3052 replies to this topic

[Powered Convoy]

Yeah, don't bother.

[Sabrblade]

are we even still trying to fit this in with the movies? 

 

Well, why else would they have used the 

Spoiler

Quantum Realm (complete with its exact design and function from the films)

if not as a tie-in to the movies?

 

And only two episodes ago did young Garrett directly mention having watched Loki kill Coulson via the Timestream.

[Dvandom]

The thing is, the movies have never acknowledged events in the show, which makes it feel like the movie is in its own nearby timeline that diverged with Coulson being revived.  In main MCU, Coulson stayed dead, none of the show's events took place.  In the AoS timeline, he came back and all of the show's events happened, including some impact on the events as seen in the movies.  Not much impact, since the big beats still happened as in the movies, but you'd have at least had some background appearances or mentions here and there.  It's still possible they share one timeline, it just seems more likely that they don't.

 

---Dave

[Destron D-69]

I'll think of it as the Razorbeast beastwars comics of the MCU then... just a smidge out of phase... events happening in one timeline if they're large enough will effect both... but large events in the other timeline have no effect on the other...

 

that's why Captain Marvel didn't explode all these timeboy ships 

[Dake]

 

are we even still trying to fit this in with the movies? 

 

Well, why else would they have used the 

Spoiler

Quantum Realm (complete with its exact design and function from the films)

if not as a tie-in to the movies?

 

And only two episodes ago did young Garrett directly mention having watched Loki kill Coulson via the Timestream.

 

 

By it's very nature

Spoiler

the Quantum Realm is outside of the timelines,

so that doesn't really signify anything.

 

But yeah - whether it was at Coulson's first revival or somewhere else thereabouts, AOS diverted from the main timeline a long time ago. Like Dvandom says, some things were already in motion which would allow for stuff like Cap 2 and some of the other big events still happening, but there were plenty of events in AOS that would not have gone unanswered in the same timeline as the MCU.

[Sabrblade]

The films were never going to reference the show since doing so might have confused casual moviegoers who only watch the films and don't watch the show.

 

That Endgame referenced Agent Carter by featuring James D'Arcy as Edwin Jarvis is an abnormality, if an awesome one.

[Dvandom]

Oh, the movies could have had easter egg level references to AoS if they'd wanted to.  For instance, Rogue One having a background reference to General Syndulla didn't require Star Wars moviegoers to follow the Rebels show, but still acknowledged that the show existed.

 

---Dave

[Kup]

Closest we got was Fury mentioning old friends, which would have been the right spot to reintroduce Coulson.

Imagine, theyre on the helicarrier. Fury says that line.

Coulson: Hello Stark.
Tony: Phil? I thought you died.
Coulson sighs: Tahiti. Its a magical place.
Hill and Fury look at him, smile, and we continue on with Age of Ultron.

Casual viewers think he got some R&R to heal, AoS fans know the true story, and we move on.

A 10 second scene. Thats all it needed. A quick cameo like the Iron Man 3 kid or Jarvis in Endgame. It legitimizes SHIELD as a series but doesnt kill the flow of the movie.

Edited by Kup, 17 August 2020 - 10:19 AM.

[Nevermore]

I have only one real criticism with the finale, and that's the fact that

 

Spoiler

we never learn what exactly the Chronicoms' endgame was other than "conquer Earth". It makes even less sense with the existence of an alternate timeline with an alternate version of Sybil.

 

Remember, the Chronicoms were originally "neutral observers" that would only engage in the case of an extinction-level event. It was only after their homeworld had been destroyed by Izel and the Shrike that the Hunters took charge. Why the hell would they be targeting Earth in the alternate timeline if their homeworld was still fine in 1983? Wouldn't it be much easier to simply prevent Izel from destroying their homeworld more than 30 years later, assuming that would even still be happening to begin with?

 

Wasn't their original plan to conquer Earth and turn it into their new homeworld? It would appear that somewhere along the way, they completely lost sight of their original goal, and their only goal going forward was to destroy SHIELD and kill Fitz because... because. And then pants, and then profit, or whatever.

 

Seriously, their evil plan was poorly explained. In the end, they were only conquerors, even though they were supposedly still the "good guys" in 1983 in the original timeline, since Enoch certainly didn't seem like an outlier among his people during season 5.

