The new ABC show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is now underway with three episodes under its belt and having already delivered great action, fun characters, and of course witty dialogue as all good Joss Whedon projects ought to.
After this Agent Coulson says: “Sorry, that corner was really dark, and I couldn’t help myself. I think there’s a bulb out.”
My thoughts by category…
Story
I thought the pilot story and the second episode story were just OK. I liked the story of the third episode better, but it still felt rushed and underdeveloped. What I am hoping to see more of with this show is more over-arcing themes, which would be totally easy to do with the tie-ins to all the various Avengers movies and characters. They have this whole big universe to explore, some which some people are already familiar with, and it would be great to utilize more of that. I’m not saying that Tony Stark or Thor need to make a cameo in an episode (not that I would complain if they did), but using themes from their stories for the show. They do reference things a lot, but I want to see it applied to more big concepts, not just little details. The end of this last episode hinted at something that might come back, and I hope it does! It’s hard to tell what is a set-up this early on, but I hope to see recurring themes. Next week’s episode looks intriguing to me, so I’m hoping to like its story more.
Action
One thing this series has definitely done right so far is the action. I never even realized I would like such an action-oriented TV show, but I do in this case! The fight scenes are interesting to me and I love the mix of ingenuity and kick-buttery involved in these sequences.
Agent May can seriously kick tail.
Dialogue
The dialogue is definitely the best part. Agent Coulson delivers great one-liners, and the other characters have their fair share of good lines as well.
“Listen, you cannot walk away from this. With great power comes … a ton of weird crap that you are not prepared to deal with.” – Skye
“Saying his name repeatedly does not increase productivity!” – Simmons
Grant Ward: There are two ways we can do this.
Skye: Oh, is one of them the easy way?
Grant Ward: No.
Skye: Oh.
And that is just a very small sampling. Not to mention how much more fun it is in context. Anyone who has seen Firefly, Serenity, or Dr. Horrible can attest that Whedon is a master of wit.
Characters
I’m not loving the characters yet… which makes me a little sad because this is generally another strong suit of Whedon’s (again, Firefly attests to this). I don’t dislike them either though, and I think over time I will like them more. Ward is interesting in a mysterious sort of way… he has this tough exterior but you know there’s more deep down. Same with May, though I find her less appealing… but that could be because there is more emphasis placed on Ward’s character, as he and Skye seem to be set up as the forefront of the show (other than Coulson). And he’s also attractive, I’ll admit that. Skye definitely already has a lot of complexity, but I have a hard time entirely liking someone when I still don’t really trust them. Well, unless they’re Garek from Deep Space Nine, but it took a while for me to warm up to him too.
It’s also real clear from the show that Skye and Ward are going to hook up at some point…
I really want to know more about Fitz and Simmons. Right now, they’re a couple of British kids spouting off all their science babble, and it’s fun. I like them and I like how they play off each other. But I want to know more about them, because I know there’s more to them than their passion for science. And I want to know more about their past. It sounds like they went through school together, which explains the neat (but totally platonic) dynamic they have.
If I go to a Halloween party this year, I may dress as Simmons. I like shopping from my closet for Halloween costumes. 🙂
Fun!
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is definitely fun so far, but I hope it won’t shy away from more serious episodes or moments as appropriate.
It’s hard to say much after three episodes, but I will say that I do think the show has already gotten better with each episode, so I hope the show will continue to grow and become more and more interesting and fun. If you haven’t checked it out yet but have some interest in the Marvel superhero world and what’s going on “behind the scenes,” I’d recommend it!
Have you seen Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.? What are your thoughts on it?
Two words for season three: roller coaster. This season was filled with some serious up’s and down’s. There were two episodes that made me extremely upset, to the point where I almost wanted to give up on it all, and yet by sticking through it there was a pretty decent pay-off. The pay-off at the end of this season wasn’t quite as stellar as, let’s say, Babylon 5’s season three, but it did help me realize that the writers really did know what they were doing.
