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Consider this Roxxon connection too: Aleksander Lukin, owner of Roxxon is not only the Winter Soldier's former handler, but has a connection to the Red Skull.

 BaronIveagh wrote:


Madam Hydra.

Which is one of my biggest annoyances at the moment. How the hell did Fox put Madam Hydra/Viper into Wolverine when although she's been in a bare handful of his comics, she is strongly linked and considered a main villian of the Avengers/Shield and we already have Hydra in the Avengers continuity.

How does Fox use her, but Marvel can't use the Skrull, or the word Mutant. It doesn't make any sense, unless she's a character who can be in both?

Oh yeah deathkorps is coming along nicely, the leg adds a good touch now he needs the face plate


Automatically Appended Next Post:

And no new episode till March fourth?!

More squandered momentum. Stupid Winter Olympics.

But yeah, this is equal to the previous episode. Seems like Agents of SHIELD is finally getting its gak together.

Towards the end the episode got a lot of momentum.

Earlier on though it felt very...silly. The continual backtracking was very annoying to me.

Also: Agreed. Stupid Winter Olympics pushing new episodes of pretty much everything(not "Almost Human" though as they have a new episode next Monday, apparently!) back.

Ah so that's why Channel 4 decide to pause the restart to March the 10th, makes sense now.

I thought Almost Human (super legit show by the way, you should all check it out) had a month delay as well that I cursed given the To Be Continued nature of the latest episode.

 Kanluwen wrote:
The continual backtracking was very annoying to me.

That wasn't "backtracking". It was parallel storytelling, a way of showing the same event from multiple points of view, and they did it very well.

Very legit episode. I wonder if it's too late to save the series though. What was that at the end? Actual character/plot development? Say it isn't so! I'm happy with the direction this is going.

I think 4-5 episodes in was a little early to be calling the series a dud. Quite a few series sometimes need time to find their feet. This one seems to be now which is could be good. Haven't seen the newest one yet but if it's as good as the last two then they are definitely headed in the right direction.

 agnosto wrote:
I wonder if it's too late to save the series though.

I doubt it's too late. The negative reactions to SHIELD have been fairly consistent in their criticisms, so much so that it would be hard for the writers to ignore the fact that many different places are all pointing out the same flaws. In the past two weeks alone I've read articles on Blastr, IGN, TV.com and The A.V. Club that all talked about what SHIELD was getting right and what SHIELD was getting wrong. They pretty much all said the same thing, and it appears that there's been enough of a shift in the way they tell stories between the first half and the second half of the season that you could almost hear the "clunk" as they shifted gears. And that's a good thing.

And lots of shows have rough first seasons. My fav show of all time, Stargate SG-1, had a pretty horrendous set of initial episodes. Spartacus was almost offensively bad for its first 3-4 episodes, and the suddenly became amazing and never stopped being good. Arrow, my current fav TV show, had a terrible start with an overblown voice-over and lots of questionable narrative choices, but has matured to the point where it's one of two shows I look forward to each week (well, three, now that Archer's back), the other being Person of Interest. It's rare for a show to hit the ground running (Stargate Atlantis is one of the few recent ones I can think of, and even that's not all that recent), and SHIELD certainly stumbled out of the blocks.

The reason we notice it more is twofold. The first is that it's such a high profile show. It's coming off of The Avengers, a movie that was the culmination of a decade’s work in making a shared universe. The idea that a studio could make 5 separate films involving 4 different sets of characters and link them together cohesively in a 6th is pretty amazing, and they’re still going strong (Avengers 2 will be the 11th film in this shared universe). So to then go and add a TV show linked to that means that far more eyes will be on it, magnifying its faults.

The second is that the TV landscape has changed. People now watch entire seasons in a day (or a weekend), and the slow grind of a week-to-week procedural with limited serialisation is something a lot of people are moving away from. There will always be shows designed in a way so that you can watch them in almost any order – the shows that do well in syndication – but people’s tastes are shifting. We’re getting some pretty amazing quality television as of late, and SHIELD fell way short of that mark. I’m not saying SHIELD needs to be Breaking Bad, House of Cards or even The Wire (or even The Shield, geddit? ), but it did need to step up its game to at least be as good as Arrow is now. The fact that it’s taken so long is a mark against it, but it’s not a fatal mistake.