 

Spoiler

Other than that, the only other thing that slightly bugged me was that we never got to see an epilogue for Deke in the alternate timeline. Did he rebuild SHIELD? Did he assemble the Avengers there? Come one, give us something?

 

What I really liked about the last episode was how they

 

Spoiler

creatively used time-travel in a "stable time loop" way for their own tactical advatage. Traveling to a point in time shortly before they departed in order to confuse their enemies was exactly the ingenuous move I'd have expected from a bunch of smart, genre-savvy agents. Which makes those episodes where they had drunk the stupid juice for the sake of "drama" all the more jarring.

 

The one thing I pretty much expected was the line about

 

Spoiler

them never being "together in the same room again" being extremely literal. Though I seriously have to wonder if they really never all meet up again in person ever again. That'd still be a bummer.

 

I'm still not entirely on board with

 

Spoiler

the Daisy/Sousa pairing, although at this point I'm just happy she finally gets together with a guy without being a disaster magnet for him, and Danny-boy is pretty much the most straight-up guy I could possibly imagine, and he's a trooper, so even if I don't think the two of them really work as characters, I'm just happy to see both of them getting a happy ending. And Daisy can bond with her sister as well!

 

One more minor nitpick:

 

Spoiler

How old is Victoria Hand supposed to be in season 1 if she was already a SHIELD agent in 1983? And come on, I know the multicolor hair is there so the dumb people in the audience recognize her, but that sure doesn't look like what anyone in 1983 would do with their hair, let alone an agent of a government organization.

 

Also, just because I cannot stress this enough:

 

Spoiler

ENVER GJOKAJ IS AN AWESOME ACTOR. Seriously. That guy is ridiculously talented, and he seems almost always underutilized in most of the stuff he's in. This guy deserves a starring role in... something.

Edited by Nevermore, 17 August 2020 - 06:55 PM.

[Sabrblade]

Spoiler

Other than that, the only other thing that slightly bugged me was that we never got to see an epilogue for Deke in the alternate timeline. Did he rebuild SHIELD? Did he assemble the Avengers there? Come one, give us something?

Spoiler

Two potential epilogues for him were actually pitched, but weren't shot because it was felt that either would have undercut the emotional development of the finale.

 

One pitched epilogue would have seen him sitting in a SHIELD office as someone walks in, his chair turns around to show his face, revealing Deke to be wearing an eyepatch.

 

The other pitched epilogue would have seen him on a SHIELD mission performing "Money for Nothing" at Madison Square Garden. This is the one that they really wish they could have shot.

Edited by Sabrblade, 18 August 2020 - 09:18 AM.

[Nevermore]

Oh yes, I would have loved the second one.

[Dvandom]

I'd settle for a professionally drawn poster/still of Deke and his Alternate Avengers (Deathlok, good Graviton, Mockingbird, Ghost Rider, Sif, maybe others) about to face Thanos.

 

---Dave

[Nevermore]

So I have recently begun rewatching the show from the very beginning. With hindsight of what is going to happen, I am not only able to notice a lot of things I haven't noticed before, but also to better assess the pacing of the show. At the point of this writing, I'm almost done with season 2, with only the two-part season finale remaining.

 

I feel safe to say that while the second half of season 1 is widely accepted to be better than the first half (especially from "Turn, Turn, Turn" onwards), season 2 is the exact opposite as far as I'm concerned.

 

Now, in hindsight, even though the first few episodes of season 1 are pretty much terrible compared to the later ones, there isn't really a lot that could be skipped since mostly everything eventually ties into the season arc one way or another. Centipede, Raina, Ian Quinn, the Clairvoyant, they're all connected. Even the 0-8-4 from episode 2 eventually reappears in the season finale, when Coulson uses it to blast cyborg John Garrett into pieces.

 

"The Well", the tie-in episode for "Thor: The Dark World", isn't a very good tie-in, unlike of course the two tie-ins for "Captain America: The Winter Soldier", "End of the Beginning" and "Turn, Turn, Turn", which is the point where everyone rightfully says the show is finally starting to get really good.

