Last night on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Lucy Lawless! Yes! There’s no way this episode can rate below a 7 with Lucy Lawless here. My first review of the season will be full of joy and laughter and the Queen of All Lady Action Stars! What could go wrong?
Spoiler Alert: Everything. I had high hopes for Tuesday’s season premiere. The title alone, “Shadows”, sounds like the moral ambiguity of S.H.I.E.L.D. may have had a good chance of taking center stage. I mean, that’s what we love about S.H.I.E.L.D., right? Captain America, Iron Man, Thor—they all have to operate with a certain amount of good intentions and clean-cut morality, but S.H.I.E.L.D. gets into the back alleys of the super power game. And the episode certainly starts out in a good place, as the opening scene features another certifiable lady of action, Peggy Carter, leading the charge into a Hydra base in 1945. She’s flanked by Dum Dum Dugan and Jim Morita, and with this scaled-down version of the Howling Commandos, we get a little taste of what the upcoming Agent Carter might look like. Still under the moniker of S.S.R., they shoot up the base and steal the Hydra tech, along with a strange geometric alien object (eventually called the Obelisk). We don’t know much about the alien tech, except that touching it with a bare hand is bad. Spoiler Alert: Someone’s going to touch it with a bare hand.
That’s for later though, as we instantly cut to Skye zip lining down into a warehouse. She’s apparently gone up a level in badassery, as she’s also been outfitted in all black and gifted a flat iron. Black Widow would be proud. Her back up crew is made up of May and Triplett, and they’re spying on some rogue agents trading S.H.I.E.L.D. secrets. Pretty bland spy stuff, but then LUCY LAWLESS appears. She’s the buyer for these classified secrets. Ironic since, as of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, all of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s secrets are on the internet. Just as the deal is about to go down, a bulletproof golem super human breaks into the room, stealing the info and killing the turncoat agents. Skye, May, and Triplett blow their cover by shooting at the intruder, but it doesn’t matter, as it turns out Hartley (Lucy Lawless) and her gang are actually working with our heroes. This becomes a bit of an unintentional theme for the episode. We’re constantly being offered twists with very little set up. A note for the producers here, because I like to be helpful: It’s not a twist—an upturning of the expected reality—if you don’t offer the audience an established reality in the first place.
As we move along, it seems Hartley and her mercenaries are going to be joining our regular cast. New characters could definitely help. Sure let’s go for it. I mean we don’t dwell on any of them, except for Hartley and her second in command, Hunter. And maybe that’s a good thing, since we’re still having trouble negotiating the relationships between our original cast of characters. Apparently, no one has seen Coulson for a while, and the father/daughter relationship between him and Skye that was pushed so hard last season, is pretty much gone. It’s a blessing and a curse, because now the only truly affectionate relationship left on the show is the one between Fitz and Simmons. We catch up with the two in a brief lab scene where Simmons shows saint-like patience in dealing with Fitz. It seems his trip to death’s door at the end of last season has resulted in damage to his temporal lobe, so while he’s still a genius, his vocabulary has taken a major blow. I’m not sure if this is how actual damage to the temporal lobe would manifest, but I’ll take it, as long as it means the dream team gets to stay together. Spoiler Alert: They don’t.
Hartley briefly mentions her own trip to Budapest—which, seriously Marvel, is Budapest some kind of jinx, or was this all the same mission to Budapest? I could definitely get behind a mission where Hawkeye, Black Widow, and Xena run around taking out bad guys, but you’ve got to give a girl more than just a casual name toss now and again. Anyway, we figure out that bulletproof monk is none other than Carl Creel. 10 Points Marvel! I’m throwing you a piñata party with streamers for stepping up and using a character from the comics as a villain (Check out Journey Into Mystery #114). It’s one of my primary bones to pick with this show. Marvel has an amazing library of characters, and while we had a few last season, I’m really hoping they’ll draw more on that library now. Basically Creel’s powers are a mix between Colossus and Rouge. He can absorb the chemical structure of any element he touches, and change himself into that element. Here he’s on hire for Hydra, who is after that Obelisk taken from them back in 1945.
Coulson and the team don’t know about the Obelisk yet, just that Creel is after a certain container that’s only mention has been in a file in Fury’s office. They do figure out the Hydra connection, which means Skye has to take a trip into vault D. It’s set up so that she’s the only person who can do it because of her amazing hacker skills, but really it’s because that’s where they’ve locked away Ward. Yep he’s alive, and in custody, and willing to sell out Hydra in any way he can for nothing (not even his freedom) in return. But he’ll only talk to Skye. After a bit of back and forth between the two, Ward finally offers up some useful information on how they can track down Hydra. Coulson reveals that this is exactly why they’re keeping Ward around, but when it’s mentioned that Ward could have a possible ulterior motive, he says he doesn’t care. Um, Coulson, not to tell you how to do your job or anything, but a lack of questioning why the bad guy would want to be locked up in your top secret facility is how you ended up with a Chitauri staff through your sternum. Still don’t care? Nope? Okay.