One Man Reviews Agents of Shield: The Girl in the Flower Dress

Rejoice sycophants, slatterns, slobs and slores, your most humble and most exalted fearless leader Dane Barbados Jr. can finally declare that "Agent's of SHIELD" has finally, finally, produced an episode that one could designated as "good."

"The Girl in the Flower Dress" delivered on most fronts with only a scant few teeth-grindingly poor moments. A return to an overarching plot? Check. A villain with actual powers? Check. A massive cutback on Whedonspeak and snark? Good Lord Barbados Check. Muzzling Skye and putting a bullet in the back of her head? ...Not quite. Yet.

This was perhaps the first episode of SHIELD that managed to fully distract Dane Barbados Jr. from a spirited session of motorboating the supple buttocks of a comely young lass. To dispense with the bad first, yes unfortunately Skye still exists and draws breath, remaining the weakest link of the show, moving through her scenes with a palpable air of vapidity. Luckily for the viewers, and Dane Barbados Jr's kidney punching hand, her amount of dialogue and, most pointedly, the ridiculous outdated teenaged valleygirl snark of that dialogue were both dialed down in spite of her having a major part of the episode's storylines.

Skye's sideline activities with (ugh merely typing the following word causes your humble narrator a slight nosebleed of suppressed rage) "hacktivist" group The Rising Tide are finally exposed with our intrepid Agents pursuing a member of the group who turns out to be an associate of Skye's with a more personal connection. And by "personal connection" We mean "fuck buddy." A post-coitus scene between the two provides one of the episode's worst and best moments. The worst being Skye mentioning returning to her fellow Agents lest she be "screwed" with her smirking knob of a paramour replying "There's a joke here that I'm struggling not to make," which is a mildly amusing aside, before following up with "It involves the word 'screwed.'" Which is not only poor writing, but also serves to illustrate how feeble Skye really is that her crotch comrade felt that he had to explain such a simple concept to her. But we were saved from a shallow sea of mediocrity as, in a nice callback to the pilot episode, as fan favorite character Agent Melinda May popped up where Skye least expected (because she's a savant-like drooling idiot) in one of the episodes's best bits.

One would think that Agent Ward catching Skye nearly bare-assed and red-handed, collaborating (and, ugh, "screwing") with a cyber-terrorist, not yet having washed off the post-drilling musk of her traitorous escapades would completely extinguish the sophomoric, One Direction-fueled, romantic tension betwixt them but Dane Barbados Jr. has a sneaking suspicion that it will only increase it in the long run. Because that is what is most predictable.

The other half of the night's narrative centered on a young Chinese street performer, Chan Ho Yin, who possesses mild pyrokinetic abilities played well by Louis Changchien, endowing him with a sense of genuine wonder and enthusiasm about his aiblities and the potential that they possess and a certain Barbadian swagger (in the classic sense of the word cretins) and charm. Unfortunately, in another questionable bit of writing, he was also given one of most generic and least-interesting codenames imaginable with "Scorch."

The writers wisely used Chan and his storyline to shed light on a number of things including the villain group Centipede from the pilot episode, their plans and more workings of the extremis derives super-soldier serum that they are developing, name dropping Captain America himself; the way SHIELD handles the super-powered individuals that it discovers, and, rather bafflingly, confirming the seeming absence of mutants in the Avengersverse. Last episode the existence of psychic powers was treated as implausible and this week's episode states that SHIELD keeps and Index of super-powered individuals but that the list is small. How this will work with notable mutants Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch appearing in the next Avengers film is yet to be seen.

The episode also had some of the series' best special effects with some impressive work being done on Chan's fire abilities, including a graphic bit where a person is burned down to ash before our very eyes. On a character front Agents May and Coulson did most of the heavy lifting with Ward providing backup support and Fitz/Simmons wisely remaining on the ever-ridiculous plane. This benefited the episode hugely as May and Coulson are easily the most likeable and interesting characters on the show and the actors seemed to relish the opportunity for a little action giving great performances including Coulson amusingly delivering a bit of fisticuff action in his trademark gray suit. Ward, if not the third most interesting character then the third least annoying character, performs his usual action duties of any given episode but benefited from being less "goofy" and more serious, doing a lot of acting with his facial expressions when dealing with Skye after her duplicitous nature was exposed. The titular Girl in the Flower Dress and back-stabbing Centipede agent deserves mention for being played by Ruth Negga who was also Misfit's teleporting temptress Nikki, and anything that reminds Dane Barbados Jr. of Misfit's fantastic early seasons earns bonus points.

All in all The Girl in the Flower Dress marked a drastic improvement in Agents of SHIELD. By upping the level of drama and lowering the level of snarky dialogue and faux-wit the show managed to deliver genuine tension without trivializing the characters. Including a super-powered main villain and returning to the Centipede storyline played to the strengths of the Marvel Universe and separated it from scores of procedureals unlike last week's episode. The special effects and sets were much improved and characters who are clearly not combat oriented such as Skye and Fitz/Simmons are sagely kept out of combat situations, playing to their respective strengths of hacking and miscellaneous TV science tasks but forgoing the tritely named scanner-bots. For the first time in the series' run Dane Barbados Jr. can fully endorse an episode of Agents of SHIELD. Bask in it. Now, faithful readers, if you will excuse your immanence Dane Barbados Jr., there are a supple set of female buttocks in need of attention.

