AoS: we need to talk about Grant
I'm going to hold off taking stock of S2 until after the midseason finale airs next week, but I don't see my take on Ward changing radically in one episode, so.
In my S1 post I talked about Grant’s role in the narrative, but mostly stayed away from the psychology of the character himself.
“You wouldn’t believe what I can talk this son of a gun into doing.”
My initial instinct was to make the easy contrast between Ward’s and Coulson’s respective recruitments. Both were vulnerable minors, but (as far as we know) Ward is the only one of the two who both experienced and engaged in violence. SHIELD would never step in for a Bad Kid like Ward, I thought; they’d have no way of knowing whether or not he would be responsive to training and become a dependable asset.
But, with further thought, I’m not sure SHIELD didn’t step in.
Garrett was, after all, a Level 8(+?) SHIELD agent all this time, and keeping that cover was a high priority for him. Bringing a SWAT team into a government facility and snapping up one of its inmates? Not exactly low-profile. Years later, Grant enrolled in the Academy under his real name, which means there was no attempt to hide his identity. We don’t know of any effort to cover up the fact that he’d dropped off the grid for a full decade, and IMO it’s unlikely that any was made - the creation of a false paper trail which would be good enough to pass SHIELD security clearance and/or the number of undercover HYDRA agents who would need to be let in on Grant’s identity and expose themselves to scrutiny if they were caught in a lie is quite a high risk to take for the reward of one single specialist, no matter how good his hand-eye coordination. It does not take an investigative genius to wonder where he was in those years that turned him from antisocial delinquent to top-notch soldier material. The simplest explanation which accounts for all available data is that Garrett’s methods were, at the very least, tacitly condoned by the highest levels of SHIELD, and may in fact have fully conformed to agency protocol.
Which group did what is not as important as the fact that it was done, and ultimately has very little to do with the question of Ward’s agency in the whole thing. But it has a great deal to do with how at least some of the other characters assess him, and therefore to the perceptions we’re building as viewers. Most notably, Coulson has good reason to be angry at Ward throughout S2, and then there are also a lot of non-Grant-related reasons he’s looking to blow off steam at someone. But still, he’s unguarded and dramatic (even by his standards) in his interrogations with Ward. What if it’s not only justified anger, or understandable venting? What if Coulson is distancing so hard because he does, on some level, feel that Ward is a fellow subject of extreme mental manipulations? What if it’s guilt, about having tacitly approved of the methods that turned an abused kid into this time bomb he brought onto his plane, or disappointment at realizing that his hero Nick Fury spent years overlooking (at best) these kind of practices?
And let’s take a good look at what those practices were, exactly.
That’s not run-of-the-mill abuse. That’s perfectly-executed cult indoctrination.
Certainly Garrett was more than capable of doing this on his own. But Fury has a history of playing with matches.
It’s also not like this ever stopped. Garrett continues his intricate twirling of sticks and carrots right up to the bitter end. The “who are you” beating under the barbershop encapsulates the whole relationship. Ostensibly, Garrett beating the crap out of him is all about The Plan. Strategically, sending Ward to the base looking like he’d had to put up a fight to get there is not unreasonable, though two cracked ribs is probably overkill. But there was no tactical reason to make Grant identify himself as an agent of SHIELD in between blows. Grant’s a big boy, he can say his name. Garrett turned Grant’s cover story into a brutal Pavlovian reinforcement exercise, designed to punish Ward for, and pull him back from, his very mild dissatisfaction with the mission.
Ward isn’t lying when he says he wasn’t brainwashed, because he doesn’t believe he was brainwashed. And as far as we know he wasn’t MKULTRA’d or whatever they call it, though he certainly could have been. But insofar as brainwashing exists in the mundane world, yeah, he was brainwashed, certainly by Garrett and possibly by SHIELD.
