100 Days of Marvel: Road to Infinity War - Day 16: Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (S1, E1-7)

Slight writers block tonight, but let's just jump right into this anyway! Since there is a lot of S.H.I.E.L.D. across the next few days, I want to spend this post discussing some initial thoughts I have on the show so far, and some thoughts I have on the characters in the first seven episodes.

I am SO happy that I have reached Level 7 and finally started watching "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." I think I am watching this right in its proper place in the timeline, after Iron Man 3. I saw season 1 when it first aired a long time ago, and have not kept up with the show since. I did love it, but it can often be difficult to synchronize shows with a wife, and so this one fell into the background as years went by and now we are here.

Clark Gregg reprises his role as Agent Phil Coulson, which is odd because he totally died in "Marvel's Avengers." The show establishes some mystery surrounding this, and I can't remember the circumstance of how they bring him back, but I am excited to re-learn. He is brilliant in this show: acting of the actor and the portrayal of the character. 

There is still a lot of S.H.I.E.L.D. left to see, and these first 7 episodes are really just a group of side quests that allow the characters to come together and gain some teamwork experiences before the real ish goes down. We have yet to get into the real meat of the series - the circumstances of Hydra's return, Coulson's resurrection, or some really cool "inhumans." 

We see a few inhumans - Scorch, Raina - and they hint of a much larger issue the characters will need to deal with later, but for now, we get training. 

I really like Jenna Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) and Leo Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) and hope that their relationship progresses further. In the first seven episodes, we really get two episode where they become major players. In episode 5 or 6, Simmons gets an alien illness and they work together to solve it and save her life, where as in episode seven, Fitz goes on a field mission with Grant Ward (Brett Dalton) and is a revealed to have some good tricks up his sleeves. But both of these episode serve as team building episodes that on slightly move the plot forward.

Agent Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen) is also a great character with a lot of potential, but we get so little of her in these first 7 episodes. The show has really focused on more of the other characters - FitzSimmons, Skye, Ward, etc. We get some hints of her and Coulson's past, but we don't really know what makes her tick. I don't even really know if she was involved in the plot to hack into home girl's eyes in an earlier episode, or if she was acting rogue from the Agent Carter handbook.

I am actually not a fan of Daisy "Skye" Johnson (Chloe Bennet). I feel like her character is a little underdeveloped, especially for the character who we are supposed to identify with as an "outsider" to S.H.I.E.L.D. We have her point of view as a character who is not an agent, and we learn about S.H.I.E.L.D. through her experiences learning about it. We learn what the clearance level system means and how it works, through her learning about it. We learn about field protocols through her learning about it. We learn about the different agents in the organization, you guessed it, through her learning about, meeting, and interacting with many of them. She is, in a way, our viewpoint character. All that to say, I don't like her. Either she is for S.H.I.E.L.D. or against it, and from her perspective it seems like, no matter how much Coulson wants her to work, her ideals just go against the group where it is right now (which is interesting to say for an organization that will later cause a civil war within itself). She is also kind of whiny, and her personality is very grating for me. Maybe others like her, but that is where I am.