Week 19: The Only Light in the Darkness, Nothing Personal

The Only Light in the Darkness: So many problems in this episode:

1) The misogyny is everywhere. Women are treated like objects, including literally when Fitz is asked to name an object in the box on his beach and he creepily says Simmons. The treatment of Audrey the cellist as a pawn to motivate men is gross. Why not write a story about Coulson considering retirement from S.H.I.E.L.D. now that the organization to which he devoted his life is in ruins, and Audrey could be a part of the crossroads at which he finds himself? Wouldn't that be better than Coulson just leering at her, obsessing about her, and refusing to give her a choice in the matter? How do these events as written affect Coulson?

2) The villain is severely underdeveloped. Blackout is an old comics villain, so I know a bit about him from the page, but on screen he's barely defined at all. Is he truly romantically obsessed with Audrey? I ask because he doesn't seem to have made any overtly romantic gesture. In fact, when he enters the auditorium, he tells her, "you're the one who can save me," which could be read as a creepy stalker idolizing her, or in a world of weird-ass sci-fi nonsense like this, could be read as her music offering a way to free him from his powers, via some mumbo-jumbo that FitzSimmons could explain. But he doesn't get to say another sentence before the team splatters him dead. Oof! This show makes it really, really hard to root for the "good" guys.

3) The subplot at the Providence base -- the lie detector, the murder of Koenig, Ward nearly pulling a gun on May, Skye realizing the double-cross -- isn't bad per se, just very clichéd, down to the drops of blood falling from the ceiling. If you've seen any show like this, you've seen all of this before. Skye's getting smarter, but it still strikes me as very foolish of her not to alert the rest of the team immediately upon realizing that Ward is Hydra, considering that she could have expected to be dead in 30 seconds at that point. Pull out your phone and text the team right away, Skye!

There was one nice touch, which was Audrey's pretty cello music, and the director's choice to play it over Skye's search for Koenig. I read that actress Amy Acker (hello Person of Interest again) was taught the basics of playing a cello, then original music was composed to match her hand movements, which is kind of neat. But otherwise, this was a stinker of an episode. (3/10)

Nothing Personal: I said that the Skye/Ward subplot in the last episode wasn't bad, just very clichéd, and that feeling intensifies here when it becomes the main plot. With the arguable exception of the final scene, nothing happens in this episode that you can't see coming a mile away because so many other shows have covered this same material. That includes the most implausible elements, like how did Deathlok know which street Skye would escape down, and why would S.H.I.E.L.D. bury maximum-clearance data in a coffin? Personally I don't care about the Skye/Ward relationship (I sense no chemistry and more interesting stories are all around), but some viewers must have really liked it, so I don't begrudge the show dwelling on it; I just wish that it was handled with more specific and more surprising writing. Talbot's heavy-handed asperity would be more annoying if he wasn't giving these agents a taste of how they treated other people. The video twist at the end seemed to tie up the Tahiti subplot in a cleverly Ouroboros-like way, depriving Coulson of someone else to hold a grudge against, and I did enjoy the humor in the episode, especially Coulson discovering Deathlok aboard the plane. I also appreciated the last scene with Hill because someone finally said the obvious out loud, that there is no more S.H.I.E.L.D. and that these character should think about their futures; Simmons and especially Fitz would thrive as Stark employees. (4/10)