With that in mind, I want to revisit the claim of numerous characters that Team Coulson gave him a CHANCE to turn away from that path. Given that they don’t know about this aspect of his story, this is…pretty much impossible. Not because they would’ve given him more woobie currency and gone easier on him, but because unwinding this particular type of conditioning (“deprogramming,” as it would be called colloquially) is a deliberate undertaking. In order to give a person in this situation a choice, one would have to be aware that it would in fact require an existential choice to break out of their twisted thinking, and to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of how their thinking is twisted. It’s possible that this would be especially tricky in this case because, other than “death and destruction” and “survival by the deserving,” HYDRA as presented by Garrett doesn’t have any discernible ideology in which to poke holes and find contradictions. It’s mostly a moot point because of course nobody knew they had to try, but still worth knowing that there was one less toehold than usual on Ward’s theoretical way out.
More importantly, though, it is not in Our Heroes’ interests to entirely deprogram him. A change in allegiance from Garrett to Coulson, sure. But everything else Garrett stripped from and instilled in him? That’s why he’s there. That’s why he is valued by SHIELD; why he is, on paper, exactly what the agency wants in a “specialist.”
None of this is an answer to anything. It raises a lot of juicy questions about individual free will and about the ethical boundaries of systematically fighting fire with fire, but it doesn’t tell us how to assess Ward himself or SHIELD as an organization. What it does clue us into is the procedural issue of how he plays and gets played.
deep cover tactics 101
Ward is certainly an excellent manipulator, and more impressive than most because he is a very conscious manipulator. Usually, people who are as slick as he is are at least somewhat instinctive about it.
Now, Grant probably would have doggedly stuck to any plan Garrett told him about, and so his conversation with Raina about how he got onto the team and then gained their trust probably results from Garrett’s training. What’s more interesting to me is that he is able to selectively apply his understanding of how people work each other to his own ends, rather than to Garrett’s. When he walks Christian to the well, he quickly and ruthlessly picks apart Christian’s tactics, which are, of course, also his own tactics. (This goes as far as them fumbling the same way when they overplay their respective hands: “I set you free, Grant!” vs “I saved your life, Fitz!”) He can apply that to perhaps his most important formative relationship - but he seems legitimately clueless as to the number Garrett pulled on him.
One tactic he didn’t lay out quite so explicitly is that Grant’s supposedly terrible “people skills” are actually a cautious part of his act. (I’ve talked about this in context of other characters, but I think AoS makes it explicit in a way that I haven’t seen.) Like, I don’t think Hill was bullshitting the end of S1, when she tells Ward she never liked him. Back in the pilot, Hill’s instincts lead her to realize there’s something off about Grant during their interview, but he successfully threw her off by being rude and awkward, and so she decided it was a “people skills” issue. This perception supports his persona in preemptively giving a reason for shutting the team out, making them overly appreciative rather than suspicious of the crumbs he does drop. Once this perception is solidified in the team, he drops it in favor of the moderately-reserved bro persona.
I also do not believe he was entirely feigning his affection for the team, once he started to relax into the role. FitzSimmons’ mystification as to how their friend could hurt them is of course totally understandable in normal logic, but normal logic is not at play here. Ward has never experienced affection, feigned or sincere, as something which has anything to do with whether someone plays cruel mind games on him or abandons him in the woods or beats the hell out of him. And this goes back way past even Garrett’s indoctrination. Grant could become as sincerely devoted to Garrett as he was because, as sick as the relationship between the Wards we’ve met was, there really does seem to have been a twisted kind of love there. I think Christian was genuinely concerned when he asked if SHIELD had tortured Ward. Most of that’s putting on appearances, and it’s no small amount possessiveness, but he didn’t have to bring the subject of Grant’s well-being up at all. And there’s a shot of Grant’s face while they’re hugging after the confession at the well, and there really is a moment of something before he falls back into that dead-eyed operative look. He’s just been torturing Christian, and is on his way to murder him, but he really is relieved to have that moment.
Indeed, Grant is faking surprisingly little. Part of it’s my suspicion that he was totally trained to be SHIELD and therefore 90% of his job was stuff he’d be doing even if he wasn’t HYDRA. I think the episode with the berserker stick is particularly interesting in retrospect because the stick’s woo was that it lowered all those inhibitions* and made the carrier face whatever it is they’re repressing. Grant does not come across as being in the least bit tempted to turn on his unit; neither, as the Asgardian professor points out, does he even seem to particularly enjoy the stick’s high, certainly not to the degree of someone who enjoys death and destruction for its own sake the way HYDRA true believers do.
