Ah faithful readers and lowly plebeians "Agents of SHIELD" is quite the quandary. Much like a gorgeous young super model with a really long second toe your humble narrator Dane Barbados Jr. wants to like it but is increasingly unable to conceal his disgust.
Tonight's episode begins with our gang having delightfully cliched bickering on their ridiculous aeroplane. In short order we find our plucky group of heroes on a much too obvious soundstage masquerading as Peru. Whilst there they find an ancient MacGuffin of doom in a temple. Rebel soldiers show up. Then aging, matriarchal, "hot" soldier arrives upon the scene with her crew. Of course she has a previous past with our Agent Coulson because otherwise it would not be a cliche. Haphazard gunfight, more cartoon quality bickering, Ming-Na Wen's impressively stone-faced and boringly emotionless Melinda May performs some action with her fisticuffs. Cue escape to the previously mentioned ridiculous airbus with a handful of Peruvian soldiers, their attractive grandmother of a commanding officer and the MacGuffin in tow.
Now one may assume that Dane Barbados Jr. has glossed over the entire first act of the episode, and one would also be a seething mongoloid, deserving of a blow to the jaw of near decapitory force and a shower of invectives for assuming such. No, Dane Barbados Jr. paragon amongst men and scion to a new age of masculinity and prosperity has merely paid as much attention to the first third of the episode as the writers and director themselves, treating it as the threadbare means to an end, a simple mechanism to shuffle the players into place that it was.
Once on the "plane" the predictable shenanigans continue. More well-worn bickering amongst the team, the unwanted, lamentable and chemistry-free insertion of a romantic subtext betwixt Agent Ward and still-annoying hacker Skye. Dane Barbados Jr. decrees this a minor achievement as Agent Ward somehow manages to have less personality than Melinda May who is constructed to have no personality.
Everything plays out exactly as you knew it would play out thirty minutes prior if you are possessed of enough firing neurons to rub together, which Dane Barbados Jr. concedes may be a bit generous. There is an obvious betrayal, a "let us put aside our differences and put our heads together" bonding moment between the bickering Agents that is a plot point as tired and worn out as your girlfriend after a night of sexual discovery with Your Humble; easily foreseen mook deaths and some more nearly wordless ass-kickery by Melinda May, who has the woeful codename of "The Calvary," which is laughable on many levels. The villains are defeated, the heroes win and Dane Barbados Jr. struggled to pay attention to the episode as opposed to the nude female Greco-Roman oil wrestling match taking place at the foot of his olympic sized bed.
That synopsis is as nanofilament thin as the plot of the episode itself. Skye continues to be an annoying Genki Girl alternating between annoying wide eyed wonder and annoying cynicism, wholly divorced from the behavior and actions of a healthy minded adult human. But not being entertaining. Never that dear reader. Agent Ward, meanwhile, still labors to develop any actual character traits beyond surly and scowling. It is a testament to the ineptitude of the writers of your American television shows, or you American television viewers, that a romance arc has to be shoehorned into every production, even if it's between two ostensible human beings with no depth or character and less chemistry between them than is displayed in five minutes of your delightful Beakman's World which was imported and translated to Dane Barbados Jr.'s vibrant and enlightened homeland during his childhood. Fitz and Simmons, who are actually referred to as "FitzSimmons" in the show are also still miring as television paupers, possessing between them the personality trait of "quirky" and nothing else to warm them, feed them or to call their own.
The episode, and by extension the show itself, however, is not all bad. Despite the fact that for all intents and purposes Ming-Na Wen's Agent Melinda "The Calvary" May has the least amount of actual character out of anyone on the show, which is truly saying quite a bit with this show, she manages to be entertaining. A large portion of that, the illustrious and infallible Dane Barbados Jr. surmises, is because she has the least amount of speaking lines of the principal cast, helping her to avoid a mealy mouthful of inane and cliche nonsense. She has no personality whatsoever, but that helps her function as a Terminator-like force of nature doling out heaping helpings of ass kick at her leisure.
And, of course, there is Clark Gregg, who continues to illuminate every scene that he is in as Agent Phil Coulson. Coulson, alone amongst the main cast, possesses layers and is able to accurately portray an actual range of human emotion. Which in and of itself fills Dane Barbados Jr. with a perverse glee as the outrageously heavy foreshadowing continues to point to him being the least human of the group (a plot point that will result in a reign of kidney punches that will rival the punishment of the gods if it is stretched across the entirety of the first season, or Barbados help them, beyond).
Gregg almost single-handedly is the reason that Dane Barbados Jr. will continue to keep Agents of SHIELD playing in the background whilst wearing a pair of lithe and supple thighs as earmuffs and, as you say, "dining at the Y." Agents of SHIELD is not the worst show Dane Barbados Jr. has ever seen, he did torture himself by watching two seasons of HBO's "Girls" after all, destroying a finely crafted television every other episode in the process, but it hasn't as of yet, emerged as good. But much like that disgustingly long-toed supermodel, Agents of SHIELD can still hide it's offensive imperfections beneath the cinematic guise of close-toed high heels and thigh high socks and earn its way to being worth the full attention of one such as myself.
Now, Dane Barbados Jr. has thought of "Girls" and must dine on a freshly shorn vagina and bestow many screaming orgasm to wash the taint of it from the pristine and hallowed landscape of his mind.
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