Agents of SHIELD S1
So I should probably start this review by reminding everyone that Dollhouse is my all-time favorite show. AoS comes from some of the same EPs as Dollhouse, who seem to remain interested in a lot of the same themes. How much can you trust your own mind? How influenced are we by our experiences, especially when those experiences are structured in a way that gives the illusion of choice?
There’s a little nod during one of Coulson’s false memory dreams (“did I fall asleep?”/”for a little while”), and he has a similar scripted response whenever anyone mentions TAHITI to him: “it’s a magical place.” Every time the trauma comes up, he reiterates the falsehood and pushes it all down a little deeper. Coulson is an interesting character to be in this position, that it’s the middle-aged white male ranking officer who is the person standing on quicksand, with more than one person lurking around him knowing more than he doesn’t about his own mind. (I am….currently revisiting my opinion about Coulson, now that I have a little more context, though I can stick to a surprising amount of it. Forthcoming, I hope.)
It doesn’t go as deep into a lot of those philosophical and social questions as Dollhouse did, but in some ways that is just as useful even in exploring these same themes. People exist in context. The Dollhouse attempted to decontexualize the Actives (and to some extent the staff) from even their own lives; everything eventually led back to a single player with a defined endgame. The world of SHIELD is a much larger stage; is in fact several worlds. The question of individual autonomy and controlled information can get lost in the shuffle, but the stakes of this are even higher. SHIELD, by necessity, makes decisions about others’ lives without their consent, and this is especially unfair because it makes their own free will and uncompromised judgment even more important. Dollhouse was about ~society as a metaphor; this is a similar set of metaphoric cues moved much closer into society.
But we do have to move away from Rossum, because SHIELD, or something like it, does need to exist. There’s no reason for it to remain exempt from FOIA-type scrutiny from the public, especially now that the Hulk is out of the bag on aliens and the like existing, which means that even then it will be as unjust as any other governmental organization. But it does serve a purpose. It’s not like “if the government doesn’t get its hands on this stuff it won’t be used against civilians,” it’s “would you rather have SHIELD get there first, or Cybertec (or, though this doesn't come up directly, non-governmental terrorist organizations).” Earth does need someone with the authority to represent it in…transdimensional? Interdimensional? diplomatic matters. But as something which can fill a need, it’s definitely “a lesser of two evils” situation, even just in theory. It can be a tool that comes into the wrong hands. It can fall to bureaucratic myopia and inertia. It is fundamentally counterdemocratic, and is all but guaranteed to be controlled by nations (the US first among them) with a nasty history of hurting and exploiting smaller countries. Its role as thing-investigator necessitates a function as thing-acquisitioner, which in turn invites an arms race, at best. The Watchers on the Wall can only be romanticized when they can also be starved out.
Sometimes it is terrifyingly easy, to confuse a sword and a shield.
In a delightful narrative tease, Skye draws a perfect analogy for all the wrong reasons when she compares SHIELD and its dance along such a fine line to “the big brother! Who fights against the bigger brother!” Ward’s story, more than any of Our Heroes’, represents the horror that lies deep within SHIELD. One could fairly wonder about the “bad seed” concept, about whether the circumstances of SHIELD’s creation mean that it cannot exist as a morally good or even neutral force in the world. One could justly consider Fitz’s perspective that evil is something superimposed on good: even hundreds of apples gone bad are no reason to chop down a tree, or burn down the orchard. From what I’ve gathered, these perspectives are the more popular ones in fandom, but I think the narrative is pretty strongly weighted in the direction of compromised identity. HYDRA knows to get in while its targets are still forming, and now this sick thing has taken root in SHIELD and in Ward. Whether they can change, whether allowing them the chance is a reward justifying the risk, whether it’s humanly possible for the other people involved to be a part of that process - there’s a long list of questions with a lot of perfectly reasonable answers, and therefore plenty of dramatic potential. As a viewer, I’m rooting for SHIELD the multinational paramilitary organization to extricate itself from HYDRA and rise from the wreckage and so exempting Ward the single individual* from that would be a little scapegoat-y for my tastes, but I don’t expect the characters to feel that way, at least, not anytime soon. *[I have a LOT to say about that single individual, but I think more of it comes from S2, which I’m hoping to rewatch and review over the weekend.]
I haven’t seen Winter Soldier yet - I know the two big surprises because people are wildly inconsiderate about tags, but I’m in the dark as to what happened in the attack - and I think that was kind of a fun angle for me as a viewer? Because the characters don’t know the particulars of the takeover, either, they just know that it happened. The characters’ respective reactions to everything going to hell are interesting for a few reasons. It’s actually quite impressive, that through their various emotional reactions and very flawed understanding of the situation, I think the team acted quite correctly, about HYDRA generally and wrt the identity of the mole specifically. Maybe it’s their level of training or the nature of their emotional bonds - probably some degree of both - they all do what they should do.
