f13.net

30 second Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. teaser. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mDKQ3L6FiRU)

Ooooo.

I'm actually pretty psyched about the show, it probably should just get it's own TV thread.

Also I hope that's Luke Cage and he's not just a cameo.

First guy looks like Luke Cage.  There is a second black dude flinging a guy over his head, doesn't look like the same actor.

Man, they could really do some cool shit with this show!

I almost made a TV thread for it, but decided not to bother yet since a preview that short wasn't really going to generate much discussion. Maybe when the extended trailer unlocks.

Huh. That looks great. Kinda Heroes with a lower camera angle  :grin:

Full trailer now up. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MXjoPRvSd7k) Scheduled for 8pm on Tuesdays this Fall.

For a trailer now?  That's annoying.

This the same thing? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4iM14dG5Ug)

Yeah it's the same.

I feel like Joss Whedon needs to shake up his style a little bit.  I can't watch anything he's written any more without being reminded every five seconds that I'm watching a Joss Whedon thing.  All the characters just sound like Joss Whedon.

They have some balls putting this up against NCIS.

It pretty much IS NCIS, except you know with superpowers.  I just hope to god they don't start trying to write NEW canon when it comes to villains and evil agencies...there's already plenty in the universe already.

Ooo, Ming Na is in this.  She rustles my jimmies.  Looks like a fun show.  Going against NCIS will require at least a cameo of Robert Downey Jr. to give it a chance though.

Forcefully reminded of this last time I watched Avengers, realising that the 'team fighting over sceptre' scene was exactly the same as 'Scooby Gang fighting over Magical Box' scene.

Ah well.  I can still enjoy it.  I thought Cabin was nicely different.

Kinda.

Great to see J August Richards is in it!

(http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18nk2d9wyu2qxjpg/ku-xlarge.jpg)

So some people are saying that it isn't Luke Cage but possibly Rage.  As that's him in the SHIELD Marvel logo.  I guess this makes more sense since Luke Cage is a more iconic character, and there has been rumblings about a Iron Fist/Heroes for Hire movie in recent years.

Except Heroes for Hire works awfully well with a SHIELD series--there's the official guys and then there's the contractors, and then there's the tension in-between.

Hell, maybe they'll actually bring Damage Control in at some point. Or the law firm from She-Hulk's old series that specialized in superhero law. A series that dealt with the real-world infrastructure of superhero shit would be so, just so, fucking awesome. The best ever.

They had me at "Welcome to Level 7."  :drill: :drill: :drill: :drill: :drill:

Marvel shut down the Luke Cage rumors.

Hmmm...Schild hasn't shown up to complain yet. He must be getting tired of Whedon-baiting.

This looks like great fun. Speaking of Joss being predictable, I saw a comment somewhere about Fitz and Simmons (I think?) saying they'll have great chemistry and lots of tension and then when things work out one of them will die or something since it's a Whedon show.

I really hope this show has SHIELD confronting minor villains and heroes from the Marvel universe who won't get their own TV show or movie.

Instead of some random dude getting super powers and SHIELD helping them get their life back.  YUCK.

I have a terrible suspicion that this show isn't going to focus on anything canon at all and is simply going to introduce new heroes/villains, in which case it will suck mightily.

I could see them dealing with doofuses like the Trapster in various cold opens, that would be fun.

HYDRA, AIM, etc. also.

Even things like Hydra may be stepping on the captain america movie canon.

Mutants? Spiderman? Sony is still doing those movies and what about the fantastic four?

The only thing I can see is them doing a lot of stuff with the chitauri(sp) race from the avengers movie and then making up a shitton of villains just for this.  All in all it's got a bad vibe to it.  Too intrenched in canon to do anything BUT feature the marvel universe but the marvel universe is too split up between companies to touch any of it.

I've just returned to comics, but wouldn't throwing a ton of C-list heroes and villains (with non-CGI powers for the most part) into a SHIELD-themed serial and chucking canon work pretty well with the whole Marvel NOW vibe? Focus on fun and interesting stuff without worrying too much about continuity other than fitting the 'event' of the moment?

Watched the 30 second trailer, but when it gets to "Coming from ABC" I just assume it will end poorly. I just have no trust in the broadcast networks whatsoever to produce anything that isn't dumbed down.

I agree.  Revolution is a big hit and it is ridiculous.  I worry about the same treatment for this.

Thing is sky, I don't think they will even go c-list for the most part. I see them making shit up wholesale.

If I'm not mistaken, the TV rights are all with Marvel and aren't split up like the movie rights are.

To be brutal, I'm more worried that they've cast a dead bloke.  I see that causing issues.

I agree. I'm just saying it doesn't have to fail from Marvel's end.

And yeah...casting is a bitch. I started to watch the Amazon pilot for a Zombieland series by the guys who did the movie...but Tallahassee was so horribly miscast I didn't last five minutes. Should've used new characters.

As long as the writing is good, I'm not sure why that would be an issue. When you think about it, is there really any value to using established c-list characters like Stilt-Man, Slyde, the Prowler, or the Desert Dwellers? Hell, every Iron Man villain has already been a pretty large departure from their comic book counterpart.  Sure in an ideal world I'd love to see them take the opportunity to say, maybe throw some of the eventual Thunderbolts (Beetle, Screaming Mimi, and Goliath in particular) in the show as bad guys, but due to budgetary reasons and various characters being considered for their own movies, many of the better MU characters you just aren't going show up here.

Comics themselves suffer from terrible continuity bloat and making up a whole new slew of characters for the tv show would be more of the same and just as detrimental to the franchises. I mean the movies are already going with guardians of the galaxy...seriously...

I really don't see them creating many new characters.  If anything I bet they just give some makeovers to older Marvel heroes and villains.  I mean what's the point of making a Marvel TV show if all your characters are going to be new?  SHIELD could run for 10 seasons and still not run out of Marvel characters.

Possibly, but characters with ANY potential for a movie or their own show aren't going to be showcased here so they can have origin stories and all that.

So... wouldn't that problem be the same regardless of whether they're creating new characters or just introducing characters from the comics?

There's a number of heroes with relatively low level powers, background conspiracies and secret "mysterious objects" that will eventually end up with the big guns battling over it. Lots of material barely hinted at that could be explored and developed. And a lot of that suits a slow and low key exposition that wouldn't work with the "popcorn and explosions" movie block-buster crowd.

Of course it all depends on the writing and character work.

Here's to hoping this lasts longer than ABCs last super hero drama, No Ordinary Family   :oh_i_see:

All this stuff is under the Disney umbrella anyway isn't it?  With Marvel making huge money right now, I am betting that SHIELD gets a bit more leeway than other shows.  Especially if they want to keep Whedon somewhat happy.

I hope they just take any ideas they want to from the comics and ignore anything that gets in the way of the story they want to tell. The show has to work in its own right, it can't worry about Marvel continuity. I buy comics and I've never heard of half the characters you guys are talking about:) The average person watching the show won't buy comics at all.

Exactly.  If they wanted to do something that was canon, you'll be damn sure it wouldn't be on prime local programming like ABC.  Maybe Scifi or Spike. 

Because Nick Fury would never use a convenient lie to motivate his team of malcontents.

Just finished rewatching Avengers.  The two things that jumped out was that Loki always seems to wind up exactly where he wants while the people around him wish they hadn't gotten what they wanted, and Colson was conveniently off-screen when his death was announced.

--Dave

I no longer care.  They've already said 'Yeah, we brought him back'.  Exactly how they do that is of precisely no interest to me.

Maria Hill does suggest in the film itself that there's some hanky-panky going on with the death announcement.

I'm still holding out for Damage Control to show up eventually--I think it's such a great concept especially for a more "realistic" approach to superheroes. They could introduce the law firm that specializes in superhero law from She-Hulk, also.

If you look at Whedon's work, there is no way Coulson didn't die. 

From an in-story perspective: A friggin God shoved a hunk of metal through his chest.  This guy can punch through a stone wall and he couldn't shred a man's insides with a giant blade?

From a story telling perspective: Whedon takes death seriously.  If you walk back from death, you paid a price.  If you can just get up from a deadly blow, death holds no meaning.  The next time a hero dies, you'll wonder how long before they come back.  Go read Whedon quotes on the death of his characters.  No way he cheapens the sacrifice.

From a story development perspective: Looking at Marvel's tool house for SHIELD from the Comics, there is a long history of replacing someone with LMDs (Life Model Decoys).  They're incorporating the SHIELD tech into the movie and series (flying cars, helicarrier, etc...)  They have to make use of it.  They even reference the tech in Avengers (Stark mentions them in his tower banter).   

What is the show about?  Average people in a Super world.  What is a compelling story to tell in that world?  An ordinary person finding out he is not ordinary.

I'd be shocked if the story angle is not that Coulson is an LMD and doesn't know it, used to replace Coulson because he had key roles that can't just be filled by a replacement.   Well, maybe - just maybe - they could use that as the mislead.  But it will be a core story being told.

I'ts Agent Cloneson!

I enjoyed this (http://janeturenne.tumblr.com/post/24127934536/humancastiel-tonysboypussy-blueisacolour) theory as to why Phil is around.

:uhrr:

Big bets that the season-long arc will involve some kind of return of/redesign of HYDRA.

Excellent, then we can all do that double armed Heil Hydra Salute.

Because that wasn't retarded.

Yeah, he did, but it appears he's not a robot or clone or anything and it's not going to be resolved in the premier.

http://screenrant.com/agents-of-shield-coulson-explained-movie-tie-in/

Quote from Wiki re: Coulson and Whedon explaining it to one of the series creators:


In another article Whedon also points out that he does have a history of bringing characters back.  (And makes a joke how his first piece of work was focused entirely on that.  e.g. Ripley.)

Turns out to be a skrull.  You heard it here first!

A skrull with REALLY WEIRD motivations.

I'm also not sure the skrulls and the chitauri can exist in the same universe. Well, I suppose they CAN of course.

The simple answer is that they used the Cosmic Cube to bring him back to life.

The simple answer is 'A Wizard Did It'.

The simplest answer is we never see him actually die and we only have Nick Fury's word to go on.

Whoah, wait, so now we have Dr. Strange involved?


And Nick Fury never ever lies or hides the complete truth. Ever. Never ever.

(This is also my theory.)

When it comes to narrative, the "clone that doe not know he is a clone" has a lot of mileage.  I think that's probably the best way they can do this since it gives a lot more depth to the character and allows room for growth later on.

Note that if they're trying to sell us that Coulson is alive before an LMD reveal, they'd have toi say he is alive in the press now. 

An additional point to contribute: Joss and I are of an age in many ways.  We grew up reading the same comics and seeing the same stories.  We have an affinity for the same era of Marvel stories.  He is a bit older than me, but when I got into comics, I was given a 10 year old collection of Marvel stuff.  If you go back to see what SHIELD was when Joss was in his formative years, you're going to see LMDs everywhere. 

And, in a show about what it means to be human in an increasingly inhuman world, I can't see Joss passing up the chance to have the character that is the voice of humanity question his own humanity. 

They did. Read the article I linked.

God that made me laugh more than it should've.

Aren't Angel and Buffy full of characters who die and come back, including both Angel and Buffy? (I just read on a random website that Buffy died twice!)

The first Buffy death isn't really a sacrifice. The second one was and worked well. But, Joss has also just straight up killed people too.

Kind of my point... them saying he's alive is not evidence that he is alive because they'd need to say it is they do a mislead...

As for the Buffy Deaths:

Buffy dies twice.  Both really screw with the character.  She doesn't get up, brush the dust off and say, "No biggie.. let's recruit some more Scoobies."   She freaks out and has real trouble adjusting to being alive after dying.  I don't recall Angel dying.

If you watched Buffy and Angel over the seasons when the show was on TV, I think you'd agree that Whedon's approach to death is that it must mean something huge.  You don't kill a character unless it changes the show.  There is no chance Coulson's death is just a ruse by Fury. 

Spike is the one that died, not Angel.  Well, I guess technically Angel died when he became a vampire but that doesn't count.

He was kinda meant to die when Buffy threw him into that Acla, swallower of worlds, demon.

He got better.

Turned out it was just a big swallowy prison.

Buffy actually had one of the single greatest episodes around a death that is still one of the best hours of television. And the death lasted and really fucked her up. (Not her own death.)

Her mom, right?  Although there were other deaths that stuck and were major events (whatshername, Willow's girlfriend, for example).  Yeah, in Whedon plots, deaths of non redshirts are generally treated as significant events, and resurrections are always more than just ways to keep a character around through handwaving.

--Dave

Look, in long-term serial fiction almost nobody stays dead. It's a miracle that Bucky stayed dead as long as he did. It's a miracle that Uncle Ben is still dead in Marvel Comics. It's a miracle that Thomas and Martha Wayne, barring a few alternate-universe and villain sidebars, are still dead.

Any story that lasts X amount of time will contain a nearly 100% number of resurrections unless it is unabashedly focused on the passage of time in a semi-realistic way, like Michener's Centennial. If your serial fiction is focused on the same set of characters, almost none of them will permanently die unless they die at the absolute end of the story or they died before it ever began.

That is our point... Whedon doesn't treat death so casually. Coulson's death had significance, and he won't wave a hand over it and diminish that significance. As S.H.I.E.L.D. brought him back, and they can' t do magic, he didn't really come back.  It has to be an LMD.

Yeah, her mom's death in "The Body". Tara's death was sadly well done too. Sudden and heartbreaking. Tara's also led to one of the most grisly things I've seen on a network show, especially for before 10pm.

Yeah, I'm still surprised they actually showed someone being flayed alive.

Quick flayed... It really wasn't any more graphic than one of those skinless medical study things we see on Medical shows all the time.

What medical shows are you talking about? Like ER, or an education/science based show?

And did you mean quick as in they only show it briefly? Because they cut and back from it like three times.

I thought Tara got shot in the musical episode....am I mis-remembering?

I didn't have a particular example in mind.  I've seen the 'skinless model' on TV a lot.I meant that it wasn't a graphic apple peeling scene with blood spewing in huge streams.  It was done in one second. 

The moment carried an impact, and seemed really brutal, but it wasn't actually that graphic if you think about it.  It was the tamest total body flay I've ever seen, on TV or in real life.

It was before 10pm, and was brutally done, and not in an educational sense. Was it as bloody/gory as say being flayed in a Hellraiser movie? No, of course not, no on was claiming it was.

I thought Tara got shot in the musical episode....am I mis-remembering?


You are not remember correctly. "Once More With Feeling" was early in Season 6. "Seeing Red" (in which she gets shot) was in the last few episodes of Season 6.

All I was saying is that I can't come up with a more tame total body flaying.  No matter how many times I try.  To bring up Hellraiser, the scene in the first one where they carry a sofa through a doorway and get cut on a nail was far more disturbing to me than the bloodless flaying.

So you're a flaying-hipster, I get it.

I'm only into horrific deaths that involve amontillado.

I use my fixie to provide the starting momentum for my pendulum. 



Wow. That reads all kinds of wrong.

We prefer faying-hipstuh.

3 weeks to go... and nobody talked about the Comic-con reveals.  I was surprised the J August Richards is playing Squirrel Girl...

ABC had a promo on last night. Looked cool. Ming Na makes my Avenger assemble.  :drill:

She's still pretty hot for a 50 year old.  :awesome_for_real:

As a 50-year old myself, get off my lawn you ageist punk.  Ming Na is going to meet me at the Sizzler for the 4pm dinner buffet before we fall asleep together after The Big Bang Theory ends.

50 is the newzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I cannot get past how "young and hip" this cast is, so much so that it's super(hah) unrealistic.  Hacker girl in van takes time to do hair and makeup before trying to get into secret database? sure.....

It's like this show was cast with no thought to the much more realistic casting of the movies.  Were agent coulsen not an established character, that actor would not have been allowed within 100 yards of this soap opera set.

Yeah, it's a super young cast if you ignore the 1/3 of it which is around 50 (not to mention a few other recurring roles). And yeah, Whedon would never cast some older actors in his shows with a hip young cast. Nor would he have used Agent Coulson if that character wasn't already established. I mean aside from the fact that he was established to dead and was brought back for the show. If it was because Whedon liked him as an actor he obviously would have used Clark Gregg in one of his other projects by now.

He has.  Gregg was in Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing.

You almost managed to bypass the sarchasm without incident.

(http://smhttp.14409.nexcesscdn.net/806D5E/wordpress-L/images/SHIELD-cast.jpg)

God damn senior citizens.

Yeah, I'm sure a team with 2 senior members and 3 or 4 people in their 20s is highly unrealistic. Never happens.

Whedon has a casting history that disagrees with the notion that this cast is anything but what he thought was best for the show. Go look up the tale of Whedon, Fox and the casting of Inara. Marvel trusts Whedon more than Fox ...

Happens all the time, on tv.  My point is not just that they are young, they are all super attractive too and quite frankly it's stupid.  Not offensive in that I care about their looks but stupid because it's now just 90210(super edition) and it's hard to take it seriously.  Look at any show in this vein, NCIS,CSI, even Buffy and yes there are pretty people but even in the main cast not everyone looks like they should be modeling clothes(willow surprised everyone I think)

See that girl on the left?  She supposed to be some fucking super hacker computer nerd, I mean isn't that obvious looking at her?

Oh, dear, it's terribly important that a show about secret agents in a superhero universe conform to your ideas about sociological realism. Definitely make sure the hacker is a sweaty fat guy living in his mom's basement, because we know girls don't know how to use computers, let alone good-looking ones.

Bullshit argument.  Neither RDJ, Mark Ruffalo, Jeremy Renner, Tom hiddleston or even Sam Jackson look like they stepped off the set of a teen drama. 

As to hacker girl? Yeah I'm sure every girl into computers is also a model who does their hair and makeup before sitting in a van to infiltrate the government.

:awesome_for_real:

I understand the points, but you guys are trudging dangerously close to the NOT A REAL NERD BECAUSE SHES PRETTY argument. Plenty to... complain about I guess.. when it comes to protraying "hackers" in general without saying "OMG SHES PRETTY TOO, UNREAL".

It's a promo shot, for a TV show about superheroes, produced in Hollywood.

And all of those actors you listed are terribly ugly, right? Let's just... step away from the beauty argument a bit.

I'm not trying to say those actor are ugly but they look like real people and not models on the set of a soap opera.  I mean there are tons of pretty women into computers but it's not about pretty/ugly it's about how realistic/fake the presentation is.  Not a single peircing/tattoo? Hair/make-up straight out of victoria's secret commercial? Dresses like she could be on the set of any disney show? 

I'm not even trying to harp on that one girl because there are problems throughout with the main cast just looking so...fake.

You're still concentrating on the "looks" which seems a bit arbitrary. There seems like there would be plenty of reasons to "pick on" when it comes to showing "hacking" without making her look like Lisbeth Salander or Neckberd McMouthbreather.

Wait - the people working for a secret government agency are not covered in easily identifiable tats and piercings?  

THE SHOW HAS NOT EVEN BEEN ON YET!  Wait to see how the characters are set up and handled before you judge.  

If you have to judge now, use the data at hand.  Look at the show runner's history.  Seriously.  90210 (super edition)?  Are you concerned about too much character development in porn, too?

You haven't read many super hero comics, have you?  :oh_i_see:

If you watch the trailer she is not working for shield in the beginning, she tries to hack shield and they recruit her.  Hey look, I'm not comparing this show to anything but super hero movies that have been coming out lately and those do not look like the cast of dawson's creek.

That's only because the people in the movie are older... but they're still not "realistic", they're all super attractive... so...

Let's put this ridiculous argument about hacker females not being hot to bed:

http://backorifice.org/477/top-5-female-hackers-of-the-world/ (http://backorifice.org/477/top-5-female-hackers-of-the-world/)

(http://backorifice.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/female.jpg)

4 out of 5 get a free pass for eating crackers in bed.

Never said they couldn't be hot(Why does everyone infer that?) Just saying they aren't models that dress up for glamour shots when breaking into top secret databases.  Gender isn't really the issue, nor is hot/not it's just about presentation of a character as wholly unrealistic soap opera drek.

Probably because you keep harping on it and specifically pointed it out, that because she looks like that she can't possibly be a hacker.

And 4 out of those 5 girls in that article are dressed similarly to the character on SHIELD as seen in the promos. 

VICTORY IS OURS!

You mean in their glamour shots?

Oh Fuck me, this fucking thread is retarded.

yeah, it's... gotten really fucking silly. I'm embarrassed for my part in all this.

Once again General Zod saves the galaxy

....

And on to other topics -

Anyone else impressed with the lack of spoilers for this show?  I figured that with a show this big, they'd have a number of leaks out there, but beyond the coverage of the pilot from the convention crowd, I have heard very little about the subsequent episodes.  I just heard the description for the second episode today, and it is about as detailed as me telling someone, "I'm meeting my friend in LA to talk about something."

Not necessarily a good sign.

I'm expecting great things.  It won't be the 100% amazing World of Marvel we'd like to see, but I have faith in the team behind the series. 

My checklist for things from the movies or comics that I'd like to see addressed by this series:

1.) Where did they put the Abomination after Incredible Hulk?
2.) We saw what seemed to be the creation of 'the Leader' in the Incredible Hulk - with no Hulk movie on the horizen, I'd like to see him appear in S.H.I.E.L.D. 
3.) Hydra and AIM have been established - I'd like to see them be regular foes.
4.) We saw some blips on the map for locations S.H.I.E.L.D. was tracking in the Atlantic and in Africa in Iron Man II. I'd love to see them explianed.
5.) I'd like them to establish whether this is a world in which the Savage Lands, the Blue Area of the Moon, Subterranea, Monster Island, etc... might or do exist.  We've been getting small snapshots of the Marvel Universe in the films - they'll have a lot more time to explore this world in the show.
6.) Lizzy Caplan.
7.) The Ten Rings existed in IM I and II.  The Mandarin in IM III capitalized upon the imagery of the Ten Rings - was there an actual tie to the group as well?
8.) There are a lot of S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel in the comics that we have not seen referenced in the show.  I'd like to see Carol Danvers, Jasper Sitwell, etc... show up.
9.) I'd like to see a classic version of Nick Fury.  Maybe we can get a multiverse story with an alternatre Earth... and I think it'd be funny to have him played by the Hoff.

Goodness, that list is funny.

You're confused.  You were searching for "awesome and very reasonable, except for #9 which is idiotic".

Oh god...I'm saving that list for the end of season one. I'm gonna print it on a napkin and soak up all your bitter fanboy tears with it.

Heh.