Those first few episodes after his capture of Hannibal Grant down there are so engaging to watch because it’s like one of those optical illusions, where the two lines don’t look like the same length or the two grays don’t look the same or whatever. Because in reflection after any given episode, I really don’t think he’s laying it on any thicker in the cell than he did before he was made. But when he’s locked underground, stripped of the I’m-Agent-Grant-Ward persona and with nobody buying his bullshit, it just makes you cringe.
Who are you?
Ultimately, what’s interesting about Grant is just how little of him is Grant. Underneath all that awareness of his directives and assets, there’s very little there there, rattling around with no connection to his decision-making processes. It’s right there in the name, even: he’s Garrett’s ward, defined by his subservience to someone else.
Ward is now living a future that he’s never had the psychological autonomy to consider. He never considered Garrett’s lack of an endgame as an issue. Without orders or purpose, he tries to kill himself. I don’t believe these attempts were genuinely guilt-driven or were made in a show of being genuinely guilt-driven. I think it was partly that he’s at sea without Garrett, and partly it’s that ability to depersonalize anyone, even himself. Agents who become liabilities get crossed off; he’s been captured, so he’s gotta go. When he’s over that, he looks to the past and decides to take revenge on Christian and their parents.
I think this near-lack of a core identity is the predominant reason Ward worms his way into Whitehall’s inner circle. Partly he just needs a mission, and partly it’s about his obsession with Skye. But mostly, I think it’s that he really can’t picture a life where he’s not living lies and playing with fire, and assigning himself to Operation Skye was the only lifeline he had once SHIELD (unwittingly?) cut him loose. (IIRC, He did follow through on one and only one act of resistance against Garrett, in lying to hide Raina’s theory about Skye’s origins. And again, this might be about his fixation on her, but it is also a chance for deceit at the moment all of his pretenses were stripped away.)
Even his formal attempts to define himself by his actions fall flat to me. Ward uses the rhetoric of I Take Full Responsibility because it’s what people expect to hear, and Ward’s defining trait is his ability to live up to expectations. But it rings hollow, less because he doesn’t mean it any more or less than the other things he says, but because it’s not an accurate take on the situation. Given the level of psychological conditioning Garrett used to get him in line, I don’t think there’s an intellectually honest argument that Garrett doesn’t bear at least some responsibility for Ward’s actions. If you don’t have sole responsibility, you can’t have full responsibility, because, like, math. And indeed, this whole man-as-an-island philosophy that you’re just supposed let every factor that led you to whatever point roll off your back and Man Up about it….is still Garrett’s schtick. Ward can say what people want to hear and own it and not blame anyone else, sure - but if he ever wants to stop being this guy, then he’ll have to deal with what Garrett did to him, which means relinquishing some sense of agency.
Which, I mean. I really can’t tell if that will happen. I don’t know if Ward has any desire to become something different. But I’m curious. I’m very interested.
*This episode is half of why I tend to believe that the story about the well is likely to be more or less what we’ve heard about it - Christian’s confession corroborates Grant’s subconscious. Also, his “it’s a well now?” comment to Coulson doesn’t add up with his knowing exactly what Grant meant when they headed toward the well. That's not to say it couldn't turn out to be unreliable, just that there's multiple reasons it seems credible and no discernible holes.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/339867.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
In my S1 post I talked about Grant’s role in the narrative, but mostly stayed away from the psychology of the character himself.
- When I talk about characters being right or wrong, I’m not talking about whether they are good or bad people for saying something or feeling a particular way. I don’t think any of the regular characters, at any point post-reveal, are in any way out of line in what they say to or about Ward. (Legally and as a matter of abstract principle, Fitz crossed the line in his stunt with the air filters, but given that Our Heroes accept torture as a matter of course, I’m loath to single him out for condemnation.) I’m evaluating them on how objectively accurate an assessment what they’re saying to or about Ward would be if they had the amount of information that we, as the audience, do.
