Nerds in the know have been waiting for this week with
bated breath since just shortly after Robert Downy Jr. and company destroyed
New York last summer. The reason? The premier of ABC’s new show, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (sidebar, typing
out that acronym every time I reference the show is going to get old wicked
fast.) The anticipation for this show? Galactic(us). The hype? Hulk-sized. The
payoff?
Um. Good? Ish?
Let’s start with the technical aspects. The show is competently
written, shot, casted, etc. We are introduced to our heroes, including the
cocky super agent, the snarky super-computer expert, the nerd-bait twin British
scientists and, of course, re-introduced to Agent Coulson, played with continued
understated aplomb by Clark Gregg reprising his role from several of Marvel’s
movies. But wait, you say! Wasn’t Agent Colson killed off in The Avengers as part of a cheap bit of
plot phlebotinum? Turns out there’s more to that story than that, which gives
us another required component of a new action-adventure story – the secret
Byronic mystery of what happened to Our Hero. “He can never know the truth,”
cameo-ing guest star Cobie Smulders mutters to a S.H.I.E.L.D. doctor. Cue
intrigue and the sincere hope by fanboys that Smulders’ Agent Maria Hill
returns to the show just as soon as How I
Met Your Mother wraps its final season.
As for the plotting and the actors, what can you expect? As
per usual, we have a collection of impossibly gorgeous people acting impossibly
gorgeous while gorgeously thwarting evil and tossing around witty rejoinders
faster than Hawkeye could notch those arrows in the movie. The pilot resolves
around our nascent team hunting down a man who has inadvertently revealed
himself to have super powers after he saves a woman from a burning building. Of course, nothing is as it seems and the burning building, the saved woman and even the reluctant super hero are all revealed to have much more going on.Along the way, the Agents recruit the aforementioned beautiful computer-ista
who is also trying to hunt him down, though possibly only so that her blog
could get a few more hits if she lands an interview with him or something. Her
motivations are a little unclear.
Nothing says "malcontent government overthrowing computer expert" like an unbuttoned cardigan.
So we have action, some high-falutin’ special effects, a
bit of the old trademark Whedon dialogue (“with great power comes…,” intones
one of the characters, “…a ton of weird crap you are not prepared to deal with.”),
and a hint of mystery. Add to it that this is all Joss Whedon, King of the
Nerds, being given mostly free reign in one of the nerdiest of playgrounds ever
and it should be a recipe for EPIC nerdgasm.
And here’s the thing: For a lot of people, I think it
will be. I was left a little…underwhelmed, maybe? I thought the episode was
good, even if I honestly had a hard time paying attention to all the scenes. I
noticed after about twenty minutes I was reaching down to play with my phone
instead of devoting myself to each scene. I’m a huge comic book nerd and a devoted Joss
Whedon fan, but I’d be lying if I said that I haven’t been approaching this
entire series somewhat cautiously since I first heard about it.
Whedon is uniformly smart in his writing, but smarts
doesn’t a good TV show make. I didn’t personally find anything about the pilot
that hooked me aside from the Marvel pedigree and the creators’ names. It also
didn’t help that the one character that I was most intrigued by is the one that
lasted the shortest amount of time, dying before the end of the first episode This
could easily be chalked up to pilot-syndrome. First episodes are notoriously
hard to make and can easily crush under their own weight or fail to adequately
capture what the show’s creators are intending to show going forward. Whedon is
also a notoriously slow starter; look at any of his shows that made it past one
season and tell me that they didn’t really start to find their sea-legs until
much later into their run.
I share Coulson's non-nonplussed reaction to the large hyped-up attention ball in the center of everyone's vision.
I’m not ruling out Agents
going forward. Joss Whedon has entertained me enough over the years that he’s
bought the benefit of the doubt from me several times over. As to whether or
not the show will be your new appointment television (there’s going to be an
open spot in a lot of dance cards after Breaking
Bad goes off the air this Sunday), that will likely depend on how much you’re
willing to stick with a hero-less superhero story and the extent to which
Marvel and Whedon’s partnership continues to be a productive one. They’re on
top of the world right now, cinematically speaking, with several movies coming
out in the next nine months and several more planned through 2018. Whether a
weekly show is a rainbow bridge to Asgard too far remains to be seen.
1 comment:
Wait, which character didn't survive the first episode? I did not recall any character death, apart from the "first subject" and the nameless technician from that hologram.
I was engrossed, but that could be situational; I was at work on my lunch break, hopping from TV to TV during commercial breaks in a desperate bid to be left alone so I could watch, so largely for reasons of circumstance I felt compelled to pay attention when I was there. That could just be my circumstances, though.
In large part, I agree with your whole review. It was good, it didn't live up to the hype, it could never have lived up to the hype, but it still could have been better than it was. It was a bit slow, but this is Whedon, and it'll get better.
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