 

There are a few problems with a subsequent revelation: In the season 2 episode "Making Friends and Influencing People", we learn that Hydra brainwashed Donnie Gill while he was imprisoned at the Fridge. Supposedly, this was expicitly done so he would help them take control of the Fridge. Considering it was John Garrett and Grant Ward who took the Fridge in "Providence", this in itself is questionable. The other problem I have with that is the timeline. Since Hydra needed Gill to take the Fridge, they supposedly weren't really in control before that point, so they probably couldn't have done the brainwashing out in the open, which means it would have taken a lot more time compared to how quickly Daniel Whitehall was able to brainwash Agent 33/Kara Palamas in "Making Friends and Influencing People". Now here comes my breakdown of the timeline: Gill's first appearance is the season 1 episode "Seeds". That episode ends with Coulson making a call to Ian Quinn, who reveals that he's working with the Clairvoyant. This leads to SHIELD hunting for Quinn in the subsequent episode, "T.R.A.C.K.S.". That's the episode with the weird nonlinear storytelling device where they're infiltrating a train in Italy. The episode ends with Daisy (then going by the name "Skye") getting shot by Quinn. This leads straight into the next episode, "T.A.H.I.T.I.", in which John Garrett makes his first appearance and helps finding the GH.325 serum from the Guest House, which is used to save Skye. Following a brief interlude with Lady Sif and rogue Asgardian Lorelei in the episode "Yes Men", which sees Skye recovering from her injuries, we already get to "End of the Beginning", which features the hunt for the Clairvoyant, which leads straight into the big Hydra reveal episode "Turn, Turn, Turn". Following that comes "Providence", in which Ward and Garrett take the Fridge. So the only really time skips are the search for Ian Quinn and Skye's recovery, with "Yes Men" taking place during that latter period. Other than that, the timeline is pretty tightly plotted, which makes it a little hard to believe that Hydra was able to brainwash Gill so quickly inside a mostly SHIELD-controlled facility.

 

A minor detail that makes sense in retrospect is when Ward, under the influence of Lorelei, fights May in "Yes Men". Just as the collar that turns off Lorelei's power is put on her neck, Ward aims his gun at May and pulls the trigger, only to realize that she had managed to remove the ammo clip without him noticing. Ward then says that he's himself again. Since at that time, the audience didn't know yet that Ward was secretly Hydra, it initially seemed that him trying to shoot May had simply overlapped with him being freed from Lorelei's control. However, in retrospect it becomes clear that he was planning to cross off May as a potential future threat to his and Garrett's plans, and then blaming it on him still being under Lorelei's control for a few more seconds. Kudos there.

 

Character relationships are pretty weird in the early episodes. Fitz has a crush on Skye, Skye turns out to be colluding with her hacker boyfriend and then has a bracelet put on her wrist for a few episodes that limits her ability to use computers before she manages to locate Coulson, who has been kidnapped by Centipede. May is secretly reporting to Fury about Coulson's condition. Fitz and Simmons are initially collectively referred to as "Fitz-Simmons" by everyone, and the episode that starts the romantic tension between them is clearly "FZZT", in which Simmons gets infected with a Chitauri virus and Fitz risks his own life trying to help save her. Speaking of viruses, there are episodes in which actors are clearly suffering from a sinus infection based on how their voices sound compared to other episodes. I've become more attentive to this in the wake of the Big Event of 2020. For one of her appearances either in season 1 or season 2, Jaimie Alexander (Lady Sif) has it, and either the episode before or after, it's Elizabeth Henstridge (Simmons), so it stands to reason that there might have been a spread on the set at the time.

 

By the way, the alien writing that eventually turns out to be part of the map to the underground Kree city in season 2 is first seen in the season 1 episode "Eye Spy", when Ward uses special glasses with a hidden camera to infiltrate a base in Belarus in place of Akela Amador, whose eye has been replaced with an implant by an organisation that later turns out to be Centipede. So... did Garrett know at the time that SHIELD had hijacked his operation? If so, why didn't he cross off Amador? Was he just relying on Ward to complete the mission? Then why didn't he kill Amador once he had completed the mission objective? Also, how did that writing end up in a science lab in Belarus when it was a side effect of a drug given to SHIELD operatives as part of the TAHITI program? And how did Garrett know about all of that in the first place long before being given the drug? It's not like this is later ignored - in season 2, Coulson asks Ward about the writing, and Ward explicitly confirms that the first time he saw it was in Belarus.