- For purposes of this post, I am going to accept the information we see in flashbacks or hear from Coulson or Ward about his backstory as being reliable, while acknowledging that this is not for certain.
- This is where I would disclose my own personal bias, only…I’m really not sure how I feel about Ward, other than “interested.” HYDRA is bad and getting abused sucks, is the official position of this blog. If you feel more strongly about the character than I do one way or another, well, you go, Glenn Coco.
“You wouldn’t believe what I can talk this son of a gun into doing.”
My initial instinct was to make the easy contrast between Ward’s and Coulson’s respective recruitments. Both were vulnerable minors, but (as far as we know) Ward is the only one of the two who both experienced and engaged in violence. SHIELD would never step in for a Bad Kid like Ward, I thought; they’d have no way of knowing whether or not he would be responsive to training and become a dependable asset.
But, with further thought, I’m not sure SHIELD didn’t step in.
Garrett was, after all, a Level 8(+?) SHIELD agent all this time, and keeping that cover was a high priority for him. Bringing a SWAT team into a government facility and snapping up one of its inmates? Not exactly low-profile. Years later, Grant enrolled in the Academy under his real name, which means there was no attempt to hide his identity. We don’t know of any effort to cover up the fact that he’d dropped off the grid for a full decade, and IMO it’s unlikely that any was made - the creation of a false paper trail which would be good enough to pass SHIELD security clearance and/or the number of undercover HYDRA agents who would need to be let in on Grant’s identity and expose themselves to scrutiny if they were caught in a lie is quite a high risk to take for the reward of one single specialist, no matter how good his hand-eye coordination. It does not take an investigative genius to wonder where he was in those years that turned him from antisocial delinquent to top-notch soldier material. The simplest explanation which accounts for all available data is that Garrett’s methods were, at the very least, tacitly condoned by the highest levels of SHIELD, and may in fact have fully conformed to agency protocol.
Which group did what is not as important as the fact that it was done, and ultimately has very little to do with the question of Ward’s agency in the whole thing. But it has a great deal to do with how at least some of the other characters assess him, and therefore to the perceptions we’re building as viewers. Most notably, Coulson has good reason to be angry at Ward throughout S2, and then there are also a lot of non-Grant-related reasons he’s looking to blow off steam at someone. But still, he’s unguarded and dramatic (even by his standards) in his interrogations with Ward. What if it’s not only justified anger, or understandable venting? What if Coulson is distancing so hard because he does, on some level, feel that Ward is a fellow subject of extreme mental manipulations? What if it’s guilt, about having tacitly approved of the methods that turned an abused kid into this time bomb he brought onto his plane, or disappointment at realizing that his hero Nick Fury spent years overlooking (at best) these kind of practices?
And let’s take a good look at what those practices were, exactly.
- Targeting a vulnerable person in a particularly vulnerable situation.
- Lack of honesty about the rules and values that the target is signing up to live by. Total isolation from the outside world.
- Deprivation of physical needs.
- Verbal and physical abuse.
- Conditioning contempt for the inferiority of outsiders.
- Intermittent rewards once the desired thought patterns are exhibited.
- Warnings that outsiders don’t understand and will wrongly demonize the guiding principles, which therefore must be kept secret.
That’s not run-of-the-mill abuse. That’s perfectly-executed cult indoctrination.
Certainly Garrett was more than capable of doing this on his own. But Fury has a history of playing with matches.
It’s also not like this ever stopped. Garrett continues his intricate twirling of sticks and carrots right up to the bitter end. The “who are you” beating under the barbershop encapsulates the whole relationship. Ostensibly, Garrett beating the crap out of him is all about The Plan. Strategically, sending Ward to the base looking like he’d had to put up a fight to get there is not unreasonable, though two cracked ribs is probably overkill. But there was no tactical reason to make Grant identify himself as an agent of SHIELD in between blows. Grant’s a big boy, he can say his name. Garrett turned Grant’s cover story into a brutal Pavlovian reinforcement exercise, designed to punish Ward for, and pull him back from, his very mild dissatisfaction with the mission.