Post scriptum: Go watch Misfits. It's not only much better than Agents of SHIELD, or any other super-hero oriented show on your American broadcasts, it's also one of the best, most interesting and best looking shows that could be put into the genre with superior characters, drama, acting, directing and emotion than anything your networks have to offer. And there's ample profanity and some nudity so there is that as well. Series 5, the final season, premiers tomorrow but you would be best served stopping after Series 3.

Post post scriptum: Spoilers for tonight's episode of Agents of SHIELD.

One Man Reviews Agents of SHIELD: Eye Spy...and vaguely remembers last week's episode.

So your ever reliable and urbane narrator Dane Barbados Jr. did not review last week's episode of SHIELD.  Had the review been missed because Dane Barbados Jr. had something better to do it would not be worth mention, however the sad fact is that despite being eternally young, panty moisteningly handsome and extremely rich even one such as Dane Barbados Jr. is beholden to the vile capriciousness of Comcast.  Mother.  Fucking.  Comcast.  And a service interruption that encompassed two city blocks claimed my viewing of the episode.

When the episode was finally seen it just as quickly vanished from the memory of your humble narrator.  Not much happened, long time Marvel comics villain Graviton got an origin and that was all of note.

Onto this week's episode, entitled "Eye Spy."  A quick synopsis can be written quickly and efficiently: "Skye is an offensively vapid slattern and Dane Barbados Jr. would enjoy to see naught but her being eaten alive by gamma irradiated gila monsters because I truly fucking hate her."

Skye is almost single-handedly sinking the proverbial stupidly multi-winged ship that is the show.  She's so incongruous to whatever is happening around her, so out of place she feels like she was transplanted from another show.  As the only character the uses it the limitations and irritations of Whedonspeak become apparent.  That idiosyncratic style of dialogue, which lent a since of youth and charm to shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. is grating and nut-crunchingly teeth grinding in SHIELD.  Primarily because it all comes from one character.  No one else talks like a bubble-headed, sun bleached, idiot from the shores of your southern California.  And really, it has little place in a group of highly funded, somewhat professional secret agents.  If the character was played by a plucky teen it would be a whole different brand of scarlet tinted fury but it would at least be believable.

Outside of that the episode, while not exactly bad judged by the lofty standards of one such as I, still ended up sucking by virtue of being exactly what Agents of SHIELD should not be: just another procedural.  This week's episode, with extremely minor changes, could have been 60 minutes of NCIS.

Rouge agent trained by the straight-faced lead agent of our heroic, government employed, protagonists.  One of our team members wants to take her out but team leader has a suspicion that all is not what it seems and that rouge agent is being coerced.  They predictably are but are being monitored and will be killed if there is an issue  Race against the clock to discover the mastermind behind it while simultaneously attempting to disable the fail-safe threatening to kill the rouge agent.

How many times have you seen that on television already?  Replace "government employed" protagonists with "peace enforcement officers" and ask yourself that question again.  There are scores of procedurals on television.  The American television populace has been inundated with them since "Law & Order" got its first spinoff in 1999, from medical procedurals to police procedurals to government agent procedurals to supernatural procedurals with Fox's "Sleepy Hollow."  SHEILD being a government procedural with science fiction elements will not cut it in a world in which "Fringe" existed.  Tony Stark mugging at the camera or Samuel L. Jackson making a dry quip every fortnight isn't a requirement but finding a way to embrace the more fantastic elements of the Marvel universe, within budget, is a necessity to separate from an endless, grasping sea of similar shows, particularly at a point where procedurals' popularity is finally starting to wane.

Even within the show other supposedly highly intelligent characters show astounding lack of logic, reason and intelligence.  When discussing the failsafe within the rouge agent with our resident geeks Agents Fitz/Simmons , Agent Coulson says of it "It could be a bomb, it could be poison gas, we don't know." Once the failsafe is removed what happens you may wonder?  Well one of our highly intelligent agents, the female one, (dare not ask Dane Barbados Jr. to remember their individual names.  If the show doesn't care if they're distinct, than neither shall I) deposits it into a small blast chamber where there is a small puff and some smoke or vapor.  Five seconds later she opens it, smoke / vapor pouring out, sticks her face over and peers in.  Good thing for her it was a bomb and not the gas.  Bad thing for us perhaps.

On the good end Clark Gregg put in his usual solid performance as Agent Coulson and there was another plot hit of what happened to him after the Battle of New York, though hopefully this won't be the season's big mystery as if all as it appears it will serve as a massive anti-climax for readers of the comics.  He also got to show a little more range and emotion than usual.

Guest star Pascale Armand as rogue agent Akela Amador was a fine addition being able the range necessary to pull off someone who has been at turns abandoned, manipulated and then rescued, with a question about Coulson near the end of the episode being played quite well.  She also puts in a good action scene against Melinda May.

Ming-Na Wen continues to just barely skirt the right side of the line between "completely empty cypher" and "quiet deliverer of asskickery" with little things like her interactions with Coulson early in the episode and effortlessly dodging a knife thrown at her head with a slight tilt of the neck and a stone-faced glare played out extremely well.

Most surprisingly Brett Dalton's Agent Ward finally got to show some actual personality beyond "gruff military man with hidden soft side" in this episode, having to infiltrate a facility posing as the rogue agent.  His small moment with a burly and surly Russian guard was a rare genuinely fun moment.

All in all this wasn't a bad episode, and "Agents of SHIELD" isn't a bad show, but both were numbingly average leaving little that lasts in the memory and not much to separate if from its many similar peers.  Very similar to your girlfriend if Dane Barbados Jr. remembers correctly.

One Man Reviews Agents of SHIELD "0-8-4"

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.