That list is a modified cut and paste from an email  (#9 was a joke, btw).  However, the email list has 10 items.  I cut out one of the items because I already know that it is going to be addressed in S.H.I.E.L.D.  I also shortened the list of things in #5 for similar reasons - one Marvel location has been confirmed to be part of the show at some point in season one (according to an implication of a quote of a writer).  I don't expect all 10 will see screen in season 1, but I do expect that AIM, HYDRA, 10 Rings, named S.H.I.E.L.D. agents from the comics, etc... will make be seen.  I also expect a few ot the others will make it to the screen as well, although it could be as vague as seeing a reinforced cell with the name Emil Blonksy on it, or S.H.I.E.L.D. protecting a diplomat from Wakanda.  Although I'd love to see 9 of 10, I'd be happy with 6 of 10. 

I dunno how many Easter Eggs of that kind you'll see, but not many of them will be major plot elements.

AIM I think you can expect, but not in the funny yellow beehive hats.

Just curious about people's predictions...

If you use the US release date for Thor (November 8) and the US schedule for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and if that show shows a new episode every week for the first 8 weeks, Thor will come out between episodes 7 and 8. 

Do folks think we'll see any forshadowing or response to the events of Thor 2 in the show?  If so, at that time or will they wate until later (after the midseason break)?

 

Doubt they will, but if they reacted/set up movies that could really inter-connect the MCU in a way not seen in entertainment.  Unless there's some TV/movies interlaced that I don't recall at the moment.

Jane does punch Loki and says "This is for New York", so they do refer to Marvel's The Avengers (sorry love typing that) in Thor 2 and possibly take a slight dig at Man of Steel:  Real Estate Adjuster at the same time.

I think it would be more a matter of when they take place in relation to each other rather than when they both come out. Also I think Captain America 2 would be the easier movie for them to tie into a bit since there's more of a S.H.I.E.L.D. connection there, you've given the show almost a full season to establish itself, and it comes around the time when most network shows are coming up on their season finales.

So this airs tonight, but I'm not going to be home to watch it.  Anyone know what time ABC.go posts episodes?  Is it right as they end, or is it the next morning?

Looks like it's the next day, based on checking out what episode of "The View" and "Good Morning America" are currently posted (Yesterday's)

I liked everything about the first episode except for the little slow-mo thumbs up montage near the end. Fucking wank that was  :why_so_serious:

it was ok for a network show

It was a good show but I am not sold on Fitz/Simmons.  They were more like cheerleaders than scientists.  Good story, and I liked some of the references. 

All of the characters sucked except Mae and Coulson; exactly due to what Lakov said.  Twerent for the writing (save the cliche koombaya moments like at the end), it'd be DOA as far as I'm concerned.  

Christ, it's really true.  I thought the actress might be her younger sister or something.  Same look, same terrible acting.

She's the weakest part of the show so far, but has the lead role in the pilot.  Go figure.  I will guess (hope) her part to play will be slowly minimized or tweaked. 

Glamourhackers.gov?

 :awesome_for_real:

I thought more than implied, pretty much said.

Hacker character is very weak and will need a lot of Whedon attention to be anything better. The casting here is terrible--this needs to be someone feels like they have hidden depths and instead they cast someone who feels like the deepest she gets is when she is sad about breaking a nail.

Muscle/assassin is such a noncharacter that I barely registered his presence. The whole truth serum thing would only have worked if he'd felt monosyllabic and remote up to that point, which he didn't.

Fitz and Simmons were fine, the pilot/veteran was interesting.

The dialog was generally good. Action choreography was ok, not dazzling.

Has potential but also could quickly spiral into suck. A lot is going to depend on how they create longer-term arcs.

The truth serum thing was the weakest bit of all because it's such a goddamn worn-out trope.  Oh no, tough guy has feelings and says things like "gram-gram!?" when forced to drop the facade.  He's human!  :oh_i_see:

Over-all it felt like a very thin fan-fiction. I'm willing to give it another shot because it was only the pilot, but it didn't even hold the 10-year-old boy's interest long enough for him to care about Gunn-nee-"Everydayworker 09959".

Then again I've also never been the Whedon fan the majority of the internet is. I find his stuff really sophomoric and the lens/ corporate censor filters that ABC are applying really buff that aspect of his work more than any depth he achieves.

That was pretty bad.

Supermodel hippie computer hacker girl - lol. I get that Joss Whedon's thing is casting terrible actresses he wants to bone and having them play ludicrously unbelievable roles but this is even worse than his typical beautiful hooker / martial artist shit. I wonder if people will ever catch on to Whedon's fake feminist stuff. Girls you can do anything, from being a kung-fu master to an expert hacker - as long as you're super hot! In general the more screen time a character got the worse they were - not a good formula. It definitely feels like they found some attractive-looking people and cast them without thinking about their acting ability or their characters. Faux-Hawkeye managed to make actual Hawkeye exciting. Maybe their mandate was to make Renner look exciting.

The speech at the end was so bad, like someone read 5 seconds of financial industry coverage over the past 5 years and thought some trite messaging would hit home. And the slow-mo thumbs up montage...it almost seemed like parody.

It also felt very small overall, like SHIELD is operating on a 6-figure budget.

The Coulson mystery stuff is not interesting as multiple onscreen people already know what the secret is - it's only a mystery to the viewers because the script is deliberately holding that information back. I mean, someone could have said "He can never know that he's a robot" and that would be it. I'm also not sure if you can construct a series around a guy who was basically a character actor / sidekick in the movies.

The dialogue was typical Whedon quippy remark / quippy response, but that's to be expected.

Doubt I will watch another episode, it feels completely inconsequential to the larger Marvel stuff and nothing more than a cash-in. I'm not a fan of Whedon in general but at least his previous work was conceptually kind of interesting in a messing-around-in-genre sort of way. This just looks to be bland characters on low-budget adventures.

The only thing that would really get me into the show was if it could show more of the existing marvel universe.  Unfortunately it looks as though it will only be expanding upon the movies established canon and then just making shit up out of thin air.

That was one of the potential issues I saw hitting this show - it's for fans of US$100m+ budget movies, but it is being done on much, much smaller budget. Which cuts down the scope a lot - instead of Doctor Doom you'll get Batroc the Leaper because he's cheap to film.

In many ways the concept (still haven't seen the show) raises the same kind of alarm bells I felt when watching "Torchwood" - they say they are there to save humanity, but the team looks like a bunch of people they rounded up in a bar.

We'll see - it could be a good series, but I actually wonder how much being tied to those action blockbusters is going to weigh the show down.

If this show gives us Batroc the Leaper it will be the greatest show in the history of television.

Ehem, anyway - didn't think it was too bad. Never like to judge a show on just it's pilot, so I'll give it a chance. I like Coulson, I think Clark Gregg has the presence to pull off a lead character. Ming na is always a solid actress (and the living embodiment of the rule that Asian women don't age). I liked Fitz/Simmons as characters, and I think the cute girl casting works for that part. Hacker girl, maybe not so much, but I didn't think she was terribad, just a little off.

Agent Douchenozzle - I thought about the episode this morning and realized he was the only character who's name I could not remember. Nor could I remember his face. Not a good sign.

I hope they are smart enough to work in some Marvel Universe Easter Egg characters for us, as I do think that will help hook the comic nerds. I'm fine with them using C Listers - not like these characters would ever make it in to movies, so why not use them now.

#0: Usefully cynical commentary.  Usefully.   

#1: Batroc is unlikely to appear in S.H.I.E.L.D. ...
#2: They had to pick their battles.  They had a lot of ground to cover in 42 minutes of show, and the main battle was making sure the show would make sense to an audience that had never seen the movies.  That meant focusing on the character that was an outsider and giving you cliche introductions to everyone else.  Why cliche?  Because you'll get the general idea really fast.  They had to service 7 characters (including the bad guy), plus service the S.H.I.E.L.D. concept.  That required them to move fast.  Too fast.  I felt like there were a dozen or so times where Whedon would typically have a pause (in dialogue, between scenes, etc...) to give the audience a chance to breath and accept something, but that were rushed into the next big moment.  For example, the 'discovery' of her in the truck (spoiled inh the commercials) is something that I think Whedon would have extended by a minute or more, although always intended to end with the sudden dorr popping open.

#3: Whedon's best pilots have both been 2 parters.  Buffy and Firefly were much better than Angel, Dollhouse and S.H.I.E.L.D.  I enjoyed all five, but Whedon (and his teams) do best when they have the time to introduce and build concepts.  To an extent, the movies served as a 'part 1' to this episode, but handling 6 new characters in this episode was still rushed.  I think you'll have a better idea what you'll be seeing over the series once you see the next 2 to 6 episodes.

On an overall basis, I think this episode was in the top 15% of prime time TV.  Adjusted to account for the constraints they had to deal with in a pilot and this unique situation, I bump it up into the 90 percentile and have expectations that subsequent episodes will be better.  Whedon starts strong, in my book, and usually gets stronger around episode 6 to 10.

I'm not saying the show was terrible, the things I was critiquing earlier are still there but the show has enough redeeming qualities to give a pass BUT...


You must not watch much tv, because putting that anywhere near something like breaking bad or even a great sitcom like parks and rec is insane. 

That said, if this show can make a season two, I can see it really hitting it's stride because I think they have some good elements that need to be refined.

Top 15% of Prime Time - there are 3 hours of Prime Time each night.  There are 5 main networks and dozens of Cable Networks making programming that gets mainstream attention (TNT, TBS, AMC, FX, FXX, USA, ESPN, Lifetime, Showtime, HBO, Cinemax, Starz, Encore, etc....) and we get that new programming for roughly 30 weeks out of the year (although most shows do not go more than 22 episodes in a year, there are often shows with new episodes int he same slot after the show takes a break, like Dome on CBS filling the spot of a show that was on during the 'main' season), and each show accounts for between 10 and 22 hours of TV.  All in all, we have about 200 shows a year going on in Prime Time that get some degree of mainstream attention - not counting the fringe %!$# that isn't even a blip on the ratings.

%@$# yeah, this was worthy of top 15%  Breaking Bad good?  Better than the worst episode of BB, but the majority of Breaking Bad (and a number of  other AMC shows) was much better than this episode.  Better than Parks and Rec?  There were some stinkers in the P&R history, but I think P & R was better most of the time than this episode.  However, they're not the competition at the 85% level.  85% is above good episodes on CW shows.  It means it is darn good for an ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox show, but we've seen better hours on each of those networks.  For comparison sake, I'd say the first two episodes of Sleepy Hollow were top 60 to 70%.  The S.H.I.E.L.D. pilot was much better.

However, I have high expectations.  I think we'll see this show be widely considered to be in the highest level of top 4 network shows.  And, in time, the show will have some episodes that will be legendarily good tv - like Buffy's "The Body" or "Hush".

I don't see how this show can sustain the budget required to make it. When they're a season in and they get their budget slashed Chuck style it's going to look pretty bad.

Of the shows potential issues(and there are many) I don't see budget slashing as part of it.  This show is more or less going to be a 42min commercial each week for upcoming Marvel/Disney movies.  I retract my "if" it makes it to season two as well because having thought about it, unless the show is utterly horrible on every level they will be very reluctant to cancel or slash the budget of this show.

If they include enough tie-ins to the movies they'll probably just consider whatever losses the show incurs as marketing costs for the movies. E.g. they spent an estimated $100 million marketing The Avengers and let's say they plan on spending $100 million to market Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Solider combined (the two Marvel movies that will released during the show's first season assuming it doesn't get cancelled). If S.H.I.E.L.D. is losing them, say, $500K per epsiode (e.g. their cost is $1 million per episode but they are only bringing in $500K in revenue), that's basically $11 - $12 million in marketing costs for the movies.

Agreed on budget - they are not slashing it grossly, although they'll continue to refine and look ways to sustain quality at a reduced price.  If anything, I expect them to get better at using their budget - Whedon admitted that using a Special Effects budget properly is something that he struggled with in Avengers.  Regardless, I think this show will have Whedon team writing, a high special effects budget (when needed - Whedon won't be afraid of having an episode that requires no substantial SE budget if the story does not benefit from it) and quality guest acting throughout.  That spells success to me. 

And as for the racial comments earlier - the scientist referenced was portrayed by Ron Glass.  If he is going to be a recurring on the show, I think you have little to worry about.  Not because he is an actor of a certain race, but because he is an actor that chooses roles carefully and has certain standards.  Give it a season and see how you feel. 

I'd be curious to see people list 'broadcast' network (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CW) shows they believe will be better than S.H.I.E.L.D. over the next 3 years.  My expectation for this show is high, and I think it will be a strong contender for best network show by the end of the first season.

Define "better".

Next 3 years? So now we're future casting to counter your Marvel fanboy hard-on?  Sure, that's legit.

Right now Brooklyn 99 is better than S.H.I.E.L.D. based solely on what we've seen.

Like I said, other then the wank near the end at the standoff, I enjoyed my hour. I guess I wasn't expecting the next dramatic masterpiece or whatever you want to call it, so I wasn't let down.


I agree with the general sentiment that generic muscle/assassin man is utterly forgettable. He's just there to fill the handsome young straight white male quota.



I do think though, that if this show wasn't SHIELD, but some random new property, I would not give the slightest of shits about it. That probably doesn't reflect well on it. It is SHIELD though and it gave me more Coulson, so I'm good.

I thought it was fun, but not yet good.

That said, it was also a BIG HIT -- like, the most successful premiere in the last four years, or something. So they now have a lot of rope.

Highest rated new drama, in the 18 - 49 demographic, since November 3, 2009.

Well enjoy it while you can fanboy, because MAoS almost tripled it in ratings.

I'm cautiously optimistic about MAoS.  The pilot felt uneven though.  Was disappointed the guy wasn't Luke Cage, or another recognizable hero/villains, just a generic guy (AFAIK).

No one thought the premiere wasn't going to be huge, what crack are you smoking?  Viewer size for a premiere has zero to do with a shows quality or lack thereof.

Well I say MAoS was better than B99.  Opinions, see how they work?

AND it had almost 3x the ratings of B99

AND both are on at the  same time.

SO I predict MAoS will cause B99 to be cancelled or moved.

I hope this clears up your confusion.

No sure who or what you are arguing here.  Again ratings != quality. 

ComicBookGirl19's take : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zEUJ4nbnz4

I think she has a fair spin on it.

One thing I wasn't clear on at the end is whether "Rising Tide" is just Whedon Female Character #99's fiction (e.g., she *is* "Rising Tide") or whether we're meant to think there is an actual organization out there with that name.

Obviously the Centipede people are for reals, but that seems like an AIM kind of thing.

Since they were active in Paris, it seems like they're more of an Anonymous surrogate than just a figment/front for Hacker Chick.

--Dave

What are you guys talking about?

It's better than most network TV...k. Who cares? Network TV is almost universally trash. It got high ratings...sure. It's a new TV series that ties into the biggest movement in movies, of course it was going to get high initial ratings. It could have been 45 minutes of poop drying on a sidewalk and it would have gotten high ratings.

How is any of this relevant?

Hey... Hate all you want.  I'm going to sit back and enjoy.  Whedon + Marvel + big budget in a series?  Fuck yeah.  The only real problems I had with the show so far seem to be pacing issues that are typical of one hour drama pilots.  I think you'll either come around or start straining yourselves with the effort of coming up with excuses to hate.  I'm going to wait for the haters to join those of us enjoying the ride.

Glamour hacker is still stupid but as I said before the show has enough going for it to ignore it.  For me the pass/fail of this show rests solely on how they use the universe available to them.  If they ignore all but movie continuity then it's a huge loss.

It seems like a stretch to call this a drama.


I suspect the show will be pretty self-contained and ignore most movie continuity as well.

I liked this show.

Why is everyone saying "Whedon this and Whedon that" when he doesn't even have real control over the show (there's like a million producers, directors, writers, and the thing is attached to Marvel/ABC/Disney).  If he did, the pilot likely wouldn't have sucked as hard as it did (relatively speaking).  Honestly, does anyone here think that pilot would've been anything like it was if Whedon had complete control with a similar budget?  There's no way.

This is why most people are "meh."  It's flat, corporate television for drones.  I'll still watch it though 'cause like, wtf else is there?   :oh_i_see:

On the flipside, I will say I'm optimistic because most of the actors have subtly said "yah, the pilot is kinda weak compared to epis. 2 and 3."

Whedon had to stop Dr. Horrible 2 because of his time doing this show.  I doubt he's as hands off as you think.

Just because he's spending time on the show (qualifying his paycheck) doesn't mean he's as hands-on as you think either.  Vision takes a backseat to the dollar most every time.

This is horrifyingly bad.  I can't believe Arrow is better than this.

He wrote and directed the pilot.

Am I the only one that remembers the pilots for Buffy (especially the un-aired original pilot)?  Or the Angel pilot (hell, the whole first season)?  It's not unusual for a series pilot to be weak, this was not actively bad in the way that would make me expect the series to sputter.  Coulsen was good, Fitz/Simmons had some good comedic timing, Not-Hawkeye was an empty suit but, again, not actually *bad*.

I saw enough potential that I'll stick with it for a while.

--Dave

I don't think I can watch a show worse than arrow. Like my eyrs will bleed from their sockets...

I'm not sure why you think they'd hand the guy Avengers (and also get him to rewrite a few Thor 2 scenes), and then for some reason limit him on the TV series.

As for my thoughts on the series, it's one episode so far and this series is starting at the same time as I (and a ton of other people) are watching the last episodes of Breaking Bad. So yeah, by comparison to a lot of stuff out there it's nothing amazing. It's family friendly network television by necessity. I like Whedon and Marvel, so as the show finds its legs and starts to develop the characters I'll probably be increasingly entertained but I can understand why people are lukewarm on it.

That's pretty much my opinion, but I liked it a bit more than she did. I think the biggest problem is that the show spent so much time on the two worst characters; the best thing about this show is Coulson.

According to a guy named Joss Whedon, you're wrong.  He has flat out said that although there were notes, Marvel (both in terms of MAoS, Avengers and his work related to the other films) is more hands off than any network or studio he has worked under.  Marvel certainly dictated some elements.  Whedon and his people (including his family - who will be hands on when he isn't) came up with the characters, plot and stories.   He is building his part of one of Marvel's universes.  He has freedom to go after available Marvel properties and incorporate them, or to come up with ideas that Marvel might pull into the comics.  I'd be shocked if we don't see the MAoS team in Marvel main continuity comic form by summer 2015.

I think Wheadon peaked as a writer a long time ago. Look no further than doll house. I don't know the premise is inherently uninspiring.

Oh Arrow is bad.  But this is much worse.  It's a beta pilot excuse doesn't wash.

I thought Cabin in the Woods and Avengers were both pretty well written.

Wheadon is great with horror,  but the avengers kinda wrote itself. Without the nerdgasms the plot falls apart. Him piling on the interesting week after week on a non-horror show feels dubious, especially when the show could have lent itself to a much more interesting premise if it was actually about the organization shield.

I disagree entirely.  I hated Arrow.  That first episode of SHIELD was kind of bland but there were enough shout-outs to the movies to make it moderately enjoyable to watch.

Now granted, my standards for network television shows has been so lowered by the terribly crap that's being produced lately that there's really only one very low bar that has to be overcome at the point: Was there anything really egregiously stupid happening?  The pilot managed to overcome that low standard (a feat surprisingly difficult for most network shows to achieve) so I'll give it a few more tries to see if it gets any better.

We need an emoticon for "TAKE COVER!"

--Dave

Whedon has actually worked as a writer for Marvel itself so I'm sure that relationship helps.

We do ?  I agree with the sentiment entirely.  I also think that 'Avengers was carried by Nerdgasms, writing didn't matter' entirely discounts what an utter trainwreck the Avengers had the potential to be.

I really, really do want more people to say this is better than Arrow though.  We get this show tomorrow and, frankly, Arrow is utter, utter shite.

It has the potential to be better than Arrow but since pilot may vary from the actual show quite much it's too early to say anything definite yet (imho).

Fair Enough.

The overall plot of Avengers was total nonsense, they had no idea what to do with entire characters (Captain America I'm looking at you - all you did was perform gymnastics on conveniently-placed obstacles), like almost everything Whedon it suffered from miscast hot chick playing at being a badass. The dialogue was generally good other than that every character was too quippy but that's Whedon's thing.

I want to say it was nothing special, but then again I look at the recent DC movies and those show how you can fuck up the basics pretty spectacularly. So you have to credit everyone involved for that.

I wish Whedon would make an active effort to for once avoid his own tropes and schtick and make something real. That's why I said I'm not sure you can call SHIELD a drama - is there any drama? There's a layer of superficiality and artifice over everything he does. Sure, sometimes in a Whedon show something dramatic happens like a character dying, but that's inevitably sandwiched in schtick so it has no real impact. I don't see how you can say he's good at horror, considering nothing he does is horrific. (In that sense) His horror is horror filtered though WB sensibilities.

It seems like he's content with this, but he probably has the talent to do something more. I'd love to see him try to do something non-schticky. (You can have comedic moments without being schticky)

You clearly have not seen enough bad superhero movies (e.g. most of them) if you think it "wrote itself". I neither get devotion nor anti-devotion to Whedon.

Yah, none of these points really matter.  Ask Spielberg, Lucas, etc. 
Just because he has superficial "freedoms" doesn't mean he's actually able to execute them how he'd naturally do-so.  Like it or not, this is a large corporate venture on, as said, family friendly network pop-millenial TV.  Regardless of that even, most producers/directors in his position end up selling themselves and their fanbase out for the thick line of mediocrity.  So thinking this show will somehow be anything slightly more than 'good' is a fool's dream just on that alone. 

It's gotten to the point that people wont defend Marvel anymore anyways, because they're pretty much a victim of their own success.  Imagine for a second that this pilot was shown 10 years ago.  The pitchforks would be out en masse.  Now?  pfft.  Who's gonna cry for the Marvel/Disney juggernaut?  not me.     :mob:

The pitchforks would have been out 10 years ago? I dunno. I think fans at least would have been eager to see what might come next.

But you're forgetting the other reason the pitchforks wouldn't have been out: fans have been predicting that every single Marvel film would suck, blow, be impossible to do. I remember people saying, "Iron Man? Pfffft, he's a minor character of little interest, there's no way you can make this guy carry a whole movie." Or "Avengers? There is no way you can pull that off, it's just going to look gaudy and ridiculous and cornball."  So at least some folks have learned, "Ok, be patient, see how this goes--I've been wrong enough times already."

edit:

I'll add a few quotes from f13 itself:

"While Downey is a good actor, he is totally wrong for the part. He's not even in the ballpark. His casting is about like tossing Michael Keaton into the Batman role. He'll do well, but he won't fit. "

"But really, Iron Man could be really good or really bad. Favreau is decent, I just don't know how he'll do with heavy effects-laden movies."