Basically, it would be impossible to talk specifics about the story line of season three and not give anything away, so I’ll touch lightly on a few episodes and characters I enjoyed this season. As far as new (or fairly new) faces go, I really enjoyed Henry the cab driver and Lincoln Lee.
Henry initially appears in the first episode of the season, “Olivia.” And though he’s a major part of the episode, it’s easy to assume he won’t be seen again. But thankfully, we do! And it’s amazing how such a small character role can have such a good character arc. In the few episodes we see Henry, we see his compassion, how his concern towards Olivia grows, and he discovers things about the world that not everyone knows, even if he doesn’t know all the details. He might be just a cab driver to most passerbyers, but we as the audience get to learn about him as a person, and he’s pretty awesome.
We are introduced to Lincoln Lee at the end of season two, and he seems like a decent guy, but that was pretty much all I thought of him for a while. But then the episodes “Stowaway” and “Bloodline” made me really start to love him as a character. Spoiler in white (highlight to see): Stowaway introducing our side’s Lincoln Lee was definitely huge for me. I just loved how different he was from the other side’s Lincoln Lee, and yet saw the similarities as well. I really loved that ours was so straight-laced though, and how he interacted with Peter. And then in Bloodline, when we went back to the other side’s Lincoln Lee, I saw how great he was too; how compassionate and loving he was underneath that tough exterior.
The first half of the second season deals with the story that left off in the season two finale, and the second half of the seasons deals with the consequences within the interpersonal relationships of the characters. “Entrada” was a favorite of mine as it seemed to resolve so much, only for some of it to somewhat unravel on me again! “The Firefly” was a fascinating look at repercussions caused from the decisions we make in life. We got more background in the characters’ lives with another flashback episode reminiscent of “Peter,” with “Subject 13.” I found “Bloodline” strangely moving for someone who was not a fan of “Immortality” for… uh… reasons (hopefully this will make sense for those who have seen the season; I’m just trying to stay vague!). “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide” was not a favorite but it was an out-of-the-box sort of episode that ended with an interesting twist that I’m still waiting for more answers on at the start of season four.
And same with the last three episodes of the season, which felt like one arc that launched us into season four with some half-answers that left me still wanting more! And while it was a good, solid pay-off, I still cannot help but forget some of the frustrations of the season. While this season is clearly better than the second in many ways, it also angered me more. Perhaps this could be seen as a testament of the writers’ amazing ability to get under my skin and give me ALL THE FEELS (not to mention the amazing acting done by everyone on the cast), but I have decided to dock it half a star and go with a 4.5 star rating, the same as last season.
I’m only two episodes into Season Four and basically nothing has been resolved, so I’m really anxious to see how it all turns out. I’m also becoming more and more glad I can watch these episodes back to back and without hiatuses!
If you’ve seen season three of Fringe, tell me your thoughts! Did you have as much of a love/hate relationship with it as I did?
How can I even begin to describe the awesomeness of Fringe, season two?
Gene the cow in a birthday hat is pretty awesome. But it does not even begin to cover the amazing continuing overall story arcs and character arcs. Questions are answered. More questions are raised. I grow to care more and more for the characters with each episode. The feelings I have experienced this season can be attributed to some amazing storytelling.
Every character grows, the plot thickens, and the relationships between the characters grow more complex. And just when all seems right between two people, something inevitably happens to make things go awry again. Really, it’s so hard to talk about this season without spoiling anything, but every episode added to the characters, to their interpersonal relationships, and the overall mythology of Fringe that becomes more and more fascinating, especially at the halfway point of the season, from the episode Jacksonville on.
In Jacksonville, we get more of Olivia’s back story. In Peter, we get more of his back story. We learn more about Walter in both too, as well as in other episodes, such as White Tulip, when we see just how haunted Walter has been over the years by decisions he has made. And just when things get super tense, we are offered a reprieve with the episode Brown Betty, a slightly musical episode (really, it’s quite light on the music) where Walter tells Olivia’s niece Ella a story that seems to have some basis in reality, or at least Walter’s perception of reality, but is a charming, fictional tale where old and new meet.
