Ahem, and that's the last time I'm going to type that all out. From now on it's either Agents of Shield, or just AoS for short.
Moving on.
Yesterday saw the premiere of Joss Whedon's newest television show, set in the Marvel universe and connected to his work on The Avengers. Joss Whedon, for those heathens who don't know him, was the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel, as well as the universally-adored-too-late Firefly, as well as the dead-due-(we-assume)-to-meddling-by-Fox Dollhouse.
Oh, and he co-wrote Toy Story.
Anywho, Whedon made a name for himself with these adored cult-favorite and critically-acclaimed TV-shows before landing a gig as the director for Marvel's The Avengers, which made all the money in the world and basically gave him a ton of weight to throw around Hollywood.
Combining Disney/Marvel's confidence in him post-Avengers with his background making awesome TV shows, the result has been this new show, based on SHIELD, the benevolent Men in Black of the Marvel Universe.
Whedon's work has always had a comic-book feel to it, and indeed the man has written plenty of stuff for comics as well, so it's a pretty damn fine fit. Agents of Shield will focus on a group of... Agents of Shield helmed by the breakout recurring character from several of the various Marvel movies, Agent Phil Coulson, who got killed off in the Avengers, but has been somehow resurrected. The nature of that resurrection is a mystery, as Coulson believes that he was merely injured and unconscious and sent to recuperate in Tahiti (which he says is a "Magical Place," and the fact that he uses this phrase multiple times is certainly ominous.)
This is a Whedon show, so it's all about the cast of characters. Obviously, there's Coulson, the leader-man with the lion's share of Whedonesque quips.
Next, there's Grant Ward, the hyper-competent secret agent man who's not happy about having to do a job that doesn't involve beating the crap out of people. Ward threatens to be the least interesting character, but given that this is the pilot and character development hasn't had a chance to get going, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
Malinda May is basically the Zoe of this series - badass warrior woman who doesn't like to take any crap. She's apparently a legend in the agency, but had taken a desk-job to get away from the action, only to be dragged back in by Coulson.
Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons (collectively known as Fitzsimmons) are the resident nerds (and also both British, the former a Scot and the latter English.) Like most of the characters in the pilot, we know very little about these guys yet, but with any luck they'll be a constant source of awkward nerdy snark before one of them gets brutally and suddenly killed because Joss Whedon is sustained by your tears. Leo seems to be the squeamish one, while Jemma is the one who sees radioactive goo dripping from an alien device and goes "cool!"
And finally, there's Skye, the outsider who is some kind of hacktivist/superhero groupie. Inevitably, she's won over by Coulson to join his team by the episode's end.
The pilot's plot involves the team trying to track down Michael Peterson (played by J. August Richards, who played Gunn on Angel,) a man who's developed super-powers, before said powers make him explode and kill a bunch of people. Peterson's super-strength gives him the ambition to become a super-hero himself, but the psychological (and possibly neurological) effects of the serum that gives him those powers has caused him to obsess over the arc of a superhero, defining "bad guys" to beat down and seeing his descent into madness as an "origin story."
It's all a rather self-contained story, but we have further hints at a greater plot, mostly involving the people who gave that serum to him in the first place.
As with all Whedon show pilots, this episode is enjoyable, but may leave you feeling a little underwhelmed. The thing is, Whedon's shows are all about the characters. The pilot needs to introduce the world we're living in, but it also has to be action-heavy, which doesn't leave a ton of time to bring out personalities. We get a decent bit of Coulson (who had the advantage of a couple movies to exist in beforehand) and also Skye, who is our audience surrogate in exploring this new setting (which is not to say she doesn't have her own mysteries.) But half the cast, namely Malinda May and Fitz-Simmons, don't really get enough time to shine, but hey, it's an hour-long pilot. Can't do everything. Once we get farther into the season, and perhaps have a few episodes that get to slow things down a little and work on who these people are, I expect things will pick up considerably.
And that's not to say it was a bad pilot. In fact, it was fairly elegant, as well as enjoyable. It's a good place from which to start.
For my part, I'm mostly just happy that we've got another Joss Whedon show on the air. I don't think he's going to be quite as involved here as he was in the other shows, and I'm sure Disney and Marvel will have a lot of veto power (though Marvel's probably more amenable to Whedon's cast-massacring ways than Disney,) but I think that the pedigree here is promising, and with a property this popular and the good will Whedon's probably attained, we could see something pretty damn awesome.
Oh, and as an aside, we had two Whedon alumni show up, with J. August Richards as the guest star and Ron Glass playing what I can only hope will be a recurring character. Likewise, Cobie Smulders reprised her role of Maria Hill from the Avengers, and given that How I Met Your Mother is ending after this season, she may become a regular on AoS. (Whedon will then only need to cast Josh Radnor and Jason Segal to have a full set of HIMYM actors within his arsenal.)
No comments:
Post a Comment