"I love RDJ, but he is my biggest worry about this movie. He just doesn't fit my vision of Ironman."

"Speaking of pictures that paint a thousand words, that one shot [of the first suit that Stark makes in the cave] says to me 'hey, this might be good.'"

"Also, that Iron Man classic pic that Stray posted - freaking awesome."

"I watched it [first trailer] and was underwhelmed but I think part of it is I'm really turned off on Ironman ever since the Civil War crap. "


-----

"Captain America, Thor, and Wonder Woman are all characters that seem incredibly hard to pull off well in cinema. At least in this day and age (Wonder Woman was perfect for 70's television though).

There are quite a few non comic reading females that LOVE Wonder Woman too, but still....Even with that built in audience, it just seems like a hard thing to do.

Captain America: Maybe if they played on the dejected/outmoded theme Marvel is doing with him now. But even then, he's too flashy and corny for the big screen (like Wonder Woman). If he hated Bush and Cheney though, that might make up for it.

Thor: I'd write it like a Kung Fu episode. Also, I'd write it where he didn't have the hammer.

Scratch that. He lost his hammer, and is on the search for it. And then he tracks it down to a small town somewhere out in umm...The West (it's gotta be like Kung Fu right?)."


etc. All these films have been hard sells both with their target audiences and the general audiences, and mostly they've won people over. Even the ones that people don't like so much (Thor) are piles better than comic book movies that aren't much older (Fantastic Four, for example).

So that's the ten year difference: Marvel has done a pretty fair job building their franchise and now they're being cut some slack from a lot of folks.

Right so since it's Marvel, we are moving it from "Pitchforks" to "Wait and See" status. I can get behind that but let'ss be clear they are spend creditability here. They don't have to season 2 to turn it around.

There was a pretty lengthy interview of him recently where he addresses Dollhouses issues.  The basic problem was that Fox was on board for them to get into the guts of the concept from the start, but when the network president balked, Fox did a 180 and stopped him from making the show he'd been planning to make.  Dollhouse did eventually find a path that worked, but the Dollhouse that was envisioned by Whedon never saw air.

And as for 'turning it around' - wtf?  There is no 180 needed on this show.  Minor course corrections are all that is in order.  Seriously, even with pacing issues, this was the best network pilot I've seen in a while for an hour long drama (anything that is not primarily a comedy is a drama - so this is going to be competing as a drama), and it showed me what I wanted to see to have absolute faith in the show.  I won't love every episode, I won't love every character, but I am going to enjoy the ride.  This was a pilot, and it had pilot problems, but it also had a lot right.

And does the show get more rope because it is Marvel?  Of course.  However, so far, it has no need of rope.

Seriously, this is a show that Marvel and Disney are heavily supporting, the show runner has a dedicated fan base that has grown every year (even when his shows are off air), they have amazing cross promotional opportunities with the movies, and they have scores of years of comics material to draw upon that will make people shiver in anticipation. 

Me too, thought it was great.

People keep saying pilot as in the traditional sense of a pilot gets pitched to a network and then they decide later if they will pick it up or not.  I do not believe shield did that, I'm pretty sure they were green lit way before any filming started and therefore we won't see any huge shifts in quality throughout the season, for good or ill.

The pilot was Greenlit last summer.  The SERIES was greenlit this summer, but was considered a lock - after Marvel saw the dailies on the pilot.  This was a true pilot.  Everyone expected it to be good, but if it were horrible it would not have gone to series and something else would likely be in development in the MCU.

I think the pilot was very good for a pilot, but I'd have done a few things differently, although they're all minor beefs (except the first):

* I'd have split the pilot over two episodes so that I could slow it down.  An approach more like the Firefly pilot with slow introductions and incorporations would have been much better.
* Based only on the pilot, I'd have recast Skye.  However, I think the main problem was really just a ghost in the room.  Someone (I'm not sure if it was the actress or the director) was trying to shoehorn some Willow (or a 'cool version' of Willow) into the character and it wasn't in her wheelhouse.  I rewatched the pilot last night (while the wife weas getting her first view) and I really noticed this in her dress, her mannerisms, and her speech.  Regardless, having seen her in other stuff, I think they'll find her character and make it work.
* I'd have simplified the McGuffin element.  I get the idea, but they didn't have to force it all in at once. 

Dude, the reasons pilots are often different and usually worse than the show is not whether the show is greenlit or not. It's because it's the FIRST THING THEY MAKE. So often they don't have a great feel yet for what's working, what the cast chemistry is, and so on. Even some of my favorite shows ever took a good half-season to a full season to figure out some of that kind of thing.

Normally I'll give a show three or four episodes if the start is rocky.  But there's absolutely nothing redeeming about this pilot.  Comparing it to Buffy's pilot is ridiculous.  I can't remember a show in recent memory (like last 3-5 years or so) that had this kind of start and managed to make something good out of it.  This show is so lazy it's just a tacit admission that they threw up their hands and decided to hang everything on being tied to Marvel.

I'm holding out hope that Skye was intentionally weak.  Something will happen or be revealed later on that will somewhat explain the trainwreck of her character.  My first guess was that she's really a "poor little rich girl."  Hence the fine clothes, makeup, etc. (they could've written her as a grifter like on Leverage too). Also, let us not forget she was really adamant about wiping her bio.  Ideally, her whole persona is a farce; that'd be fuckin brilliant.  So yes, on the level I'm not impressed but I also hold out hope there's a reason the show is so blatantly pandering; there's gotta be a flipside.  Hopefully at that point she'll make it to the T&A thread.   :awesome_for_real:

Zoolander-Assassin hopefully is a frickin robot.  That'd be the best future for him.  Either that or he dies.

Since Whedon is involved I'm expecting at least one of the cast to die at some point in the first season.

Yah, that'll be the black guy.

Yes, but Arrow is fantastic. This is merely great.

This.  Arrow is probably one of the best superhero TV shows we've had.

Arrow is not exactly hard on the eyes either.

This is why I never understand why TV people make episode 1 as the pilot.

Not only does it give the premiere bad acting and production values, it also fills the the first episode with unnecessary exposition. Filming a mid season episode first at least helps you work out what really needs explaining when you go back and film the first show.

I'm assuming it's because they don't go into making a pilot with a whole season worth of scripts.  Besides you are going to have exec's and others that have no clue what your show is or what your characters are.  Hence why most pilots are the first episode of a show. 

It doesn't matter what you film first--a 'mid-season' episode or episode 1--the first thing you film is going to be the roughest work you have on offer, most of the time. It might also have some great ideas or a mood that you actually lose over time as the series meanders this way or that, of course. Both the original "pilot" of The Six Million Dollar Man and the first aired regular episode ("Population Zero") were a good deal grittier than the series--the pilot was much closer to Caidin's novel and the first episode concludes with Steve Austin killing the shit out of a van full of bad guys, something he rarely did later on. I liked that version better than the campy Bigfoot-laden show that came later, but that's the thing: whatever you make first is inevitably different. Lost's first four episodes are pretty different in mood and content than everything from season 2 on. Etc. You can't avoid it--which is why most people have learned not to assume too much about what a show is going to evolve into from the first thing made. The only time I think the pilot or first episode is a good guide to what comes later is when everything about the pilot is bad--when the setting is bad, the acting is bad, the storytelling is bad, the effects are bad, the characters are dumb, etc., when it's uniformly or almost entirely dumb and bad, it's not going to get better. Terra Nova, for example.

Which is in large part because of how TV shows are written and how pilots in particular are written.  It's not like novels, where a single writer comes up with pages of backstory and notes and have a larger story they want to tell.  You get very defined and refined characters (that sometimes require editing down the line because early bits don't match later bits)

A TV show is an ongoing novel, edited and written in near-real-time by a team. The back story for a character might be a page, or a prior work (Coulson) but it's most likley a "this guy is trope xyz with this twist."   The details and personality come later as the show develops and that trope-with-a-twist is affected by the greater story arc.  Think about any character you know well and go watch the pilot for the series.  The rough outline is there but the characters is probably fairly unrecognizable because there's no details yet.  It's just a trope.  

For example, Picard was a "by the rules captiain" and Riker was "Handsome playboy hotshot who has a history with the telepath chick" in Encounter at Farpoint.  Worf is "Klingon who was adopted by humans and joined Starfleet."  nothing more. They're hollow, hollow, hollow.

The Pilot gets all the worst of this It's a concept you write and shoot to sell to executives.  Folks who are going to see 100 of these a year, minimum. Shit we never will see or hear of, they watch and decide on.  The pilot has to get a lot of this across to get pushed through to production and air, which means broad-strokes.

The key audience for a pilot is not the audience.  It is the executive.  If you don't sell it to the suits, you don't get a chance to sell it to the masses.

Here, Marvel wanted proof of concept.  They wanted to see Whedon do all the things that this show had to do.  They wanted to see the tech in action, they wanted fights, they wanted special effects, and they wanted character development.  And, most importantly, they wanted an end product that appealed to the casual fans and hard-core fans.  Basically, they had a marathon of things they wanted to see - and they only gave him 42 minutes to run it.  They had 42 minutes to cover dozens of key elements, each deserving 5 to 10 minutes of screen time to establish.  In spite of these challenges, which I think were greater in this episode than in a typical pilot, they had (mostly) witty dialogue and laid a lot of foundation. 

Of course, the executive wants a product that sells to the audience.  But if you build it just for the masses, and ignore any of the other elements the executive thinks it has to see to authorize the bill expenditures, you're dead in the water.  The executive comes first, even if it hurts the product the audience sees.  Here, Whedon had to take some shortcuts to make sure he had time for everything the suits needed in his 42 minutes.  Expect more from the next few episodes.

If this had nothing to do with the avengers you guys would can.it on principle. Cough sleepy hollow (which is rather bad) cough.

If there were no Avengers, IM, Thor, Hulk or Cap movies, but this was still set in the Marvel Universe with the expectation that it would incorporate additional Marvel IP, and unlike Arrow, would not shy away from the fantastic?  And it was being done by Joss Whedon?

I'd be more excited.  I'd be adding in the excitement I had for Iron Man and Avengers to what I have for this show as this would be Marvel coming to life for the first time. 

However, if the same show were put together,  all Marvel IP were pulled out (and replaced with different names), and some random nobody (rather than Whedon) was running things but the show was otherwise the same: No, I would not be as excited.  I would not have the same expectations for the future. And I wouldn't be seeing the same things in the pilot because I wouldn't be looking for them.  However, I'd give it higher marks than Sleepy Hollow, Revolution, Arrow, Vampire Diaries, Dome, Falling Skies, the Cape, No Ordinary Family, Terra Nova, Undercovers, the Event, Nikita, Teen Wolf, Defiance, Alphas, Warehouse 13, Eureka, Supernatural, American Horror Story, Da Vinci's Demons, Fringe, Grimm, Cult, Being Human, 666 Park Avenue, Once Upon a Time, True Blood, Game of Thrones, and all the other 'genre'pilots I've seen in the past decade ... with the exception of Walking Dead (which got bonus points for really nailing the concept right off the bat) and Lost (which peaked in episode 1 IMHO).

Something on that list is not like the others.  :oh_i_see:

There are a lot of things in that list that are distinct from the others... It was just a list of 'genre' pilots I'd rank behind the MAoS pilot, even if we were not relying upon the Marvel brand or Whedon name.  With those intact, this is likely the show that I've gone into with the highest expectations.

I'm going to guess he was referring to Game of Thrones, which did struggle at the start with having to cram in all the characters and backstory, but is crazy to call worse than Agents of SHIELD. Actually I think True Blood had a good pilot as well, and it was just about everything after that which wasn't particularly good.  I personally haven't watched a single other show on that list so I can't comment on an of the others.

Just saw this. It was OK.

Had a lot of bad pilot exposition sequences created because script writers don't trust execs, but it did OK.

Coulson as a clone? Really? 'I wasn't quite dead' was a way better plot. Also that plane struck me as a remarkably impractical way to move half a dozen people and some gear around the continental US.

Aside from that - it's fine. Way better than Arrow.

Also the GoT pilot was great - not least because it didn't bother to explain the backdrop in excruciating detail. Similarly this show didn't need to recite the Avengers script word for word, but pilots get a pass from me on that shit because that sort of insecurity usually disappears after a few episodes.

The Plane isn't limited to the US, but really it's just the poormans helicarrier. I believe they said so as much.  :why_so_serious:

I'm fascinated that people think they know how they're going to solve the mystery of Coulson's survival but that their assumptions are different. "Pfft, he's obviously a robot/android/clone/LMD/returned from Valhalla, how boring."

He's obviously one of those robot duplicates Nick Fury always uses in the comics.  :why_so_serious:

All Coulsen is capable of is going from scene to scene with a shit eating grin.  Why are we supposed to care what he is?

The plane isn't limited that way but the show isn't going to have them go save brown people.


The point is he isn't Coulson, and they didn't need Shephard Book and Robin HowImetyourmother to give that away up front in such an eyerollingly bad scene of the sort that no writer worth a damn would have included if this weren't a pilot.

The scene itself was way too blunt but I like that they weren't going to stretch out the question for an entire season.  Something is up, get it out of the way and move on, worry about details later.

I have a feeling you're going to be eating those words before too long.  Episode 2 takes them to South America.  They'll be in Africa before midseason, I bet.Whedon does a lot of misleads.  LMDs are the obvious answer.  To me, that makes it a mystery, still.  However, I think you're caught up in the mechanic and missing the story.  If he is an LMD or what-not, that reveal is going to be a small part of the storyline.  How would Coulson being an LMD play out in a show that is all about the 'normals' in a world of supers?  Because the show is about what it means to be a hero in a world where there are Superheroes, I think there is a good chance that the obvious (to comic fans) LMD option is just a mislead. 

Man you motherfuckers are way too goddamn cynical for your own good. This show was a good start.

It's almost easier just to stay out of these threads if you like a show.  :why_so_serious:

I should stress I liked it. It was fun.  Just they were the bits I didn't like.

I too "liked" it, but let's be honest with ourselves... 5 yrs from now there will be a MUCH better supers show on TV and we'll look back at this one whilst choking back the upwelling vomit.  I look at the show as a purely freshman, corporate attempt to cash in on a burgeoning market.  Fun for now, yes but definitely not as good as it should be nor as good as a similar show (down the road) likely will be.

Either that, or they'll catch their stride in the 2nd season mayhaps.  We'll see.

HBO needs a good supers show tbh.  Something from the Image or Vertigo lines maybe.

Your optimism about future super shows is just so cute. Even so, I think it's a weird that you're bitching about SHIELD because it's not as good as some non-existent future television show.

Image?  Really?  Name one good Image superhero comic.

If you count imprints and stuff that started at Image that ended up moving somewhere else I think you've got Rising Stars, Invincible, Powers, and Astro City.

And especially weird to be bitching that Marvel are cashing in on the superhero bubble. Marvel *is* the superhero bubble, and Marvel do little outside of telling stories about superheros.

Its like accusing GM of being a corporate sellout for making cars during a period of strong car sales.

Fixed.


Wildcats was a pretty good cartoon series.  So was the Maxx.  Stormwatch was supposed to get picked up into something TV/movie-based if not fed into CATS (essentially grittier x-men).  I also thought Deathblow was a noir work of art that definitely could be done into a great movie.  Piit/Maxx in some kind of live-action satire "kickass-like" thing might work too.  I've been out of comics for quite some time though;  has anyone of late been able to top the dominance of Jim/Jae Lee + Choi??  Granted, I'm partial to their styles.

In re. Spawn; a huge letdown and likely the deathknell for anything Image in the movies tbh.  I guess Vertigo had "V," but meh.  Quirky shit like Marvel-Razorline might be fun too (they tried Saint Sinner but failed).

When Marvel or DC makes a TV or movie series, it'll be seen as bringing the character to the screen.  If Image, Vertigo or some other 'small' company's character makes it as a success on screen, they'll talk about how it began as a comic.  Marvel or DC going to the screen is a universe apart from Spawn, Rising Stars, or their ilk going to the big screen.

However, there is a path to making it a 'bigger deal'.  One that was just walked by Angela. 

Wanted was an Image book. Also there's that kinda successful TV show Walking Dead which is based on an Image comic. I don't think that some shit movie from 15 years ago really carries quite the stigma you think it does. Especially since Image stuff is all creator owned and it's ultimately up to the creators to shop around their properties. It's not like Image as a publisher is trying to get studios to take interest in their stable of properties or something.

Lots of movies are based on comic books but don't come off as comic book movies - for example 30 Days of Night, A History of Violence, etc. However in these cases the fact that they are based on comic books doesn't do much for them in terms of marketing, awareness or appeal.

Yeah,  if there's unsuccessful or big-flop Image properties out there, look to the artist for bumbling or not shepherding it properly, not the studio. That Spawn was such an abomination can be laid entirely at McFarlane's feet. (And good lord I just read they're doing another attempt at it.)

I specified Image *superhero* comics deliberately, since I know Walking Dead was Image.  The only three Image superhero comics I remember having looked at way back when were Wildcats, Stormwatch and Spawn and all three of those sucked balls.

The Walking Dead comment was specifically directed at Ghambit. However I did point out a number of good superhero comics that came out of Image as well right underneath your previous post.

Yeah, I know.  It was just a general comment, which is why I didn't quote you.

Sandman would make a great radio series.

I'd like HBO or Starz to do a Dresden Files show, one that doesn't have SyFy's fingerprints all over it.

Use the same actor for Dresden though, from the little I remember of it he was great casting stuck in bad writing.

I agree on the Dresden Files for HBO (or any network that will treat it with respect); not sure about the Sandman for radio only because I'd love to see it brought to "life" somehow.  Wonder if animated would work?

Back to the actual topic - I finally got around to watching the pilot episode and even after reading this thread first, I really enjoyed it.  Enough to keep the series on record and watching.

Yeah, I liked Paul Blackthorne.  At least he's in Arrow now.

Oh man this show....

Isn't fuck stupid. Oh no its not great, its just really corny. Wheadon dialogue prevents the ham from being sliced, but the show seems to chugging along as a walking ad for the...fuck me Marvel Movie Universe? The characters are really un-pleasing to the eyes. Coulson smiles waaay too much, the "nerds" are basically super models who talk really fast and except for the "guy" nerd who basically a trendy "sexy nerd" and we know he is nerd because of his hot-topic/h+M attire. Oh fuck me. The most bland character is easily the most likable...behind coulson, simply because he was typed casted to a T and the only one whose actions and mannerism come from the scary government agency PR calls Shield. Everyone else is wide eyed civilians who only manage to keep their jobs because their the only ones in their age group that doesn't smoke weed.

Some bits of facepalm is...

1. So your bad guys of the week manage to get their hands on
* hulk blood
* super soldier serum
* alien weeboo tech
* extremis

Oh look and by our powers combine we are CAPTAIN MARVEL UNIVERSE!!  :facepalm:

2. the social commentary non speech of derilum!!  :uhrr:

Can only get better from here   :awesome_for_real:

I just don't get enough opportunities to read conversations that could have been pulled straight off of Harry Knowles' site. Thanks!

...does MediumHigh write Time Cube?

The "super models" are unappealing to the eye?  I'm not sure how that works.  Usually when people try having it both ways with a super model, they have something else in mind.

Regardless: People are falling over themselves to hate on this show, and I just don't get why.  

This is TV - everyone is more attractive than they should be if this were real life.  They're no more attractive than the casts of Angel, Buffy, Firefly or any other Whedon show.  Or, any other prime time show.  Besides, there are very attractive people in the tech world.  If you feel the need for justification, us beautiful people tend to get more opportunities than you ugglies.  It makes sense that being beautiful might give them an opportunity to get into something as difficult to enter as S.H.I.E.L.D.  

This was a 1 hour 'drama' (as opposed to comedy) pilot, so it had the typical rushing issues to cram in all the things they wanted to test and establish.  I don't understand why people don't get that after seeing a number of pilots.  They had to sell executives on this show, so they had to throw in a kitchen sink.  They did a great job limiting how rushed and crowded it felt.  

Watch episodes 2 through 6 and then evaluiate.  It will be worth the viewing.

I'm more surprised by the lack of negativity given just how bad this show was.  If this used an offbrand license people would be calling it The Cape 2.0.

You need to go back and watch The Cape again if you really think that.

This. The Cape was utter fucking trash. This had issues that need fixing but is certainly not a bad show.

But its not a good show, certainly not a show that makes some who is a fan of the Marvel Movie Universe excited. Not excited fan is a disappointed fan.

I think the right word would be "jarring" when it comes to the casting.  They are well and above tv pretty and it goes well into the realm of ridiculous, even hotties like Alyson Hannigan on Buffy were dressed down to an extent, not looking like they stepped out of a jcpenny catalog.  Case in point: Jeremy Renner who plays Hawkeye would never have been cast in this show for being too ugly.

There was only one main character in the show that wasn't in a uniform or suit.  Seriously - are we so fucking dedicated to typecasting that one pretty girl with a brain that is dressed up a bit is a nightmare beyond reason?And, for the last time, she is NOT THAT HOT.  If you put her on stage with the Victoria Secret girls, the last 12 Playboy centerfolds, or those pictures I have of your moms from before I wrecked them: She is going to be easy to pick out (mostly because she doesn't look like she is walking funny).   

If I met her in real life?  A 10.  Clearly.  Hot.  Amongst the model crowd?  A 4.  Not THAT hot.  Contrary to popular belief, we are encoded genetically to consider certain combinations of characteristics to be attractive.  If you run pictures through systems that analyze the traits to look for the things that we're encoded to like, there is a very high correlation between the rating a picture would get on the hotness scale and the score you'd get under that system.  They'd knock points off of her for her eye location, her nose tilt and a few other defects that we can see if we look for them, but we note unconciously when we look at people. 

Regardless, one episode is not enough to judge this show.  It is enough to judge the foundation.  That is an amazing foundation for the Marvel Universe to continue to build upon in TV and movies.

One hot chick pretending to be a dork. Hey its tv, we need the fanservice. But two? I don't know... the trope is wearing thin. Combine that with the h+m nerd and you have an all star cast of young, attractive, super smart, government agents that have hearts of gold and whose clothes are more expensive than my laptop. It's gag worthy. 

Have to look nice for your slow-motion high-fives.

12.1 million watched the premier.  Hard to sustain that, but half that number makes it a hit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNUvqIsYo7k

 :awesome_for_real:

High-fashion geeks are insulting to geeks (hey, local audience) because it misunderstands the persona.

