Man oh man, trill believers, we hit the one-month mark on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and a month of these debriefs. Now see, I take this seriously for real - and you guys too - since I not only missed watching half of the BET Hip Hop awards, I also missed some of the Superheroes special on PBS. But I have to give you this no-prize-worthy recap of ABC’s hit Marvel show. This week’s episode is titled "Eye-Spy" and introduces a character from Coulson’s past that might have turned evil since he last saw them.
So the episode begins with all these guys in suits and red
plastic masks, for some reason, and a black woman all ending up on a subway
train. It's filmed in a way that makes you think they are after her. Then she
kills the lights and proceeds to defeat each man. When the lights return and
all the other passengers scatter, we see all the men on the ground and one with
his hand cut off. Then we see her crouching on a steel beam with a metal
briefcase which has a lot diamonds in it, then she disappears as a train passes
by like a ninja. What’s interesting about this is that in this short sequence
we’ve gotten more spy action than we’ve had in the last two episodes, which
really says a lot about the direction this show is going. Can it really keep
viewers interested?
Team Coulson is soon going to investigate as we learn the
black woman is a former SHIELD agent named Akela Amador and used to be under
Coulson’s command. She was M.I.A. and Coulson seems to feel guilty over it. They
begin searching for her and Coulson has more “cute” dialogue with Skye to
use her magical computer skills to find Agent Amador. Coulson wants to find
her and find out what happened to her while most of the team, especially Agent May, want to find her and take her in. All the while, Agent Amador is selling the
diamonds and being a pretty dope evil spy. When they get close to her, she ends
up ramming the Team Coulson van that had the nerd squad in it over and scaring
them.
At this point Agent May decides that she needs to go and get
Amador, no matter what Coulson says. One thing I like about the show at
least now is that Agent May is Coulson’s equal and actually is written like she’s
the most badass agent in SHIELD, even more than Black Widow and Hawkeye. They
have a nice little match in Agent Amador’s hotel room. May is having the upper
hand until we see why Agent Amador cuts off the lights all the time: she has a
cyborg eye that lets her see in the dark, on some Predator $#!+. Coulson busts in and shoots her with a Taser
gun bullet thing from 1994 Marvel comics.
So once they take Agent Amador to their jumbo plane base, she
has a heart-to-heart with Coulson about what happened to her: She was
injured and rescued by a mysterious group who cured her blindness, but then learned that someone was seeing through one of her eyes and sending
her messages to do missions. If she didn’t complete them, she would be
killed through the robot eye. Basically Akela Amador has gotten the Betsy
Braddock treatment in life.
Team Coulson cooks up a plan to trace where the signal is to
get the person controlling Agent Amador, while the two scientists take the robot
eye out of her head. They are able to do this by making glasses that are connected to the signal as Amador’s eye. So Agents Ward and Skye go and do the mission sent to Amador, while Coulson goes and follows the trace May is doing
on the signal to get the person responsible for controlling Amador. Skye and
Ward have more forced sexual tension banter while Ward gets into some generic
building to get past a guard and into a secret room. Once in there we see some
old men type and some alien writing on a wall. A picture is taken and then Ward
needs to escape while at the same time Coulson finds the guy sending the mission, and once he announces himself as a SHIELD agent, the guy is killed through his
right eye. So basically a person is controlling that person to control that
person. IT’S AN ENDLESS WEB OF EVIL!
Then Agents Fitz and Jemma remove the robot eye from Agent
Amador with much hamfisted humor, and the
day is saved, I guess. Another day where Team Coulson saves a black character
that is good being corrupted from some evil medical healthcare procedure.
Coulson and Amador says their goodbyes, as she is given to custody for the crimes
she committed while being controlled, but as she walks off talking to Agent May
she asks what happened to Coulson because he’s different. May tells her he
almost died before the battle of New York a.k.a. The Avengers (in which he did die
cause Loki never half-steps) and Amador says what did THEY do to him. Did she
see something with her robot eye or is he acting some much differently than
before those events? Either way, she notices something is very different with Coulson.
Did You Know:
To be quite honest, not many Easter eggs in this one. I’ve
yet to really make out what alien text that is. It looks Kirbyesque and
something you’d see in a Sterlin comic, but that’s it. It doesn’t look like
Builder code from the current Avengers comic, either.
Also, as I said earlier, Akela Amador’s predicament very much
mirrors what happened to the X-Man Psylocke, which turned her from a British
woman to a Japanese woman with robot eyes to send video back to Mojo, the ruler
of Mojoworld, a dimension based around television entertainment.
My final thoughts: While this episode was an
improvement over episode three, it was still lacking, and I found it hard to pay
attention to it while I saw some many fun tweets going through my timeline
about more interesting TV. This show is becoming more and more like NCIS or some
other procedural on CBS. I hope it stops with all the quippy humor and get a
bit more serious. Also, the Skye character since the pilot seems to be more and
more there to be sarcastic eye candy or a surrogate daughter for Coulson. After
a month now, that is tiring; I want to see why she’s on this team in terms of
skill, and not just a pretty face.
And on that, I’m out.
And on that, I’m out.
