Seeing as this is my first review of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, I should start by giving my overall opinion of the show so you can understand my rating. I thought the first half of season one was duller than an old penny. It took me forever to get into the series. I liked the pilot, but the pilot is where you put your best foot forward so it’s not surprising that the pilot was good but pretty much everything from after the pilot to the fall of SHIELD was hit or miss. There were some highlights, sure, but things didn’t get good until after Winter Soldier. There were a couple of really solid episodes leading to the heel turn but Hydra taking over was the best thing that happened to the series. Suddenly every episode was a homerun and I was anxiously awaiting the next week. Season 2 came along and I thought right from the start it was great. To me every episode felt like a Marvel mini-movie and I really enjoyed appearances by Absorbing Man and Blizzard as well as the higher stakes SHIELD was playing for. The introduction of Mr. Hyde, Mockingbird, the change to Fitz/Simmons, everything made the show stronger and more interesting, in my opinion with the height of this season being the mid-season finale. I have been anxiously awaiting this episode for a while now with only Agent Carter to keep me company. As far as company goes you could do worse than Agent Carter.
Needless to say I’m a super fanboy of the series which is going to bias my score on the high side a little. If you don’t feel the same way about Marvel's Agents of SHIELD then you might be able to shave a point or two off the score, but if I tell you something is bad about this show then you can trust that it must have been bad for me to draw attention to it.
The season return of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD is a very emotional one as we find the crew still morning the loss of Trip during the mid-season finale. Honestly I was kind of heartbroken about Trip, I thought he was a great replacement for Ward last season and I was looking forward to seeing more of him. He was such a better character than Ward I kind of wish he was on the team from the start. Ward spent most of last season boring and lifeless, he didn’t start to get interesting until after he turned evil whereas Trip was interesting from the start. So, Trip is gone and we spend the episode morning him and I have to admit there were some truly emotional moments concerning him.
What can I say, I’m a sucker for fictional emotions, I’m very emotionally reactive. I tend to feel what I’m seeing being felt more than I tend to display emotion. I blame my programmers for that. Dr. Noonien Soong hadn’t perfected the emotion chip yet so my brother got all the feelings, which he passed on to the Borg. One criticism I have is as much as I like Clark Gregg his emotional notes can be spotty. Some of his anger came off flat and took me out of the moment but overall I enjoyed it. However as spotty as Clark Gregg can be, Chloe Bennet does emotion very well and Coulsen and Skye play off each other as characters very well.
While the episode was very emotional it wasn’t without its action moments. Coulson decides to take Hydra head on, the thought process being with Daniel Whitehall dead (which I didn’t think would be a permanent thing but I guess it was) now is the time to target all the heads of Hydra. To top this off the end of the episode promises some kind of secret plan going on within SHIELD. The idea of a plot within SHIELD has been done before on this series whether it’s positive (Agent May reporting to Nick Fury) or negative (the whole Hydra thing), so it’s not groundbreaking. However whether this is yet another Hydra plot or another internal, rather benign, plot I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays out. With Mr. Hyde still in play and Skye’s new super powers all they need to do to make a killer finale is bring back Deathlok and Absorbing Man. Add to that an Inhuman ending that made me mark out a little and you have a really strong return episode.
Score: 4/5
Marvel's Agents of SHIELD 2.11 - Aftershocks Tuesday's 9/8C