S.H.I.E.L.D. revisited...
Sep. 26th, 2013 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I watched Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. again tonight, this time with Pim and
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In the comic, she looks like this:

While in the TV show, she looks like this:

and because I am pretty much madly in love with her anyway, it's hard to adjust.
Now that that is off my chest...
A look at more details:
- On first viewing, Skye (and Chloe Bennet) seemed to my eyes too like the other women, too middle class, too ordinary and charming to be the counter-culture hacker who lives in a van. I wanted her to be like Kenzie in Lost Girl, or more goth, or more... something. Second time, I really liked her. Pim thought at first she was too much like Elisha Dushku but this time I saw her as more like Jewel Staite - which isn't a bad thing at all.
- Great to see Ron Glass as Dr. Strieten. I hope he appears regularly, and has his own story.
- Love seeing the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo on their lab coats and all over the place.
- Having Skye and Coulson fly away in Lola was sort of ... perfect.
- I like the way people are freaked by the appearance of superheroes, gods, aliens and monsters, and S.H.I.E.L.D. has to deal with that.
- I was really prepared to dislike Grant Ward, who has that "I'm really a geek and a doofus, aren't I cute?" vibe that some of my least favourite Whedon men have. But he somehow pulls it off without being annoying; he's enough of a superspy to play both ends of the spectrum. And I loved Coulson jabbing him with the SHIELD-penta to earn Skye's trust.
- Agent Coulson is better than ever. What is the secret of his resurrection? Is he a Life Model Decoy? A clone? Was he magicked alive by Dr. Strange, or given Fury's elixir?
- I still think Hydra is behind the people with the alien tech who are trying to create superheroes. But we won't know till they tell us.
- Is there anybody slashable there yet?
- Have I mentioned how I adore Fitz and Simmons? The best science team since... since... well, maybe ever. The best since Stark and Banner.
- I love the way there were plenty of references for us comics obsessives to crow over, but the show didn't suffer in the least if you didn't know the references.
- Five days till episode two.
Another thought... a somewhat inchoate one, but bear with me. Whedon often or usually writes stories about outsiders, about people who for one reason or another are not part of the establishment. Now, on the one hand, S.H.I.E.L.D. is a huge powerhouse of authority - which presumably is why Skye was worried about them. On the other, they are individuals fighting a good fight - as Ward says when he's drugged, he has killed people, but they were bad people. And Mike Patterson's speech about how 'they' say you'll have a good life if you play by the rules, and then it doesn't happen - that was a nice angle. He wasn't a religious fanatic, or a terrorist, or a villain - he was a guy victimized by all sides.
So even though Tony Stark (the billionaire industrialist), or Fury and Coulson (the militarists and spies) might be cast in establishment roles, they are very far from it, and so is the viewpoint of the show.
I wonder if we'll re-encounter the shadowy and not-so-admirable people behind S.H.I.E.L.D. whom we glimpsed in the movie The Avengers. They are not and never have been, as far as I know, in the comics - S.H.I.E.L.D. was Nick Fury's playing field, as Director he had complete power and autonomy, while maintaining a careful relationship with the U.S. government and, it is implied, with the U.N.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-27 02:25 am (UTC)It's not *completely* true, but it's *mostly* true. Tress-ophilia seems particularly acute in this show, I keep getting distracted by how much I want to give the female characters scrunchies for their hair.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-27 01:03 pm (UTC)Yes - and I dislike that intensely! I like women with short hair. And long hair, and any other kind of hair. I don't like them all looking alike! Mostly I'm resigned to it, but when the canonical character has always had a certain look... it's like part of her costume or persona.
No big deal, right? They can change what they want. After all, they changed Nick Fury's skin colour! I just don't have to like every change.
Scrunchies. Yes, that'd help.
[Looking through my icons to find a short-haired woman... Yes! Marena Boccarin! The most gorgeous short-haired character of all.]