Week 13: Repairs, The Bridge

Repairs: hey, we have a telekinetic lady who can’t control her powers, let’s put her on a plane and fly around with her. What’s the worst that could happen?

Also, you kinda ruin the surprise when you cast a known actor as the guy who was supposed to die prior to ever meeting his character on-screen.

Repairs: Kelly and I got to talking about this show's insistence on spoiling its own mysteries (showing us Tobias before we knew what was happening), and she rightly pointed out that TV has changed a lot in ten years. AOS came from the broadcast era of television, when the audience was not expected to pay attention and supposedly needed everything spoon-fed to them, especially with commercial breaks. Now we're in a streaming era, when a show can drag out a good mystery for most of a season, and in fact can build some pretty good buzz online by making viewers wonder what's happening. Anyway, despite the gaping logical flaw that Erik mentioned, this was a decent episode, going dark with May's backstory and the villain's fate, while more or less successfully going light with the pranking subplot. Even Coulson's love of antiques, which in worse episodes threatens to substitute for personality, felt like it fit here. (6/10)

The Bridge: I love it when disparate stories come together, like a good long RPG campaign. I don't know if "Eye Spy" was written with the intention that Centipede was behind the ocular technology or if that's a retcon, but either way it's exciting to see the show tie threads together, something that I expect will continue. I liked the twisty plot and the heart-to-heart between Coulson and Peterson. I didn't like the broadly evil Po, who needs his villainy toned down a notch or two. And I'm confused about why Peterson didn't get the tracking odor onto Coulson, knowing that Coulson was the real abduction target. That felt like it was done solely for the benefit of the viewing audience, not something that would plausibly happen in-world.

But what I liked least was the casual sexism, first in the ogling of Peterson's body and then much worse in the gross discussion of "classes about women." Do Coulson and Ward seriously think that Women's Studies is about how to pick up women? Are they incapable of thinking about women as anything other than a date or a sex partner? Ugh, what disgusting writing. I've been annoyed by the show's sexism before, but it's getting really glaring. And I want to blame the time period, but this was 2013! Kelly said the scene felt like something from the 1990s or earlier. Still, the callback to Coulson once being in love with a cellist was a nice little touch. (5/10)