‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ Episode 2.7 “The Writing on the Wall” (9 out of 10) Created by Joss Whedon, Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen; Starring Clark Gregg, Chloe Bennet, Ming-Na Wen, Brett Dalton; Tuesdays on ABC.
For those of you with more developed social lives than my own, I want to take a moment to explain the term “jumping the shark.” It’s a phrase that television enthusiasts have applied to an initially successful series that plummets in quality so dramatically that it never really recovers. After watching tonight’s episode of “Agents of SHIELD,” I move that we now apply the term “punching the shark in the mouth” to a series that was initially kinda bad, but makes a huge leap forward in terms of quality.
I can’t remember when the show has handled two separate storylines with such solidarity, and the episode had enough cryptic twists and turns to leave me scratching my head until this very moment.
Spoilers ahoy!
Ward at Large
As Ward (Brett Dalton) has escaped from the clutches of his brother who may or may not be evil, SHIELD has been keeping close tabs on him. May (Ming-Na Wen), Tripp (B.J. Britt), Morse (Adrianne Palicki), and Hunter (Nick Blood) are tasked with following the former agent at a discreet distance. Not only have these four become an excellent group to watch on these away team missions—Morse and Blood are still bringing that pissed-off ex-spouse chemistry to the table—but the cat-and-mouse espionage scenes are sufficiently tight. Seeing May orchestrate the appropriate moves and counter-moves to Ward’s actions was fun to watch, and dammit, I’m actually interested in Ward as a character. As much as I resisted, I think that I no longer hate Ward. He tells a HYDRA big-wig—who he later turns in to Coulson (Clark Gregg)—that being an agent of SHIELD was as much of a prison as the one on Coulson’s plane. Up to this point, Ward has always been somebody’s lapdog. Now that he’s no longer on anyone’s leash, it’s going to be interesting to see what path he’ll choose.
Coulson Gets it Together
For what has felt like a really long time, Coulson has been obsessed with a series of lines and circles that have been surfacing in his brain as a result of the alien gunk that brought him back to life. Side note, has anyone else noticed that Skye hasn’t been as compelled to scratch this map into every available surface? Anywho, it’s gotten to the point where I was ready to be done with this little side effect, but tonight’s episode made the wait worthwhile. In a complicated series of events, we learn that Coulson wasn’t the only SHIELD agent brought back from the dead by the GH serum, but that he actually oversaw the early stages of the TAHITI project.
The speed at which all of this information was revealed came on like a monsoon, which was both good and bad. Despite the fact that a lot of information was stuffed into about fifteen minutes of screentime, I loved the idea that SHIELD has this secret that is so dark and mentally damaging that they’ve had to erase the subjects’ memories. I also loved the idea that one of these TAHITI agents was murdering the others in order to decode the alien writing—it created a creepy yet sympathetic villain in Sebastian Derek (Van Holt), and it also revealed that all of this alien writing was actually blueprints for a city.
This is what my brain is currently trying to unravel. What in the hoary hosts of Hoggoth could this city be? My initial guess went to the world of the Inhumans, but since that film’s slated for 2018, it wouldn’t make sense to go there. I’m not sure about this city’s significance, but it’s going to be bugging me for quite some time.
Verdict
This is “Agents of SHIELD” at the top of their game. The action was well-paced, and we got a veritable buffet of new character development that could potentially lead in some interesting directions.
Here’s to punching the shark in the mouth.