I'll throw $200 at a new video card I'll discard in a year or two without thinking twice.  Meanwhile I question spending more than $30 on a shirt I'll likely use once a week for the next 5-10 years.

That's why geeks dress badly. That's why "high fashion model geeks who are also poor" are always a "wait, wtf" moment.  You have misunderstood not the trope, but the personna.

You're asking us to believe in the cop who doesn't talk about guns or the sexpot who doesn't look-over the eyecandy in the room.


The show has problems. It's not a sin to point out these problems.  It's also OK to be a fan of shows with problems, so long as you're willing to admit to them but like it anyway.  Dismissing ALL criticism of something is where you get called a fanboy and can be ignored.

You're allowed to like something even if it's really terrible. Really. I love Starship Troopers but it's AWFUL.  The same with the first season of Babylon 5 and Star Wars in general. I still like them but I'm not going to defend them as if my own personal cred were on the line. They've got flaws and I love them despite those flaws.

30 dollars? Any shirt that cost more than 5 dollars gets a critical stare  :oh_i_see:

I have an office job where wearing a T-shirt or crew neck would be unprofessional and an unusual disdain for collars.  Those things are terrible to iron, always poking you in the jaw when they flare-up.  They're also useless in a world where nobody wears a tie anymore.  Oh look, extra fabric for no good reason that I have to launder, buy points for and maintain.  What a joy!

Therefore all my work shirts have banded collars which are hard to find and slightly more pricey.

A single pixel is dead....must buy new monitor.

Ahhh... so she isn't your type of geek, so she is ridiculous.  Climb out from under your rock and look around.  You're missing the party.  The stereotypes of the 90s are out of date.  There are hot women in tech.  I live in the SF Bay Area, I've worked with and around a lot of tech companies, and I know seen a large number of people in tech - and there are quite a few that seem like they'd shock you. 

Some of the geeks in my circle have $1500 handbags, 80 pairs of shoes, and (at least some of them) had more plastic surgery than Barbie. And some of those are female, too.

Have you been to (or seen) Comic-con?  Do you remember those cosplay girls they mocked in the pilot?  The good outfits cost thousands of dollars to assemble, and the bodies poured into them took a lot of effort, too.  If you stalked some of those girls home, some of them have decent incomes and spend them on the 'nice things' that Carrie Bradshaw would buy - and spend hours on cardio and toning. 

Are the majority of girls that would classify themselves as hackers wearing classic Dior, carrying the latest Louis Vuitton, and walking on their 8th pair of Manolo Blahniks?  No.  Do mostof them look like they fell out of a magazine?  No.  Do some?  Heck yes.  And if you google the images of the top female hackers in the world, you'll see what I mean. 

That's true. To me the problems are the somewhat thin characterization in the first episode, and that there wasn't anything particularly surprising plot-wise (partly because I think they put out enough preview footage that I felt like I'd seen half the episode already). What I don't consider a problem is the "the people on this network TV series are too attractive" crusade Lakov started before the series even aired. Yeah, it sucks that attractive people in Hollywood get more work than unattractive people, but I'm not sure why this particular show is where the line needs to be drawn. Nor do I give a shit about the fashion sense of any of the characters. That kinda stuff to me falls under "looking for reasons to complain".

There are hot women in tech. There are, however, very *very* few hot women programmers.

I guess I live in a cave because it didn't even occur to me that hacker chick wore expensive clothes. I got the feeling she was a poor little rich girl, but that's probably cuz I'm racist.  :why_so_serious:

AoS needs more Steranko and less Buffy IMO.

This thread is giving me flashbacks of the Felicia Day talk that was going on for a few pages in the f13 redesign thread.

Look I ain't pissing on female nerds that are hot as hell. Lord knows I've drooled over my share. What I'm pissing on is the overuse of the trope. And the hot topic nerd guy on top of the fanservice cast? Well fuck me. Actually I have nothing but venom for that guy. I don't know, a weird combination of being white bread characters (2 of which are apart of a rather scary government agency) + being a part of a trope that seems to be overused by everyone recently...arg. I mean we live in a decade where robocop can't be a disfigured meta-human, nope ladies he is defiantly brad pitt under the mask.

How many of those live out of a van, park behind a coffee shop so they can leech free WiFi and use a laptop they won in a bet?

It's fucking stupid. Her character is basically a homeless person yet she looks like a supermodel. It shows a complete lack of commitment to their own premise and a disregard for honest storytelling. If she lives out of a van and has no money think about what that means and follow through on it. If you're being honest there's no way you write an obsessive computer hacker who lives in a van to be an attractive perfectly groomed woman, or if you do you address it in the script in a way that makes sense.


It's basic characterization and storytelling. It's fine if you don't care about those things but it seems awfully silly to object to people who do. There are plenty of good recent dramas where the casting and makeup is much more in line with the characters. (The problem here is less the casting than the way the character is presented) A character like this would be completely out of place on a good drama that isn't network comic book shlock.

Didn't watch the pilot but based on the latest episode I'm not impressed with the show.  The characters seem like cartoons, the plot had holes you could fly that plane through and the writing for the weapons expert/soldier guy was especially painful.

The second episode was better than the pilot.  It felt tighter, more self-contained.  The two scientists were more tolerable; they were correctly useless in a firefight.  Ward and Hacker girl are still kind of weak, but maybe they'll get better with time.  It didn't revolutionize TV, but it kept my interest and I enjoyed it.

 

Well, anyway, this is the least of the show's problems, judging from tonight's episode. Really did not like it.

1) There's a cheesy 70s vibe in a lot of it and about the same kind of pacing. It feels more like a spin-off of the Six Million Dollar Man and less of the Marvel movies. Coulson is starting to remind me of Oscar Goldman. If this was on purpose it would be more fun. But I don't think it is. The car chase from the temple was just  :uhrr: cheap looking--it was like all those 70s shows where somewhere in Topanga Canyon would double for exotic locations all around the world.

2) The pacing through the rest of it was also just laggy, dull, languid. Everyone's line readings feel like they're on barbituates except for Fitz/Simmons.

3) Sexy evil Latina lady was a bad dumb stereotype AND kind of incomprehensible to boot. I don't get her exactly: she was just cruising through the jungle with her commandoes 'cause she heard the Hydra dingus was found, and then rebels came and then she somehow managed to get her guys on board and they somehow came up with a plan without talking with each other and what? what? what? These guys are supposed to be ordinary Peruvian soldiers but with elite skills?  Plus Marvel Universe Peru is evidently somewhere really different than Our Universe Peru, either that or the last thing Whedon read about the place was when Sendero Luminoso was on the rise, which would be back when he was an undergraduate. Plus ex-Nazis went to Argentina, not Peru. Plus Peru's politics were pretty turbulent after WWII: I have a hard time imagining a sinister cabal within the Peruvian government of that era making a plan to acquire a superweapon.

4) OMG the cheesy music during certain "character" moments. And OMG the bit at the end about how he's going to have to train the hacker chick to be a secret agent. This shit I cannot make excuses for--it was excrutiating.

5) SHIELD sends a rocket to the sun every single time they find a powerful artifact? That's post-Cosmic Cube policy, I guess. (Speaking of which, how is a HYDRA weapon still powered up? Didn't they all depend on the Cosmic Cube for their power?)


The pilot I could excuse. But the show is now on execution watch for me. That was just really bad.

also p.s. an inflatable raft plugging a hole that big in depressurizing plane? what was it made of, adamantium?

That she doesn't look like a person who is living out of a van I think is a reasonable complaint. Certainly it makes more sense than the people complaining that geeks just don't look or dress like that, which to me is like going into the thread for Gravity and complaining that George Clooney and Sandra Bullock are too attractive to be astronauts.

Even though this show is a colossal train wreck, it's certainly not because the actors are too attractive.

(http://radicalrevisions.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/inigo_montoya.gif)

Welp, I'd say after watching epi. 2 (the one that was supposed to knock our socks off) that Whedon indeed doesn't have full control over this IP.  This show has Disney's stink all over it; Utter fail.  Fuckin Terra Nova's worst epi. was better then this one. 

It felt like I was watching a creepy Mouseketeers episode, complete with horrible music, politically-correct (and wholly unrealistic) dialogue, and overly made up kid-actors.   The only bright spot??  Seeing Leonor Varela in all her glory.  (she is definitely aging well; keeping in shape)

Wow, that is exactly right. It felt like it belonged on the Disney Channel right after Wizards of Waverly Place. Had the same pacing and same acting style.

I should point out too that I never said the glamour models in the show was why it would suck, only that it was indicative of the suck that would follow.  When you cast your show to look like 90210 you are generally not going to have anything of substance behind it and lo and behold I was right. Shocking.

Or the simpler explanation is that it's not that Disney isn't isn't letting him control things, it's that this show likely isn't his main focus. I get the feeling he's left it more in the hands of his brother (and his brother's fiancé) while he's off focusing more on the movie stuff.  Also, looking at the list of writer's on this series, there's a couple people he worked with on Angel (one of whom also apparently did a number of episodes of Spartacus), but the other five were writers on stuff like Alias, Lost, Chuck, Hawaii Five-0, Hemlock Grove, Fringe, none of which are shows I've ever watched.

Oh dear. Well at least this show gave us hot latina lady. That wifebeater cleavage :grin:

The best part of this episode was the last 10 seconds... beyond that...oh dear. This show is defiantly corny and even worse has terrible action sequences.

The one of many things that bug me....why on god greens earth would they let the peru military inside their plane? I mean sure fire fight, big chase, and all that jazz but there was like 10 of those guys vs 4 dudes in a jeep, even if there was more rebels coming i'm sure the one of your commando's have a radio. they should have parted ways at some point, not led a squad of heavily armed men four times their number head right to their hq... Oh and considering that shield is kinda like the cia of the UN (or even more secret version of the CIA for the US) why in the 9 fucks do they drive around with their logo printed everywhere? I mean fuck how did tony stark never heard of these guys when their operating procedure is to ride around with their flag waving in the air.

Oh yeah I noticed that.  Super secret organization has their logo printed on their truck and Coulsen introduces himself as a member of shield, which isn't even in line with the movies where shield was very much in the shadows.

The movies seem somewhat inconsistent in that same regard though, probably due to the fact that when they were introduced in Iron Man Marvel didn't have solid plans for what they were building to yet. Coulson doesn't seem all that secretive in the first movie about who he works for, and even though later movies suggest that SHIELD had been operating for quite some time they aren't even going by the acronym yet in IM1.

Dude.  Duuuude. 

I was thinking more like a MacGyver episode, but otherwise I think you nailed the vibe I got from the episode.

There it is! I was watching trying to figure out what the whole action scene reminded me of.  I was thinking "80's action drama" but it didn't seem quite right.  MacGuyver fits.

Of course I was joking.  And I covered up any tracks that would prove otherwise.

I was thinkin shitty version of the A-Team.  (especially the action scenes)

I saw two episodes and I don't like them very much.  I think maybe it's geared more towards teens or something.  Dunno.  I just didn't fine it interesting or very superhero-y.  I'm disappointed.  I also am finding most of this thread confusing and I'm not even sure what show we're talking about sometimes.  Anyway, I gave it the second chance thinking maybe they'd have some actual superheroes or awesome special effects or anything to take the attention off the silly dialog.  But, no, they didn't. 

It's definitely geared towards a younger audience.  It seems almost like a live-action cartoon.

I got home at 10:30 at night (after starting my day at 3:30 in the morning) and watched Episode 2 while eating dinner.  My review:

I was a bit disappointed (and I've been very optimistic for those keeping track).  I'm still very enthusiastic for the show, but they did not make the strides I hoped between the pilot and episode 2, although I am still confident we'll get there soon.  I was groggy watching it, but here were things that jumped out to me:

1.) Glamour hacker had make-up, but her attire was certainly a step down from the pilot.  Apparently she ran out of her nicest clothes.  

2.) The cameo was as forced and unnecessary as the Hawkeye cameo in Thor.  I never disagree with seeing that guy, and while I was watching that scene I suddenly realized he might be the best actor in the world to deliver Whedon lines (and was likely under-utilized in Avengers in retrospect), but the scene was essentially a redo of the prior scene with an unnecessary Easter Egg.

3.) At least when I'm tired, Fitz and Simmons were hard to understand.  Too hard to understand.

4.) "A magical place" is going to get old, fast.

5.) I agree that Whedon is still going through the checklist of things Marvel wanted to see in the show.  I will be interested to see them get to a show that makes no reference (other than Coulson) to anything that was in a movie.

You didn't watch much MacGuyver, did you? Better stories, cool sciency stuff, TERRIBLE TERRIBLE "action" segments.

It's the wank that kills me. They keep trying to instill this kind of sentimental nostalgia with people I don't know and character's that don't know each other. Save that shit for the season finale, not the first couple episodes.

But, dude, dude, dude.  She's The Cavalry.  How does that not awe you?

Yeah, I wondered about that.  Did I miss an explanation or is it a well known comic book thing which I wouldn't really know because I never read comics much.  Other than my ex brother in law's ancient collection of Zap Comix.  I'm sure they were priceless but I read them anyway.  I bet he still has them, too. 

The Cavalry thing is a set-up.  YOu'll hear about it for a few episodes and then they'll tell her story.  All of the characters in this show (save Fury and Hill) are original creations of the MCU.

Really agree on how the show wants us to already have highly developed, highly 'cued' feelings for the characters. That's also a really bad sign. You gotta earn that, guys: there is no way I can possibly have any feeling at all for what Mr. Bland Killer Guy is feeling.

Like how calling Mulan the cavalry means absolutely nothing but the characters keep telling us that we should care.

Crap now I'll never know her character name.

With so many here hating the show, I'm sure this thread will be pretty empty this time next week.  :awesome_for_real:

Aha!  So maybe THEY don't even know what the fucking cavalry means yet!



Yeah, this is kind true with me, too.  I don't feel anything for any of the characters at all.   It's almost like no one has a personality yet, which is okay, but the way they're addressing this is not making me look forward to seeing how they develop.  I love superhero films but I don't even get the feeling that this show has anything to do with superheroes.  Oh well.  I think The Dark Knight and Hellboy were my favs.  I really liked Watchmen, too.  But I think those were all mostly made for grown ups and precocious teenagers.  Maybe that's the reason this one bores me so much.

Yeah, I was not happy with the second episode.  It seems like they're trying to fast-forward through all the character and relationship development.  Rather than have the team actually have and work through conflicts, they just crammed together a "Everything is better with teamwork!" episode with absolutely no explanation or foundation.

I get that they don't want to spend an entire season with touchy-feely stuff, and hopefully they're just trying to get to the good parts (villains, heroes, freak/mcguffin of the week), but if that's the case they should have handled it like a cop show, jump straight into an already formed squad and let the relationship exposition flow organically.

It definitely didn't feel like a Joss Whedon show.

--Dave

They literally could have called this weeks macguffin "the macguffin"  does anyone know what it supposedly did beyond "some kind of laser"?  Between that, random tech magic staves and the star trek level of technobabble from the scientists, I don't have high hopes.

Maybe it's due to reading all the negative comments but the second ep was better than I expected. I agree with the Macgyver comments. Not really feeling the raft bit. I still want moar Steranko but I'll go halfsies with moar Leonor.  :drill:

I find Camilla's critique of Coulson very meta. I don't think anyone pointed that out.

re: "The Calvary". I don't see the big deal; even in the pilot it was hinted that Mulan was a former badass field agent so I don't see the big deal. Why she decided to quit and get a desk i I guess is the question. Not that I care really.

The implication with "Mulan" is A) She is famous as a very, very bad ass fighter and is the one teams call when they're in deep shit ("The Calvary") and B) something went very wrong in her last mission causing her to retreat to a desk. My guess without any actual knowledge is that somebody she cared about got killed and she feels like it was a failure on her part or because of her arrogance. I thought the talk between Wade and Skye was kind of neat as their relationship is developing. They are clearly going to be the ones with sexual tension in the show. So far the team dynamics are: Wade/Skye: Sexual tension mixed with a bit of distrust and antogonism. Fitz/Simmons: Comfortable with each other, a bit intimidated by "Mulan" and Wade and Coulson. Coulson/"Mulan" : A bit aloof and disconnected from the others. Him because he's team lead, her because of whatever happened to make her go to a desk job.

It should be pointed out to the people who think the cast is too young and pretty that Ming-Na Wen will be 50 in November.

Though she may be the best looking 50 year old in the country.

I also want to point out I'm not trying to be derogatory in calling a strong asian woman Mulan. Only that she is the VO of Mulan and I can't think of anything else watching her.

I felt it was too on the nose and the discussion had moved on to other aspects of the show.


Well of course that's exactly what it is.  It's also a trope and one that's been clumsily jammed in to the show rather than revealed better because they wanted to get to "RAH RAH WE'RE A TEAM" right away.

I'm fine with the cavalry thing--it's the one bit of info about the characters' past that I thought worked. I think it's pretty obvious what they're setting up--she got too used to believing in her own image and fucked it up one time resulting in a catastrophe.

Wade is a hopeless character, though. I can't see how they're going to make him anything but a face and some bad lines. If the show starts to drop in the ratings, I think you can expect him to get killed and/or superpowered.

Fitz/Simmons are fine, plenty of room to make them more interesting.

Skye is a fairly lousy wild card but maybe they have a good idea for her, I'll allow that's possible.

I would love it if they'd just add some very low-key, non-visual-effect-requiring metahuman to the group.

But jeezus, the real thing is: make it Marvel, FFS. If it's got to be cheesy, go 2013-standard COMIC BOOK cheesy. Not McGuyver/A-Team/70s Show cheesy. Not Wizards of Waverly Place cheesy.

You know who they ought to hire RIGHT NOW as a writer? Dan Slott. He's got a proven ability to make clever low-key use of the Marvel Universe in ways that are at least somewhat 'realistic' and to work a premise for its hidden potential. I think if they brought Slott on and he started writing Damage Control and the law firm of Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzberg & Holliway into the show as background elements or occasional plot premises, they could really go places. But the clock is ticking now--moving to a bottle episode for your follow-up to the pilot is a terrible sign.

#1: There is a metahuman on the show... wait for the reveal.  And what separates Wade from Widow?  Fitz/Simmons from Stark?   
#2: My biggest complaint about the show is that I can't understand Fitz/Simmons when they speak.  Whedon fast talk and strong accents is a challenging combo.
#3: The 50 year old Meinda May / Ming Na is catching my eye more than Simmons or Skye.   
#4: Whedon has a laid out plan for each of these characters.  He knows why Melinda is known as the Cavalry, he knows what Wade's family issues are, he knows where Skye came from, and he knows exactly where/what Couslon went/is.  He also knows whether someone is going to die in the first 10 episodes (unless there is a contract issue, etc...)  He always has a plan.  However, he does change those plans as the story unfolds if it serves the story.  That is the way it goes.
#5: Reportedly, Whedon did some quick script doctoring on the first few episodes.  That tells me that there were problems, and that the 'fixes' may have been rushed.  I expect that as time goes by, they'll get the formula down a bit better.
#6: Anyone else waiting for the reveal that the things sent out via the Slingshot are not actually reaching the sun?

Miracle patch coming any day now.

This. The second episode was much more of a letdown to me than the first. I could forgive the really bad CGI compositing on most of the shots that involved the plane, but the fucking raft plugging up the hole in the plane? Or the way some actors walk and fight normally IN THE SAME SHOT with actors having to grab hold of things to keep from flying out of the plane? None of that whole fight scene made any fucking sense whatsoever. I still like it because I like Coulsen and May but the rest of the show really needs fucking work. And they really need to start interacting with super heroes not 40-year old tech buried in 1500 year old ruins.

It isn't on my death watch yet because it's Marvel - but it needs to improve.

Call her Chun-Li. Much less derogatory.

Expecting to see mainstream heroes, villians and features of the Marvel Comic universe in the first few episodes is asking a lot.  They'll get to more of it, but it wouldn't make sense for a world without supers to go from a handful to hundreds in the span of a few months.

I was disappointed in episode 2 for many of the reasons above, but give them time to get it down.  They're trying to make a 42 minute movie every week.

No, I don't think that's it. That's far too kind.

But not getting some sort of recognizably super hero/villain type into the series early makes it unlikely that folks who expect that sort of thing when they see the Marvel brand will stick around watching MacGyver 90210 until the supers show up.

Yep.  I like the show mostly, but no supers and I'm bailing.  Ain't got time for a show in the MCU that don't have no cape wearin' fellas.


Aside:  They said the macguffin was tessaract/gamma radiation powered.  Does this mean the tessaract output is gamma rays?  Any comic book science guys care to explain?

The Tesseract emits low level gamma radiation.  That's how they were trying to track it in Avengers.

Oh, OK TY sir.  I was thinking The Hulk was the most powerful super if he's energized by the same juice as the tessaract. (sp?)

He's not powered by the Tesseract, but he is potentially the most powerful super.

He's the strongest one there is!

So, if Gilligan told you that Breaking Bad was set in the MCU, but just didn't happen to run across any heroes or villians during the 1 year run of the show, you'd have bailed?

Kind of a ridiculous way to make my point, but the point needs to be made: There are good tales to tell that do not require the core of the comic world to be present.  I'm looking forward to seeing if/how they address Wakanda, the Savage Lands, an Inhuman Moon base, etc.. and to the slow introduction of some of the heroes and villians of the MCU, but I'm not going to be sad if they have a good story that slows things down and barely touches on anything superhuman.  If all you need its the powers, there is an Avengers cartoon on Sunday mornings.

Breaking bad is a terrible example since they did everything right from episode one, comparing this show to breaking bad only makes this one look worse.


Everything you say gets more hilarious.  Look, what you want in a show and what I want are probably not two different things but this is not the show that is going to deliver them.  Expect marvel movie canon and jack shit else.

I really doubt there is going to be a super on the team at all.  Although SHIELD has had supers as members, they have always been about being the normal human response to supervillains. 

Actually, wasn't angsty black guy they almost killed in epi. 1 supposed to end up on the team?  I was surprised not to see him in epi. 2, since he was pretty much the highlight of epi. 1.  At the very least they'd use him like Omega Supreme and just call him in when the fit really hits the shan I guess.

So far though, Alphas is/was a better supers show.  That's pretty telling.

I wouldn't call this a supers show.  It's more like a men in black show that deals with the unexplained in a world with supers in it.

Also I'm pretty sure they cured the super from the first show of Extremis.

I think Skye is a (possibly unbeknownst to herself) super.

Possibly, probably a low level mutant with some kind of computer related ability.  Kind of like Cypher from the New Mutants.

