Week 87: Deals with Our Devils, The Laws of Inferno Dynamics

All six episodes of Slingshot are available on YouTube, in a playlist from ABC Television.

Deals with Our Devils: So soon after seeing Dr. Strange repeat the phrase, "Dormammu, I've come to bargain," we get an apt episode title in "Deals with Our Devils," which is immensely promising: Several characters in this hour strike bargains of sorts with forces that they really shouldn't, and this might result in satisfying consequences for all involved, or at least some involved. (I've already said that I don't expect the show to punish Robbie Reyes for his evil choices to the extent that he deserves, and I doubt that Melinda May will herself personally suffer any fallout for using the Darkhold, but clearly the show is going somewhere ominous with Aida and with Eli Morrow's new powers. Plus, the exposure of Jeffrey Mace's relationship with Senator Snotty Pants, and Jemma Simmons's impulsive bond with a Terrigenesis sufferer, both seem like they might amount to something.)

What I loved most about this episode was the narrative trick of showing us the same scenes twice from different perspectives, and using light and sound to convey the characters' growing jeopardy. If AOS is at its best when paranoia takes over and the agents turn on one another, then the show is at its second best when manipulating time or perspective to show us things in a new way, like T.R.A.C.K.S. in season one or Spacetime in season three. Twenty-some episodes per year are an awful lot to churn out, so when the show hits on an idea for how to present one of its stories in a new way, the change feels so refreshing. I'm fine with granting the show some leeway to pull it off on a budget, like having ghostly Phil Coulson sidestep around people instead of walking through them. I assume that it was merely a coincidence that the dimensional wall that appeared when Aida created the portal so closely resembled Doctor Strange's mirror dimension, a consequence of two unrelated productions hitting upon the same design idea at once. Ghostly Leo Fitz spying on Mace's phone call was such a nice touch, a clever way to use the kind of information that normally only we in the audience get to see, without any character having to become sneaky or stupid in order for Fitz to learn it.

The only part of the episode that I didn't like was the Terrigenesis scene, because it made no sense. I had assumed that the man was in some kind of biological stasis, but no, he's apparently awake and in normal shape inside that cocoon. How did he survive so long without air, food, and water? How did he not have a long Rip Van Winkle beard? How was he not blinded by sudden light, even with the light levels reduced in the room? For that matter, why did Simmons turn down the lights to soothe him when he's trapped inside rock and unable to see them? How is he not suffering from pooling of blood and clotting in his lower extremities? How does he not smell horrible? And worst of all, it looked like Simmons barely pulled on the shell to expose his face. Did no one at any time try gently tugging on the rock? The show made a point of showing us the cracks forming over the man's back as if to imply that his Terrigenesis was complete and he could "wake up" now, but that image came after Simmons detected his heartbeat and soothed him by talking to him one on one, so I think we're supposed to understand that the man was awake the whole time. I'm just baffled by the ridiculous crap that this show expects us to accept sometimes. Still, one bad subplot did not ruin an otherwise excellent episode. (8/10)

The Laws of Inferno Dynamics: The show never comes out and says that Eli Morrow is "stealing" the matter from underground and causing the earthquakes, so is your understanding the same as mine on that point? Setting this story in a famously earthquake-prone city was an odd choice, but I guess it let the show film in its own backyard. I'm more troubled by the show trying to connect Morrow's "stealing" of matter from the ground to the racist criminal assumptions that people have made about him all of his life. I'm glad to hear a TV show discussing that kind of prejudice openly and sympathetically, but man, that's… that's one hell of a reach, and the show does not pull it off.

Mace insists that Aida be dismantled because she's an android. "Doesn't anyone remember Ultron?!" I'm sure they also remember Vision, the lawful-good android who destroyed Ultron and is morally pure enough to wield Mjolnir, but ok, let's judge all artificial life by the worst among them. And let's confiscate and dismantle them, without authorization, after they saved the lives of several of our key operatives. And let's make "dream of electric sheep" jokes about them while we're at it. For a show that wants to be noble by calling out anti-Latino prejudice and using anti-Inhuman prejudice as a metaphor, it's remarkably unconcerned that having its heroes engage in prejudice against artificial life forms might undermine its points. (3/10)

Slingshot: Holy shit what did I just watch. It starts fine, with a warm conversation with Pleasant-Ass Coulson and the potential to fill in season 4 narrative gaps with a time jump, but it goes downhill faster than Mikaela Shiffrin. Elena Rodriguez doesn't want to work for S.H.I.E.L.D., but Mace implies that there will be heavy consequences (imprisonment?) if she refuses to work for them, on top of whatever legal extradition she'd face if she used her powers without authorization. So S.H.I.E.L.D. enslaves its agents now? After that left me reeling, Fitz outfitted her with a bracelet that would track her precise location at all times, alert them if she used her powers, and send an aircraft to her location immediately if she removed it. What in the actual fuck?! And then she was cornered by her superior Alfonso Mackenzie, who has been pressuring her to date him and who just rearranged her schedule so that they can have dinner together and who tells her that he'll be evaluating her job performance. I wanted to throw up in my mouth.

