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- Airdate: 1/14/2014
- Director: Ken Fink (Nikita, Revenge, Fringe)
- Writers: Jed Whedon (SHIELD Co-Showrunner) & Monica Owusu-Breen (Revolution, Fringe, Brothers & Sisters, “The Well” episode of SHIELD)
THE MAIN PLOT
Fitz and Simmons are called in to investigate an accident using one of their old creations (a freeze device) at the SHIELD Academy. They take Skye and Grant with them while May pulls Coulson out of his “I was dead and SHIELD altered my memories” funk to go off on their own to Mexico City follow a lead about Skye’s past.
As it turns out, Fitz and Simmons are kind of rock stars at the Academy while Grant actually attended a separate SHIELD Academy designed for field operative agents. Both sides think they are superior to the other, although only Fitz is a jerk about it. When Fitz and Simmons address a lecture hall at the Academy, a student Donnie Gill (Dylan Minnette) suddenly turns into a block of ice. Skye, Fitz and Simmons manage to thaw him, deducing that these highly competitive students must be targeting one another to eliminate competition. Fools! They’re being played. Donnie manufactured the whole scenario to coax Fitz and Simmons to campus so that Fitz would help him solve a problem he had with the power mechanism of his freeze device. He and a partner, Seth, plan to sell the technology to Ian Quinn, the villain from the third episode. Our dim-witted team figure it out, but not after Fitz has done exactly what Donnie needed. Oops. Donnie and Seth try to use their device as a demonstration for Quinn in exchange for him extracting them from SHIELD. It all goes wrong, a massive weather storm erupts due to the machine, but Melinda flies the Bus into the heart of the storm. The team saves Donnie, but Seth is deadsville.
Lola flies again in this episode. Did you really miss that, though?
The lead Melinda and Coulson followed was a former SHIELD agent who after a quick fight helpfully tells them that Skye was designated by SHIELD as an ‘0-8-4‘ as a baby. An entire Chinese village had died protecting her, and the SHIIELD agents protecting her were slowly killed off, at least until they managed to hide her existence by shuffling her around to different orphanages. May implores Coulson not to tell Skye, but keeping SHIELD secrets is not his bag anymore. All it takes is Skye to ask, “You’re acting weird. What’s up?” for him to spill his guts to her. She takes it well, oddly taking comfort in the idea that SHIELD has been looking out for her for her entire life.
Our big cliffhangers? En route to the sandbox, Donnie discovers he has freeze abilities now, and Quinn tells Coulson over the phone that the Clairvoyant says hello.
THE REVIEW
Many will and have compared Agents of SHIELD to Arrow for obvious reasons: they’re both comic book shows, one from Marvel and the other from DC. There is a tendency to place those two comic book behemoths (Marvel and DC) in opposition to one another, often pointing to the strengths of one to validate your arguments about the shortcomings of the other. The same is also true of SHIELD vs. Arrow comparisons. However, these are two very different shows that don’t otherwise warrant comparison. As such, I am reluctant to use this quote, but in a recent interview with TVLine Arrow Executive Producer Andrew Kreisberg spoke to the approach to writing on their show:
“We act as if these are the only stories we’ll ever get to tell. I mean, any idea that we have where we’re like, “Oh, we could do that in Season 3,” we’ve moved into Season 2. We feel like that level of velocity is the way television is being produced now, especially when you look at shows like Scandal. You just can’t tell the story fast enough, and one of the great things about both the world that we’ve created for Arrow and also the greater DC Universe is there are always more stories to tell. There’s always more characters, there’s always more villains so we’re not ever really worried about where do we go from here.”
Has this approach always worked out for Arrow? No. However, it’s also a sign that they recognize the TV environment within which they live. Like Kreisberg said, the emerging model for storytelling on TV is that “you just can’t tell the story fast enough.” Maybe it has something to do with the creeping death of the daytime soap opera, thus audiences in need of their soap opera fix gravitating toward increasing soapy TV shows (Revenge, Scandal, Nashville). Maybe it is a reflection of the instant-streaming, Netflix generation where every episode needs to hook you so that your mini-marathon turns into an all-day marathon. Either way, the rule of thumb for many current TV shows is that they can’t burn through storylines fast enough.
Agents of SHIELD is not like that. In fact, no Joss Whedon show has been like that, although let’s be honest SHIELD is not really a Joss Whedon show. It has been playing the slow-burn with its mysteries in favor of rigidly formulaic episodes which serve to only incrementally advance the overall plot. This approach appeases the casual viewer who can pick up any episode and not be lost, with the “previously on…” segment filling in the gaps (even SHIELD‘s pre-closing-credits cliffhangers aren’t really cliffhangers which are resolved the next week). Beyond accessibility considerations, the benefit of the standalone/quasi-serialized approach is it allows your characters more time to breathe. However, the downside is that by stretching out a mystery or two across so many episodes the mystery better be dang compelling to begin with and your pay-off better make the wait worth it. Supernatural used to be the master at this, and featured characters we cared about.
Unfortunately for SHIELD, none of its mysteries are that compelling. Fortunately for SHIELD, they’ve cut their losses, and in two consecutive episodes given us the answers to both mysteries. Unfortunately for SHIELD, neither answer was really worth the wait. Fortunately for SHIELD, now that we’ve addressed the mysteries we can finally move on. Unfortunately for SHIELD, yeah, the mysteries have only been partially explained, as if they are still holding back on us.