The pilot wasn't too bad for a start but the second episode was awful.

just a few points:

Nobody is a mutant - they don't have the rights to call anything a mutant in this show due to the deal for the X-movies.  That is why Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver will not be called mutants in Avengers II.  According to some stories, they've now accepted they can't have mutants in this world and are introducing something into the comic cannon this year that will work into the movie universe during phase III and give them an alternative to mutants that they will have the rights to use and fits perfectly with what they're establishing in GotG - and it all relates to the Inhumans.

One member of the team is a super of sorts.  This isn't confirmed... but come on.  This is a show about being human in a world of superhumans - what is more Whedon than to have someone dealing with being a superhuman? 

And, the team is made of up people as super as Iron Man, Black Widow and Hawkeye.  They've had plenty of comics with people less extraordinary than this team.

Wakanda will be addressed in the show at some point as they've prepped Black Panther as a movie and already introduced Vibranium.  I believe we'll see the team in space, on the moon, in the Savage Lands and possibly even in other dimensions over the next few years.

The Black Panther stuff is at best tenuous--they haven't even confirmed a desire to make the film at the same level as they have Dr. Strange.

But I'm sure they'll do MU settings. To do some of them right is going to require less cheapness by a huge margin.

It's perfectly possible to do a show about the backdrop of a comic-book world. But to do that takes more energy and imagination by many magnitudes of difference from what we've seen so far in this show. I really think the series bible needs to direct more towards something like Damage Control or Slott's "superhuman law firm", basically a humor-slanted take on the real-world things that would happen as the world became slightly more and more unreal.

If you think about how the history of the Film-MU looks, it's something like:

1.Captain America and the Red Skull are created by "superscience" during WWII; the Red Skull also gets a hold of an Asgardian artifact of immense power and nearly destroys most of the Allies' cities.

Upshot: at this point, the world's governments would now be aware that it is possible to create a superpowered human being; they would also be aware that there are extraterrestrials and/or extradimensional beings with immensely powerful technology. STORY POSSIBILITIES FOR TV-MU: Endless. A whole alternate history of the Cold War that surely includes the founding of Film-MU SHIELD. (Comic-book SHIELD was founded more as a counter to HYDRA and AIM, other organizations with advanced technology; Film-MU SHIELD is clearly a defensive reaction to the reality of superpowers and extraterrestrial tech.) 

2. The US and other countries begin secret efforts to acquire extraterrestrial tech and to duplicate the super-soldier formula. This eventually results in the creation of the Hulk. STORY POSSIBILITIES FOR TV-MU: Endless. Tracking down experiments that went wrong, rogue scientists, strange locations.

3. Tony Stark is captured in Afghanistan, makes the Iron Man armor, goes public and creates the idea of a "superhero". STORY POSSIBILITIES for TV-MU: Endless. You can reference this event again and again. Basement inventors would suddenly be trying to make their own armor, etc.  You could mix in things from our real world, like the Boy Scout who tried to make a fission reactor in his dad's greenhouse, etc.

4. Thor's hammer comes to Earth. Thor comes to get his hammer, the Destroyer appears, there's a publically known battle, SHIELD and the world gain information about where these technologies come from. SHIELD recovers Captain America and the Tesseract. STORY POSSIBILITIES: Not quite endless but they can still go over this ground a few times. Maybe a teeny sliver of the Destroyer got blasted off during the battle and some dude in the town has it. Maybe we start a cold open with Coulson trying to convince a professor to give a negative peer review to an article by Jane Foster. Etc.

5. The "Battle of New York". STORY POSSIBILITIES: A lot but this is the least interesting territory for the show to work unless it wants to look at how life has changed in the world as a whole now that aliens, superheroes, etc. are a known part of our daily lives.

None of your thematic tropes matter when the characters and writing are shite.

You were right, that was a thoroughly ridiculous way to make your point. As has been said, Breaking Bad didn't have one bad episode in five fucking seasons. In two episodes this has had one decent episode and one pretty bad episode.

Also, if the point is to tell about secret agents finding weird shit, why put it in the Marvel Universe at all - other than the cross promotional opportunities with the successful movies. I'm not watching this show for "secret agents finding strange shit," I'm watching it for "SHIELD agents find strange shit in the Marvel Universe which has eleventy billion cool-ass superheroes and super villains to call on as story material." Not using supers in this show is a huge waste. Not doing it in any episode in the first season is a huge mistake. It needs to bleed Marvel and expand the universe in ways that can't be done in the movies or in ways that lead to new movies - things like cameos by Reed Richards, the introduction of hints towards Ultron, as well as adding some interesting characters from the MU like Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Daredevil, etc.

As for the mutant thing, I'm sure they'll introduce the Terrigen Mists from Inhumans and call them mutates. But they better do it quick before I lose interest.

Something that has kind of nibbling away at the back of my mind is what exactly was so bad ass about that laser thing?  I mean all we saw it do was blow a modest hole in a plane.  Yet they acted like they were carrying around (when they didn't just kind of throw it in a bag and chuck it in a truck) something that could destroy the world.  Then they launched it into space.   If nothing else you'd think that an organization whose job was to protect the world would want to keep a super weapon handy in case something really big and nasty showed up.   

Wasn't it a HYDRA weapon from Captain America?  Yeah it blows only modest-sized holes in things but those things are "ANYTHING"  It's a ranged lightsaber.

RE: the device:  When fired, it was a laser.  However, it was implied that if it overloaded, it might go up like a nuclear bomb.  If there were another tech out there that could be as devastating as a nuke, I think it would make sense to contain knowledge of it.

RE: The Marvel Universe - Think of this as one of the many Marvel universes.  The Ultimate Universe and the core Marvel universe are very different.  So is this universe.  You're in the very early stages of this universe.  Go back and read the first few comics set in the Ultimate Universe.  It took a while for them to re-introduce the mainstream characters in that universe, and it will take time to get to all of those.

If you're only going to enjoy this show if there is core mainstream Marvel Universe shoved down your throat in every episode, I can save you some time.  They've said you will not get that experience from this show.  You're not going to see the team battle Klaw in episode 3, the Ghost in episode 4, the Crimson Dynamo in episode 5, etc...  Go watch the Sunday morning cartoons for that experience.  To me, this show is Buffy + Alias + Man from Uncle in the MCU.  Not S.H.I.E.L.D. comics brought to life.  With that expectation, I'm happy.

To me the problem is that this isn't a legit drama in the sense that it's not actually dramatic, but it's also not a good fluffy superhero show because there are no superheroes.

I don't think the Marvel movies are good dramas - they are fun action movies where the characters, story and dialogue support the action. They work on that level, but if you removed the action and spectacle they'd be pretty lame. I mean, what the fuck is the actual plot of The Avengers?

This show seems to follow that same formula while missing the key ingredient. 2 dimensional characters quipping back and forth works in an awesome $20 million set piece when those characters are Iron Man and Thor, I'm not sure it works if it's two shield flunkies fighting an angry black dude.

I agree that something like Damage Control would make a good series because it's a different angle and smaller scope that makes sense, rather than just the same formula on a budget that doesn't work with the formula. Or if you're going to make a show about humans living and fighting among super-humans really make it about that - what happens when you it takes your maximum effort to stop a dude like Stilt-Man then an actually powerful guy shows up?

It's hard to think about what the one-line summary of this show is. "Human field agents fight other humans while making references to Marvel movie stuff." Given that it doesn't have the budget to be a popcorn superhero show it really needs to be about something - an interesting story arc, characters, real drama, etc.

You guys ever read Planetary, specifically the introduction of John Stone? That's what this show should be imo.

Planetary would be a great model for this show.

Leverage the intellectual property or go home, that's all. That doesn't have to mean an endless procession of cheesy Marvel guys in leotards. But just being a bunch of hand-me-down Men From UNCLE with a bit of Whedon dialogue and the visual look of a Disney Channel show is a waste of the opportunity. It's not even a particularly good bit of convergent-culture marketing on Marvel/Disney's part.

If this didn't have Marvel in the title, no one would be talking about it and it wouldn't last past this season.

Patient: Doctor, doctor... I have a problem!  Everybody seems to love X show, but every time I turn it on TV all I see is %#$@ that is painful to watch.  What should I do?
Doctor: Stop watching?

Alias.  S.H.I.E.L.D., ignoring the Marvel side of things, has a lot in common with Alias.  Theoretically hot chick with amazing skills?  Check.  Espionage?  Check.  Secret organizations?  Check.  Super sciene?  Check.  Famous showrunner?  Check-ish (Alias was putting JJ on the map).  Dialogue a perceived strength?  Check.  I think this show is on par with Alias.  I think Alias had the stronger pilot (which was perhaps the strongest episode of the series), MAoS (so far) is easily on par, if not clearly better, than most Alias episodes.  Alias went 5 seasons.

Since this is a Whedon show my expectations are somewhat balanced. The only Whedon show I ever felt was strong out of the gate was Firefly. Angel had some good early work but was uneven. Buffy? The entire first season is only ok. Dollhouse? The first season sucked horribly.

I'm not at all surprised we're seeing growing pains with this show. It has potential but it hasn't reached it yet IMO. This being a Marvel show is both a blessing and a curse. I think ABC/Disney will give it a good shot unless it tanks horribly but it also has high expectations. Before Whedon only had to deal with expectations from his core fanbase, now, the fact that the Avengers was so successful is actually working against him. We'll see how this show pans out.

Anyone expecting this to mine the marvel universe is riding the short bus.

The spin in this thread is pretty fucking amazing.

The spin is really only coming from one guy, he's just very enthusiastic about it.

No, the spindown is coming from a lot of people... the truth is coming from one guy. It is amazing how often people get that type of thing mixed up.

jg, you gotta pace yourself man. 

We gotta ditch the fish tank.

I liked it. Is it uneven? Fuck yeah it is. It's still watchable at this point though.

Hipsters gotta, um...hip?

Well, at least you're all finally seeing that I'm entirely right. 

(Not much else to say that hasn't already been said until we've seen a few more episodes.  I'm looking forward to them.)

Two episodes in, and I'm not going to read the rest of the thread first or risk colouring my opinion...

It's a desperate, painful attempt to capture the feel (and audience) of 'new' Dr Who, but with all the charming ugly scrubbed off and homogenised to fuck to suit the offensively bland taste of prime-time non-cable America.
Two episodes, enough time to be a decent length movie - and I can't remember anyone's name except Coulson's. If I leave the cinema after watching a movie for 90 minutes and can neither remember anyone's name nor give half a flying fuck what happens to any of them, that movie has failed.

Ok, so AoS has a longer game plan, it's a TV show, we have more time to delve into the characters... but I don't want to. I've watched Captain Bland, Laughably inappropriate Hacktivist Girl who lives in a van but has PERFECT FUCKING HAIR, the two Comedy British Moppets plus Batteries Not Included and Asian Lady with chip on her shoulder less subtle than the Las Vegas Strip, and I feel... nothing. I don't think that's going to change.

I wanted to like this. But it's off to a really, really shakey start. I hesitate to call it dreadful so early on, but I'm seriously wondering if I should invest any more time on it.

Haven't seen any of this yet, but from reading here I don't think it's our cup of tea, or particular written with us in mind.

Fair enough.

Considering you're far harsher toward recent Dr Who than me (and to be fair even I have to relent that the last season was almost totally utter balls), I cannot imagine you'd make it through the first episode.

 :awesome_for_real:

$100 says that Vette does a Heavy Metal Soft Landing by the end of the first season.

"I got that!  I got that reference."

Her name is Lola.

--Dave

She was a showgirl?

L-O-L-A, Lola?

I know two people with cars named Lola. It's a financial and reliability statement:

"Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets."

They just made their first super villain.

I enjoyed this episode more then the previous one, but this fucking wanky sentimental shit, it needs to go away.

"sets show in marvel universe, makes entirely new continuity up"   :oh_i_see:

Marvel MULTIVERSE. We don't know what Earth it is or what the continuity should be.

Not sure if serious...

Compared to the second episode, this was better.  That's a low bar, and they're still trying to fastforward past the character development.

--Dave

The marvel films and SHIELD TV show are probably given their own universe in Marvel.  There are a ton of different ones in their storylines.  For instance Mainstream Marvel is Earth-616, the Ultimates are Earth-1610, Age of Apocalypse is Earth-295, etc.


Edit - The Marvel Universe is Earth-199999

Unless I'm totally high, it's this dude:

Same name for the doctor so yes that's him and I am now pleased with the show.

He was on the Avengers Cartoon as well!

Yep he's supposed to be Graviton, and his origin isn't too far off from the one he had in Avengers:  Earth's Mightiest Heroes.

I have to admit I'm liking this episode so far...but their technobabble makes me want to throw a brick. I'm reasonably smart but geez the hell fucks at least pretend you didn't scribble this after snorting coke.

"The gibble gook does gibbly way when SCIENCE is applied to the gibblga"  :uhrr:

I noticed the dialogue was a bit snappier but the cast still leaves a lot to be desired.

Ok. FUCK. THIS. SHOW. If I hear one more self righteous doctor who speech I'm going to drive a semi-truck over the writers of this show. Cracker with goddamn cheese this is beyond white bread, this is mayonnaise.

At least we had the requisite bouncyboobs from skye in this epi. and can look forward to more black angst in the next.   :oh_i_see:
Still too much Skye in this show btw (though I did like the last scene where she's made-under and sweaty).  They might as well call it the "Skye Show" aka Fringe via Disney.  Wake me when she goes all Miley Cyrus.

That said, I thought this was the best epi. so far.  Ditto on the scigarble being better too; then again, I like ST:Voyager, so I'm broken and unreliable in those regards.

I've decided that the music on this show sucks.

The music is definitely the biggest problem for me.  It's what gives the show that extra cartoony feel, like it's Power Rangers on Saturday morning.

Aside from that, this was the strongest episode of the three.  And yeah, I was thinking we'd see Graviton as soon as they started talking about an element called 'gravitonium' or whatever.


Has there ever been a Marvel movie or tv show that didn't make up its own continuity?

This show is pretty mediocre while Brooklyn 9-9 on at same time is freaking hilarious, best tv comedy I've seen since Archer. I'd flip to shield on commercials and cringe at the bad acting and soap opera type sets.

We're 3 Episodes into it.  If you still hate it, you clearly are not going to enjoy it and should just stop watching (just a suggestion).  

I liked it, but I've aliked all 3 episodes.  

You don't actually read this thread do you?

Maybe if there were more pictures, some of us would "read" more.

It was better, but aside from the leader guy who sort of vaguely reminds me of Oscar Goldman I don't really much care about the characters yet.  I couldn't decide if the hacker chick at the party was just badly acted or poorly written.  I understand that she is a novice at that sort of undercover stuff, but walking around talking to herself while pressing a finger to her ear while in front of the rest of the party guests seemed a bit much even for an amateur.

Glad to see I wasn't the only one to cringe at some of the score. The triumphant trumpets during Coulson and Agent Whathisname's fist fight actually made me start giggling. Someone could do one of those eighties action show remixes of this, and I'm not sure we'd notice the difference.

That said, it was a much better episode. Still way too corny, but this episode flowed a lot better.

One moment when the guy caught hacker girl and was trying to recruit her out of shield it was pretty funny there was a close up and she made this stupid perturbed facial expression and then a tense violin sound effect went off.

This is the strongest episode by far. Let's retcon the series and make this the pilot.  :why_so_serious:

Better but not good.

Totally agree on the score. It is making ok scenes bad. This should never happen in TV that is being made by alleged professionals.

Coulson's 'mystery' is being developed well, at least--the muscle memory thing near the end was good.

If they're going to keep filming scenes at houses in LA and on highways that I fucking recognize in the SoCal area, they might as well play the 70s/80s action show vibe for laughs, self-consciously. I can think of four ways for them to do the show on the cheap, with this cast, that would be more appealing than pretending they're in a globe-trotting plane that always somehow manages to land in a place that looks like Southern California somewhere.

If they're going to do the 'international' angle so strongly, they need to learn a page from Covert Affairs on USA.  That show has the star and a few people go to locations and shoot so that their trips to Europe, South America, Africa, etc... look real.  

They just got their 22 episode full season pick up.  We'll get a chance to see how they work out the wrinkles.

I also noticed this on TVLINE: "As first reported by Marvel.com, (Titus) Welliver will guest-star in the freshman drama’s sixth episode, “FZZT,” which finds Coulson and his team hunting down an elusive killer after “floating bodies” start turning up." 

I love that guy...

They need someone snarky, i imagine that is supposed to be Skye but she ain't good enough.  Edit: calling it now, Coulson is a clone or something like that.  That's why he lost his muscle memory.

Yea agree. I didn't hate the dress, but she's not gritty enough to be the character she purports to be. I hope this is just them not knowing who their target audience is yet. She looked more like who she's playing in the final scene.

I don't hate the music. But the sappy long stairs gotta go. Getting vibes of Spiderman 2 here. Gods any non-action scene in that movie was outright painful.

I do like how they've made an arc out of Poulson's recovery.

Basically what everyone has said from the beginning

Yep.  Stark even mentions the tech in Avengers.  Beyond the tech being a mainstay of S.H.I.E.L.D. in the comics, this is perfectly in Whedon's wheelhouse in a story about regular people in a Super world.

Why are we spoiling speculation!

I'm doing it because this seems certain to me, someone that knows the comics, but it would be non-obvious to someone that has not read them.

I could really like this show but currently half of it makes me want to punch babies.  It's almost worse because it's very close to being good but nooooot quite there.

Ah that makes sense given the context.

So far I am entertained. I actually like some of the hand to hand combat scenes, but the parts with any kind of gun play just look ridiculous. Seriously, it's Starship Troopers 2 (http://youtu.be/f-Xo1a9NQ-A?t=2m15s) bad.

edit: That clip is supposed to start at 2:15.

That last episode is what I was expecting from this show.  Still some problems, but a good plot, better pacing, better acting.  Ward was leaps and bounds better because his back story was more fleshed out and he had good action scenes.  The truth serum bit was unexpected and fun.  The billionaire is a great character and I'm sure we'll see him again. 

It sounds like Marvel is bringing some partners to S.H.I.E.L.D. to TV over the next few years - maybe multiple partners.

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/64631 (http://www.aintitcool.com/node/64631)

Ah comic book companies, the word saturation means nothing to them.

FWIW, my partner and I are both Whedon fans, but less so comic book fans and thought the last episode was the weakest, bordering on unwatchable.

I thought this one was pretty good. Finally starting to build a bit of a sense of momentum--feels less 'one off'.

They are taking some steps in the right direction but I would like them to touch on more than super science.  That may be asking too much of course but still, they are heading for a good season two.

Seduce him!

Finally got to see last week's episode. Glad to see them create Graviton, though I doubt we'll see his spiffy blue and white outfit.

Enjoyed this episode, looks like they are starting to get in to a watchable rhythm. Only plot whole that irked me was that no one noticed that Agent Ward's (I remember his name!) perspective would be about two feet higher than the girl's. Guess the handler just assumed everyone in that building was really short?

Still not sure the lead girl has that it factor to be the next Whedon girl fans go nuts after, but personally I never got the Sarah Michelle Geller thing either.

So was the research facility in the latest episode some private thingy or government run (since the "good guys" did shoot a few guards which might be a bad idea to do to some law-abiding government workers) ?

Wasn't clear to me either. If it's ex-Soviet government, then you might ask why they're sitting on that super-sekrit information in that room and not sharing with SHIELD, who seem vaguely international. (Though this would be a good thing for the series to clarify--is SHIELD international or American in the show? The comics have several different answers to that question at different times.) If it's private, that's also interesting.

I'm assuming in the end that the secret bad guys in this one are AIM. Or at least I'm hoping it. I could totally go for at least one beehive helmet guy just as a joke at some point.

Some clever lines and a liked the reveal at the end of who the "handler" was. Still don't like Skye that much and the music is seriously bugging me. Maybe it is because I only half-watch it while playing tanks so I notice the audio a lot more than other shows.

They said something in early episode 4 that made me think S.H.I.E.L.D. started out in the U.S. but is now international.  That also gels with the world map behind the counsel in Avengers.  I would like to know how it is funded... if it is international and gets funds from across the globe, it would beinteresting to see how they deal with a funding government that missteps.

Implication from the Avengers is that they're supposed to be under the control of the World Security Council that Fury is seen talking to. There haven't really been any details on the Council itself, but I think Marvel might have referred to them as an international organization.

Releasing as many different titles as possible is what made the comics industry the success it is today!

It the TV industry. It's pretty much built on a model of over-saturation. Fuck, how many half-hour sitcoms come out every year? They could put out 20 shows about superheroes and it would still be a fraction of the number of reality shows about "celebrities" that exist, or shows about chefs who yell at their incompetent staff, or CSI series.

Something that really jumped out at me in the Peru episode is how this whole canon is built on assumptions of the 50s, 60s and 70s that ever more globalisation and liberalisation was/is inevitable and that a common enemy would unite most governments/cultures.

I'm not expecting much exploration of that weirdness, but if it were brand new I'm not sure you could sell the very idea of an overt UN driven military unit post 2000.

So far every episode has been great.  You picky bastards have problems.

I just watched the episode, but like the prior four, on the ABC app rather than on TV/DVR. Who did they say the handler was? I missed it. I thought they didn't know after

Yeah, I'm thinking The Reveal - or the non-Coulson one, at least - is going to be AIM (or HYDRA, or any of the other evil counterparts to SHIELD) has been behind some or all of what they've seen in the series.

Including, I'm guessing, "Rising Tide". Which will probably lead to lots of double-agent hijinks with Skye--and will probably be the underlying reason Coulson took her on board, to get a line on whomever is behind Rising Tide.

We are Joss diehards and rode Dollhouse into it's controlled impact with ground, but tonight is the last chance. This is just rubbish.

I stopped being a die hard josstard when I read the buffy season 8-9 comics.... the fuck was that shit.

This about sums of the jist of this show (especially after watching tonite's epi):
(http://img.pandawhale.com/post-29439-Agents-of-Shield-Sky-running-g-10Uy.gif)

I watched this ep after not watching the last few.

Yeah...it's bad. Boring, lame characters, bad acting, awful script.

I don't know if the dialogue is just bad Joss, or someone doing a bad Joss imitation, or what. The whole "they named him" repeated thing just didn't work at all. It was supposed to be - funny? I also don't get the idea of making fun of Superhero code-names in the context of a comic book show, at least not to this extent. It might be funny if a guy has an obviously lame name, but his name wasn't any dumber than "Iron Man" or "Hawkeye." Really weird thing to hang your hat on.

Don't think I'm watching another episode.

And you guys laughed when I called her fanservice on the first episode.  :awesome_for_real:

I am still enjoying the show.  It isn't perfect, but I think they're going to find their way as time goes by.  Some of the problems from the pilot have been smoothed out.  I still have high hopes that more will get worked out.  However, I agree that the script on this one needed more work.

