Agents of SHIELD S2
The first couple of episodes of 2B were strong enough to get me to go back and revisit the end of 2A, which even though I’d liked it hadn’t really clicked for me the first time around, but it worked a lot better for me this time around. The mid-season finale was a pretty direct demonstration of the sunk costs fallacy. Skye’s dad sinks his life into killing Whitehall, to a point where he destroys his relationship with his daughter. Skye knows better than to go down to the obelisk, until she can’t deal with her father and she decides that’s how to “make it right” even though Coulson tells her not to, and then Coulson decides to “make it right” and follow her down even though may tells him not to.
Skye’s power is such a great match for the character. She’s always been someone who has that force of personality which can move mountains, but who is also too adaptable for her own good, unable to entirely hang onto her own boundaries when environmental pressures on her raise. It says a lot that May, without even knowing about Skye’s transformation, was coaching Skye into the emotional tools she’s going to need.
Anyway, snaps to this season for validating my choice in favorites. Fitz is breaking my heart. I had a hard time putting this post together because I don’t know how much of my reaction to Fitz is first-person and it kind of got into some stuff that felt O/T but was hard to talk around so I’m going to explain under a cut and whether you care or not can be up to you, lol.
[and not caring is totally ok]
I talk relatively openly about being a psych patient because on balance it’s a good thing for a lot of people, myself included. But when I first got started with medications, I was seeing a pdoc who turned out to be either negligent or incompetent, who kept putting me on treatments which turned out to be off-label for some very good reasons, which resulted in long stretches of time where I took a huge hit to my ability to connect thoughts with speech. Both the practical realities of Fitz’s difficulties communicating and his subjective experience of having lost his voice to someone he trusted are….they’re getting it right, to a point where it’s tough to detach.
ANYWAY, I don't anticipate being reasonable about Fitz-related topics in the foreseeable future.
Long story less navel-gazey, his disability is handled very sensitively, and Iain de Caestecker is fantastic. FANTASTIC. Fitz has been both recovering and adjusting throughout the season, but he continues to mistrust his own mind. If it were any other character I’d think his disbelief at Skye’s test results were just about not wanting to admit that something huge had happened to her, and that might be a small factor here, but it’s mostly about, Fitz can’t afford to just believe his own eyes, especially when he sees something weird. And his whole life is weird stuff!
Still, his being the one to step in and protect Skye is the kind of thing that makes perfect heartspace-sense but is a recipe for disaster. I was actually expecting it to turn out a lot worse than it did. Skye needs a safe person who can help her calm her environment, and Fitz can’t modulate his response to things because he has to do so much work just to spit something out. It’s great that he empathizes with her being “different now” in the way he’s had to come to terms with, but it’s so not the same.
And it also turned very quickly from being about what she needed to being about what he needed? Or at least, what is an understandable framework of relationships to him. She did need to know what was going on with her, and that someone would accept and protect her. But she didn’t need Fitz trying to push her into keeping things to herself. Fitz is the kind of person who’s great on the ball when you need him, but who only knows how to relate to others when there’s crisis and codependence and need involved. And he projects a lot onto Skye: his soreness over Jemma having abandoned him, the way he needs to work so hard to contain (ie hide) a lot of what he’s going through and the fact that there’s not really an end in sight for him. I think he’s sincerely acting on what he’s learned through his own experience, but I think he’s also a little afraid of seeing Skye treated differently.
And oh, yeah, she is treated differently: Fitz was left to collapse into his own mind, but Skye is PROTECTED AT ALL COSTS. And compare both of those experiences with what happened when Mack got fucked up.
OH ANYWAY MACK, THE BEST. Mack has been consistently skeptical of Coulson almost since getting on board? He was vocal about whether it was a good idea to even try to find the city, and then he laid it out about why things had gone wrong. And that’s why I really side-eye Coulson’s claim that Mack is needed on the front lines? Obviously Mack is a skilled fighter and very strong. But Coulson already has plenty of muscle with May, Bobbi, and Hunter, even technically himself and Skye even though they shouldn’t be in the field. But he only has one mechanic! Fitz probably knows some amount of what Mack knows, but even if Fitz weren’t needed elsewhere, he can’t do a job which depends so heavily on fine motor skills. Mack is most valuable right where he is, doing what he’s doing. And I can’t help but suspect Coulson is really thinking on some level that Mack is more valuable to him if he’s doing something he doesn’t want to do, makes him spend more time getting direct orders, sets him up for an exploitable guilt/dependence cycle, and makes him non-indispensible and therefore less likely to challenge Coulson when challenges are warranted. I mean, I doubt Coulson admits that to himself, I think he’s telling himself that it’s about bringing Mack closer to the ~team, but I don’t buy it. And there are such sketchy racial dynamics with Coulson getting all Coulson like this with Mack. Just, ew @Coulson.