They can come back from this, and it seems that they are. Just a pity that we’re getting multi-week breaks between episodes right now. Not the shows fault, sure, but it’s not as if they didn’t know the Winter Olympics were coming.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:


I doubt it's too late. The negative reactions to SHIELD have been fairly consistent in their criticisms, so much so that it would be hard for the writers to ignore the fact that many different places are all pointing out the same flaws. In the past two weeks alone I've read articles on Blastr, IGN, TV.com and The A.V. Club that all talked about what SHIELD was getting right and what SHIELD was getting wrong. They pretty much all said the same thing, and it appears that there's been enough of a shift in the way they tell stories between the first half and the second half of the season that you could almost hear the "clunk" as they shifted gears. And that's a good thing.

And lots of shows have rough first seasons. My fav show of all time, Stargate SG-1, had a pretty horrendous set of initial episodes. Spartacus was almost offensively bad for its first 3-4 episodes, and the suddenly became amazing and never stopped being good. Arrow, my current fav TV show, had a terrible start with an overblown voice-over and lots of questionable narrative choices, but has matured to the point where it's one of two shows I look forward to each week (well, three, now that Archer's back), the other being Person of Interest. It's rare for a show to hit the ground running (Stargate Atlantis is one of the few recent ones I can think of, and even that's not all that recent), and SHIELD certainly stumbled out of the blocks.

The reason we notice it more is twofold. The first is that it's such a high profile show. It's coming off of The Avengers, a movie that was the culmination of a decade’s work in making a shared universe. The idea that a studio could make 5 separate films involving 4 different sets of characters and link them together cohesively in a 6th is pretty amazing, and they’re still going strong (Avengers 2 will be the 11th film in this shared universe). So to then go and add a TV show linked to that means that far more eyes will be on it, magnifying its faults.

The second is that the TV landscape has changed. People now watch entire seasons in a day (or a weekend), and the slow grind of a week-to-week procedural with limited serialisation is something a lot of people are moving away from. There will always be shows designed in a way so that you can watch them in almost any order – the shows that do well in syndication – but people’s tastes are shifting. We’re getting some pretty amazing quality television as of late, and SHIELD fell way short of that mark. I’m not saying SHIELD needs to be Breaking Bad, House of Cards or even The Wire (or even The Shield, geddit? ), but it did need to step up its game to at least be as good as Arrow is now. The fact that it’s taken so long is a mark against it, but it’s not a fatal mistake.

They can come back from this, and it seems that they are. Just a pity that we’re getting multi-week breaks between episodes right now. Not the shows fault, sure, but it’s not as if they didn’t know the Winter Olympics were coming.

Thank you for the intelligent, succinct analysis. I agree that the multi-week break is going to be a drag, especially coming off of 2-3 very successful episodes. I'm not a big fan of where Skye's story is going but I see the draw for it and it could work out as long as they don't draw it out too long beat us across the face too much with her inner turmoil over her mysterious past (seriously, does every conversation have to end with her trying to dig for information? It makes the character tiresome.)

I think Deathlok is a great character to bring in, especially in the 40th anniversary year of the character; he's a fitting character for the SHIELD universe in that he's struggling to gain control of his own destiny and is basically a likable guy. We'll see where it goes. And I do like the character development in the last few episodes; they really needed to be fleshed out of the cardboard cut-out personas that they began the year as (super-spy, assassin, nerd and nerdette, captain-dad, double agent). We now have a love interest angle and the actors are showing much more depth in their characters than before.

Cheers.

As for new shows. I quite like Black Sails so far.

Saw the first episode of that. Thought it was a little slow, although it did surprise me in that the obvious antagonist (the guy who wanted to be Captain) was killed before the first episode ended. Haven't seen any others since then, but I'm willing to give it a chance.

So, I'm really looking forward to the 4 netflix series marvel is working on... Luke Cage is still one of my favourites. This show getting better gives me just that little bit of extra hope for those.

I presume because they're on Netflix and not on generic network TV that they'll be able to take a few more risks. Moreover, the four characters chosen for the series they're working on are a bit more high profile, so I'd imagine they've been given more freedom of scope.

My main question is: Will they be linked to the MCU? I certainly hope they are, as Luke Cage and Iron Fist showing up in an Avengers movie, or teaming up with Scott Lang in an Ant-Man movie could be quite cool.

I also hope that Agent Carter show gets off the ground. I finally opened my Iron Man 3 Blu-Ray that I've had for a few months and watched both IM3 and the Agent Carter One-Shot. The Agent Carter thing was the best thing on the disc.

I doubt they will show up in Avengers 2 since the series are slated for a 2016 release. Avengers: ultron owns being a 2015 movie, though it would make for some good early hype.

And I should look up that one shot.

