Agents of SHIELD’s return: What you need to know

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http://www.agonybooth.com/tv/Agents_..._2_Return.aspx

The mid-season premiere of Agents of SHIELD is almost upon us, so here’s a quick recap of season two so far. If you haven’t been keeping up with the show, these are all the people, places, and things you’ll need to know to jump right back in, and if you have been keeping up with the show, consider this a quick refresher. But first...

The state of the show

To those of you who bailed on Agents of SHIELD early on, you’re probably expecting the usual smug gloating about how much you’ve missed. But honestly, I can’t say I blame you. If not for the articles I feel obligated to write every so often about this show, I doubt I’d have stuck with it for this long. But the series has certainly picked up from its sleep-inducing early episodes.

The biggest change this season is the expansion of the regular cast with several new faces. The new characters aren’t that much more well-defined than the old, but simply having them around makes things a whole lot less monotonous, and the presence of a few seasoned actors means the original cast finally has something to play off of, improving the quality of performances all around.

And a larger cast means episodes can now crosscut between three or four subplots, never staying with any of them long enough for us to get bored (though I’ll admit that on occasion, the multiple plotlines get crosscut into incoherence). Also, there’s a lot more action this season; I assume some sort of mandate was handed down from the studio or the network, because the show now appears to be contractually required to have one big knockdown, drag-out brawl per episode.

The character of Skye has also changed a lot. If you’ve read my previous articles, you know this deserves special mention, because as the everygirl audience insert character that nearly every episode of the previous season revolved around, Skye was consistently the show’s weakest link. But now she’s a full-fledged field agent, and shown to be as competent as anyone else on Phil Coulson’s team. Frankly, Skye becoming a tough, uncompromising, ass-kicking sharpshooter in the space of a few months is not that much more believable than her original role as a genius computer hacker, but it’s made her infinitely more tolerable.

Overall

As far as primetime, broadcast network TV shows go, Agents of SHIELD is sufficiently diverting. And I suppose if you’re a fan of Joss Whedon-esque snappy patter and cutesy lingo, you’ll enjoy the reasonable facsimile of same provided by Whedon’s brother and sister-in-law.

But overall, the show feels like a bit of a mechanical exercise. Characters trot around the globe and get themselves in and out of dangerous situations, but it’s not invested with a whole lot of depth and none of it is terribly memorable. This half-season brought us a few emotional moments (mostly courtesy of Kyle MacLachlan), but a lot of the show feels like they’re just filling up airtime before the inevitable reveals, and one can’t help but wonder if the entire half-season could have been reduced to about four or five episodes without leaving out anything of value. I suggested previously that Agents would be better off adopting the basic cable model of shorter seasons, and I’m more certain of that now than ever.

Also, it would appear they’ve pretty much given up on making this series accessible to anyone who’s never watched the show before. Or really, anyone who’s not marathoning three or four episodes in one sitting. Agents of SHIELD now feels very much built for binge watching, as there are no standalone episodes whatsoever and it’s nearly impossible to follow some of the storylines if you’re limiting yourself to one episode a week.

If I had to grade this half-season, with the presupposition that the first half of the first season earned a D grade, then I’d say the show as it exists now has worked itself up to a steady B minus. It’s entertaining enough, but if the show was suddenly canceled tomorrow (which currently seems unlikely), I’d probably breathe a sigh of relief that I don’t have to fit even more useless trivia and background information about the Marvel Cinematic Universe into my brain. But then again, I’m no huge fan of the MCU—I find most of the movies respectable, but ultimately disposable—so your mileage, as always, may vary.