Ward isn’t lying when he says he wasn’t brainwashed, because he doesn’t believe he was brainwashed. And as far as we know he wasn’t MKULTRA’d or whatever they call it, though he certainly could have been. But insofar as brainwashing exists in the mundane world, yeah, he was brainwashed, certainly by Garrett and possibly by SHIELD.
With that in mind, I want to revisit the claim of numerous characters that Team Coulson gave him a CHANCE to turn away from that path. Given that they don’t know about this aspect of his story, this is…pretty much impossible. Not because they would’ve given him more woobie currency and gone easier on him, but because unwinding this particular type of conditioning (“deprogramming,” as it would be called colloquially) is a deliberate undertaking. In order to give a person in this situation a choice, one would have to be aware that it would in fact require an existential choice to break out of their twisted thinking, and to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of how their thinking is twisted. It’s possible that this would be especially tricky in this case because, other than “death and destruction” and “survival by the deserving,” HYDRA as presented by Garrett doesn’t have any discernible ideology in which to poke holes and find contradictions. It’s mostly a moot point because of course nobody knew they had to try, but still worth knowing that there was one less toehold than usual on Ward’s theoretical way out.
More importantly, though, it is not in Our Heroes’ interests to entirely deprogram him. A change in allegiance from Garrett to Coulson, sure. But everything else Garrett stripped from and instilled in him? That’s why he’s there. That’s why he is valued by SHIELD; why he is, on paper, exactly what the agency wants in a “specialist.”
None of this is an answer to anything. It raises a lot of juicy questions about individual free will and about the ethical boundaries of systematically fighting fire with fire, but it doesn’t tell us how to assess Ward himself or SHIELD as an organization. What it does clue us into is the procedural issue of how he plays and gets played.
deep cover tactics 101
Ward is certainly an excellent manipulator, and more impressive than most because he is a very conscious manipulator. Usually, people who are as slick as he is are at least somewhat instinctive about it.
Now, Grant probably would have doggedly stuck to any plan Garrett told him about, and so his conversation with Raina about how he got onto the team and then gained their trust probably results from Garrett’s training. What’s more interesting to me is that he is able to selectively apply his understanding of how people work each other to his own ends, rather than to Garrett’s. When he walks Christian to the well, he quickly and ruthlessly picks apart Christian’s tactics, which are, of course, also his own tactics. (This goes as far as them fumbling the same way when they overplay their respective hands: “I set you free, Grant!” vs “I saved your life, Fitz!”) He can apply that to perhaps his most important formative relationship - but he seems legitimately clueless as to the number Garrett pulled on him.
One tactic he didn’t lay out quite so explicitly is that Grant’s supposedly terrible “people skills” are actually a cautious part of his act. (I’ve talked about this in context of other characters, but I think AoS makes it explicit in a way that I haven’t seen.) Like, I don’t think Hill was bullshitting the end of S1, when she tells Ward she never liked him. Back in the pilot, Hill’s instincts lead her to realize there’s something off about Grant during their interview, but he successfully threw her off by being rude and awkward, and so she decided it was a “people skills” issue. This perception supports his persona in preemptively giving a reason for shutting the team out, making them overly appreciative rather than suspicious of the crumbs he does drop. Once this perception is solidified in the team, he drops it in favor of the moderately-reserved bro persona.
I also do not believe he was entirely feigning his affection for the team, once he started to relax into the role. FitzSimmons’ mystification as to how their friend could hurt them is of course totally understandable in normal logic, but normal logic is not at play here. Ward has never experienced affection, feigned or sincere, as something which has anything to do with whether someone plays cruel mind games on him or abandons him in the woods or beats the hell out of him. And this goes back way past even Garrett’s indoctrination. Grant could become as sincerely devoted to Garrett as he was because, as sick as the relationship between the Wards we’ve met was, there really does seem to have been a twisted kind of love there. I think Christian was genuinely concerned when he asked if SHIELD had tortured Ward. Most of that’s putting on appearances, and it’s no small amount possessiveness, but he didn’t have to bring the subject of Grant’s well-being up at all. And there’s a shot of Grant’s face while they’re hugging after the confession at the well, and there really is a moment of something before he falls back into that dead-eyed operative look. He’s just been torturing Christian, and is on his way to murder him, but he really is relieved to have that moment.
