There are TV shows, and then there are Joss Whedon TV shows.
If you're not sure of the difference, if you're not one of Whedon's acolytes,
the difference is this: Joss Whedon TV shows aren't just about the shiny, or
the witty dialogue—although both of those things obviously factor heavily into
every Whedon production—they're about people. Oh sure, you could argue that
every TV show is about people and you wouldn't be wrong, but Whedon shows tend
to focus on the psyche, and what makes us human, what makes us strong, what
makes us want to be better. Whedon shows explore humanity in abnormal
circumstances and scenarios, and they're never really about what they appear to
be about on the surface.
Whedon's four previous series—Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
Buffy's spin-off Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse—all focused on good people
fighting the good fight against whatever evil they came up against, whether it
was a demon in the night or a corrupt organization that had the ability to wipe
personal identities and free will and reprogram humans as it saw fit. They were
all stories about people from all different worlds who fought evil.
Buffy wasn't a pop-culture phenomenon because its main
character was a tiny blonde girl who chased after the monster in a dark alley;
it became a landmark series because it turned every notion we had about horror
and the supernatural on its head, and it did so with heart and comedy. But more
importantly, it was about how "family" means more than just a group
of people who are related by blood. In fact, while most of Whedon's work
doesn't actually involve many blood relatives, the concept of family typically
factors heavily, and Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.—which I will be shortening
to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and probably just S.H.I.E.L.D. by the middle of
October, and maybe eventually I'll get really crazy and go with SHIELD—is no
different. So let's take a second to review what we've just learned about the
members of this new S.H.I.E.L.D. family, shall we?
Much like every other Whedon production, Agents of
S.H.I.E.L.D. will be a procedural with season-long arcs that tell a
bigger story. Eventually, once the series establishes itself, I wouldn't be
surprised if it pushed the procedural to the back burner, and brought the
character development to the forefront. That's where Whedon shows really
excel. And the pilot had everything you could ask for from a
Whedon production: heart, witty dialogue, and enough action to keep even
the most ADD viewers interested. But perhaps most importantly, it had the
patented Whedon Deeper Meaning of Life Speech, which I've transcribed here
because it perfectly sums up the underlying message of the series. As Gunn
became potentially more volatile in response to S.H.I.E.L.D.
trying to contain him—lest he he explode, taking out two city
blocks—he said:
Brett Dalton stars as Agent Ward, who I will be referring to
as Agent Handsome for the rest of the series. Ward is your typical hard-ass
who's all about the job and probably eats his frozen dinners by himself. He
also likely believes emotions are a weakness, hates puppies, and doesn't play
well with others. In the premiere, Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) explained
to Agent Handsome that in her files, Agent Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) had
described Handsome's "people skills" via an illustration of a little
poop with knives sticking out of it. Hill explained later that it was actually
a porcupine, but whatever, poop + knives is way better.
Then there's Skye, though that's totally not her real name.
She's played by Chloe Bennet (who, btw, was one of our nine actors who deserve
to break out this season), and she's a hacker. We don't know much else about
her yet, but it's probably safe to assume she didn't have the best childhood,
and was probably forced to raise herself. She's great at improvising, always
has really great hair in the middle of a crisis, and she's smarter than all of
us combined. She was able to break into S.H.I.E.L.D.'s database, and she knows
how to erase people's entire identity from government databases. If she could make
my driver's license picture go away forever, that would be super cool.
Making up the science-y part of the team—a staple of all
Whedon shows (think Willow in Buffy, Fred in Angel,
Kaylee and Simon in Firefly, and Topher in Dollhouse) are
FitzSimmons, a.k.a. Leo Fitz (Iain De Caestecker), who's in charge of
engineering, and Jemma "I'm not Hermione!" Simmons (Elizabeth
Henstridge), who's a biochemistry whiz. They like to talk over each other
a lot, and they seem to get along as well as they fight. Ming-Na's
Melinda May—the veteran team member who's only function is "to drive
the bus"—is a puzzle, because we still don't know why she's been out
of the field for so many years. MYSTERY.
And lastly, but perhaps most importantly, is Agent Phil Coulson,
who you'll remember bit the dust in The Avengers. He is the leader
of this clan, but how he came to be where he is is shrouded in secrecy.
