By: Brandon Wolfe
The list of things that ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ did right in its first season is extremely short. In fact, there’s just one thing on it: The post-‘Winter Soldier’ reveal that Agent Ward was secretly a member of HYDRA all along. Ward, up to that point, had been the blandly handsome lead agent aggravatingly bereft of any personality. He stood as a totem for the entire show: dull, stiff and generically unenjoyable. Making him a turncoat didn’t solve all the show’s problems, but it shook it up enough to remove a doldrum or two. And, being fair, a series taking its chiseled lead and turning him into a treacherous killer was gutsy in a way that ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ didn’t seem capable of being.
The question ever since was how ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ was going to screw up its lone victory. When was it going to decide to backtrack on Ward, whitewashing his crimes enough to get him back on the team and exchanging poorly written professions of affection with Skye? Refreshingly, the show finished out the first season committed to keeping Ward bad, but so far this year, his Lecter/Starling tête-à-têtes with Skye (hold the everything that was good in ‘Lambs’) have suggested that the show was sanding the edges off of Ward’s past misdeeds, presenting him as a man who lost his way and was committed to getting back on track. As the least intriguing of all possible roads to take, it seemed almost certain to be the one ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ would go with. Yet “A Fractured House” does the second interesting thing the show has done with Ward, two more than initially seemed possible. It intimates that the guy might be an actual psychopath. All things considered, that’s not bad.
Well, possibly. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Technically, the show introduces Ward’s brother, Senator Christian Ward, this week and each brother - separately, yet presented concurrently in a surprisingly well-executed sequence – indicts the other as a monster going back to childhood. It’s only because the episode ends with Ward’s escaping custody during a prison transfer by breaking free of his confines and shooting all personnel present that we assume it’s Ward that’s the lunatic. It’s easy to imagine the show backpedaling next week and saying he did what he needed to do to stop his brother, the REAL crazypants. But the possibility of the show doubling down on Ward’s dark side is certainly better than the alternative.
The main story focus this week is a HYDRA attempt to frame S.H.I.E.L.D. for an attack on the UN, using weaponized disks crafted from the alien Obelisk that make the unfortunate souls on the business end crumble into dust, an effect that reminds us of a much better show with Joss Whedon’s name attached to it. Coulson meets with Senator Ward to strike a deal to clear S.H.I.E.L.D.’s good name in exchange for custody of his incarcerated brother. Meanwhile, the rest of the team sets out after HYDRA. And I’ll say this, Adrianne Palicki as Bobbi Morse has given the cast a minor boost. It’s not that she’s written any better than anyone else, but the energy she has brought to the show thus far has been welcome. God help me, I’m going to say something else positive about ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’: its fight sequences have really stepped up their game this year. In addition to Morse’s acrobatic baton-twirling, May gets into a scuffle with a henchman wielding a sickle on a swinging chain like a video-game miniboss that is notably well done.
Now that that’s out of the way, we can resume our regularly scheduled discussion of what doesn’t work about this show. All of its intrigue, including the introduction of yet another Big Bad (this one tatted up with those markings Coulson keeps carving into everything like a doink), still struggles to hold our interest. It’s all just stuff happening, white noise. It never feels vital or gripping or clever. Also, the show’s characters still need a lot of work, and constantly piling on new ones doesn’t fix what’s wrong with the old ones. The show is still pushing the would-be tragically doomed friendship between Fitz and Simmons like it really has something there. Fitz is sad – he’s always sad, this guy – because Simmons walked out when he needed her most (technically she was on assignment, but try explaining that to this giant child), and now her being back in the fold is also hard for him, making her choose to leave again. It’s exactly as obnoxious as it sounds. These two aren’t even a romantic couple, so I don’t know why the show is killing itself to generate so much pathos from them.
Watching the ‘Age of Ultron’ clip that was attached to this episode, with the Avengers lounging around Stark’s penthouse and competing to see if any of them can move Thor’s hammer, it occurred to me exactly what’s wrong with the ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ characters. There is zero sense of this sort of loose camaraderie between any of them. And they’ve been together for around 30 episodes now, as opposed to the Avengers’ bonding time of one movie. There is no personality or nuance to any of these characters, just rote, overcooked dialogue and lame one-liners. Much of that is the ocean of difference between the talent levels of the respective Whedons running each endeavor, but it’s a crucial deficiency that all the decent fight scenes in the world won’t paper over.
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