Week 31: Aftershocks, Who You Really Are

Aftershocks

Opening scene, I thought I was watching an X-Men series, because dude had some serious Nightcrawler vibes going on.

The most interesting parts of this episode were the bookends with Gordon, actually.

Who You Really Are

Lady Sif! Haven't seen you in a while! At first, I thought this was going to be a bottle episode until we started to realize (confirm?) that the Kree are, in some way, behind everything going on with what's going on with Skye.

Aftershocks: I didn't care for the first scene, in which a grieving Skye took responsibility for going into the underground city against orders and causing what happened, and Coulson said it's not her fault (yes it is, Phil), but otherwise this was a pretty good episode. The big events of the last episode really gave the writers a chance to re-calibrate, with some characters showing promising developments. I like Simmons showing more backbone now, even if I don't fully buy her anti-superhuman stance given its awfully convenient timing. (It's rare for a Marvel production to say it out loud, but nobody in that world should trust superhumans, being that power corrupts and all. Ask Alan Moore.)

The SUV ambush tricked me. I could tell that something was up due to Coulson and May talking openly in front of Bakshi, but post-crash I was too distracted thinking about why their SUV didn't have all of the fancy security features of Nick Fury's in Winter Soldier to catch on until the ruse was revealed. It's such a big dumb cliché in action shows when a car is ambushed mid-intersection by a larger vehicle traveling in a perpendicular direction (it felt like Person of Interest's lazy writers leaned on that trope in every other episode), and what especially irks me about it is its improbability: It's extremely hard to know where a car will be at that exact moment and to work out the timing just right. AOS revealing that the interception was all a ruse makes so much more sense.

I really liked the joke that every Radio Shack was secretly a Hydra outpost, which would explain so much. And seeing Hydra's high council wiped out was nice, though it would be nicer if I could trust that this truly was the end of Hydra and their endless self-branding. (I don't think the Nazis had conference tables with giant swastikas on them.) Hydra is too useful to the MCU and to AOS to be completely gone, right? But even better than that sequence was my favorite part of this episode, Fitz covering for Skye and her fully accepting responsibility for what happened. Fitz badly needs improvement, and assuming he's not helping Skye because he wants to get into her pants, I'm relieved to see him behaving decently. And Skye has been so badly written since the show started, with her frequent disobeying of orders and common sense just to further the plot, that this scene feels like the writers acknowledging how problematic she's been and hopefully laying that bad habit to rest. (8/10)

Who You Really Are: Returning to AOS after the superior Agent Carter, I have two impressions: 1) All right, I'm convinced; the shorter episode count really does help a show focus. You can feel the AOS writers ssstttrrreeetttccchhhiiinnnggg out every subplot across multiple episodes, to the show's detriment. 2) AC had such great specificity in its set decoration that I took it for granted until returning to AOS's drab, barely-decorated backgrounds and generic spaces.

I like Lady Sif and I'm glad to see her again, but the A-plot just didn't have much juice, except for Morse cleverly using Vin-Tak's own memory-eraser against him when she got the chance. I want the Morse-Mackenzie* conspiracy to shit or get off the pot at this point, and given the ending here, I assume that it's about to do so. Fitz continues to vacillate between doing the right thing for his friend and colleague Skye, and yet again making every conversation with Simmons about his feelings for her. I liked Skye suddenly shooting herself to save the team, an outcome that I didn't expect. And she appeared to do it in the boob, too; ouch! Very Tyler Durden of her. Now I wonder if Skye getting shot is just going to become an annual tradition. Funniest line in the episode: "I can." (5/10)

*Apparently his name is Alphonso Mackenzie, not Alphonse Mack like I thought all this time; I surmise that Mack is just a nickname. The beginning of season two suddenly dropped him and several other new characters into the series without proper introductions, and here we are halfway through the season and I'm just learning one guy's name. Anyway, I shall call him Mackenzie going forward.

I just want to back up for a second to "Aftershocks," and specifically the Hydra high council turning on itself. That was a violent sequence, culminating in a moment where Hunter shot Fred Dwyer (TV's other Hunter, ha) in the head. We saw the sudden bullet wound, the jerk of the head, the blood spray, everything. And yet this episode was rated TV-PG, and aired in a family-friendly time slot. Are we this desensitized to violence? I guess we are. :-(