Not even Coulson knows what really happened to him. He claimed he stopped
breathing for eight seconds after being "shanked by the
Asgardian Mussolini," and then spent several weeks in Tahiti
recuperating. Also, the Avengers don't know he's alive (which is the easy
way out of explaining why Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Hemsworth won't be
stopping by the TV series).
It was clear very early on that Coulson doesn't know
the truth about his own resurrection (was it a resurrection?), as
was made clear by an ominous exchange between Shepherd Book (okay fine,
Ron Glass's character on this show is Dr. Streiten) and Agent Hill:
Streiten: "He really doesn't know does
he?"
Hill: "He can never know."
This story undoubtedly goes much deeper than a simple
eight-second death, and I suspect it will be a major arc that plays out
over the course of the first season, or perhaps even longer. And for the
record, I'm not mad that the question of how Coulson is alive wasn't
answered right away, because that would have been awfully cheap. And Whedon is
not cheap.
Speaking of not cheap, as you probably already know, Agents
of S.H.I.E.L.D. is a spin-off of the highly successful,
kajillion-dollar 2012 summer blockbuster The Avengers—though you
don't have to have seen it to understand S.H.I.E.L.D. (However,
you should see it regardless, because it was A.W.E.S.O.M.E.) The series is not
about the superheroes who populate the Marvel Universe, but about the little
guys who "protect people from the news they aren't ready to hear"
(and look out for the helpless/hopeless?).
That being said, the pilot focused heavily on an
"unregistered gifted" played by Whedon alum J. August Richards (Gunn
on Angel). He plays a down-on-his-luck man who put his trust
in a doctor (played by The O.C.'s Shannon Lucio) who
promised she could improve his life. Unfortunately, and you'll know this if you
saw Ironman 3 (or read the comics), what she did
instead was pump him full of Extremis, a
highly unstable new drug/serum that was supposed to create super soldiers. Did
I mention it was unstable? Because it is, and people who've been injected
with Extremis usually eventually explode because human bodies cannot
handle it. So Gunn (okay, the character's name is actually Mike Peterson
but I will call him Gunn because I want to and I can) was basically a
ticking bomb. Sounds awesome! Where do I sign up?
The Extremis pumping through Gunn's blood made him extremely
volatile. And after kidnapping Skye to "protect her from the scary men in
dark suits" (she's said the same thing to him earlier in the pilot,
right before she yanked his ID out of his pocket—sneaky!), and also so
she could work her hacker magic to erase his identity so he and his son
could start over, he completely lost his cool when he
realized that Skye had alerted S.H.I.E.L.D. to their location. And for a
second it looked like he was about to take out Union Station. Obviously, the
new S.H.I.E.L.D. team that Coulson had assembled was able to save Gunn's life,
because you not only can't kill off J. August Richards in the pilot, but
because that's what this team does. They take relatively small (compared to the
Battle of New York), odd, unexplicable (to the mass public) situations and
diffuse them.
Gunn: "I'm not like that other guy. It
matters who I am inside. If I'm a good person. If I'm strong... You said
if we worked hard, if we did right, we'd have a place. You said it was enough
to be a man, but there's better than man—there's gods. And the rest of us? What
are we? They're giants. We're what they step on."
Coulson: "I've seen giants up close, and
that privilege cost me nearly everything. But the good ones, the real deal,
they're not heroes because of what they have that we don't—it's what they do
with it. You're right, it matters who you are."
The Agents of S.H.I.E.LD. pilot was exactly
what we expected to be. You needn't be a Whedon fan to enjoy this series,
because it's shaping up to a fun action series that will probably tug on
our heartstrings as much as it will pull out all sorts of cool gadgets and
gizmos and take down lots of bad guys. There will be plenty of humor,
but there will be plenty of real danger, too. The speech at the end
of this first episode was typical Whedon, but it worked because it
solidified what the show is about: people, and who those people are on the
inside. It doesn't matter that they're not genius, billionaire, playboy
philanthropists, or the Chosen One. Because being human, and being the best
that you can be, is what's important. Believing in yourself, that's what
makes everyone a hero (in their own way).
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