I never noticed the music until I read the threads but now I did notice it you are right the music is pretty god awful. I like the show so far but man the music is terribad and does more to detract from the show than it adds.

After 5 episodes this show hasn't shown anything that gives me a reason to remember what night it airs or to make space on the DVR.  Maybe it will pull out of the nose dive and become something epic but I don't think I'll hold my breath while I wait for that to happen.

To be in a nose dive it would have had to have already been up at some point.  I think the show is still trying to find a way to take off.  So far it seems like a four-color comic version of season 1 Buffy, for better or worse.  Its biggest problem is the characters themselves are rather bland.  The storylines seem fine and there's an arc developing that looks interesting, but aside from Coulson I really wouldn't care at all if any of the main characters died.  That's a problem, since you want the audience to care about the characters.  Also, the music is still terrible.

On the other hand, Buffy did get better so there's still a chance for this to get better, too.  I wouldn't expect it to happen overnight, though.

Of the episodes that have aired so far, only the first one was co-written by Joss. The writing could be a case of them just not wanting the dialogue to sound like Whedon dialogue, or it could just be that writing teams from Buffy and Firefly in particular were just better at writing in a similar style to Whedon.

(http://i.imgur.com/5PDA8r5.gif)

LOL, I was JUST about to post this same .gif
To that end, here's more Chloe Wang (err, Bennet)  :oh_i_see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA0SufXtJNE

p.s.
It'd be wise to let this woman speak at least some Mandarin at some point (ala Firefly)

I was under the impression that he did script work on all episodes so far. 

I think the show has a lot of promise and just needs time to work out the kinks.  It is clearly going to get at least a full season.  Given their plans for other shows, I would be surprised if, even if the numbers drop down to CW levels, the show doesn't get a Season 2. 

And here I was thinking that once again the show had too much Skye  :awesome_for_real:

Seriously I can't stand the character. I'm sure Chloe is a nice gal irl but I hope Skye diavs like yesterday.

The wild swings between joy and optimism after a good episode and utter black despair after a bad one are pretty funny stuff. Don't ever change F13!  :why_so_serious:

The only episode he has a writing credit on so far is the first one. I'm sure he was involved in plotting the season and probably helps approves the scripts. I suppose it's possible he throws some dialogue in here and there or maybe reworks a scene or something, but showrunners don't generally write and direct every episode of their show, and especially not when they also have to write a script to follow up one of the top grossing movies of all-time. Whedon has never been very good at dividing his attention between projects either.

In the past he's been able to surround himself with writers who can kinda match his style (Espenson, Greenberg, Minear, Noxon, DeKnight, etc...). It's also worth noting that he got Tick creator Ben Edlund on to write two of the best episodes of Firefly, and some good episodes in Angel's final season (more or less the only season really worth watching). Most of his former collaborators have moved on to their own things. Hell, DeKnight went on to create Spartacus.

AoS has already been given the greenlight for the second season, I believe.

It's a weak show that sometimes strays into so-bad-it's-funny territory. Like SHIELD being this covert organisation who put their logos on the side of cars that are then used to chase suspects through crowded traffic.

One thing this show could be tapping into is the fact that it is a complete flip on the usual government organisation chases people with powers - that should make them the bad guys. Instead they are meant to be the good guys and anyone who gets superpowers turns evil instead (or is manipulated to do evil). I really can't get behind the idea of barracking for the men in black.

The show was picked up for 1 season only, so far, but Disney wants it to run long.

There are a lot of people writing for shows that do not get the 'written by' credit.  According to multiple articles, he has been doctoring every script produced to date. As some of them are primarily written by his family, I imagine he is more heavily involved in those scripts.

There are issues to address, but I think it might be wise to look back at Dollhouse and remember that the show didn't really get going until halfway through the first season.  It took them a while to find a voice that the studio and the creative team both agreed upon.

In my opinion, Dollhouse never really got going until later in the second season, when it was announced it would be cancelled.  It meant the writers were finally able to make they show they wanted to make originally, before the network executives started meddling.

Or the show sucked to begin with and it's only had one final chance to gasp for air. I always had the impression that dollhouse wanted to say something "important"  and that got in the way of the scifi elements that made the show worth watching in the first place. Something on the lines of "human trafficking is wrong and evil corporations are soulless monsters out to turn us all into mindless slaves and look how relevant we are!"...or something. Snore. It would have done better dropping the scifi elements from the premise so the hipsters who enjoy that crap can faun over how real the show is.

I don't wade into these crazy TV threads much, you folks are crazy.  :grin:

I'm kind of bummed this show isn't doing more with what it has. Casting isn't horrible, though the agenty guy is a bit generic and the hacker chick is a bit too Mary Sue for the target audience (imo). Coulson and hong-kong fooey chick are of course awesome, and I like Fitz and Simmons, they give it just the right amount of awkward.

I think the biggest waste is how they don't cash in on the Marvel license. Yes, it's not about the heroes, and that's fine. But it feels completely outside the Marvel Universe. Why isn't the organization developing the centipede tech called AIM (tenuous hope for that still). Why did they squander a chance to intro B and C list heroes that could cameo or even develop on the big screen? I thought the first centipede experiment was going to be Luke Cage, but no. Random dude and he dies. Then the second experiment, holy crap it's Sunspot! No, random dude and he dies.

And the dialog needs a lot more Whedon snap. More Whedon, more Stan Lee. Less ABC or CBS or whatever clueless network is carrying this show.

The problem is that this show isn't about Shield. It's more in line with Torchwood/Dr. Who-light. Where it's more government agency defeats the many evils and wrongs of the world by preaching the true gospel of democracy, humanism, and generally not being a douche cause that shits bad ok. Where it should be shadow government agency that doesn't give a fuck about saving the world or being the good guys, they just don't want those motherfuckers in charge, i.e Hydra, Aim, etc, etc. Hell the biggest misstep of the Marvel Movie Universe is making Shield the organization that gathers the Avengers. It was a lame plot point in the Ultimate's Universe, it's a lame one now. Shield HATES the Avengers. The Avengers have the power, resources, and influence to be the same type of douche bags they shoot on principle on a regular basis. The only reason Shield doesn't take down the Avengers is because the Avenger's are A. Prone to break up, B. stupid enough to commit all their energies toward saving the world and not changing it, and C. they get in the way of the bigger plans of Hydra and Aim with regularity, so even if Shield fucks up, and they do often, the Avengers clean up their messes without even being asked. All in all a decent relationship but a relatively tense one.

RE: Dollhouse - Whedon pitched a show to Fox that was quite different than what made it to screen.  They were deep into it when someone high up uttered the word 'prostitution' and suddenly there were heavy changes required.  By the time the pilot  

For MAoS and the Marvel license:  We're 5 shows in and have seen 5+ pieces of Marvel comic tech (up to 20 if you count S.H.I.E.L.D. tech in the show previously seen in comics) and 2 Super Villains - in a world where the existence of heroes (outside Iron Man) were essentially unknown prior to the NY tragedy.  If they had run into Moon Knight, Daredevil, the Beyonder, Squirrel Girl and the Armadillo in the first 5 episodes, people would be criticizing them for trying too hard, for putting too many crazy things in, or for something else.

The show is what it is - and I'm still enjoying it.

This. I like the show, but it has squandered major opportunities to get the diehard fanbois on board in favor of... I'm not really sure where it's going honestly. I still enjoy it, and nothing has been as bad as that 2nd episode. I just feel the show could be doing so much more with so many decent B list characters and organizations.

While a Matt Murdock attorney at law cameo is EXACTLY the kind of stuff they need to be cashing in on, I'm not saying toss in random heroes (villains).

I'm saying twice in 5 episodes (that's 40% for the punters) I've been excited for a 'movie marvel' hero origin (luke cage and sunspot). Both those eps seemed so much like they were written to feature those heroes and then watered down to include generic hero who dies at the end of the episode, throwing away anything interesting about them. Scorch? Give me a break, wasted opportunity. Why not make him Sunfire and at the end he bursts out of the building and flies off into the moonset? Bam, now you have a vehicle to ease in characters to the movie franchises AND please the comic fans (note I'm ok with them creating new fiction for existing characters, as Marvel has been doing it for decades).

And if this centipede organization thing isn't AIM or HYDRA (HAIL HYDRA), the show is basically a crap x-files knock-off and needs to go away.

Now I'm starting to sound like the crazy people in tv and movie threads, I hope you're happy.

You won't ever see Sunspot or Sunfire because they're mutants, and Sony owns the rights to the mutant characters.  I admit, I was also expecting Luke Cage in that first episode when I saw the preview for it.  Only reason I can think of as to why they didn't use him was that they only wanted a throw-away character for that episode and Cage is far from just some throw-away character.

We did see an established Marvel character in Graviton though, even if it was just his origin story.

Edit: Regarding Luke Cage, looking at his wiki entry it seems that Columbia Pictures owns the movie rights to his character and there's been on-again off-again development going on for a number of years now.  That kind of thing is probably going to be a problem with a lot of characters.

I believe that may be out of date, cuz there were rumblings about Marvel doing a Luke Cage/Heroes for Hire movie around the time Iron Man came out.  Who owns what when it comes to Marvel properties is pretty messed up overall hehe.

I assume any character that's even remotely being considered for their own movie or TV show is immediately out of bounds. That means if they've got somebody somewhere working on ideas for a Heroes for Hire movie, Luke Cage is not going to show up in AoS. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point way off in the future some writer or director complains that they had a great idea for a story with Graviton as the villain but it wouldn't have fit with what was established on the show. In the minds of the people at Marvel and Disney, their characters are all potential billion dollar grossing movie franchises and they're going to be reluctant to put the TV show in a position where it might dictate how these characters appear in the Marvel Movie Universe.

If we see anything in AoS it's gonna be the more obscure heroes/villains like Graviton.  Which is fine with me, Marvel has more than enough people to use on the show.  Any new characters they build seem to be one shots so far.  Michael Peterson was cured in the first episode, so I doubt he's gonna show again, and Scorch was taken out.

I'm not really all that interested in seeing established Marvel characters, but I wouldn't be mad if they did. I just want this to be crazy ass Steranko or Warren Ellis and it's more SHIELD 90210.  :oh_i_see:

In hindsight the good parts of the 4th episode was a lot like the John Stone bits in Planetary (with the black female agent a mix between Bride and John Stone).

Problem there is, what does Marvel really consider obscure enough that it won't potentially step on the toes of any of their future projects? The Guardians of the Galaxy are pretty obscure for most people but they're being positioned as Marvel's big summer movie next year. If you figure that characters who show up on AoS have to be more obscure than Star Lord, Rocket Raccoon, and Groot, then you're pretty much reduced to mostly using villains who've been killed by Scourge.

Considering there are thousands of characters in the Marvel Universe it shouldn't be too hard.  Even taking out all the X-Men, Spiderman, and Fantastic Four characters that are locked up.  I mean they are using Batroc the Leaper in Cap 2 for crying out loud.

That's my point though. If Batroc is considered a viable character to put in the movies then that would have made him off-limits to introduce in the TV show because they aren't going to want the show to dictate the origin, powers, and casting of any character they might want to use in a movie.  If you've got to go more obscure than that, you're getting to the point where you might be better off making new characters rather than using Commander Kraken, Blue Streak, Slyde, or the Desert Dwellers.

You're all overthinking this.

If a Marvel writer wants to use scorch in a future film, they'll just do it. If they acknowledge Agents at all it will be one line to say 'this is another Scorch' or 'he got better'.

I re-watched the pilot again this morning.  It's the actors.  The young attractives are not good in their roles yet.  Now the second episode was a crap fest for sure but Gravitron was great and Scorch was fine (again, actor kinda sucked for me).  It's a new show, everyone's getting dialed in.  I'm not giving up after five episodes.  I didn't give up on Defiance and I was glad I did.

It's an uneven show so I understand some folks bailing.  But I'm in for the long haul. 

I'm going to agree with the overthinking this bit. There's nothing that says Marvel/Disney can't take a character from the TV show and change him for a movie, or that they can't use the TV show to establish a character for a movie - especially if you are talking about bit characters/villains. The lines between movie/TV are and should be getting blurred. The first X-Files movie had bit characters from the TV show and had characters that had never and did never appear in the show. I mean Coulsen has appeared in every Marvel movie since Iron Man and now he's a regular on the TV show. Why couldn't a character move back and forth in a shared universe? That's the whole advantage to having a shared universe in the first place.

They can move back and forth, but given that the movies are the big money makers (and to a lesser extent in the shows they're rumored to be working on for the purposes of shopping around), the execs in charge of such things are more than likely going to want most characters to originate in the movies. To go the other direction and have characters appear in the TV show first in my opinion would likely be viewed by the execs as the tail wagging the dog.

And the X-Files movie didn't make $1.5 billion worldwide. If you think numbers like that don't make Disney consider really fucking hard what they do with every character in Marvel's stable no matter how minor, I think you're underthinking things. That kind of money tends to make people more risk adverse not less. It doesn't matter that a movie about the Shroud would have no chance of hitting those numbers, anytime the writing team on AoS comes to them and says "hey we want to introduce this character on the show", you can bet there's going to be a long discussion on whether or not the character is worth more money being used elsewhere.

And yeah, there's nothing to say that if someone writing a movie doesn't like the way a character was depicted in the TV show that they can't change the character, but if they can start handwaving away anything that's done in the show then why even bother with the show at that point anyway? Is it really all that interesting that they introduced Graviton on the show if he shows up in a movie later with as a completely different character? Using characters from the Marvel Universe doesn't inherently make the writing on the show any better. The only real selling point is the novelty factor of "look, they're using Stilt Man". That in and of itself isn't particularly exciting, and becomes even less so when it just ends up being the TV version of Stilt Man who gets retconned by the movie version of Stilt Man later on.

It's cute how we still think TV adaptations will have any bearings on the movie universe.

A few things:

They established that the movies and TV shows are in the same continuity.  For all purposes.

Also, mutants are not necessarily off limits.  Some mutant characters have shared rights, and it is possible there are some mutants out there that would be outside the licenses in existence.  If they have the rights to the mutant in the MCU, it will just have an alternate (or unexplained) origin - Like Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch will.

On another note, they've already said these roles are not tied to an actor.  When RDJ stops being Iron Man, they'll Bond on to the next Iron Man. 

RE: Luke Cage rights: They reverted to Marvel.  You're likely to see Cage in a Heroes for Hire or Ms. Marvel movie/series/mini-series, perhaps part of that combo package of 5 properties Marvel is reportedly shopping.  They might introduce a lot of characters on MAoS before they get their own treatment.

I'm getting a laugh out of the people that hate this show and keep watching it...

Shield is a wholly owned property, it is part of movie continuity, if you think either movie or show will contradict each other you are crazy.  Now whether the movies have more pull or the show or even a "first come first served" basis on character rights is anybodies guess.  Whatever their arrangement is, you can be certain one was made and there will be zero stepping on toes between the properties.

It's like you guys never heard of "differences in budget" or "special affects" or "the fact that they rebooted the hulk 3 times, managed to do nothing with war machine (despite going through the trouble of changing his actor twice), and made the cosmic cube asguardian tech/ww2 nazi technology at the same time".

Remember when Velorath said that getting Thor onto the Avengers team for the movie would be really hard and require a lot of setup due to the way Thor ended, and I said he would just be on the team and there would maybe be one line of throw-away dialog like "lol we built a new space bridge" to explain it?*

I do.  :awesome_for_real:

For fuck's sake. If a guy appears on the TV show and they want to use him in a movie in a different way they'll just change him in the movie. "Oh, we already met a guy named Scorch? Well, this is a different Scorch. Only so many wacky villain names to go around I guess!" Bam, done.

* Thread in question, oh, the actual point of contention I argued was with Iron Man being an active member, but the Thor stuff was also in there.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=19590.70

Not to pick on you Velorath, but you were hilariously off target there, because you weren't thinking like a movie executive. Which is usually a good thing. They set up a bunch of stuff then ditched it because money. The Avengers did pre-vis on the major set pieces before they even had a script! We're not talking about people who are super concerned about continuity details or everything making logical sense.

Thor was stuck in Asgard at the end of Thor because it made for a good movie, he was back on Earth for Avengers because that made for a good movie. Maybe that sort of weak planning will bite them in the ass eventually - people are already starting to ask questions like "where were the Avengers during Iron Man 3?" But at this point I think it's safe to assume that if including a dude in the TV show will make money they'll do it, then if re-introducing him in a movie will make money they'll do that.

Don't underestimate what you can gloss over with a line of dialogue, especially in super hero comics. Oh, a Graviton that looks different? Well this is actually the brother of the original guy, who took up his name after he died offscreen. That sort of thing.

They aren't going to kill off Iron Man on the TV show, no, but I find it hard to believe that anyone at Marvel is super concerned about whether or not they can use Stilt-Man in the show because maybe in 5 years a movie will hinge on Stilt-Man.



Any sane person can correctly guess which has more pull. The Marvel movies are pulling in like two billion a year in world-wide box office alone. The TV show is essentially just another form of movie merchandising.

So what's the over/under that the old dude at the end of last episode was Skye's dad?  :why_so_serious:

Again, if you're going to bring it up multiple times, you could at least try to get my point right.

It wasn't that they can't just dismiss stuff from previous movies with lines of dialogue, it's that I think it ultimately undermines their own writing when they do it and I think that point stands. Iron Man 2 and Thor aren't particularly great movies anyway so in the long run I can't get too up in arms about it, but even if Thor had been really good, Avengers would have pretty much neutered the end of it. When you know both of these characters are next going to appear in the Avengers I don't know why the logical course of action wasn't to write the movies in a way that facilitated them grouping up rather than doing the exact opposite. I also think having to handwave things away is why Thor barely had anything to do in Avengers even though he has the strongest connection to the villain.

Um.  I don't think you're right and, frankly, even if you are, it doesn't matter.

Which is what Margalis was saying, I suspect.


No-one gives a flying fuck about 'undermining their own writing' on a Blockbuster Summer Movie.  I really, really don't think you believe that anyone does.

I also disagree that ANYTHING in the Avengers neutered anything in Thor, even the pathos of being seperated from Earth.  It doesn't matter if five minutes later after the credits, they said 'Oh, hey, Earth.' 

Now, if you want to believe that watching Thor just makes you angry because you KNOW that the end that it ultimately doesn't matter then.... well, then I don't know what to do with you.  It's like someone complaining about Jason or Freddie or Saw and saying 'But it won't mean anything because he'll be back in the sequel.'   Well, duh...

I think you guys are both wrong in a way. When the sausage of a big franchise gets made, there are guys at the table who just say, "Eh, don't worry about next week's show, we have Ed Begley Jr. already cast as this guy Speed Demon, we can see if he gets good ratings and go from there" and there are guys at the table who say, "We think that you should be introducing Stilt-Man because of the possibilities for merchandising a new line of ladders" and there are guys at the table who say, "Hey, I'm very excited about the story possibilities that could come from introducing Misty Knight, but we need to think carefully about whether to introduce Iron Fist at the same time". They're all there at different moments, and they get a different share of the outcomes depending on all sorts of variables. You wouldn't have Guardians of the Galaxy coming out if the creatives didn't sometimes win a fight--I can't imagine your average cautious executive who is looking at Marvel's portfolio would say, "You know, our next big movie should be the space one with the talking raccoon and the big tree."

Explaning Thor's return in Avengers would have taken screen time and cost them major bucks to bring back Elba, Hopkins, etc...  However, when they gave us the quick expalnation in Avengers, it left things open for them to give a better explanation in Thor II - which I believe I've heard we'd be getting. 

Regardless, S.H.I.E.L.D. is being factored into movie planning and movie planning impacts S.H.I.E.L.D.  Whedon has been interviewed quite a bit about the development of both the series and the movies, and this is the general picture he has given:

1.) The general ideas of the movies going forward have been pitched, but are not fixed in stone.  When they put a movie or tv series on their radar (and Marvel has tentative plans stretching to 2024), they have an idea for a story, but they'll change it and plot out the ramifications as they put things into development.  As an example, Ultron was NOT the first plan for a villian in Avengers II, but Whedon pitched it during Avengers I development and the plan changed.

2.) He can find out which characters they have rights to very quickly - and Marvel avoids dealing in characters in the MCU to which there are rights issues.  For example, they had no plans for Punisher or Daredevil until the rights reverted, which means we won't get them soon in movie form.

3.) Movies trump TV.  If he has an idea for TV, he has to see if it is on the movie radar (that stretches to 2024, currently).  If it is, he can't use it.  If not, he can put a flag in it and use it in TV.

4.) Marvel wants the movies and TV series to feel like the same universe (which they're kind of failing at so far), which means they want to utilize guest stars, movie sets, and other assets to coordinate the universes and keep them feeling like the same.  I expect to see the MAoS team on the helicarrier at some time this season when it is available as a set.

This all comes from interviews where Whedon has flat out said this is the path

Ironwood, our longest fucking threads on this subforum are people bitching about the writing in summer blockbuster movies. I'm not sure at what point "I think it would have been good for them to make sure all the movies flow together well since they've gone through the trouble to make a shared universe of films" became a controversial thought. Jesus, you nerdrage over Doctor Fucking Who, you don't really get to comment if I don't like that the last 10-15 minutes of Thor get undone by a line of dialogue in Avengers.

And what I say on that topic doesn't matter either.  You don't see that ?

These are people who get confused easy. Their head exploded when it was announced that the Flash may be featured in Arrow.

Well obviously their going to use the same actors for the justice league movie, cause otherwise two different Flashes will confuse people and IT NEEDS TO BE EXPLAINED OTHERWISE.

Non-Retards : Err it matters 8 dog shits in a public park if they use the Arrow version of the Flash, they're actually obligated to reintroduce him for film.

Well no, obviously the studio execs care about continuity!

Non-Retards : no they don't

But it'll confuse audiences

Non-Retards : no it won't

Yes it will because cause there will be 2 Flashes

Non-Retards : Yeah... ok... have fun with that....


Now it's like

"Well Marvel cares about continuity!"

Non-Idiots : "Here is like 3 examples when they didn't give a shit"

"But Josh Jesus Wheaten says..."

Non-Idiots : "Josh Hack can go fuck himself, there's like 10 reasons why the TV show means fuck all."

"But they wouldn't make the TV show if it had nothing to do with the avengers..."

Non-Idiots : "Never heard of ratings, or merchandising, or franchising, or anything that ends with "ings" have you?"

