Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Episode 1.11 “The Magical Place” (6 out of 10) Starring Clark Gregg, Chloe Bennet, Ming-Na Wen, Brett Dalton; Tuesdays at 8/7 central on ABC.
A month can be a long time to find out what became of SHIELD’s Agent Coulson after he was captured by those dicks over at Centipede. Tonight, we got to see what exactly Centipede wanted with our secret agent, as well as receive a bit of insight into how exactly Coulson was brought back to life after Loki impaled him with a cosmic scepter. Do not proceed if you fear spoilers!
“We Find Centipede, We Find Coulson.”
Without Coulson, our intrepid team of SHIELD agents has been temporarily placed under the command of the icy Agent Hand (Saffron Burrows). The conflict within the episode comes from her presence, as she’s made it pretty clear that she believes Coulson to be a lost cause. Instead of searching for him, her main priority is focused on locating Centipede installations that have been popping up all over the globe. In order to properly demonstrate her cold demeanor, her first order of business is to boot Skye out of their flying base of operations—a decision that May agrees with. Mutual expressions of shock and disbelief abound.
However, given the fact that it was super easy for Fitz and Jemma to hook her up with a satellite phone before she gets grounded, it would appear that May knows that Skye is more useful when she is disobeying orders.
The appearance of Agent Hand and her lack of compassion regarding Coulson’s capture reopens the mistrust and paranoia that we’ve seen from SHIELD’s upper management in earlier episodes. It’s a useful place to start the episode since Coulson’s resurrection is starting to seem like a conspiracy in and of itself.
Good Cop, Bad Cop.
While Hand is globetrotting after Centipede, Coulson is at the mercy of Edison Po (Cullen Douglas) and his brain probe. As Raina (Ruth Negga) mentioned at the end of the mid-season break, Centipede is extremely interested in Coulson’s resurrection, and Po is trying to forcibly remove those memories. So far, all he’s gotten is a Tahitian beach and a few margaritas.
Coulson’s capture and torture show us how much of a badass Coulson really is. Despite facing painful mind probes and getting tickled with a cattle prod, his dry sense of humor and firm sense of loyalty remain intact—and, in a roundabout way, end up getting the Clairvoyant to puree Edison Po’s brain after his repeated failures. After Po’s brain hemorrhages, Raina becomes Centipede’s liaison to the Clairvoyant.
Choosing to abandon the torture via electricity in favor of simply having a little chat with Coulson, Raina manages to get some results. Turns out, bringing up Coulson’s romantic involvement with a cellist before his untimely death does the trick and he agrees to go all the way under. Raina manages to convince Coulson that SHIELD brought him back to a tragic and lonley life without her, which breaks through his otherwise steely resolve. Though the episode needed some kind of catalyst to show us the truth about Coulson’s painful experience, the idea that his relationship with a woman who is mentioned as a bit of fluff conversation with Pepper Potts in “The Avengers” was actually a deep and profound romance seemed a bit forced—why not capitalize on the fact that Coulson’s father died in front of him instead?
Skye Makes Herself Useful. Finally.
Remember how May knew that Skye would disobey orders and get things done on her own?
Well, she does.
She tracks down a wealthy dude named Lloyd Rathman (Rob Huebel), and with a bit of bluffing and computer hackery, she manages to trace Coulson’s location to one of those towns in the middle of the Nevada desert that was built to test nuclear bombs. In an impressive contest of who is the iciest of the ice queens, Hand and May agree to split up—While Hand is investigating her leads, Ward and May lead their team into the desert to extract Coulson.
Meanwhile, Coulson has allowed Po’s brain probe to remove the paradisiacal façade to reveal a sterile hospital room in which Dr. Streitan (Ron Glass) is screaming about how what they’re doing is wrong. When we see the camera pan across Coulson’s head and focus on his exposed brain being zapped by a strangely alien-looking surgical machine as Coulson screams “Let me die!” it’s hard not to agree with him.
Coulson is in the middle of this nightmare when the team shows up to rescue him. Skye is the first person that he sees, which feels significant given the father/daughter nature of their relationship. She’s understandably a bit freaked out by the whole scene, but likely relieved that May’s decision to unplug a device that was invading Coulson’s brain didn’t result in turning their boss into a vegetable.
Piecing It All Together.
It’s no surprise that Coulson—and us, for that matter—has a lot of questions about the procedure that brought him back to life. When Skye asks him about said procedure, he offers the guarded response that Centipede had somehow implanted those images in his mind, and changes the subject by removing the anti-hacking bracelet that she earned earlier. Hopefully this means that Skye’s being useful will become more of a thing as the series progresses.
At the conclusion of the episode, we see Dr. Streitman enter his car to find Coulson in the back seat. It would appear that Coulson is about to get some answers. Now, before I go on, I need to cop to the fact that I probably had seventy-two theories to explain what really happened with Coulson. When I saw the crazy surgical procedures being performed on his brain, theory number eleven—the one that involved Coulson being rebuilt as The Avengers’ pet cyborg Vision—came immediately to mind. Of course, I realize that’s a bit far-fetched. Regardless, I was hoping for something that would be worthy of his resurrection.
So what happened?
According to Dr. Streitman, Coulson had been dead for several days and Nick Fury had “moved Heaven and Earth” to bring him back to life. Streitman describes immoral procedures and significant mental trauma, but I couldn’t help but think, “Really? They just, like, brought him back to life?”
As I watched all seventy-two of my theories flutter to the ground in a lifeless pile of…theories, I couldn’t help but feel a bit let down. The whole Marvel canon at their disposal, and the writers can’t come up with something cooler than “he just got brought back to life with science?”
There was also a scene of the horribly disfigured Mike Peterson (J. August Richards) with the Centipede serum attached to his arm that popped up after the credits, but I was too busy wrapping my head around the ways in which Coulson’s resurrection could still be the result of something monumental and canonical to acknowledge Peterson’s presence.
Verdict
The episode had some solid momentum until Coulson learned the secret of his resurrection. Skye was representing, Coulson was resisting torture, and SHIELD had Centipede on the run. The episode had two faults that lost me. First, the decision to reveal Coulson’s resurrection this early in the series was a mistake. Season one’s not even over and we already know the biggest secret of them all? Sure, there’s still the mystery behind Skye’s parents, but fans of “The Avengers” are on board because of Coulson, and dropping such a huge bomb with so little fanfare lacked respect for the character. Second, though Coulson didn’t have to become Vision, the writers showed a lack of imagination in the way they handled his big reveal. When Coulson was alive at the beginning of the season, my assumption was that SHIELD brought him back to life using fancy technology. Now that an assumption that I made at the beginning of the series has been confirmed, I have to say that tonight’s episode was disappointing. I keep hoping that “Agents of SHIELD” will start taking advantage of Marvel’s wealth of characters and stories, and maybe that’s still on the horizon, but if it stays on this current trajectory, “Agents of SHIELD” runs the risk of burning itself out.