“Last week’s episode” of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D was a real winner: An interesting story, fun new characters, bravura action sequences and an intriguing cliffhanger. Unfortunately, by the laws of episodic television that means it’s likely to be immediately followed by something less than a winner, which is what we get in Repairs.
Our opening: Batesville, Utah; a small town where we’re informed a tragic explosion at a research laboratory recently claimed four lives. A young woman in a gas station convenience store (Roxxon, the Marvel Universe catch-all stand-in for Big Oil) is recognized as said laboratory’s (surviving) safety manager by the clerk, who begins harassing her because he lost a friend in the accident and blames her for failing to prevent it. But before he can threaten her further, he’s attacked by flying cans… and then shelves, and then loosened gas-pumps and a fiery explosion; all while the girl cowers on the floor clutching her Crucifix necklace and repeating “Not again!”
Naturally, this is a job for the Agents. But first, we pick up the big dangling plotline from last week: Agent May and Agent Ward getting dressed after spending the night in a hotel room – not the same one as last time – and resolving to stick with the plan of going back to HQ separately so as not to arouse suspicion. So… yeah, at least by implication Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D’s first big office romance is between the team’s resident young hunk and a woman twenty years his senior. That’s something you don’t see on genre TV every day – well done.
Telekines apparently not being on S.H.I.E.L.D’s list of strange phenomena that they know to actually be real, Fitz/Simmons are dispatched to investigate the original explosion site (a particle accelerator facility) while the other Agents go to collect the girl (Name: Hannah Hutchins); taking Skye along so she can witness official Agency procedure for making first-contact with “Gifted” individuals. Unfortunately, they find Hannah’s house being picketed by an unruly mob of locals; a tableau which feels like an attempt to fake-out viewers who may not know that Mutants are contractually-unable to exist in the Marvel Studios universe. When things get heated (i.e. when Hannah appears to telekinetically throw a police car at the crowd) May drops her with a tranquilizer gun.
Meanwhile, Fitz/Simmons are musing about a telekinesis-oriented prank pulled on them as Freshman at S.H.I.E.L.D Academy, and how they feel cheated out of the prank-playing experience since they graduated so early they never got to torment Freshmen themselves. This turns out to be a puzzlingly clumsy clothesline on which to hang the episode’s B-story: Teasing out Melinda May’s backstory (specifically the origin of her nickname, “The Cavalry”) piecemeal by having Skye ask about it and Fitz/Simmons decide handing her (the newbie) an intentionally-exaggerated fake story can be their version of a Freshman Prank. Clumsier still, their fabulism – that May is so nicknamed because she wiped out a bunch of enemy commandos by dual-wielding automatic weapons on horseback – doesn’t really sound that out of the ordinary either for the Marvel Universe or just for May, a woman who just last week shook off the effects of a magical rage-enhancing Asgardian relic without much visible ill-effect.
In any case, Skye is suddenly curious about May’s background because she’s upset at the tactics used to corral Hannah; who’s now in The Bus’s superhuman holding-cell being questioned by Coulson and May. According to her, she doesn’t think she has any powers, telekinetic or otherwise: a devout Christian, Hannah believes that God has abandoned her for failing to prevent the explosion and that the strange occurances surrounding her are the work of demons that can now stalk her freely. The Agents don’t buy it (evidently “Mephisto” isn’t a known threat in this universe yet), but right on cue a ghostly figure can be seen lurking in the background. Not long after, “something” knocks a paperweight of Coulson’s desk.
Simmons uses S.H.I.E.L.D’s all-purpose hologram-analyzer gadget to recreate the original accelerator explosion and finds something strange inside the blast: A flash-image of a bizarre alien landscape. But before she can finish exclaiming that the machine “opened a portal…,” than does a hulking ghost-figure materialize behind her and finish the sentence with “…TO HELL!” before smashing the hologram generator with a wrench and blinking into nothingness again.
Short version: Whoever was running the lab (the signs said “STATICORP,” which doesn’t appear to have an origin in the Marvel comics or movies) was using the particle-accelerator in an attempt to recreate the dimensional-portals seen in Thor: The Dark World. Tobias Ford, a worker at the facility who’d been cited for making excessive incident reports to Hannah, was somehow caught in the explosion and is now stuck between our world and wherever the portal opened to (technically, since this is the Marvel Universe, it could actually be Hell.) The shifting back and forth while stalking Hannah is gradually scrubbing him out of existence, but he’s still tangible enough to wreck up The Bus’s power supply and force a near crash-landing and trap everyone onboard in near-total darkness for an extended slasher-movie chase sequence.