Then, on top of all of that, May breaks the rules to cover for Rodriguez so that she can take an unauthorized flight to Baltimore to murder a man. At least the criminal gets to call Rodriguez a hypocrite, so maybe the show is self-aware after all? She can't bring herself to shoot the guy, but she allows him to die anyway when she could push him out of the way of a deadly laser beam and doesn't. Then she gets Daisy Johnson to break into a classified system to delete the record of this incident so that she won't get disciplined for it in any way. Great, cool cool cool. Good show.

Holy thunder fuck this piece of shit was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Short Form Drama Series I just can't it's so bad I just $%@#& F&!@ 0?&! +$($>#

"Vendetta": 6/10
"John Hancock": 1/10
"Progress": 1/10
"Reunion": 5/10
"Deal Breaker": 5/10
"Justicia": 3/10

overall series rating: 3/10 (It sucked.)
best episode: "Vendetta"
worst episode: "John Hancock"

Deals With Our Devils
Stream of consciousness review-in-the-moment writing ahead...

Nightmare territory, indeed, Mack. Anywhere your horrible excuse for a running gag known as the shotgun axe appears is a nightmare in my book.

I'm glad someone is trying to talk some sense into Mack and talk him out of going John Wick on Uncle Eli.

Spoke too soon about Mack. What good does he think he can do? They're 100% right about the fact that he can't do anything against a guy who can kill someone with their mind. I don't care how sharp your dumb shotgun axe is, it's not going to work against this guy.

Oh damn! Mack is Ghost Rider! Bad. Ass. I take back the complaint about him flying off the handle. Well, mostly. Thye weren't talking down Ghost Rider at first.

I'm going to nitpick a bit here, but how can they be out of phase with everything except inanimate objects? Can't touch anyone, but they can sit in a car? Seems that they'd be able to manipulate objects if that were the case.

Who is in the cocoon!?

How did Robbie get out of the car!?

I know that Coulson has plot armor, but I was actually a bit worried that he'd be sucked into that vortex. I just figured he'd have to be rescued from something more than the current plan.

Robbie isn't gone. No way in hell. Oh... and there he is.

Ada is building something that she learned from the Darkhold. My prediction at this point is that she is going to be the AOS version of Vision, sans infinity stone, of course.

The Laws of Inferno Dynamics
Looks like Uncle Eli is constructing a Holodeck. That would be one hell of a crossover.

I was about to ask why Ada being an android was such a bad thing. I forgot about the Sokovia Accords. Also, thanks for mentioning Ultron, director! Further driving my prediction from last episode about Ada becoming the AOS flafor of Ultron, followed by her becoming the AOS flavor of Vision.

Slingshot
What the actual living fuck did I just watch? No, seriously. What was that? This was an entire series dedicated to answering a question that nobody had. I lost exactly zero sleep wondering how Elena came to be helping Daisy. But hey, now I know. And I still don't care.

Contrary to popular belief, that meme of Robert Downey Jr. rolling his eyes did not come from The Avengers. It was his reaction to Mack pulling out the shotgun ax again.

I don't know whether the characters on this show ought to agree with the Sokovia Accords in principle -- they're government enforcers who believe in very harsh means to protect society, but they break their own rules constantly so maybe not? -- but I don't understand why artificial life would qualify as a violation of the Accords merely because it's artificial. I thought the Accords were about "enhanced" life forms. Would something intelligent but not alive, like Dr. Strange's cape, even qualify as a violation of the Accords? (I don't mean Strange wearing his cape. I mean the cape itself treated as an independent being.) Maybe this was all explained in a line of dialogue at some point that I forgot.

Great point about the terrible Slingshot, Erik. It's funny to me that part of the original concept for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was that it would fill in the gaps in the MCU movies, and now there's this supporting web series to fill in the gaps in AOS. Heaven help us if they ever start releasing gifs to fill in the gaps in Slingshot.