Indeed, Grant is faking surprisingly little. Part of it’s my suspicion that he was totally trained to be SHIELD and therefore 90% of his job was stuff he’d be doing even if he wasn’t HYDRA. I think the episode with the berserker stick is particularly interesting in retrospect because the stick’s woo was that it lowered all those inhibitions* and made the carrier face whatever it is they’re repressing. Grant does not come across as being in the least bit tempted to turn on his unit; neither, as the Asgardian professor points out, does he even seem to particularly enjoy the stick’s high, certainly not to the degree of someone who enjoys death and destruction for its own sake the way HYDRA true believers do.
Those first few episodes after his capture of Hannibal Grant down there are so engaging to watch because it’s like one of those optical illusions, where the two lines don’t look like the same length or the two grays don’t look the same or whatever. Because in reflection after any given episode, I really don’t think he’s laying it on any thicker in the cell than he did before he was made. But when he’s locked underground, stripped of the I’m-Agent-Grant-Ward persona and with nobody buying his bullshit, it just makes you cringe.
Who are you?
Ultimately, what’s interesting about Grant is just how little of him is Grant. Underneath all that awareness of his directives and assets, there’s very little there there, rattling around with no connection to his decision-making processes. It’s right there in the name, even: he’s Garrett’s ward, defined by his subservience to someone else.
Ward is now living a future that he’s never had the psychological autonomy to consider. He never considered Garrett’s lack of an endgame as an issue. Without orders or purpose, he tries to kill himself. I don’t believe these attempts were genuinely guilt-driven or were made in a show of being genuinely guilt-driven. I think it was partly that he’s at sea without Garrett, and partly it’s that ability to depersonalize anyone, even himself. Agents who become liabilities get crossed off; he’s been captured, so he’s gotta go. When he’s over that, he looks to the past and decides to take revenge on Christian and their parents.
I think this near-lack of a core identity is the predominant reason Ward worms his way into Whitehall’s inner circle. Partly he just needs a mission, and partly it’s about his obsession with Skye. But mostly, I think it’s that he really can’t picture a life where he’s not living lies and playing with fire, and assigning himself to Operation Skye was the only lifeline he had once SHIELD (unwittingly?) cut him loose. (IIRC, He did follow through on one and only one act of resistance against Garrett, in lying to hide Raina’s theory about Skye’s origins. And again, this might be about his fixation on her, but it is also a chance for deceit at the moment all of his pretenses were stripped away.)
Even his formal attempts to define himself by his actions fall flat to me. Ward uses the rhetoric of I Take Full Responsibility because it’s what people expect to hear, and Ward’s defining trait is his ability to live up to expectations. But it rings hollow, less because he doesn’t mean it any more or less than the other things he says, but because it’s not an accurate take on the situation. Given the level of psychological conditioning Garrett used to get him in line, I don’t think there’s an intellectually honest argument that Garrett doesn’t bear at least some responsibility for Ward’s actions. If you don’t have sole responsibility, you can’t have full responsibility, because, like, math. And indeed, this whole man-as-an-island philosophy that you’re just supposed let every factor that led you to whatever point roll off your back and Man Up about it….is still Garrett’s schtick. Ward can say what people want to hear and own it and not blame anyone else, sure - but if he ever wants to stop being this guy, then he’ll have to deal with what Garrett did to him, which means relinquishing some sense of agency.
Which, I mean. I really can’t tell if that will happen. I don’t know if Ward has any desire to become something different. But I’m curious. I’m very interested.
*This episode is half of why I tend to believe that the story about the well is likely to be more or less what we’ve heard about it - Christian’s confession corroborates Grant’s subconscious. Also, his “it’s a well now?” comment to Coulson doesn’t add up with his knowing exactly what Grant meant when they headed toward the well. That's not to say it couldn't turn out to be unreliable, just that there's multiple reasons it seems credible and no discernible holes.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/339867.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.