Arrow/Flash and the DC movies is a different situation.  They have no intention of aligning the movies and tv, just as the animated Avengers show is not in the same continuity as the movies (despite having imagery inspired by the movie universe).

Marvel has said they're aligning the movie and live action TV series - and have people dedicated to the task.  It is a priority.

Top priority?  No.  If there is an awesome story that required them to back the truck over continuity, they'd do it - just like they do in the comics.  However, they recognize the attraction to fans of a cohesive and consistent universe and they're trying to put it together.  Your 'non-idiots' are not factoring in the goal of Marvel and Disney here - cross promotion.  They want you to watch the movies because you want to see how it will impact the shows and watch the shows to see what is being set up in the movies.  They want the popularity of one to drive the other.  Right now, MAoS is not holding up the end of the bargain because the ratings are decent, but not Lost-ish. 

I think the first interesting situations will be seeing how Thor II impacts MAoS, and whether MAoS sets the stage for Cap II. 

Nerds and Geeks bitching about nerdy and geeky things should never, ever, EVER be considered a valid argument for anything, much less actually used.

People didn't give 2 shits about Colson returning for this series.  We get some "oh it's a magical place lines." and non-geeks are fine with it.

The ONLY people who care about continuity are those who hold all this shit too close to the heart.  The same ones who bitched about a different batman when Keaton was replaced, who bitched it's not going to be Bayle in S vs B and who gave two shits about midichlorians.

Just because movie makers use geek-universe material doesn't mean they give two shits about pleasing them.

WHAT BALE NO BE BATMAN!!!1111111   

If they cared about continuity they would have kept Couslon dead. Shield would still be a secret organization instead of globe trotting UN task force shoving their bumper sticker on everything. I mean how does Tony Stark or Captain America or Thor not know that Couslon is still alive when half the world seen his face or has shitty phone cam vids of him doing superhero shit in public. How does Tony not know when Shield can be hacked by a homeless girl in a news van? Yeah the show already says fuck continuity because the show isn't about that. It's about drumming up geek interest in the Marvel Movie Universe because geeks are gullible idiots that will shell out cash and eyeballs to any loosely associated derivative and the non-geek public can stomach a few minutes of 80's action movie shitck since crap like Heroes and Torchwood made this type of thing popular a few years ago. It's the most expensive ad about absolutely nothing, which is fine cause the ad is currently paying for itself.  

Wait a comic book character came back from the dead!  Say it ain't so!  Also SHIELD hasn't been covert in the comics for a long time now.

The way some of you people bitch, I don't know why you even bother watching TV at all.

It wouldn't make sense in Universe. Too important for his resurgence to be unnoticed but here he is flapping around in public and no one cares? Lolz.

Velorath you've sort of lost the plot here.

What you think about the quality of the movies or the writing doesn't matter. We were discussing how Marvel is going to handle SHIELD, not how you would handle were you in charge. You care about these sorts of issues. That's fine. Marvel clearly doesn't care, at least not to the same extent.

I think Marvel will handle SHIELD in a way consistent with how they've been handling things - do whatever works for the show and movies that maximizes revenue while glossing over continuity issues.

They aren't going to kill Iron Man permanently on SHIELD or something crazy like that, but if they want something cool to happen in the movies that contradicts the show or recast a role or something they'll just do it.

How do we know Stark doesn't know?  Are they supposed to pop up a cut scene where Stark is looking at his computer and finds out?  Considering we don't even know if it is the real Coulson or whatever, it's stupid to worry about what the other Avengers will think about it.  It's totally in Nick Fury's wheelhouse to have lied to the Avengers about Coulson being dead.  The fallout for that lie hasn't come about yet and I doubt it's gonna happen on the show.  If it happens anywhere it'll be in Avengers 2.  

They only brought back coulson because they can't afford to

1. All unknowns
2. Any of the human avengers
3. The internet went crazy when marvel released a coulson short, apparently focused groups, nerds, and soccer moms love this guy.

I only pointed him out because its an obvious example of marketing which is the real drive of this show.

I originally assumed they were going to use Robin Howimetyourmother and that was why they'd brought her on to the Avengers. But I guess they'll have her take the film Coulson role.

Would have been cooler imo if they just kept using Coulson in the films - with no explanation whatsoever.

The Tahiti references started to grate about 20 minutes in on the pilot.

I'm not sure exactly what people are arguing about, as though the movies and the show are made by separate entities, they are not.

What is driving me mad are all the assumptions on this thread contradicted by interviews where Marvel and co. had no incentive to lie. I have a feeling that a number of people would feel rather foolish if they went back through this thread in June...

The movies are made to cash in on billions of nerd dollars by making passable films.
The show is made to drum up interest in an over-saturated market by over-saturating the market.

Wait, seriously ?  Who did that ?

Thanks, f13. Thanks for reminding me why I don't bother discussing tv and movies with you folks.

 :uhrr:

Is it because we're too highbrow ?

 :grin:

On Coulson:

Honestly, I never thought he was dead. He died off-screen and Fury blatantly used his death to motivate the team. I'm sort of surprised Stark fell for it but I think even he can get blinded by emotion. I suspect there will be a throwaway line in Avengers 2 where Stark says something to Fury like "You're a dick for lying about Coulson" and Fury will shrug and say "I'm a spy, lying is what I get paid for and besides, it worked didn't it?"

I am a little surprised we haven't had a scene where Coulson answers his mobile phone and says something like "Hey Stark?" *listens* "I got better, what can I say?" but that would be about as much as I'd expect from the TV show.

We're a few episodes in and so far the only character I am on the fence about is Skye. The actress just doesn't have the chutzpah to pull the role off. The scientists seemed to have calmed down in the last couple of episodes I've noticed and seem much less hyperactive. Ward (?) is growing on me now that we're a couple of more episodes in. He's still sort of the wooden statue of the team but I am hoping that is on purpose. Ming Wa? I quite like her character especially now that she seems to be getting back into more of an action role and less of a bitchy role. Coulson? 'nuff said.

I think the network guys are watching things and I wouldn't be surprised if we have some cast shakeups in Season 2. They'll probably add another character to bring in whatever element they feel is missing and I wouldn't be shocked if one of the scientist twins dies and Skye goes on the run because her past catches up with her or something.

If that's highbrow, I'm happy to be lowbrow. As if 'easily amused' is a bad thing  :grin:

Back in the 90s - I did.  Of the Pre-Bale era, I still think Keaton was the best and bitched about it on message boards when they recast the role.  He was surprisingly good.

Oh dear.  Though this does highlight the point about differing opinions being valid;  I didn't like him and I hated Nicolson's Joker even more.

But I also thought Burton was entirely the wrong choice.  Years later, I got my happy on since apparently Chris Nolan was who I always wanted.

Ah well.

What are they going to say in interviews? That SHIELD is a creatively bankrupt product that exists just to be another form of movie merchandising, and that what happens in SHIELD isn't actually all the relevant and that the tie-ins are mostly limited to random asides and name drops? Of course they're going to say that the show is integral to the movies, because otherwise people wouldn't be excited about it.

I really don't get how on one hand someone like Velorath can complain about how the different movies don't link up properly, but at the same time be convinced that the relationship between the TV show and the movies will be handled very thoughtfully. If Marvel doesn't treat their movies like that, which are worth billions of dollars a year, I don't see why they'd treat a fairly irrelevant-by-comparison TV show like that.


The SHIELD series started with a giant handwave, Coulson. As you've noted yourself, so did Avengers regarding Thor (was stuck on Asgard), Iron Man (was interested only in being an advisor) and Hulk (off in some remote corner of the world, different actor) You even thought it might be a problem with how Captain America was integrated into the present. All of that was handled with handwaves.

Where are the Avengers during the events of IM3? Another handwave. Where will they be during Thor 2? Probably another handwave. Didn't Loki like float off into space at the end of Thor or something? (I honestly don't remember)

Why bother with the show? $$$$

The pilot was essentially guaranteed to get huge ratings, and without a monumental plummet you'd expect most of the first season to get at least decent ratings. It was literally a can't-miss proposition, there was no way the first few episodes were going to bomb. From a business perspective it would be stupid not to try it.

Right now the show has the same number of people watching it as The Biggest Loser. If someone has an idea for a Graviton movie and Marvel movies are still worth billions of dollars each there's no way in hell his appearance on a show slightly more popular than The Good Wife will be allowed to derail that.

On a note unrelated note, I started watching this.  I've missed the pilot, so I started straight at Episode Two, a fact that didn't seem to matter.

I thought it wasn't hugely awful, just mediocre and the Wife fell asleep.

So there's that.   I truly suspect that this is the start and end of my contribution to talking about the show though.  It was simply...bland.

My SO likes this.

Though I suspect she sees it as an opportunity to be nice about my interest in manchild culture without having to ruin an evening out watching Star Trek.

Hey, that's what I did instead of watching this last night.  Didn't realize BBCA ran episodes at 8pm.  Got to watch the whole Klingon Civil War arc again for the first time in 15 years.

Which really made me laugh.  Not for the GFX but for the ridiculousness of the plan to catch the Romulans.

Still a better evening than SHIELD.  :why_so_serious:

For the haters: We're 5 episodes in.  Why are you still here?

I'm not encouraging you to leave this thread - I'm just curious why you're wasting time talking about / watching a show you hate?  I don't go on the true procedural (yeah, I know there is a faux procedural aspect to MAoS) and reality TV threads to discuss that crap.

We're hoping for gifs of the girl in her knick knacks.

But seriously, don't ask me, I'm only one episode in.  After some more thought, it seems to me that the characters are acting like they're SEEN Avengers, rather than it being something that happened.  I was giggling about it today.

I watched a couple episodes and stopped, then I came back because I kept reading that the show had gotten better.

I would like a good Marvel show. This just isn't it.

I'm the first to point out how business could give a shit about the whining of the niche when the dollars disprove every point of nerdrage ever raised.

But come on man, making a statement that sweeping pretty much calls to question 90% of every conversation had, including all non-sponsored barking on twitter  :awesome_for_real:

This thread is like supernatural. You mostly browse the forms for hints that they've actually done something with the material.

No, I just disagree with you on some things, and then you brought in a different argument from a different thread where you continue to misrepresent what my point was and despite knowing better I responded to you. Mind you I haven't even watched the last three episodes of AoS, and I think the only really good movies so far have been IM1, Cap, and Avengers, so I don't know why I'm even bothering to argue at this point.

Well, it passes the time.

This is the first time I've whole heartedly agreed with you. Keaton is the best Batman of all I have seen. Heck, put him in Chris Nolan's first two movies and I'd be in heaven. (I pretend DKR was just a weird fever dream!)

DKR on the hate list? Begins was bad, not burn the franchise bad but maybe never needed to be made to begin with bad.

I don't think recasting a part or Iron Man saying he wanted to be an advisor then being a full-fledged member qualify as continuity issues.

The former is just an aspect of the medium. The latter may be sloppy writing and planning but it's nothing that can't easily be explained by a line of dialog or an implied event that took place offscreen. And Midichlorians weren't a contituity issue, they were just dumb.

Most movie series don't last long enough or come out frequently enough for continuity to be a major issue. I also think that in the end when people go to see a movie what they want is the best 2-hour experience, not the best experience that seamlessly works with a 2-hour experience they had a year earlier. The way people consume movies lessens how much continuity matters.

^^This.  Most people don't go into a movie having just watched every other movie in the same series, nor do they have the details engraved in their memory.  You know how many people actually cared that Ed Norton had been replaced by Ruffalo?  Even less than cared that Norton had played the Hulk a couple of years after some other guy.

A movie can be bad enough to damage a franchise, but only when it is a really bad movie on its own merits.  Recasting, continuity errors, 99% of the audience doesn't care about that shit.

--Dave

Poassibly, but TV execs care if TV shows lose their audience rapidly. If AoS doesn't perform well, it puts the plans of other Marvel TV shows on ice.

I'm still watching AoS for the unintentional laughs. Things like superhacker Skye hacking SHIELD and getting a job on the team, but scruffy boyfriend hacking SHIELD sees him tossed homeless and partly shackled in another country because Coulsen obviously doesn't think he'd look as good in a wet t-shirt. Or the team of specialists that are barely functional.

And secret agency SHIELD having their logo over computers, water bottles and cars.

If it wasn't Marvel and Whedon and a comic book show, I probably wouldn't be watching. All it will take is a change in timeslot and I'll probably lose interest.

The problem with SHIELD isn't continuity, and even if you grant that maybe they are reserving all the cool (read: all) superheroes for the movies to avoid continuity problems that still doesn't explain why it's bad - in the end it's just not a good show. I don't know if the Man From U.N.C.L.E. meets A-Team meets X-Files approach makes that much sense, but this isn't even a good execution of that formula.

The show is losing a lot of viewers and I assume it's not that cheap to make, especially compared to reality TV.

I would guess at Marvel there's a lot of debate about whether the problem is lack of recognizable relevant characters or simply show quality. Would not shock me at all if the rumored 5 other shows Marvel is offering get reworked / pulled.

Well another big problem with their ratings is they are up against NCIS and The Voice.  Both of which are big programs for their respective TV stations in the 18-49 brackets.

Yeah.  It still amuses me that people think Captain America being The Human Torch is in any way A Thing.  No-one gives a ratfuck.

People do care about recasting, nobody ever gave a shit about Hulk.

I know you were going for the funny, but that's just not right.  It hasn't been right in ages.

Sometimes they say they care, because they think it's the wrong guy, but they don't care.

Changing Bruce Banner in different continuity is fine but if they recast Ruffalo in Avengers 2 it would be incredibly jarring.

Maybe, but that's only because Ruffalo really, really OWNED that role.  It'll be like the next Batman, or recasting Loki.

But I put it to you that if the next guy did it fine, no-one would care, not really.

I hear that when they recast James Bond, it totally tanked that franchise.

I think people would have cared plenty about recasting if Iron Man had been recast instead of the one character nobody gives a shit about.  Or if they had tried to use a different Joker in the third Batman.  You could recast every single of the dwarves in the next Hobbit movie and no one would bat an eye, but try to use a new Gandalf and see if people don't care.

But the reason no wants to recast RDJ as Iron Man is there is almost 0 chance you can get someone as good at it as him. And the reason no gives a shit about continual recasting of Hulk is Edward Norton(miscast) and Eric Bana(can't act) were horrible. People only care about the end result, re-casting sometimes make it worst sometimes better.

Man, Eric Bana was so bad, it made his abusive, psychopathic father look sympathetic.

I said all this.

  :awesome_for_real:

Ruffalo was good and i don't think anyone would give a shit if you put Bana back in.

Did you see On her Majesty's Secret Service?

Yes, it was easily in the top third of Bond films and both a critical and financial success.

If Affleck acts good, the script is good and the direction is good, everyone will accept him as Batman.  Daniel Craig was accepted as the new Bond because of this. 

Soo for those wondering, the Nov. 19th episode of AoS will have some Thor 2 crossover.

Yeppers.  No Thor actors overlap, but the episode centers around the ramifications of the film.  I'm guessing they'll be visiting that site we've seen in the trailers.  Glad to see it... but I would have been surprised not to see something like it.

Early info makes it sound like it's a crossover in the same sense that the pilot would be a crossover with Iron Man 3.

Yep.  Makes sense that a S.H.I.E.L.D. team would be there to clean up after the action...

So I just watched the Graviton episode and I'm struggling to figure out what you people are complaining about.

This is cheeseball kiddie stuff, clearly aimed at an audience that's either ok with that or, more importantly, Not Most Of This Board.

And that's ok.

It's bad.  But not BAD.

Right. Sort of.

It's why I don't entirely mind the resemblance (in my mind) to The Six Million Dollar Man. I can imagine being very excited about it as a 12-year old, though maybe 12-year olds are more jaded nowadays. I almost wish it was making more knowing use of the cheeseball feeling. But that's where the issue of its relationship to the other Marvel properties come in. I haven't seen anything as remotely self-aware as the USO sequence in the first Captain America film yet in the series. Some of what they could do isn't about budget and it's not about nerd-desire that they have an episode where they have Paladin or the Texas Twister show up and audition to be a SHIELD agent.

"That would have never happened to the other guy"

You only get away with that because you're Bloodworth.

Its F13, who take joy in not liking anything.

Eh? That's a quote from the movie. Like, the opener.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8XNBpIkQpU


Sorry, "This never happened to the the other fella".

Yes, I know.

Also mentioned a third of the way up the page.

I think I am up to date on this show now. Good grief the writing is terrible.

My favourites from the last episode so far...

What ? How ?

and


That last one almost made me throw something at the screen. The Hacker-Technobabble is bad enough (don't even get me started on that and I now almost nothing about programming), but that was just ... I.. I don't even ...

I'll keep watching it, but only to see how bad things canwill become.

You mean the 'TRACK THE DHCP SERVER' type stuff ?

Yeah.  Giggly.

Especially when the DHCP Server then showed video.  Whut ?

Wait until someone runs a GRIDLOCK.mp4 on his smartphone that turns all traffic lights to green.

I hope they tie in to Thor 2 better than they did IM3.  *mumble mumble extremis handwave*

Oh, that?  That's just a cleverly disguised virus.  Obviously he couldn't name it GRIDLOCK.virus.

Wait.

I should be writing for this show.

You guys are friggin hilarious. 

That guy pushes a button and the traffic lights change?  WTF?  This is totally ruining my suspension of disbelief!  They're starting to make the man flying in a suit f armor, the radiation rage monster, and the God like alien with a magic hammer seem unrealistic.

Yeah, no.  Source material being comics does not give an excuse for lazy writing.

You guys are acting like this has never been done in any other movie or tv show.

While I agree the technobabble could be a bit better, it is never going to pass close inspection because it is fake technology.  It is comic technology. 

I just don`t get how could know about Minecraft, even enough to have heard about Zombie Pig Men and still manage to fuck it up. "Apparently in his free time he plays a lot of minecraft..." would have been enough. I am pretty sure they only added the rest because they want to spite me and make me argue rage about it on the internet.

This is always true of suspension of disbelief: Do not force your audience to look at the wires that hold up your flying saucers.

It's fine if you just want the audience to be comfortable with your magical world, but if you also want to include hip real-life references, then those references have to be spot on... because you're specifically trying to activate those parts of the brain your material otherwise insists they shut off. If the hacker was using some sort of 3D interface where they swim around in a sea full of schools of data and there's a picture of the guy floating there with a picture of his house... yeah, a few people roll their eyes but nobody really complains. If the wrong options on fgrep or xargs are visible on screen for less than a second, heads will be on pikes.

Alternately... it's okay when Superman dodges a thrown gun because none of us knows what it feels like to have bullets bounce off of us, but most of us have had heavy metal objects bounce off of us and ouch!

Process there was that a writer who knew the reference wrote the line, then somebody else decided to try and make it funny for people who don't know what zombie pig-men are.

--Dave

Do people think tonight's episode was better? 

no

About as good as the Scorch one.  Skye falls back into the group.  Good.  Nice to see some actual character drama, especially around the bubbly scientists as shit gets real. 

Yea, I liked this one better. The second half was pure action tv cliche, but it served to give some depth to the characters.

I've come to realize that I will watch (and even enjoy) shows just because they are about a setting and subject matter that interests me, even when the acting and writing is questionable.

See: Season 1 ST:TNG as an example

We're a week (or possibly 2?) behind. The pyromancer episode. We got through 15 minutes and just turned it off and dropped the season pass. It's a mix of bad cliche writing and a cast with zero chemistry together.

On the other hand, I'm still enjoying it for what it is:  Just a silly show that's entertaining enough to spend 40 minutes watching.  There's nothing that's especially hair-pullingly stupid, like in say Revolution or Falling Skies or Under the Dome or Terra Nova, the list could go on.  Actually, I'd put AoS at slightly better than Defiance.  I still like Coulson.  The rest of the cast is just window-dressing, really.  Skye is the only big misstep, she's just irritating.

The cast is what is really killing it for me. Just not interested in anybody, even Coulson. There's also something about the basic set-up with the plane that's dull--it's a bottle show in a boring bottle.

Agree on the plane base of operations... not working as well as hoped.  I think they need the 'Serenity' shot where you follow two of them walking onto the plane and see them go from area to area (using photography tricks) to give us a feel for the layout of the plane.  Serenity was a big part of Firefly, but this plane feels like a set piece.  They should be able to do better.

Who are you and what have you done with the real Ironwood?  :grin:

Yay less Skye. Still no Steranko but baby steps.

Fitz Simmons got more to do. They are silly but I like them.

Overall I liked this episode.

I think the big thing for me in this episode was something I'm going to attribute to the director: It looked less like 'comic book acting' and more like 'acting'.  I think that is a sign of good things to come... and a sign that they're finding the characters.

The team itself just doesn't make a lot of sense.

If you didn't know that they are supposed to be part of SHIELD, a huge important organization, you'd assume this was some rag-tag group of misfits that got together through happenstance like the A-Team, or were outcasts like Fox Mulder, or something like that. The idea that this is the special team they've come up with is just crazy. It's using the same Scooby-Doo gang formula as other Whedon shows but it doesn't make sense here.

"Why is this the group of people that has their own plane and fly around solving mysteries?" is a question that I don't think has an answer. If someone told me the original concept was a SHIELD: The New Class thing about fresh recruits I might believe it. As it is this group of people working for SHIELD in this capacity is just weird.

The two "nerd" chicks are auto-boners for the target audience. The asian chick is an instant boner for the anime crowd. Agent Couslon is a big fat dangling pointer to the AVENGERS, MARVEL MOVIE UNIVERSE, FUCKING AWESOME...and did I mention THE AVENGERS. The generic not grizzled white government agent guy is the safe "bad boy" contrast to the hot-topic geek guy, you know something for the fangirls.

Wrong on so many levels.

Her not looking like some member of a kpop girl band is a minus, but considering how long I've spent with that crowd, how many of the forums I go to, how many of them still watch crappy jap porn...I'd wager I'm right on this one.

I get that people enjoy the lady and that she looks good for her age, what I don't get is why she is supposedly big with the anime watching crowd.

Yeah if anything the other (half) Asian chick is the bigger draw.

Hang around some anime nerds still in their highschool years.

I'll flay the bones off a show that's actually aimed at me and misses the mark.  This ?  Not so much.  It's like getting worked up about Arrow (also shite) or the early Smallville.  Not really worth my time.

Since I don't, can you explain their fascination?

Especially when in the movies, Coulson  was Nick Fury's point man at command, and in dealing with important assets like Stark. He was a top officer at the headquarters and now he's running a random field team?

That much, at least, is explainable as a rehab assignment.  Dude died being Fury's point man.

This is addressed in several ways in the show, although future revelations will likely revise the explanation.  

