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eleanorjaneEpisode thoughts, spoilery! This may well have been the episode that sold me on the show for good.
I thought it was very well-executed, and the interactions between Coulson & May, to a lesser extent Ward & Skye, and most of all between Jemma & Leo... so very well done.
I like the way they're handling Coulson's renewal and recovery, and the closing scenes of the ep bode well for Coulson being even more awesome in future. And May's gentle handling of him, speaking to years of friendship and intimacy, was just lovely.
I really liked Ward's moment of wanting to hurt somebody, to punish them, and I like his anguish and frustration over not being able to protect "you all". Which is a huge step for somebody with a guy who spends the first episode bitching to anyone who'll listen about how he's a solo operator. In many ways he and Skye are on the same trajectory, from solo kid with attitude to team player and family member. They can probably understand each other better than anyone else on the team, and looked at in that light, I'm a lot happier with the potential future Ward/Skye they're likely to develop.
And oh, god, the Simmons/Fitz stuff was so good. That one hit me close to home, for various reasons, and that moment when Fitz retorts that Simmons has always been beside him, and you see the stakes of this hit home for both of them - that moment was lovely, and I must confess it did nearly make me cry.
So, yeah. If the show can keep this up, I will be very happy. :)
I suspect one reason why the show's not quite hitting the right notes for some members of MCU/Avengers fandom is that it's really not within the mold of the SHIELD we expect. We're used to the spy agency which exists in fanfic to provide missions for some combination of Natasha, Clint and Steve, or to provide a new challenge for Darcy Lewis to be awesome at.
And the SHIELD we see on the show isn't that agency; this is a team of monster-hunters, not operatives of a politically-active intelligence agency. I'm sure the fandom vision of SHIELD exists in parallel, really, because that's a place where people like Melinda May and Grant Ward would feel at home. But the show's lens on SHIELD doesn't feel like the agency that fanworks have primed us to expect, which isn't the show's fault, but is probably causing some cognitive dissonance. I know it did for me until I came to grips with it.
I like this SHIELD, though. I think I would like the covert spy agency version more, because I love spies and have many feelings about them (SPY DADDY ♥), but now that I have adjusted my expectations accordingly, I am pretty much okay with what we have. I can always get that other SHIELD from fanfic anyway. :)
I thought it was very well-executed, and the interactions between Coulson & May, to a lesser extent Ward & Skye, and most of all between Jemma & Leo... so very well done.
I like the way they're handling Coulson's renewal and recovery, and the closing scenes of the ep bode well for Coulson being even more awesome in future. And May's gentle handling of him, speaking to years of friendship and intimacy, was just lovely.
I really liked Ward's moment of wanting to hurt somebody, to punish them, and I like his anguish and frustration over not being able to protect "you all". Which is a huge step for somebody with a guy who spends the first episode bitching to anyone who'll listen about how he's a solo operator. In many ways he and Skye are on the same trajectory, from solo kid with attitude to team player and family member. They can probably understand each other better than anyone else on the team, and looked at in that light, I'm a lot happier with the potential future Ward/Skye they're likely to develop.
And oh, god, the Simmons/Fitz stuff was so good. That one hit me close to home, for various reasons, and that moment when Fitz retorts that Simmons has always been beside him, and you see the stakes of this hit home for both of them - that moment was lovely, and I must confess it did nearly make me cry.
So, yeah. If the show can keep this up, I will be very happy. :)
I suspect one reason why the show's not quite hitting the right notes for some members of MCU/Avengers fandom is that it's really not within the mold of the SHIELD we expect. We're used to the spy agency which exists in fanfic to provide missions for some combination of Natasha, Clint and Steve, or to provide a new challenge for Darcy Lewis to be awesome at.
And the SHIELD we see on the show isn't that agency; this is a team of monster-hunters, not operatives of a politically-active intelligence agency. I'm sure the fandom vision of SHIELD exists in parallel, really, because that's a place where people like Melinda May and Grant Ward would feel at home. But the show's lens on SHIELD doesn't feel like the agency that fanworks have primed us to expect, which isn't the show's fault, but is probably causing some cognitive dissonance. I know it did for me until I came to grips with it.
I like this SHIELD, though. I think I would like the covert spy agency version more, because I love spies and have many feelings about them (SPY DADDY ♥), but now that I have adjusted my expectations accordingly, I am pretty much okay with what we have. I can always get that other SHIELD from fanfic anyway. :)