The point is that they are trying to fix things. How did Coulson survive? Multiple open-brain surgeries, and SHIELD altered his memories. What is Skye’s background? She was some kind of magic baby SHIELD has been protecting her entire life. But…what really saved Coulson? Where did the technology come from? Why is he so special to demand saving in the first place? We don’t know. So, wait, what the hell is Skye if SHIELD designated her an “0-8-4″? Is she even human? Again, we don’t really know. However, coming out of the mid-season break they are clearly trying to get things going a little faster. Heck, they even had May admit her affair with Grant to Coulson as if why on Earth do they need to keep stringing along that secret?
“Seeds” was far more adept at advancing their mysteries while also being a good episode, unlike last week’s rather bland and forgettable episode. While hugely significant, everything with Skye’s background was but a small aspect of “Seeds.” This was really more about giving us an origin story for a comic book villain, Donnie is the Blizzard.
Is the loner angle maybe overplayed? I actually liked it.
Sure, the plot is in some ways a carbon copy of the third episode “The Asset” in which Fitz & Simmons are connected to someone or thing from the Academy who it turns out is being manipulated by Quinn. However, Donnie was the best kind of villain: a sympathetic and believable one, although his ending hostility toward Fitz was perhaps unwarranted (take some responsibility for your own actions, Donnie).
The show’s mantra from this point forward should be to get them off that damn plane as often as the budget will allow.
Doing all of this by getting all of our characters off of that damn Bus was a great move (they need to interact with more than just villains-of-the-week) as was expanding the universe of SHIELD by depicting an Starfleet-eseque Academy where cadets are trained.
On the downside, this is a very easy episode to nitpick. A bar with a pool table in the basement of SHIELD that only the students know about? Unless we are to assume SHIELD knows all about the Basement but just lets the students think it’s a secret doesn’t that make our giant spy organization seem really stupid? Plus, how did SHIELD not realize that Seth’s connection via his father to Ian Quinn was a giant red flag? How did the weather machine actually stop working at the end? How exactly did it work that Donnie got those apparent freeze powers while everyone else in the eye of the storm did not? Is it really that comforting for Skye that her entire life has been but the whimsy of a giant multi-government entity which helped create all of her abandonment issues? Sure, it is funny how May just blurts out her secret about Ward, but isn’t that the kind of thing that required a little more build-up to truly land with maximum effectiveness? Would Coulson really suck so much at keeping secrets that he wouldn’t even be able to look directly at Skye due to overwhelming guilt?
THE BOTTOM LINE
In a rather astutely observed essay, FilmSchoolRejects recently said of Agents of SHIELD:
“The paths these episode’s plots take can be mapped out by the viewer a mile ahead, and they absolutely reek of network notes asking for things to be dumbed down for Middle America. The dialog is the kink of clunky, mindless crap that often includes phrases like ‘He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?’ or ‘In English, please!’ This garbage isn’t just not up to the standards of Whedon, it’s not up to the standards of today’s television, period. “
In many ways, “Seeds” is not that different. All of the twists happen right around when they always do for this show, and Coulson’s closing speech about Skye’s resilience accompanied by composer Bear McCreary’s smothering musical score is over-written. It attempts to elevate Skye to a higher level than her characterization deserves. However, despite its flaws this episode was better than most. They were trying to advance story arcs (Skye’s mystery, May and Ward), they gave us an interesting new look at the SHIELD (the Academy), and utilized each cast member well. Even May’s little fight scene prior to Lola’s return was kind of cool. SHIELD has yet to really earn our trust that this is the sign of something better, but “Seeds” was actually a pretty decent episode, as SHIELD episodes go.
THE NOTES
1. Have You Looked at the Ratings Lately?
Agents of SHIELD’s “The Magical Place” delivered 6.67 million viewers, and “The Seeds” apparently held roughly even with that.
2. Some like when Fitz gets a little bitchy if only because it better differentiates him from Simmons. I’m not one of those people. I just don’t think Ian De Caestecker is that good at playing comedy.
3. Of the cast of SHIELD, FilmSchoolRejects said:
“critics said that Chloe Bennet was just a pretty face and that her Skye character was going to be an annoyance, but over time she’s shown that she’s a strong enough actress to get the audience on her side when she’s put in danger or playing the underdog, and she’s shown a strong ear for delivering quirky dialog. Initially Brett Dalton was derided as being a generically wooden hero guy, but in the few cases where his stoicism has been broken and he’s had a chance to get a little bit silly, he’s shown a strong enough sense of comic timing to make good material work. And Iain De Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge, they’ve been derided as being annoying and twee exposition machines, but when they were finally given a chance to do something substantial in Episode 6, it produced the highest heights the show has reached to date. No, the problem here isn’t the cast, the problem is the miserable writing the cast has been working with.”
Agree? Disagree?
What did you think of “Seeds”? Let us know in the comments section.
All of the pictures used in the above review, unless otherwise noted, came from ABC.GO.COM.
Second Opinions
- Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 1, Episode 12: “The Seeds” Review (sidekickreviews.wordpress.com)
