As a huge Joss Whedon fan, I had some trepidation four years
ago when Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD debuted on ABC. Joss’s (his fans call him Joss) contribution
was tangential, mostly in the hiring of his brother Jed to be the
showrunner. The early results were
so-so, but after about five episodes or so the characters kicked in and it
became appointment TV. It was nowhere
near Buffy or Angel quality, but it was solid genre television in a medium that
usually gets genre shows wrong.
The show did well for three years, managing to make Brett
Dalton’s character Grant Ward interesting despite his woodenness (making him a
[spoiler!] Hydra agent made his character much more understandable), the inscrutable
Melinda May (is it racist to call an Asian character inscrutable?) became . . .
well, scrutible (the series started to be good the moment she left her hotel
door open as an invitation for Ward to join her for the night), and the adorable
tag team scientists Fitz and Simmons were fuel for shippers. Anchoring the whole thing was estimable
character actor Clark Gregg, grounding the silliness with needed quippy gravitas.
I even stayed with the show when they started linking to the
Marvel movies and you couldn’t follow the plot on Agents of SHIELD unless you
saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier on opening weekend. More and more characters acquired powers that
verged on dopey, and it didn’t help that the “contagion” of augmented powers
was spread by fish oil pills. They had some good guest stars (Kyle MacLachlen
was outstanding) and the added battling Bickersons married couple of Lance and
Bobbi (Nick Blood and Adrian Palicki provided some needed levity.
However, after watching the first episode of season four, I’m
done. The show was supposed to be about
the “little people” who worked at SHIELD, the Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns
who toiled in the bureaucracy while Thor and Iron Man saved the world. The technology got to be increasingly
questionable, but it was always recognizable as science fiction.
Then they introduced Ghost Rider.
You remember Ghost Rider from that really bad Nicolas Cage
movie (I understand he was in a graphic novel before that, but when Nic Cage
interprets a character everything that came before vanishes) in 2007, right? He sold his soul to the devil to get
vengeance, and now he rides around with a flaming skull killing bad guys. This is science fiction?
As soon as I heard that Ghost Rider was going to be a main
character on Agents of SHIELD, I knew it was a “jump the shark” moment. Gone is the concept that these are the “normal”
people in SHIELD who help the superheroes; now we have augmented people chasing
a demon. With a flaming skull. Oy.
I am also not buying the plot resonances from Captain
America: Civil War. I think the first
two Captain America films are the two best features in the Marvel oeuvre, but
the third one makes no sense. The “Sokovia
Accords” now require augmented people to sign an agreement and submit to
oversight, or they won’t be permitted to save the world? Yeah, that’ll teach them! The argument between Captain America and Tony
Stark over the proposal to “regulate” the Avengers is completely one-sided;
Stark should know that no amount of “supervision” can keep Thor, the Hulk, and
Hawkeye (what is his superpower again?) from doing what they want to do. And if the Avengers are to be watched, there
is always the ancient question—who watches the watchers? The whole idea that a UN oversight committee
could prevent collateral damage when the Avengers were busy saving the Earth
from destruction was a bureaucratic wet dream.
As much as I’ve come to enjoy the actors on the show (even
Chloe Bennett as Skye, or Daisy, got less irritating), I am getting off. Adding Marvel’s fantasy character Ghost Rider
to a science fiction show like Agents of SHIELD is just more corporate synergy,
like the idea that Once Upon a Time can be used to find new venues for all of
Disney’s endless princess characters. It
may work, but it is television driven by branding, not imagination or storytelling.
Throw in the fact that Lance and Bobbi were written off the
show to be in a spin off that was subsequently spiked, and I see a TV series
that is not making good decisions. The
key to making a successful TV series is making decisions—you have to make about
a million right decisions to create a good show. Once the decision making process goes wrong, you
start making decisions to correct previous mistakes and pretty soon you’re in
Lost Season 5.
So I am jumping off here, erasing my “series record”
instruction from my DVR. The question
now is what will I do with the one hour a week I’ve just gained?
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