Amidst all this, Skye finally gets the truth about May from Coulson: He, a group of Agents and civilians were trapped in the compound of an unnamed “Gifted Individual” who had followers worshipping him like a god, and May took it upon herself to rescue everyone by (apparently) killing the leader and his cult – an experience which Coulson believes transformed her from a friendly, fun-loving, rule-breaking Agent to the icy hardcase she is now.
Ever timely, we cut to May dragging Hannah out of The Bus and into a nearby barn to use her as bait for Tobias, who shows up for a human/ghost fight scene exactly sluggish enough for Skye to figure out the missing piece of the puzzle: Tobias is mentally-challenged, had a crush on Hannah, set-off the explosion while trying to stage an accident that would get her attention and has been causing the incidents around her out of a misguided protective instinct. He really does think the alternate dimension is Hell, and that he needs Hannah to forgive him to escape damnation. Ultimately, she talks him down and he appears to dissolve into nothingness.
Back on the plane, Coulson explains to Skye that her empathy and uncanny skill for reading people are among the newest batch of vague reasons why he brought her onto the team. Case in point: She’s already sussed-out that Coulson similarly tapped May for the team as an attempt to get her to come back out of her shell. Someone pulls the shaving-cream wakeup prank on Fitz, that someone heavily implied to be a (maybe) loosening-up May.
PARTING OBSERVATIONS
This is the epitome of a filler episode, which is kind of frustrating considering the toolbox at this series’ disposal. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using “let’s fight a random mook villain” as pretext to ladle out May’s origin, but while I’m not in the camp that says the problem with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is that it’s not packed to the gills with Marvel cameos, Tobias Ford’s role in this is exactly why supervillain D-listers exist in the first place.
Either way, even a more interesting villain-of-the-week couldn’t fix the main problem: A clumsy, meandering script. The prank thing is transparently only there as an excuse to turn May’s backstory into an episode-length mystery, and there are no visual flashbacks to the actual event to offer any kind of broader context or questions of interpretation – Skye hears another version from Ward, how funny might it have been to show his version rendering May in a more, well… “romanticized” light than Fitz/Simmons’ in light of their relationship?
Speaking of which, while I maintain it could still be misdirection (even with all the implications, we haven’t seen them kiss or even so much as embrace) the idea of this being the show’s inaugural romantic angle is pretty damn cool. Partially because it’s a nice surprise given how heavily Ward/Skye was being teased, but also because it highlights how absurd it is that this should be a surprise in the first place: Character-wise, Ward and May are the most logical pairing imaginable (same disposition, similar history, shared interests/issues) …save that Ming Na-Wen is old enough to be Brett Dalton’s mother and older-woman/younger-man relationships are virtually nonexistent outside of punchlines in movies and on TV.
On the other hand, it’s possible that Ward/May are sleeping together but are not romantically involved. Their initial bonding was over having both been afflicted by the Berserker Staff in The Well, which we were told takes its sweet time cycling out of one’s system. Maybe they worked-out that clandestine sex was the most efficient way for them to release all that energy and amped-up strength – since they’re both able to give as good as they get?
CRAZY FANBOY THEORY OF THE WEEK:
So. Melinda May is the way she is because she went through some unspecified hell taking down some unspecified superhuman with a cultish following. That sounds like something that’ll come up again… so who was it she fought and (supposedly) killed?
Somebody I’d like to see who’d fit the bill: “The Leader”, aka Samuel Sterns – Tim Blake Nelson’s character from The Incredible Hulk. The Leader has psychic powers, which could conceivably make him the mysterious “Clairvoyant” whose existence was teased back in The Girl in The Flower Dress.
A less-likely candidate: An as of yet unknown Marvel Movieverse version of Erik Lensher, aka Magneto. See, it’s finally been (officially) confirmed that the sibling duo Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch will be joining The Avengers for their next adventure; and a lot of their traditional dynamic involves being the children of a villain. In the comics that’s Magneto, but X-Men characters cannot be part of the Avengers movies for contract reasons – introducing a new mastermind-type guy on this show and making the pair his children instead would be one way to preserve that dynamic without having to waste script-pages in the movie.
NEXT WEEK:
Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D is taking another week off, but then it’ll be back with The Bridge; which will feature the return of the mysterious “Centipede” villains and the drafting of Mike Petersen (the scientifically-enhanced superhero from the pilot episode) as a new Agent.
