So...Agents of SHIELD season finale?
*******SPOILERS**********
This was a...
good finale to a
good season. There were elements that, IMO, could have made it great. But also some missteps that I felt brought it down a bit--things that I felt did not emotionally resonate like they should have. Then again, I have had a lot going on and may have been more distracted during viewing than normal. But still. A few stray comments:
-Agent May.
"What, you didn't see that coming?" Nope! How could I? I thought the "death doesn't matter here" was going to be a contrived way of having her somehow survive being run through, and it was kind of an eyeroll "stakes don't matter" moment. I thought for sure they were going to have her somehow pull through. Under the circumstances, purely from a
plot standpoint, I'm glad she didn't. But, man!, will she be missed!
-Related to that...okay, the original team, if I'm not forgetting somebody, was 6 people: Coulson, May, Fitz, Simmons, Daisy, and Ward. Half of them are dead. Half. How crazy is that? Yeah, we have an incarnation of "Coulson," sort of. But it isn't
really Coulson (although I have no doubt that next season will play with the idea of "well, what
is 'real' Coulson anyway, and is this version any less 'real?'" even more than this season did). And I guess I make a distinction with Fitz because, although one version of him died and we now, arguably, have a different version, it's still "real" Fitz. But, again, we've lost HALF of the original team from the start of this thing!
-Speaking of Fitz and Simmons...yeah, they NEVER catch a break. That's well established as a "thing" in this series. It's kinda like Spiderman/Peter Parker never really catching a break and never really getting a happy ending has been a thing in the comics, and the end of FFH delivered HUGELY on that. But what exactly does “change the natural course of your lives forever” actually mean? I felt like this was supposed to have been a huge gut punch moment, and it wasn't. I guess it's hard to keep the emotional stakes so high when they have already been through so much as a couple. But I just felt like this fell FAR flat of what it was supposed to be. In any case, their overall storyline arc this season was, as always, deep and incredibly fun.
-Nothing good ever comes from being in ancient temples. Nothing.
-Piper got progressively less annoying, which is good. But I still feel like she is unnecessary. ...from a viewer standpoint, that is; from a team/tactical standpoint, they obviously need to replace big pieces that are removed from the board. Luckily, even with SHIELD getting decimated so many times over past seasons, they still find ways to have enough red shirts to make the SHIELD machine go.
-Flint. Hmm...not sure how I feel about this. I kinda felt like this was a cheap, quick way to get to the end of the Izel/monolith arc. I don't feel like the way the lore was set up should have supported that a person/thing created by somebody's mind(s) should be able to literally have the power to do what Flint did. But whatever. I guess I can suspend belief on that. It just seems like a bit of a chore to do so. And I think the writers sort of acknowledged that by keeping the pace so frenetic that you didn't really have time to think about it too deeply as it was going down. But I'm not sure how I feel about him actually showing up and being around going forward. Seems like some fan service in an area that nobody actually wanted. I guess we'll how well his character fits in going forward.
-Chronicoms...hmm...I liked it when I thought they were basically
all a race of anthropologists. Part of me is still trying to reject the idea of the hunter caste. And SHIELD is the only thing that can stop them? Well, notwithstanding the conflict between MCU film vs. MCU tv, they still both exist and purport to be in the same universe, so I kinda feel like they owe it to the viewers to come up with SOME kind of contrived explanation as to why some of the others supers aren't a legitimate "threat" to the chronicoms. I'm just not sure of this whole chronicom storyline. But then again, every season so far has ended up turning out to be pretty good, so I guess I shouldn't doubt.
-More Ghostrider? Please? I don't particularly care for the character, in general. But I feel like they really made him work well in the AOS universe, and the Ghostrider teases they have been dropping really make me hopeful for a return.
-Gripe of the day: Well, first, a preamble to the gripe of the day: This applies to ALL tv shows and movies alike, so I'm NOT singling out AOS here. Okay, with that out of the way, here is our gripe of the day: NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE SOLVED AT THE LAST POSSIBLE SECOND! YES, IT
CAN BUILD TENSION, BUT IT CAN ALSO COME ACROSS AS LAME AND DISINGENUOUS! Yoyo did NOT need to have a shrike fly down her throat and be mere seconds away from shrike-zombification when Izel died. The transformation was already underway. Her body would have been too wrecked for her to survive. I hate stuff like this. I really do. And related gripe: I hate the stupid "maybe if we kill the queen, the hive mind dies, and the overwhelming threat of innumerable drones just goes away because they all just die/deactivate" trope/plot device. I always have. It's stupid. It didn't work in The Phantom Menace. It didn't work in The Avengers and brought down an otherwise stellar film. It almost kinda worked in Stranger Things 2 and 3. But not really (although, for some reason, it pissed me off less). And it didn't work here either.
Topic: Marvel's Movie/TV Universe v2 (SPOILERS) (Read 252195 times)