I feel like this Mack and Fitz thing is headed for catastrophe WHICH IS SO SAD because they’re so great together. In contrast to Fitz and Skye, this is in a lot of ways effective safe-person-ing? Speaking from a moderate amount of experience on both sides of this situation, being able to be close with someone whose shit is not 100% in order is not actually about generous and/or patronizing selflessness. That touch for figuring out what’s normal for a person whose normal isn’t normal comes more naturally to some people than others. Like, I don’t think Bobbi is unkind to or dislikes Fitz, but she’s pretty consistently kept her distance from him. And Fitz doesn’t take Mack for granted, and is quite direct about it when Mack is the one not doing so great after Puerto Rico (though that’s partly about Fitz’s thing about being needed). Still, that’s likely to make it worse in some ways that this is the second time Fitz has latched on to someone who’s there because they’ve got an agenda. I do think there’s more of a genuine relationship there than there was with Grant, though there also is the fact that Fitz has been a way into the team for Mack because he’s loved, but still isolated and primed for manipulation.
Mack’s pro-Fitz and Coulson-skeptical tendencies are worth looking at for their importance in the group dynamic, but put together, I think they illustrate Mack really well? That well-calibrated bullshit detector is part of this concrete rationality about Mack which everyone thinks they have but very few people actually do. And I think his conversation with Bobbi about how the team are going to feel when they get outed about whatever it is shows that he’s able to think critically even about himself and how he comes across to people, which is difficult. There’s this great little moment in the temple where Mack just straightforwardly says he’s scared of the dark. Which, you know, if you work for SHIELD, YOU SHOULD ABSOLUTELY BE AFRAID OF THE DARK.
Main contenders for who he and Bobbi are working for are Nick Fury or General Adrian Pasdar, do we think? It kind of does crack me up that they ended up overplaying their hand being all SECRETS SECRETS ARE NO FUN with Fitz. Hunter might act like a fool but he knows what’s up. (I don’t know where to go with the way Mack’s refusal to bring Lance into things with Bobbi comes up so often right next to Fitz’s pressuring Skye to keep quiet?)
I have also done a turnaround on my reaction to Lance and Bobbi. That ranting resentment we heard from him is the kind of thing that makes me wary. Not because he struck me as THE WORST EVAR, because they consistently work together in a way that shows a lot of mutual respect. Just that there’s a huge kind of gravitational pull to men who fetishize Strong Women ™ and then resent those women’s confidence. But he’s definitely growing on me, and as we’re seeing now, his defensiveness toward her really doesn’t seem to have been ego. He does love her, and she is willing and able to play him like a fiddle.
Um, who else, what else. The last couple of episodes have pushed me to suspect that the show is becoming more aware and insistent about the problems with Coulson. May and Coulson talking about their script was a pretty strong signpost that yes, Coulson’s persona is in fact a persona. Even back in Puerto Rico, Coulson wouldn’t admit to having an acceptable loss threshold, and then he threw Mack right under the bus without a second thought. His explosive anger at people questioning him and not following orders is questionable as fuck, given that people following orders unquestioningly were exactly what let the Hydra crisis become as pervasive and disastrous as it was. And I also feel like May is opening up as a character? I mean, she’s always made a lot of sense, but it does feel a little more dynamic to have her relationship with Skye come to the foreground and just to have her saying more.
I also really like that the show’s sticking with the “threat within” idea. Grant’s true allegiances were ultimately something that existed before the group, came from outside the group. Skye really is dangerous. Mack and Bobbi aren’t Hydra and don’t seem likely to be up to anything truly ~nefarious. There’s the potential for some real conflict and ambiguity.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/341334.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.