BAD:
I hate to hold advertising against a TV show or a movie, but it’s hard not to be disappointed about the bait and switch with the latest episode of Agents of SHIELD. Promoted as a tie-in with Thor: The Dark World, the episode had a brief opening sequence that saw Coulson’s team (they really need a squad name) cleaning up debris left by Thor’s battle with Malekith… and that was it. The rest of the episode was, admittedly, centered around an Asgardian artifact, but it was one that had nothing at all to do with the movie.
It didn’t have much to do with Asgard at all, really. The artifact was a Berserker Staff, which fills the bearer with intense rage and gives them superstrength. I’m not sure if such a thing exists in the Marvel Comics universe, but the staff on this episode felt like a generic MacGuffin Stick more than anything else. Asgard’s just the frilly lace they hung on this thing to make it Marvel-esque, as opposed to a generic item that could have popped up in The X-Files.
To be fair, the rage stick did give an opportunity for the show to explore a little bit about Agent Banana Republic and his own issues, including a repressed childhood memory that sort of shows his heroic origin story and that hints at an even worse relationship with his older brother than we thought (and also shows that Grant was a chubster as a kid). Much more interesting was the very offhand way it was used to explore Matilda May, who picks it up and remains uneffected by the anger it bestows because, like Bruce Banner, she’s always carrying it with her.
But everything else was kind of dull. The stick showed up not because of Thor: The Dark World but because some generic Norsemen had heard legends about it and began hunting the pieces down. These guys are nobodies, with nothing interesting about them. They basically exist to show up at a church at the end and have a fight scene. The episode is much more interested in exploring other characters, but the thin villains speak to a larger Marvel Cinematic Universe villain problem - it’s like the opposite of the Batman movies here, with so few of the villains thus far truly registering.
Peter MacNicol guest stars as a Norse myth expert who turns out to be an Asgardian who exiled himself to Earth. The episode threatens to get interesting when he’s being interrogated and talks about what it’s like to be non-royalty on Asgard, where the lifespans are measured in millenia. He was a mason, and after thousands of years breaking rocks he decided to start over on Earth. That’s interesting! Which is why it was relegated to a quick conversation, I guess.
All of the tedium of the episode was almost worth it for the end, which saw Grant and Matilda May lock eyes in their hotel hallway and then, presumably, have a hot and heavy tryst (it’s an 8pm network show, so the hotel room door closes and the show smash cuts to commercial). That comes right after Skye all but throws herself at Grant in the hotel bar. That relationship seemed to be what the show was building towards, but I like this wrinkle a whole lot. Grant and Matilda make more sense in terms of understanding each other, and keeping Skye on the outside makes her a more interesting character.
On the positive side maybe this will be an episode we one day look back on as a minor entry with a major character bit at the end. I keep holding out faith that this show will improve, and it was for a while, but this episode feels like big time backsliding. And don’t get me started on the endlessly repetitive scenes of Coulson telling someone he died; he’s turned into that guy at the bar who drops his same sob story on every soul unlucky enough to grab the stool next to him. Coulson has become pathetic with this ‘I died and don’t know what happened’ ****, and there must be a better way for the show to keep that thread alive without finding excuses for him to get expository with it.
Get your **** together, Agents of SHIELD. You were building actual promise for a few episodes. You can do better than this.