Well I said an Avengers movie. Doesn't have to specifically be the next one. Chances are we'll have to get new Avengers eventually as I doubt RDJ is going to stick around after this one, and I don't think Chris Hemsworth likes the routine he has to undergo to get into shape for Thor.

I'm very interested to see where they take Deathlok.

I have this very one in my comic stash

You know, I have no idea who Deathlok is. The names vaguely familiar, but that's it.

I didn't know either. I had to look him up. Same goes for Victoria Hand and the guy Bill Paxton will be playing in the next few episodes. Still, the more people they bring in from the comics, the better. We're getting Sif in a few episodes time as well, so that's awesome.

Hmm...


Possibles:


Madam Hydra (for reasons I outlined earlier.)

Baron Strucker: Strucker is rumored to be involved in the creation of Ultron in the next Avengers film, and is another Hydra leader. Would be interesting if the show leads into the next avengers film after the first one lead into it.

Baron Zemo: The Clairvoyant seems to prefer Zemo's MO, and has a definite like for high tech. Founder of the Masters of Evil, and likes to get super villains into his employ by manipulating events. Given what's happened so far this whole thing may be him setting up a bunch of super villains so he can then spring them from Shield.
There's also the connection that Ultron reformed the Masters of Evil following Zemo's demise.

Kang the Conqueror: A time traveler would explain how he know what will happen and has happened, as Kang is an expert in, what is for him, History (and Coulson's resurrection seems to have been kept a very big secret, even from him). Further Kang is something of a puppetmaster in order to keep the future he comes from viable. He also tends to use the highest tech available in the time period he's in, in an attempt to avert paradox.

Kang's a little too much for a bunch of SHIELD agents to take on.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Kang's a little too much for a bunch of SHIELD agents to take on.

He also tends to bring some more.. bang.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Kang's a little too much for a bunch of SHIELD agents to take on.

You're forgetting both that Kang has no super powers of his own, and part of his weird personal world view is to 'fight fair' ie not bring anything that his targets can't conceivably beat. (as he explained when asked why he simply didn't go back in time and kill Reed Richards as a child.) Taking on a team of shield agents probably isn't his end game, but could conceivably be part of a larger ploy.

My suggested Villian for A.o.S.
Rupert Grint, aka Ron Weasley, as Arcade! He has the right look, can be coached on the laugh and accent, and would be the right level of bad guy for the show and could be recurring.

Problem with Arcade is that while flying rodent gak crazy, he also is a member of the Spiderman and Xmen rogues galleries, and there fore off-limits.

His MO really doesn't match either.

Arcade has appeared in nearly every Marvel title, and has even gone after several villians.
He is more of a Marvel Universe baddie than a title specific one.

As for his MO... he started by going after normal people, which would fit, then moved on to bigger fish like supers.

SHIELD got away with including Skrull text in that episode where Ward and Fitz go out on a mission together, so there's clearly some leeway in what they can and cannot include.

Arcade's a difficult one though. He's kinda dumb - he makes a big amusement park meant to kill you, and somehow no one can find this non-super-powered stooge? - and you really have to find one-off situations where he fits. Plus if he puts the team into Murderworld and no one dies then he's not an interesting or even threatening villain.

Even making Arcade make sense in the broader scale of the universe is difficult. I'll pick three examples:

1. Marvel Ultimate Alliance. This is a PC game from a few years back where some Baron Mordo shenanigans sends your teleporting team from their chosen destination (Castle Doom) to a version of Murder World disguised as Castle Doom (at least at first). You fight your way through because you start out trapped. That worked for the most part, but then you fight arcade's giant robot suit and it feels really silly.
2. Agenvers Arena. This is less about Arcade and more about the characters stuck within. And it's just Battle Royale/The Hunger Games with Marvel Characters, and I don't think that'd work on TV (especially if none of the characters can die).
3. Avengers Alliance. This facebook game recently did a big Arcade/Avengers Arena event, and to make it plausible that your team (consisting of everyone from Thor through to Ghost Rider) could be threatened by Arcade they had to give him supreme technological, psychic and magical abilities far and above any one hero.

Now try to translate that into Agents of SHIELD. The show would need far more reoccuring characters (that can be killed off to raise the stakes), and you'd have to make Arcade into something more than a joke character.

Seriously? You start with an important person, politician, business person, or a couple Shield agents being found murdered in an abandoned warehouse. A clue (perhaps left on purpose) leads to the possibility of it being Arcade.

Then the less combat oriented get kidnapped and placed in Murderworld. Plus there is the Sky sl they opened that could be the reason for same.

Maybe May had a run in with him previously, which leads to some interplay with Colson and the others. Make it a 2 parter ...

It could be worked out.