TV Time: Marvel's Agents of Shield Season One (Fall 2013-Spring 2014)

Note-A Level 3 Spoiler Warning is in effect. It is simply not possible to talk about this show without spoilers for Captain America The Winter Soldier. It hasn't been for seven weeks. If you haven't seen that movie yet and you don't want the latter two acts spoiled, you probably don't want to read all of this article.-End Note

Alo Party Peoples.

So Here Is Everyone Left, Darn.

When I heard that Marvel was doing a TV show, I got pretty excited and there were some reasons for that.

For one, Marvel was doing something that hadn't been tried before, or at least not on this scale. There had been the odd novelty film like Alien vs Predator before, but a crossover on the scale of the Avengers, one where the preceding films were intended to crossover from the start, that was something inconceivable, but it somehow worked and made a ton of money.

Then they decided to take it to the small screen. Not that taking a film and doing a TV show based off of it is something new. Stargate spawned a TV series that lasted a decade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was sort of based on a movie that Joss Whedon had written in 1993, several films got animated series in the 1980s' and 90s', the list goes on for a while. However, usually there is a more direct connection to the film, not just centering around a side character that the fans of the movie series had latched onto.

Speaking of Joss Whedon, when I heard that he was heading the show, I was officially pumped. The man is a legend among nerds, known for making some impressive stuff, and it seemed that he was almost guaranteed to be able to finish his plans this time. (Whedon is also famous for his shows not lasting very long) Agents of Shield wasn't some weird and hard to categorize thing like Firefly was, this show was drawing from the most successful of a very lucrative series of films. The combination of the sheer size of Marvel's fan base, and the - to be frank - obsessive nature of Whedon's fan base insured that there would be viewers for this show, and I was among them.

Let's be honest, Agents of Shield had some very real problems in the first half. Granted, not all of them were it's fault, but they were still there. Skye isn't a very interesting character, the actual connection to the Marvel movies was tangential at best until fifteen episodes in, and the combination of a slow episodic start with an erratic broadcast schedule was definitely not helping. The show took week long breaks seemingly at random, was put on hold for a month by the Sochi Olympics, and one time it was interrupted to air what was essentially an hour long commercial for Marvel Studios. Was the early stuff bad, not really, in fact the weird thing about this poly-franchise is that it has yet to make something truly bad, but it wasn't especially good, and I probably would have dropped the show if it wasn't connected to the Marvel movies.

Then, around sixteen episodes in, the new Captain America movie came out and things got all shaken up. If you didn't take the warning above, this is where the spoilers start, if you don't want that movie spoiled, stop reading here.

Seriously, here be spoilers.

I've already talked about this movie and it's twist before, but here's the short version. Shield is full of undercover mad science Nazis, it has been since they got drafted into Shield in the 1940s. They attempted a coup, Captain America stopped them, but not before Shield is branded a terrorist organization by the UN. Which makes Coulson and company wanted men, and it also makes Agents of Shield much more interesting to watch.

The results of the Hydra incident, besides causing Hydra to trend on Twitter for a few weeks, allowed for much change to the show's status quo. Gone was the episodic tedium of the early episodes. We got some entertaining new characters out of Bill Paxton, Patton Oswald, and Brett Dalton. That wasn't a slip of the tongue, Brett Dalton's character is very different after the Hydra incident, he's also much more interesting. With Fitz in critical condition, Ward captured, and Coulson set to rebuild SHIELD from the ground up, we've got our setup for Season 2.

In conclusion, if you can persevere a slow start, it picks up after the first ten or so episodes. If you can't stand a slow start, just skip episodes 2-9 and you'll probably be fine. Agents of Shield has been renewed for a second season which airs this fall on ABC.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B