 

Speaking of drugs - the original Centipede serum is claimed in the pilot episode to be based on Extremis, on which I call bullcrap, since initially its only real effect appears to be "super-strength", plus that pesky "making its users explode" side effect, but what is completely ignored is the original primary purpose of Extremis as seen in Iron Man 3, namely to regrow missing body parts. If the Centipede serum was really based on Extremis, it alone would have already been all Garrett would have needed for his condition. Also, Mike Peterson wouldn't have needed all those cyborg parts either, since he could have just regrown his missing leg and eye. So that mention of "Extremis" is simply there as a movie tie-in reference, with no real relation to the substance as seen in the movie other than the name and vague "dangerously unstable superpowers" capabilities.

 

Anyway. Bill Paxton as John Garrett is already hamming his way through every scene he's in from the moment he first steps on the screen, but once he turns out to be evil, he really begins chewing the scenery. A lot.

 

Fury's eventual explanation for why he did what he did to Coulson, and Coulson just accepting that ("break in case of emergency", Coulson replies that this was meant for the case when an Avenger dies, and Fury replies "exactly"), is pretty weak (what makes this one particular agent so special, other than "plot relevance"?), considering all the build-up to that confrontation in the previous episodes going back all the way to "T.A.H.I.T.I.". Admittedly, not as weak as some of the "explanations" we get in the second half of season 2, but more on that later.

 

The CG is pretty bad at times, as are the greenscreen effects, especially when characters are sitting inside the cockpit of a plane and the lighting on their faces looks extremely off compared to the background outside the plane's windows.

 

I had completely forgotten what a massive and ill-defined organisation pre-"Winter Soldier" SHIELD was. They had official offices in all sorts of countries, with locals among the ranks of their agents, and the authority to freely operate in those countries with full approval of local authorities, including an office in Hong Kong! How exactly did that work?

 

Before Ward turned out to be a traitor, there was some romantic tension being set up between him and Skye/Daisy. I assume a lot of fans were shipping them at the time. Obviously, all of that quickly went out of the window once he had his face-heel turn. Brett Dalton completely changed his approach to playing the character following that reveal, going from the reserved professional who doesn't like getting too attached to a very creepy, unstable psychopath who somehow still thinks there's a future for him and Skye. However, his continued murder spree keeps burning all the bridges he is still trying to build, and season 2 only continues that trend. I'd be curious to know how many people were still shipping them after he brutally murdered Eric Koenig.

 

Another thing that bothered me was the behavior of some of the characters in "Repairs". So they have a woman in their custody on the Bus whom they assume to have dangerous, potentially deadly superpowers, and Fitz and Simmons think this is a good time to play pranks on Skye? While they're on a mission? This cannot wait? Seriously? Also, May plays a prank on Fitz at the end of the episode, which is supposed to harken back to her more light-hearted personality pre-Bahrain, but ends up being completely out of character for the rest of the series. And I'm seriously supposed to believe a superstitious woman who believes in literal demons and being abandoned by God is working as a laboratory safety supervisor at a high tech company that experiments with inter-dimensional portals?

 

We never really get an explanation for why Coulson would keep up pretending that he's dead to the Avengers, and really only to them. Maria Hill knows he's alive, General Glenn Talbot knows he's alive, and I have a hard time believing he would keep this a secret from his superiors. The conspiracy to maintain the official status of Coulson as deceased becomes more and more absurd as the show progresses, and the occiasional allusions (insisting that he prefered Thor learned from him rather than from Sif, or telling Maria Hill to say hello to Tony Stark, only to remember that Stark still believes him to be dead) aren't really helping. It soon seems that Coulson is really only deliberately withholding that information from the Avengers, while being completely okay with the rest of the world knowing just as long as these particular people don't find out, for reasons that are never explained. I can only hope he eventually told them at some point prior to "Age of Ultron", since the pretense is never brought up again in season 2. However, I seem to recall it still being relevant in season 4, since wasn't that one of the main reasons for installing Jeffrey Mace as the new Director of SHIELD so they could go public again without Coulson being out in the open? What the hell.

 

Those are just the things I remember from rewatching season 1. Next up: Season 2, and how the second half is much worse than I remembered it. 

Edited by Nevermore, 18 January 2021 - 05:57 PM.