Week 90: BOOM, The Man Behind the Shield

BOOM: This was a pleasant hour, using its multiple remote filming locations to freshen things up. I appreciated the little symbolic detail of Agnes Kitsworth's necklace being an ouroboros; that's clever on multiple levels. I've talked enough about the show's morality and don't want to dwell further on it, but I have to acknowledge Alphonso Mackenzie refusing to compel a dying woman to work for S.H.I.E.L.D., which was welcome but also a sign of just how wide this show's window of acceptable behavior has become. I wouldn't say that I rooted for Senator Snotty Pants to die, but if the show was done with her, getting killed by her own collaboration with dumbass terrorists was deserved, especially with the nice touch of disproving Daisy Johnson's callous predictions. I could have done without that death being called "villain-on-villain violence" as if the characters know they're in a comic-book universe. I also resented the Hollywood trope of a late-stage terminally ill person still looking like a Vogue cover model; I kept expecting Agnes to take off her wig or stumble over her words or something to indicate that she's in the final days (weeks?) of living with a brain tumor. I don't buy the Superior casually reading the Darkhold when he's so opposed to extraterrestrial threats. The physics are questionable, but I really enjoyed the big action showpiece of Quake's battle with Tucker Shockley, and the way that Leo Fitz effortlessly made a containment unit for the exploding man; a lot of death and suffering could have been prevented if the comic-book version had been so quickly outsmarted. I'm still waiting for the show to reveal that more characters are LMDs and/or are trapped within the Framework without realizing it, because that seems like such a natural twist at this point; Holden Radcliffe discovering that Aida has killed him and replaced him with an LMD seems the likeliest because it would be so poetic. (7/10)

The Man Behind the Shield: I've avoided talking about it so far because I didn't know where the show was going with it, but now I have to ask: What do you think of the romantic pairing of Melinda May and Phil Coulson? Before this season, I had been low-key shipping them because I had some lingering fondness for both characters, I wanted them to find the happiness that had eluded them in prior relationships, and I thought that the age difference setting them apart from the rest of the characters (they feel like "Mom and Dad") might bring them closer together. But there wasn't really any chemistry between the actors, and because so much mass-media entertainment insists on romantic pairings, I wanted to applaud one of the few shows that normalized colleagues of mixed gender just working together like professional adults. (Well, at least when it came to Coulson and May. I've talked enough about the show's very damaging portrayals of other pairs.) All of that said, now that the show is going there, I find myself a little bit more annoyed with it in each passing hour: Not only does it feel perfunctory and forced by the plot, but it is once again highlighting just how crazy and evil Coulson is under the charismatic surface. We've seen him become obsessive about doing terrible things in secret, like carving the Kree symbols into the wall, hunting Grant Ward to murder him, and forcing Werner von Strucker into the torturous memory machine. Now he's keeping an android copy of May inside HQ because he can't bear to destroy her, and apparently his LMD has reactivated her and is acting out Coulson's romantic feelings towards her, which is disturbing. This series launched with so much potential to spend time with the quiet little "nice guy" of the MCU, but just as "nice guys" in real life often turn out to be creeps and jerks, Coulson has slowly revealed himself to be reprehensible. I do not expect to remember him fondly when the series is over.

The rest of the episode is better. I enjoyed the flashbacks to Coulson and May's first assignment, and Coulson's line about starting to wear sunglasses got me to laugh, as did Agent Davis taking offense at Leo Fitz not trusting him to protect Jemma Simmons. Aida's lessons in cruelty -- the Watchdogs' submarine is no place to raise an impressionable android! -- have a satisfying payoff at the end that is juuust believable enough. The tension of FitzSimmons discovering the four LMD replacements at the end is excellent and promises to deliver more of the intra-agency paranoia that this show does so well. I liked the suggestive use of light throughout the episode, from dramatizing the loneliness and isolation felt by Jeffrey Mace, to silhouetting Coulson against the wall of photographs to illustrate that he's "the man in the shadows" behind it all, to a more junior Coulson asking May to hold up her flashlight to reinforce that he needs her help to accomplish his work. Even though it didn't make any sense tactically or physically, I liked Alphonso Mackenzie using a rocket launcher to blow a hole in the side of the submarine base, because sometimes the simplest pleasures are the best ones. The fight between Daisy Johnson and Anton Ivanov was satisfying, although I have no clue why Johnson simply left him behind, unconscious in the rubble; isn't he one of the most wanted men in the world and a man who'd made it his life's work to attack both S.H.I.E.L.D. and inhumans? (7/10)