Interestingly, none of them articulates the principle on which they seem to be acting: regardless of how he got that way, Ward poses an extraordinary threat which needs to be neutralized one way or another. I don’t think that the team had any reactions to finding out Ward is HYDRA which are wrong or out of line. But I do think that they, mostly the kids, were incorrect in ways that tell us a lot about them. Which, again, they didn’t have time to be correct, and they certainly didn’t have all the information the audience eventually gets. The big error they all make is in the mindset of “either total free choice or otherworldly brainwashing,” when of course, brainwashing is a thing that happens in the real world, and of course the audience knows that Garrett has the science of grooming down to a T.
Jemma thinks in abstract taxonomy. Perpetrator, not victim. Skye needs to characterize Ward unambiguously and down to his core: he’s bad and that’s that. In large part that’s an understandable reaction to the whole situation, but I think that she also turns this logic on May. “You look like a statue to me, so you are not actually feeling anything!” Bounced around her whole life, Skye has had to learn to take people at face value because her interactions with them are likely to be utilitarian and heavily curtailed.
My initial instinct was to say good on Fitz for being the only one to remember that mind control was a possibility, and I think I ultimately agree with myself on that, though in a slightly more complicated way. It is much closer to accuracy than the “bad seed” explanation, but Fitz doesn’t, can’t, wrap his head around what that means. If someone really is brainwashed, the code word to snap them out of it isn’t going to be “you’re a good person, so just stop being controlled!” (HAVE YOU TRIED VITAMIN SUPPLEMENTS AND EXERCISE??!?) FitzSimmons’ final appeal to Ward to snap out of it ultimately runs up against some of the same issues as Garrett’s favorite motif: Just Be Strong and Rise Above what every fiber of your being is telling you to do.
Having both Skye and May be reporting to someone else throughout the season also puts a spin on the whole thing that I can support. The problem with Ward isn’t betrayal. Shit, Ward is as loyal as they come. He’s faithful to a fault: loyal to a bad person, to a hateful ideology.
In concept, this whole deal is significantly darker than even BSG. SHIELD being heavily infiltrated with HYDRA agents isn’t even like “one or both of the two people running the government could be Cylons.” It’s like if Adar and Cain and everyone between the two of them and most of the people who had held their ranks since the First Cylon War had been toasters. And I am eating up the grimdarkness, don’t get me wrong. But it also does manage to be quite a fun show, mostly through (1) mildly meta shenanigans and (2) ship-wise, you’re spoiled for choice.
(1) (a) I know it’s a little heavy-handed but I do love that Skye named herself. She knows she’s not Mary Sue - though it’s SHIELD itself that is responsible for her having that name, treating her more as a priceless artifact than as a person. (Can someone get me up to speed on the mythology around Skye? Is it that she is an alien? Then how did the GH-x formula work on her?) And she chooses to name herself after one of the too-few constants in her life, something that cannot be touched and cannot let her down. Or, to put that in the more optimistic terms I think Skye herself would use, it is something relevant to everyone in this world, a symbol of unlimited aspiration, something which cannot pretend to be other than it is.
(b) It’s definitely by fans, for fans, and starring characters who are enthusiastic fans. It’s interesting to see how they geek out over the Avengers. Everyone speaks affectionately of “Cap,” but nobody seems to know Steve; Natasha is one of them in a way Steve is not, referred to with the impersonal “Romanov,” rather than Black Widow. It is a bit funny how they all fawn over Fury’s special snowflake-ness. “A SECRET BUNKER! That’s TOTALLY his style!” Um, a secret bunker is everyone’s style. Well, maybe not Stark, lol. But everyone else.
(2) (a)I don’t so much buy Fitz/Simmons, though ofc FitzSimmons is great. I don’t really get ~vibes from them? I think that, having latched into each other at a particular stage in their development, they react to having ~grown-up feelings for a lot of the people around them (OMG they’re both so queer <3333) by retreating into But We’re FitzSimmons when they want that sense of safety and familiarity. Which I actually don’t think is …necessarily all that unhealthy? though it would be a terribly unhealthy foundation for an actual romantic relationship.
(b) Is May/Coulson a thing? KIND OF INTO IT TBH. I like their silent conversation. (Well, half conversation, though I kind of think that was a silence = tacit agreement thing, since if he was going to make a catastrophic error, May would tell him.) I love that this show which is so explicitly Millennial in a lot of ways still treats not one but two middle-aged characters in the same manner as the pretty young things around them. May and Coulson are well-drawn enough that they’re two very different takes on a similar survivor narrative: What is the relationship between the person you were before and the person you are after?
What does it cost, to survive an event that breaks your heart?
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