Agents of SHIELD 1x20 reaction thought

[jedi_of_urth]

(Icon has no relevance except that it's part of why I've been less active online of late, it's baseball season and my Rockies are doing well so far. Also I'm not sure any of my other icons are any more relevant.)

So I started writing a reaction post to this week’s Agents of SHIELD on Tuesday night but my thoughts were super scattered and dumb sounding, so I’ll try again.


-After Cap 2, Maria Hill is basically my new favorite person, and she continues to be here. I want to watch her and Pepper build the new SHIELD (with occasional input from Tony I guess)...even if she is totally lying to Pepper about knowing what the Fridge is and what’s there and everything.

-Really, resolving the timeframes between Agents and WS has been an issue since the show started down this way, because WS acted like the conflict was over but on the show the *war* is far from over; WS settled for SHIELD and HYDRA going out in a wave of mutually assured destruction, and while that’s the likely end result on the show, HYDRA is still in play so somebody *has* to be out there keeping up the fight.

-I have no idea what this show gets called next season (if it gets a next season, which I want it to), which is making me anxious about whether it’ll happen even more than the lack of news I’ve seen somehow does. But I think there would be some awesome stories to tell with this show after the fall of SHIELD.

-Ward may be several dozen times more interesting now than he was as Agent Blandy for most of the season, but I still don’t really care. However, while I’m not exactly Skye’s biggest fan I do appreciate elements of her reaction here. Oddly, having no emotional connection to their scenes may actually be helping in some ways.

-I have been waiting all season for Lola to actually get some use like this, and I really think it should have happened well before now. I can just see it having a really good thematic connection if they had to sacrifice the car after it had been like part of the team, but it hasn’t been part of the team so all I’m wondering is if Fitz can fix the car of if they’ll have to find a way to get Tony to do it (with or without telling him it’s Coulson’s car)

-Okay, so it’s become very clear to me the last few weeks that my favorite ship on this show is Coulson/May. Apparently I need wild amounts of angst to make me flat out love a ship, because the angst of late has been amazing and heartbreaking and makes me want them to make up and make out. I hope they’re ready to make up now and be an amazing team again.

-But...and I hate to say it, but I can see it going a very different way too. They could go a very Dollhouse route here, where she’d been his handler all along and their possibly decades of history may not even be real. Up until this episode I, and I think most of us, had basically assumed that the only memory change was about his recovery, but they went in and wiped probably at least weeks’ worth of knowledge of running the TAHITI project from him so what else might not be real?

-Speaking of...yeah the last couple episodes have really been messing with SHIELD’s ability to have any moral high ground in this war. And the flaws were always there but they’ve really let loose with showing them now. Fury didn’t just keep all the advanced tech, he launched hundreds of empty rockets into the sun so no one knew he was hoarding advanced tech. They did experiments on the guy from last week to increase his abilities. And there must have been some serious Frankenstein shit going down with TAHITI; it’s not like they could have been experimenting on animals because I’m not sure how you ever assume a dog has a moral crisis knowing what was done to them, or how you surgically alter a monkey’s memories of it, or anything.

-I did however have a thought as I was writing my Tuesday attempt at a reaction post that I’m sorry you don’t get fresh; but, is it possible the TAHITI program was in play when they were bringing Steve out the ice? Coulson watched over Steve during that process and Coulson would have been running TAHITI about that time; and with the super soldier serum it’s possible Steve wouldn’t have any of the potential physical problems of the TAHITI stuff as long as they didn’t tell him, because Cap would have some big issues with it naturally.

-Additionally (and this occurred to me during WS, but since I never did a review of WS I didn’t have a place to bring it up), but how do people not know at least that Coulson’s alive if not about TAHITI now? Natasha was supposedly dumping all of SHIELD secrets out there. And while thinking back on it, I’d be willing to bet that wasn’t the truth; that while Steve and Sam were out talking on the dam, Fury and Hill were telling Natasha some secrets she could under no circumstances *ever* reveal, it’s not like Coulson being alive at all was a closely guarded secret because people saw him and at the start of the season the guy couldn’t shut up about the fact that he had died.

-Yes, this *is* less rambley and unfocused than my thoughts the other night.

-So I’m going to hold off on actually making predictions for how the season ends until next week. I suck at predictions so I will probably still be wrong at that time. Plus a lot of the ideas on how I want it to end sort of depend on whether it’s the season or series finale, which...anyone know that answer yet? I do suspect I will at least have a better feel on how they intend to handle Ward’s story after next week (I’ve seen it speculated that they could Black Widow him and turn him into an honest ally and...I don’t know, I think it would take more time than they have left). And hopefully be able to say my fears about May/Coulson were wrong, because I need them to be good again.

(-To be fair to my shipping history, while I would have to rethink my shipping choices if they turn out to be a lie, and definitely rethink how I see them as a ship, I’m not sure it would completely stop me from shipping it. I did ship Echo/Boyd pretty much right up til Boyd turned out to be evil so active/handler isn’t unheard of for me, and my Watcher/Slayer shipping tendencies are a big part of my history.)

-Sorry Fitz, Simmons, and Trip, while I like you all, generally enjoyed your scenes, and am chill with however your little love triangle goes at this point, apparently I didn’t have many actual thoughts on any of you. Maria’s awesomeness overshadows a lot of things that aren’t my OTP I guess.

Comments

[lynnenne]

Up until this episode I, and I think most of us, had basically assumed that the only memory change was about his recovery, but they went in and wiped probably at least weeks’ worth of knowledge of running the TAHITI project from him so what else might not be real?

I half-expect them to reveal that Coulson and May were married at one point. She did say, during the last episode, that she had been married once.

[jedi_of_urth]

I both will and won't be surprised if they go there with that little nugget of info. That was sort of an unexpected reveal, but I'm not sure if it has to mean anything. We'll see...or not, we'll see if we'll see.