And then we get Northwest Passage, where we get back to the present tense, and Peter must come face to face with his own demons.
And then the two-part finale… with the second part seemingly wrapping things up well then BAM! I can’t elaborate any further, but it’s intense.
Seriously guys, I love this show. Just watch it.
Season two was better than season one, but I am anticipating that the best is yet to come.
If you’ve seen Fringe, what are your thoughts on season two? If not, do you have questions about the show that I can answer for you?
I recently read 1984 for the first time, and the first two-thirds of the book did very little for me. In the third part of the book, however, when Winston was arrested and tortured to become indoctrinated to the ways of the Party, I was much more intrigued. And what especially intrigued me was there were some similarities to an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation I remembered in which Captain Jean-Luc Picard was being tortured and interrogated by a Cardassian. In case you’re wondering what a Cardassian is…
Just so we’re clear…
The Number Four
I think you’ll soon see the similarities as well. Here’s a conversation from the Star Trek episode Chain of Command, Part II:
“How many lights do you see there?”
“I see four lights.”
“No, there are five.”
“I see four lights.”
And from 1984:
O’Brien held up his left hand, its back toward Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
“Four.”
“And if the Party says that there is not four but five – then how many?”
“Four.”
But of course, it doesn’t stop there for either Picard or Winston. And just so you can understand the full context of these conversations, both men are starved, naked or near naked, have been beaten or degraded, and both experience pain when they give the “incorrect” answer…
“I know nothing about Minos Korva.”
“But I’ve told you that I believe you. I didn’t ask you about Minos Korva. I asked how many lights you see.”
“There are four lights.”
“I don’t understand how you can be so mistaken.”
“Four.”
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston’s body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O’Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four.”
The needle went up to sixty.
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!”
The Psychology of an Interrogation
In the 21 hours of psychology classes I took in college, I learned a few things about how we as people are influenced, for better or for worse. When it comes to this sort of situation, where someone is trying to bring something out of a person who may be very strong and unwilling to provide such information, certain tactics are used. The idea is to transform you from who you are to someone else.
The Stanford prison experiment was a study conducted by Phillip Zimbardo that took place in 1971, where the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or a prison guard proved shocking to all involved. In this experiment, normal college students who volunteered to take part in the study for some money were assigned to either be a prisoner or a prison guard, and to play out their roles in a “jail” that was at Stanford University. Just how quickly the students truly seemed to transform into their roles prisoners and prison guards, and how Zimbardo even got sucked into it himself, was shocking to me personally as a college student when I studied the incident.
Just by playing the role of a prison guard, college students grew power-hungry and beat the prisoners. Just by playing the role of a prisoner, college students grew depressed and rebellious. Things got so bad so quickly that the experiment had to be cut short… after only five days. Tactics that were used included: shock (prisoners were blindfolded and taken to their cells), humiliation (prisoners were stripped naked), and a transfer of identity (they wore prisoner uniforms, shackles on their feet, they were assigned a prisoner number, and their heads were shaved). Some of these elements can be seen in 1984 and Chain of Command. In the latter, Picard is stripped naked and is left suspended by his wrists. He is told:
“From this point on, you will enjoy no privilege of rank, no privileges of person. From now on, I will refer to you only as Human. You have no other identity!”
I saw this pattern when reading Unbroken as well, the true story of a WWII pilot who was taken to several Japanese POW camps. Prisoners were degraded from human to less-than-human, to the status of an animal or even worse. The Japanese culture is high on honor, and to lose one’s honor and dignity is the greatest insult, and that is what they did to their enemies during the war. Laura Hillenbrand wrote:
The Pacific POWs who went home in 1945 were torn-down men. They had an intimate understanding of man’s vast capacity to experience suffering, as well as his equally vast capacity, and hungry willingness, to inflict it. They carried unspeakable memories of torture and humiliation, and an acute sense of vulnerability that attended to knowledge of how readily they could be disarmed and dehumanized. Many felt lonely and isolated, having endured abuses that ordinary people couldn’t understand. Their dignity had been obliterated, replaced with a pervasive sense of shame and worthlessness.