The current story: After Coulson was stabbed and recovered, he asked for this assignment.  He requested the plane (per his conversation with Fury), he selected his team (per his conversation with Hill), and he outlined the types of tasks that they'd be assigned to handle (per his conversation with Melinda).  

And I do not think this is a random field team - it is designed to be a team of specialists set to handle top tier situations as they arise.  To equate iot to Stargate: They're SG-1, not SG-14.

I think you can defend the team. The core is Coulson, May, and Ward, and all of them appear to be seasoned, highly-capable vets. Fitz Simmons, while young, are highly competent; afaik we were never told where they are on the SHIELD scale, but why not pretend they are at least top 5?  :awesome_for_real: 

Skye is young and cute.  :oh_i_see:

You people hate fun.

Well they aren't top, because we know that shield has actual badasses who are (hawkeye, widow).

I think May is supposed to be up there, but something happened to her where she wanted to just be a desk jockey.

It's meant to be an elite team. The other agent at the epilogue of this week's episode refers to it as Coulson's "dream team".

This, he got to hand pick the people he wanted for this team.

His dream team just happen to hit all the marketing 101 checkboxes.

The way I see it, these people are Avengers-lite.

Skye and FitzSimmons are brilliant, but a few rungs behind Stark.  Stark outdid what we've seen each of them (Hacking SHIELD in Avengers at will, Drunk solutions to biology mysteries in IM III, countless technical marvels)
May was last generation's Widow.
Ward is not Hawkeye, but he is not that far off (unless you're talking theatrics).

They're the best you can get without being Superhuman.

This argument is becoming just old and stupid.  You do realize this stuff is still made by Hollywood right?

Therefore it must be formulaic? I'm not shitting on the show, I've already done that but come on, there is nothing wrong with having standards.  "Hollywood" makes plenty of shows that are not blatant pandering to demographics all the time. 

It's ludicrous to simply say that by virtue of being made it can't be bad.

I'm not sure if this was a reply to me, but my "top 5" statement was referencing Fitz Simmons, and anyway Hawkeye and Widow are just humans and given hints of their training/background there's no reason to think Ward and May aren't their equals. 

Per the last episode, FitzSimmons are straight out of school, if that's Cambridge or Shield Polytechnic I don't know.  But it does explain their goofiness and lack of combat skills.

I assume Shield was heavily invested in them and Coulson snatched them up for his 'dream team'.  May and Ward for combat and a convenient hole for a 'leet haXXorz' girl.

So I'm fine with the backstories except for Skye.  Poor acting doesn't help her case either.  I give Ward some rope because he's supposed  to be a Terminator with poor social skills.

Ward has been humanized a bit so while I wouldn't say he's grown on me, he's not as bad as he was in the first couple of episodes.  The stoic professional trope works better for his role on the team than the alternative, the loose cannon trope.  Making him self aware enough to poke fun at himself that last episode was a nice touch.

I'm finding the 'hints' around Coulson to be entirely unsubtle and annoying.

Not being able to handle the gun due to lack of 'muscle memory' was almost rubbed in our faces.  In a bad, pornographic way.  Whedon used to pretend his audience was somewhat clever.  When did that change ?

I'd really rather they'd got that shit out of the way in episode one and not bothered making it a mystery because, honestly, I don't care.

They aren't hints to the audience, since it's generally understood that the audience knows from the start that there's something up. They're hints to Coulson himself. The idea isn't that we're supposed to be piecing together that something is wrong, we're supposed to be watching Coulson piece that together.

Fair enough if that's how you see it.

Still annoying.

Right, but I'm saying they don't come off as an elite team at all. They have some supposedly bad-ass Asian chick who doesn't want to do anything useful, two young naive science types, an anti-government hacker that got hired without any due diligence and has already betrayed the team once.

Ward is the only guy who comes off as an elite agent. Simply referring to the rest as elite doesn't make it so.


And again, to me this would make more sense if this was a project that Coulson believed in but SHIELD as a whole was lukewarm on, so he had to rely on talented youngsters and outsiders rather than established talent. With the exception of Ward the team is up-and-comers and also-rans. Even Coulson himself is damaged goods - he may not know it but SHIELD does.

Maybe the twist is that SHIELD knows Coulson is messed up and gave him something to keep him busy that they don't really care about? That would make a lot more sense to me - sure, take some recent grads, a hacker chick and a desk jockey, here's a plane, go knock yourself out. Better than having you short circuit in the office and gun down a bunch of people.

SHIELD's problem isn't that it panders, it's that it tries to and fails. Arrow is pandering its ass off to us and we're eating up every Oliver-doing-a-chin-up and Felicity nerd-strutting minute of it.

"I don't mine a parasite. I object to a cut rate one."

I'm still liking this show, and I think it's starting to hit as good of a stride as it's going to hit. The best bit of acting this season was Coulson talking to the firefighter that was about to blow up. That was really strong and of course, it's Coulson. He's really the heart of the show and I'm glad because both Ward and Skye are holding the show back. Ward has gotten better but Skye is just... not. Fitz Simmons make for some good banter though I have problems understanding their accents at times (which is weird because I don't usually have a problem with those accents at all).

I'm still enjoying it, but it's not holding my attention. I find half the time I'm just barely listening. I don't mind the acting as much as I don't like how they're treating Skye. It's very soap-opera-ish in treatment, how she's the cause of a problem then passively-aggressively suffering for it then the solution then the problem again. Only a handful of episodes in though, and they're still going through the "this episode is now about this character" sequence. It's good treadmill distraction, and I've run out of Netflix, so it'll do :-)

I have a good enough time watching it, nitpicking things that make no sense (and maybe complain about them on the internet). It is entertaining.


Carrying  a box containing a deadly virus on a plane and then just putting it onto a table in a room where aparently nobody is watching it ? Really ?

I'm all caught up now.

Nothing really blowing me away, but it passes the time.  The scene with Skye in her undercrackers was painful, in all the wrong ways.  Talk about gratuitous and shoehorned in.  Also, those pants were just ugly as fuck.

Anyway....

Well I did my part and saw Thor 2.  So lets see how the next episode plays off of that story line. 

I mean, the very first episode had a "he must never find out!" scene. This are not hints, it has been made obvious to the audience something is up with Coulson.

I didn't catch the pilot.  Sorry.

(But he's not a robot.  Shame.  I was enjoying shouting 'It's because you're a robot' at the screen every ten minutes, much to wife disgust.)

Funny PA comic on the show.

(http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-hhJBQRK/1/950x10000/i-hhJBQRK-950x10000.jpg)

What's bad is that Arrow, with probably 1/3 of the budget is kicking its ass.  Maybe it's because the format is more of a soap opera, but:

1.  Actions have consequences.  Queen's mom is in jail and on trial still for a huge explosion she was involved in in Season One.
2.  Queen has two comrades, one of which is a hot hacker chick, but reasonably portrayed i.e. she's not wearing designer duds in a van beside a coffee shop.
3.  Queen has secrets and flaws.  Coulson has a secret but is the perfect agent.  Queen is haunted by past mistakes; Coulson grins and saunters off.

Of course, there are limits in episodic vs. serial storytelling, but Arrow is a pretty tight show with believable characters making mostly believable decisions.  Maybe Arrow is doing well staying focused on gritty street-level action while AoS is trying to tell grander stories.  I feel Arrow knows what it's about while AoS is still figuring out what kind of show it wants to be.  It might be unfair to compare Arrow season two to AoS season one, but it's the only benchmark that matters to me at the moment.

Arrow season one was better than Agents of SHIELD so it's a fair comparison.

I find Arrow just as painful, but that's probably because I don't really 'care' about either premise, to be honest.

I'm not a fan of CW superhero shows but they at least seem to know and embrace what they are.

SHIELD is a show that's half-embraced CW's philosophy. (Basically what Numtini said earlier) A lot of Whedon's shows try to blend drama, comedy and pandering, and rather than succeeding on all fronts SHIELD is failing on them all. I think this SHIELD show is actually less dramatic than the Avengers cartoon. (Earth's Mightiest Heroes) To me that's the single greatest failing - it's just failing as dramatic television. Largely because it doesn't take the characters or situations seriously. Whereas something like X-Files could have a lot of comedy but still function as a drama.

To be fair I think most of the Marvel movies don't really work as dramas, but they have enough other stuff going on that it doesn't matter so much. But on a TV show without a lot of set pieces, adventuring or super heroes you need a dramatic core.

Yeah.  I don't feel any drama or tension either.

I find it hard to worry about the main character dying when, you know, been there, done that.

 :why_so_serious:

There have been a few scenes with her in designer dresses and they've been exquisite for how realistically uncomfortable she looks.

I'm not sure that was what was exquisite about those scenes.  I can think of a couple of things that were really shown off there...  (See GIF above)

Arrow =/= MAoS.  Arrow is about a man, his family, and the people supporting his agenda.  The stories are about him - his past, his relationships, his goals.  MAoS is about a team coming together. The stories are about what pulls them together, and how they interact.  Rather than a focus, you have several focuses pulling together into one.  This is also a fundamnetal difference between Buffy and Firefly.  As such, I'd argue Whedon can pull off either approach.  We just need more time for this show to develop and a bit more backstory on each character.

And then you see her in her underwear and they're nowhere to be seen and, yet again, you thank God for push up bras in TV.

I don't care if it's written by Whedon's brother, it's not a Whedon show. It just isn't. He does not have enough input into the show which is I think one reason it's not as good as it could be.

GO back and review some of the Whedon interviews where he describes his role with the show.  He characterizes it as greater than you do.

It reminds me enough of dollhouse wheadon that I'm convinced its his show. If it isn't his show he has enough of an ego to bitch about that to the fans...which we know he usually does anyway. So its wheadons show or wheadon doesn't care.  :awesome_for_real:

As far as Arrow vs Agent of Shield...man what drew me into how ridiculously corny Arrow was the assembled cast playing against each other. The family drama built the show, which is funny considering the show suppose to draw you in with the bow and arrow revenge shit. I gave two shits about his crusade, his mission, or his ability to achieve any of the above. Instead you get relationships with real consequences and motivations. Agent of Shield should be able to play up the relationship angle. I mean you have a team of misfits, I should kinda care how they play off each other. And three episodes in and well it wasn't there. No desire to see any of them in a room together.

Dropping in on this. Looking around. Still not good, but this episode didn't make me want to uninstall google chrome....progress? Ehh... whatever. They trying to add a little scary government agency to shield but they come off unnecessary douches. No reason for any of the "tension" to exist, completely utterly artificial. I mean the mission itself was soo boring the only thing gained was some flat Ward/trying to be tough Fitz interaction. Which I admit..wasn't godawful and kinda carried the episode. If they had treated the mission more seriously, and giving more me Ward/Fitz, I would have actually enjoyed this. 

 (all in all the show is "good enough" that I'm still watching it but not so good that the flaws I think there are in the show wouldn't bother me)

edit:added spoiler in case someone hasn't seen the latest episode

This is a comic book show.  They had another couple of good character moments but this is a comic book show.  It asks us to not think too hard about some of the shortcut nonsense they use to move the show along.

Simmons reminds me of Hermione.

I find it hard to feel involved with Marvel's version of the NSA crossed with the CIA. It feels weird supporting the men in black.

I did love tonight's lesson of "trust the system, until the system doesn't do what you want, then you can do what you want without consequences".

No.  She's clearly trying to be Keira Knightly.  In almost every way.

It's awful.

Last night's episode was really forgettable. What's happening with this show is we get a few moments of necessary character development stuffed into a turducken of utterly forgettable and unnecessary plots. It's trying to follow the Burn Notice formula of main story arc being parceled out in little weekly bits during a "crisis/mission of the week" goes on. Only with Burn Notice, the stories were decent and these are... meh at best. At this point, I'm mainly watching for Coulson and the bits and pieces of Marvel that are scattered throughout. Some of the characters are started to get fleshed out - Fitz and Simmons especially. I still find it hard to care about Skye or Ward.

I also kept thinking discount Hermoine....

So far, the best thing about this show is the folks on this forum saying they can't stand watching the show... week after week...  Hilarious.

The preview for next week was disappointing.  When they said they'd deal with the fallout of Thor II, I pictured them dealing with something seen in the movie that was not resolved.  The preview seems a far sight from that picture.

The storytelling follows the Buffy mold more than the Burn Notice mold.  In Burn Notice, you could usually separate out the season long storyline and the episodic storyline from each other almost entirely.  In Buffy and MAoS, they weave the season long storylines into the episodic storyline more.  For example, in Burn Notice, it was usually 'Team A does Season goal, Team B does episode goal'.  In MAoS and Buffy, the entire team is involved in the episodic events and a subsection of them deals with the season long events.

This last episode was hilarious, i have enjoyed all of them though.  You people are really weird.

I only popped back in to see if this is the Thor episode...

Artificial Tension, that about sums it up.

What the show needs is more Alan Tudyk.

Nailed it. Not that it was hard.

I haven't watched since the third episode, but I do like to check the thread to see if there's any reason to start again. 

I thought this epi. was the best of the bunch honestly (which isnt saying much sadly), simply because of Fitzsimmons.  I'll echo the Ward+Skye weaksauce.  At this point I do believe they're dragging the show down with no possibility of recovery.  I actually took the liberty of doing more research on Chloe Bennett, and really, there's nothing in her persona that'd enable her to be anything different then how she in on this show.  It's not gonna change.  As for Ward?  The issue with him is more a function of how he's written; which is not enough like Hawkeye.  Also, he talks too much.   :oh_i_see:

That moment when the first 5 minutes of Arrow is doing a better job of being agents of shield than agents of shield. Motherfucking Cadmus. That DC Universe  :drill:

Meh, She's still utterly shagable.

I hope they wrap up Skye's story really fast because I really don't care. Surprisingly though, only Simmons annoyed me. The opening, Fitz/Ward  and Coulson/May were pretty strong bits I thought, but Skye/Simmons wow just no.

Recognized a name in Jasper Sitwell. I can't believe I missed him in Thor though.

He's shown up in a couple of the Marvel One-Shots also. The Consultant (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDwaqFo4Sjk) is mostly a conversation between him and Coulson.


Edit:


Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen wrote more episodes of Dollhouse than Joss did. In fact they wrote the finale's for both seasons, and while Joss only wrote the first episode of Season 2, they wrote almost 4 episodes out of 13. The fact that it reminds you of Dollhouse would actually be further reason to suspect that he might have once again delegated a lot of the day to day responsibilities to them. Joss sucks at dividing his attention. The best seasons of Buffy and Angel (Buffy's first three seasons, and Angel's last season which some might say were the only actual good ones) were the ones where he wasn't working on multiple shows at once. When he was focusing on Firefly, Buffy and Angel were debatably at their low points.

My suspicion is that it's a bit of nepotism. The studio gets to say that the show is being run by Joss because they know he has a following and because he did Avengers, and Joss gets to hook his brother and sister-in-law by letting them take care of a lot of aspects of running the show while he's working on the movie stuff.

That One-Shot has in a few short minutes just about everything that's missing so far from the series.

Accurate, but I'm not sure it reflects the underlying truth.  If you go back and look at some of the interviews from June through September that Joss Whedon did where he characterizes his involvement, he says he is heavily involved at the key steps of each episode.  No, he doesn't write the episodes - but he does review (and often is involved in generating) the outlines of each episode and make adjustments before they're written.  He then reviews the finished scripts and makes tweaks.  He checks in on the post-filming steps and has control over the final cut (although there are hands above his on the chain at Marvel, etc...).  Other hands come in to manipulate the material, but he is guiding it - and the grunt work is in the hands of people that have worked with him for a long time.  He is not rowing the ship, and it is moving through swift waters with a lot of currents, but he is at the wheel.  I have no doubt that his involvement is going to be less at times when he is pulled to Avengers II duty, but he knows this show is tied to his name and he wants to protect that name.

Agent Hand's smile at the end made me think the reason she chose Ward and Fitz was to test Coulson, but we'll have to see if anything comes of it.

Given her story in the comics...

Nice to see Saffron Burrows on TV - need more of her.  Not sure I agree with her fake American accent though.
Really, I wish we had more of certain people and less of others.  It's almost like they're purposely minimizing the good roles and maximizing the shitty ones.  I mean, why??

Actresses like Burrows, Wen, Varela, etc. should have much more screen time both due to their skills (and hotness) and the coolness of their characters.

Also, I'm starting to think they're riding Coulson a bit too much on this show.  I mean, I get it, he's the leader, but we don't need him in our face every 2 seconds.  

He is the core of the show.  In a show about being human in a Super world, there is no better central character than the one that isn't really human...

Well she's new to me. Never heard of her before, but then the last Marvel stuff I bought was Priest's Panther so there you go.  :awesome_for_real:

The problem isn't riding Coulson, the problem is terrible writers who can't go 5 lines without a reference to him dying or a line about how fucking mysterious and implacable he is.

It's like they are writing a movie cameo in every damn scene.

It's definitely some of what you speak, but in a show about SHIELD and supers, it doesn't make sense to focus entirely on one guy (who's actually not a super, nor even the leader of Shield nor the most 'gifted').  This isn't MacGuyver.

It's like watching Star Trek and every single episode is a variation on "The Inner Light."  Complete with corny alien flute and mysterious probe.

"Its a magical place."

You mean one of the best star trek episodes ever?

This is a show about S.H.I.E.L.D., but is not a show about supers.  It is about NOT being super and dealing with Super threats.  That is why you focus on the character that is the 'humanizing factor' from the movies (Whedon's description), and that is why it is interesting to make him non-human while keeping him human in terms of his ability level.  This show is about dealing with Super situations.

Except there have been maybe 3 actual super situations out of 6 episodes?

If you exclude S.H.I.E.L.D. and other advanced tech: 3 of 6, but 5 of the first 8 feature super elements.  However, as the tech in those other episodes is unrealistic, I think all 8 are in the realm of Super.  In fact, the tech in the last episode is a version of tech from the comics (Overkill Horn)...

This is not a show about SHIELD nor a show about Supers, it's a show about Coulson and his millenial misfit groupies. 


touche

I do not consider macguffin tech to be super unless there is a super villain explicitly attached to the other end of it. Vague Eastern European goons with guns? Not super.

But that's exactly who I would expect S.H.I.E.L.D. to be fighting.  When the real super villains start to show up, that's when the Avengers are called in.

Actually shield should be fighting super organizations that use a combination of high tech gadgetry and doomsday weapons to accomplish their goals.

No name third world countries with guns is what we get instead.

I thought it was framed as a terrorist organization with a doomsday weapon?

Yeah, I don't think we were meant to believe it was just random terrorists that built a super weapon.

I don't think the show is smart enough to care if you did or not.  :oh_i_see:

I'm honestly baffled as to why you keep claiming that this is what the show is about. The show has very few "Super" elements and almost no actual super heroes. It's less about "being human in a Super world" than the X-Files was. Or Sleepy Hollow. There's no Super person to contrast the SHIELD agents with.

The show you're describing sounds interesting but that's not the show we're getting.

Take the episode with Scorch. He was a super guy, but most of the episode was spent on Skye shenanigans and computer hacking. Scorch was basically just a MacGuffin character, he could have been a valuable crystal and the episode would barely have changed.


SHIELD is actually pretty boring when thrust into the main role. There's a reason comics centered around SHIELD tend to not last long.

That's because marvel rarely gets that part of its universe right. DC suicide squad has better material and generally does a better job of being shield than shield.

Because Whedon said it repeatedly in interviews?They're dealing with the comic book world threats, whether that is the Super Villain, the Super Weapon, or the Super Strange.True - but this is not a show about Super villains per se, and having a new super villain every episode would get boring - fast.  They're looking for variety of threats, and they're looking to slowly introduce villains into the world.  Would it make sense to suddenly have hundreds of villains running around when there were none a few years earlier?Lots of comics fail - few come back as often as SHIELD has.  There have been plenty of spy shows that have worked with the elements of advanced/fantastic tech, too - Alias, Man from Uncle, etc...  

This show is building a new Marvel universe.  It has to respect a lot of things, so it isn't going to flood the universe overnight.  I think they're doing a good job.  I think they have a lot of potential, and once they work out a few kinks, the show is going to hit stride and be darn good.  Nobody is forcing anyone to wait it out until it gets there, but once it does, I bet those of you that go back and look through the earlier episodes will see more than you see now.

That's not what's actually in the show though. Maybe that's what he was aiming for but that's not what's showing up on screen. In terms of having to deal with things bigger than themselves the show is far behind a lot of comparable shows.


No more so than the X-Files, Fringe, Grimm, Sleepy Hollow or the 80s GI Joe cartoon, or most genre shows really. I mean Cobra Commander had the weather manipulator, just add a line of dialogue that says "it's based on Dark Elf tech" and you have an episode of SHIELD.

They've been recycling the same McGuffin plot for 6 episodes now (OMG here is a thing/person we need to track down, track it down, complication, resolution). They really need to mix it up a bit.   The only one that was even slightly interesting was the magnetic goo episode, but they seem to think that the characters and dribbling out the longer arc is enough to sustain the weekly mission. They are wrong.

They're still trying to attract and audience, and so far he and the "Marvel" name are the only two recognizable elements in it. Without Coulson it's just Heroes redux.

Wait - one person claims there is nothing Super in the show, another claims it is Heroes redux... Ugh.  It is almost like people are just complaining for the sake of complaining.  But that never happens on the internet...

Who wants to name the people/things in the last episode that come from the comics?

Or it's like different people have different complaints about the show. Also I think you're misinterpreting the Heroes comment. I'm pretty sure the point he was making was that if they barely use any aspects of the Marvel Universe, then it might as well be like Heroes in that Heroes didn't take place in an established universe.

Forget the show, I really want to lock MediumHigh and jgsugden into a room and study what happens next.

(http://i.imgur.com/x17B11x.jpg)

(http://beatlesfanhere.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/sissy-fight.gif)

Yes, that. It's kinda like the pilot episode for Star Trek DS9. They had Picard, but that was it, and only for that one episode, and without any of the other crew. Or when JAG introduced NCIS, or NCIS introduced NCIS:LA.

There needs to be a bridge. And it's great when that can happen with the kind of talent/secondary character than can jump screens/formats.

Says the guy who likes Thor 2. I rather see you circle jerk with jgsugden... wait no scratch that this echo chamber we call a forum allows me to hear you two just fine.

That was obvious - but there is an implication in the comment. 

As for locking us in a room... I doubt any of you can afford my prices.

So, I enjoy the show... but I think I enjoy just how heated a conversation over a fucking SHIELD show has gotten.

I'm sure it's all a part of Whedon's master plan.   :oh_i_see:

Which was?