The Writing on the Wall

This week's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was a bit of a mixed bag for me. It basically ran two plots in parallel, and I only felt engaged in one of them.

Sadly, it's the Coulson plot that wasn't really doing it for me. His resurrection storyline has been part of the show from day one, and has generally been interesting whenever the writers have inched it forward. It has always helped (then and now) that Clark Gregg is a very talented actor. This seemed like the hundredth time we've watched him carving on the wall, and it was the second time we've seen him strapped into the memory/torture device, but he gave a compelling enough performance to make the repetition work.

But we have seen all this before. It's hard to top the shocking revelation of Coulson begging for his own death, on a table with a robot picking at his exposed brain. Having him watch others go through that just didn't pack the same punch. It did lead to some "badass Coulson in the field," which is always fun, but I guess my doubts are with where it all ended up.

I feel like I should be happy that we got probably our biggest plot movement in a while (maybe ever) in the revelation that Coulson has been carving a blueprint to some kind of alien city. But instead, I'm skeptical that this is really in service to a future plot line for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Somehow, this instead feels like something setting the table for a future Thor or Guardians of the Galaxy movie or something, like it's beyond the scope of the TV show. And as it good as it was when events from the Marvel movies finally pushed things forward on the show, the knowledge that there are no Marvel movies coming for the rest of this season makes me feel like things can't really flow in the other direction any time soon. In other words, I worry this all isn't going to go anywhere.

That would be fine if they could somehow just bench this hole plot thread and focus on other things. They can't completely of course, but I mean that the Ward part of the episode I found quite compelling. Evil Ward (or "maybe double agent Ward," whatever he is now) is far more intriguing than pre-HYDRA Ward. And the cat and mouse games between him and the pursuing S.H.I.E.L.D. agents was just great. I love that both Ward and Our Heroes were allowed their moments to be clever. And at the moment, I'm far more interested in seeing Ward go after his brother than I am in the alien city story.

I suspect many fans will take exactly the opposite view of this episode -- they'll be excited about the aliens and lukewarm about Ward the sociopath. But perhaps we'll agree on the mixed bag resulting in a good-but-not-great episode. I give it a B.