier, and what happens in that movie directly effects this show. By episode 16, named "End of the Beginning" We are fully immersed in not only the Marvel world and the ripple effects from The Winter Soldier, but AoS starts tying everything we saw in the early half of the season back together with everything else that has happened, and makes for a very compelling and interesting watch.
It had to be hard making the first season of AoS. On one hand, it's supposed to be an enjoyable standalone show to the films. On the other hand, it's also supposed to be an underlying continuity keeper for the MCU. This presents you with two opposite goals, plot-wise. AoS both needs to create it's own interesting storylines that can function without the films of the MCU, yet it also needs to both tie in and reverberate the films of the MCU. While I do think AoS has so far achieved that goal, it took them until about halfway through this 22 episode season to get to that point. Since the show is the first of it's kind to do this kind of task and it's in it's first season, I didn't expect it to get the balance right at first, but a lot of people expected it to just be as instantly good as the movies that surround it. I'm happy to say now that I think AoS has achieved that goal, and will be interesting to see how they tie in to things in the future (especially the Netflix series) but it did half a rough first half.
The biggest problem for me in that first half is that the episodes were all serialized pursuits of items that came around based on the film properties. While an alright idea in itself for an episode or two, they really focus on it for nearly the first whole half, and that becomes tiring. The biggest thing everyone wanted for this series was to tie in to the rest of the universe, and when it seemed the show's answer to that was an alien staff, or an alien energy thing, or an Asguardian item, it felt like a cop-out. I don't blame the show for this problem either, they didn't know how they were going to approach this universe in relation to everything else and it takes awhile to figure that kind of thing out. Once they set in motion the reveal of Tahiti and the effects of The Winter Soldier, the show seemed to find it's voice. The characters while sometimes a little far-fetched, fit better than they did early on, and their dialogue improved as the writer's found the characters voices.
What I really liked as the season went on was the improvement in the other character's. We're introduced to the series through Agent Ward, a cold, barely emotive character. For the first good handful of episodes they kept trying to put him into character moments where he is supposed to warm up, and for the most part...he doesn't. I'm not slighting the actor who plays him at all either, because as the plot develops towards the end of the season you can totally see why Ward stays cold and barely tries normal reactions to things. The problem however was trying to make your lead character the guy who doesn't emote. Throughout the series we get immense developments in Skye, or real protagonist through the show, as well as in Agent May and even Fitz & Simmons. By the second half of the season, I knew who they were, and I cared way more about them and Coulson than I ever did about Ward.
So basically this was a long-winded review in which I say to check out the show. If you haven't seen it yet or dumped it in the first 6-8 episodes, give it a chance. Forgive the show the first half of the season, but don't skip it. A lot of the plot points early on are still relevant later in the season, so it's still valuable to watch for the overall arc of the show, but it's handled much clumsier than it would be later on. I for one am super excited about the future of AoS and how they'll incorporate the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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