A True Change in Nature
Captain Picard is offered the chance to go… but is told if he does so, his chief medical officer Beverly Crusher will be interrogated. Picard cares for Beverly very much and refuses to let this happen, so he stays. Winston does not immediately say anything to betray his lover Julia, but when he is about to be inflicted with the worst torture he can imagine, he exclaims:
“Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her! Tear her face off, strip her to the bones! Not me! Julia! Not me!”
This is what we are led to believe is the end of Winston’s indoctrination, at least until the very end of the book, which I won’t give away. But his ending is not happy. In fact, at one point after he is released, he finds himself writing:
2 + 2 = 5
…one of the things that his interrogator was trying to tell him was true if the party said so. Picard, on the other hand, as he is being released from his interrogation (as his ship the Enterprise has come to save the day) he shouts out in defiance to his interrogator:
“There… are… FOUR LIGHTS!”
Though Picard’s ending is happier, and I do believe in the end he was a much more noble man, the two are not as different as it might seem. Winston had this experience:
“Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember that?”
“Yes.”
O’Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.
“There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?”
“Yes.”
And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity.
And at the end of Chain of Command, Picard has this conversation with the Enterprise’s counselor:
“What I didn’t put in the report was that at the end he gave me a choice – between a life of comfort or more torture. All I had to do was to say that I could see five lights when, in fact, there were only four.”
“You didn’t say it?”
“No! No. But I was going to. I would have told him anything. Anything at all! But more than that, I believed that I could see five lights.”
It Doesn’t Just Happen in Fiction
It’s easy to chalk all this up to these stories being fictional, that this would not happen in real life. But the Stanford prison experiment suggests otherwise. The identity of those college students were truly lost in five days’ time. It’s been seen elsewhere as well. Patty Hearst, daughter of publishing giant William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by a guerrilla group and ended up aiding them in theft, not seemingly out of fear of what they would do to her otherwise, but from a conversion to their side. Afterwards she seemed to have a change of heart again and was fully pardoned by President Clinton.
Here’s a brief interview with one of the students involved with the Stanford prison experiment:
Needless to say, I think both 1984 and this particular episode of Star Trek did a great job of portraying how convicted men can become desperate, and how a good interrogator wears them down. It’s not fun to think about but I do find it fascinating. And it again, it makes me think of Unbroken, particularly the title. Louis Zamperini was broken, not just once but many times. But after a time, after it was all over, he was able to overcome the torture and heartache he went through, able to forgive a particular Japanese commander he had hated and had wanted to kill. From Unbroken:
On an October afternoon, Louie stepped out of an army car and stood on the lawn at 2028 Gramercy Avenue, looking at his parents’ house for the first time in more than three years. “This little home,” he said, “was worth all of it.”
To ease the load of this post a bit, here’s a cute picture of hugging kitties:
I have no idea what question to ask, but I’d love to hear any thoughts you have on the subject! I’m also curious as to how you feel about more posts where I incorporate Star Trek and/or psychology into a discussion about a book.
Awesome Adaptations is hosted by Picture Me Reading, and is a focus on book-to-movie adaptations that we think are awesome! Today’s topic is an awesome coming-of-age adaptation. I think Little Women is all about coming of age. It focuses mostly on Jo, but also on her three sisters, from their youth to their early adult years as they go through separation from their father, simple Christmases, sickness, suitors, adventures, and tragedy. Through it all, I think Louisa May Alcott really captured the spirit of growing up quite well. I love that in the end, Jo writes her and her sisters’ story after a tragedy stirs her heart of Professor Bhaer’s words to write from her heart. I think it’s important advice for all writers to heed.
Here’s a scene from the movie that breaks my heart every time I watch it or read it in the book, but I think is a critical turning point for Jo in the story:
What scene from Little Women (book or movie) stands out to you? Or what do you think is an awesome coming-of-age adaptation?
Characters
Have you seen Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.? What are your thoughts on it? 
And then the two-part finale… with the second part seemingly wrapping things up well then BAM! I can’t elaborate any further, but it’s intense.
