Agents of SHIELD - The Hub
Nov. 19th, 2013 04:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eleanorjaneWe were a bit late watching this one and I have to admit I didn't find it super awesome, for three reasons:
1) I haaaaaaaate the "character is busting in somewhere and has to pretend they belong" trope, and the execution of it in this episode (Jemma & Skye) was the absolute exemplar of what I hate about it. I had to leave the room while Jemma was being awkward at Sitwell.
That's not the show's fault, that's just it pushing one of my squick buttons. (Although I do think it doesn't make sense for the show to let them off the hook the way it did.)
2) I think Skye being incredulous at being out of the loop, and her ongoing lack of understanding of "spies" and "intelligence agency" and "classified", are bizarrely out of character and naive for a counterculture hacker with a special interest in SHIELD. How did she think they operated?
3) I... don't understand the lack-of-extraction scenario. Victoria Hand says "oh, we couldn't give them an extraction because SHIELD resources were needed elsewhere", but in fact Coulson's team extracts Ward & Fitz quite successfully with no harm to SHIELD's overall mission; Coulson's team weren't tasked with any other jobs during the operation, so why couldn't they have been tasked with the extraction in the first place? There's no logical reason at all.
The Doylist explanation is "a need to create drama, and lazy writing in setting it up".
Looking for a Watsonian explanation: Hand is kind of ... weird ... around Coulson, and gives off a few odd emotional cues when Coulson's team performs the extraction. So perhaps it wasn't lazy writing just setting up drama, perhaps it was a deliberate choice to set up future plot elements involving Hand and the bigger SHIELD agency as a whole.
I dunno. I want to give the show credit for setting stuff up for the future, which requires treating the inconsistencies as deliberate choices rather than poor writing. We'll see how well it holds up, I guess!
1) I haaaaaaaate the "character is busting in somewhere and has to pretend they belong" trope, and the execution of it in this episode (Jemma & Skye) was the absolute exemplar of what I hate about it. I had to leave the room while Jemma was being awkward at Sitwell.
That's not the show's fault, that's just it pushing one of my squick buttons. (Although I do think it doesn't make sense for the show to let them off the hook the way it did.)
2) I think Skye being incredulous at being out of the loop, and her ongoing lack of understanding of "spies" and "intelligence agency" and "classified", are bizarrely out of character and naive for a counterculture hacker with a special interest in SHIELD. How did she think they operated?
3) I... don't understand the lack-of-extraction scenario. Victoria Hand says "oh, we couldn't give them an extraction because SHIELD resources were needed elsewhere", but in fact Coulson's team extracts Ward & Fitz quite successfully with no harm to SHIELD's overall mission; Coulson's team weren't tasked with any other jobs during the operation, so why couldn't they have been tasked with the extraction in the first place? There's no logical reason at all.
The Doylist explanation is "a need to create drama, and lazy writing in setting it up".
Looking for a Watsonian explanation: Hand is kind of ... weird ... around Coulson, and gives off a few odd emotional cues when Coulson's team performs the extraction. So perhaps it wasn't lazy writing just setting up drama, perhaps it was a deliberate choice to set up future plot elements involving Hand and the bigger SHIELD agency as a whole.
I dunno. I want to give the show credit for setting stuff up for the future, which requires treating the inconsistencies as deliberate choices rather than poor writing. We'll see how well it holds up, I guess!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-19 11:46 pm (UTC)I've some speculation that SHIELD wanted to test Coulson to see how he'd react, to see how much he's changed/stayed the same after... whatever actually happened to him in the aftermath of being stabbed through the chest.