By: Brandon Wolfe
Agent Ward is boring. This is one of the immutable truths of the universe. The character is such a black hole that he manages to stand out as bland on a series populated entirely with flavorless ciphers. He is a perfect storm of dull, the yawn-generating point of intersection between generic actor, stock character and bad writing. Even going as far as to make him a surprise villain hasn’t managed to successfully nudge him into the realm of interesting. At best, it merely thrust an interesting development into his orbit. If ever a television character could be chalked up as a lost cause, too hopelessly humdrum to continue to bother with, it has to be him.
Unfortunately, boring is where ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ hangs its hat, and so it sets up “Ragtag” as a means of finding out just what makes Agent Ward tick. His HYDRA turnabout seemed pretty clear-cut. We had previously been told that he was recruited by Garrett and groomed into a fully fledged HYDRA acolyte, and that was all we needed to know. Yet “Ragtag” presents us with a series of flashbacks to actually illustrate the process by which Garrett found Ward in a juvenile detention center 15 years prior (due to setting his house on fire while, unbeknownst to him, his brother was still inside) and saw promise within him. We then get to see Garrett taking Ward out to the woods and leaving him there for six months to make a man out of him, with nothing given to him save for a canine companion named Buddy. Ward survives and Garrett is impressed enough to officially bring him aboard the HYDRA train. The problem here is, since there were no twists or bumps in the road with Ward’s recruitment, the whole thing plays out essentially as you would have imagined it to, if your brain is boring enough to have bothered to try.
Sketching out Ward’s origin is just a piece of what “Ragtag” is up to, though. It’s also working overtime to set the tables for next week’s season finale. Coulson and the gang are attempting to locate Garrett, Ward and Deathlok by finding a means to activate a dormant trojan horse implanted by Skye in the stolen hard drive. Garrett, meanwhile, has enlisted Raina to develop a reproduction of the GH-325 serum that brought Coulson back to life, of which she manages to produce one lone vial. “Ragtag” doesn’t skimp on revelations, or at least allusions to them. We learn that Garrett was the original Deathlok, produced in 1990 (the year of ‘RoboCop 2’, appropriately enough), and his organs are beginning to falter, making that vial of anti-death serum a valuable commodity. But we also are given a vague hint of what Skye’s “084” status might be about, as Raina relates to us a story (more like a fraction of an anecdote) she once heard about a baby born to monsters.
Fitz and Simmons locate the stolen Bus and are apprehended by Ward. Fitz, using an EMP hidden in a joy buzzer, manages to disable Garrett’s circuitry, putting him in critical condition. Then “Ragtag” serves us up a clumsy (even for this show) parallel, where we flash back to young Ward being ordered by Garrett to kill Buddy the dog, to prove he can divorce himself from emotion as per the HYDRA way. In the present day, Garrett again orders Ward to kill, this time Fitz and Simmons. Paranoid that the audience might not grasp that a line was being drawn between these two events, the scenes are interwoven together and Garrett even delivers the same line to Ward in both timelines (“That’s not a weakness, is it?”). Ward ultimately opts to pledge his loyalty to Garrett in both instances and jettisons the container Fitz and Simmons have taken as a refuge into the ocean. We are left hanging on their fates this week, and they obviously won’t die from this, but ridding us of those two sickeningly adorable chipmunks would be one way for the show to win a chunk of my heart.
“Ragtag” stands as a prime example of how lousy ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s’ sense of humor is. Going through Agent Triplett’s collection of his grandfather’s old Howling Commando gadgets, Fitz horses around with a laser disguised as a cigarette and sets fire to the motel drapes. Later, when Coulson and May are attempting to infiltrate a tech company, Fitz feeds him lines and Coulson accidentally repeats one of them in Fitz’s thick brogue. And when Fitz does get the better of Garrett with that joy buzzer, he can’t resist hitting his enemy with the groaner “Looks like the joke’s on you!” Coulson also orders pizza at one point under the name Pablo Jimenez, which is funny because he is a very Caucasian gentleman and that name is comically unsuited to him. These are the jokes. (Though, in the interest of fairness, a gag about a “large file transfer” in the form of a filing cabinet thrown out of a building’s window is surprisingly not bad)
‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ has one episode left, but it isn’t exactly rollicking toward it brimming with possibility. I’m sure we will get revelations and cliffhangers aplenty next week and I’m equally sure they’ll be as boring as dirt. The show never ceases to prove itself tin-eared toward what would make for exciting television. Witness the final scene in “Ragtag”, where secondary villain Quinn attempts to sell the Deathlok technology to the military, which the show presents as showstoppingly dramatic, but in actuality plays out as the mundane business meeting it sounds like (literally the only interesting takeaway from it is that bin Laden apparently existed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe). How can we expect ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ to ever excite us when it apparently can’t even recognize what exciting looks like?
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