Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

They were able to do that with Mace because they could bank on the audience's kneejerk to the character's introduction. Mace was always going to be greeted with hostility, suspicion, and resentment on account of the fact that he's some new guy who stole Coulson's job during the time skip. Now, Coulson actually stepped down, but that's how it feels to viewers: who is THIS f*cking guy and why isn't he Coulson?

Consequentially, the way they played him was absolutely brilliant. They gave audiences something to latch onto. A hook for that resentment. A straw to grasp in order to qualify the bitterness. They spent several episodes establishing his character and building him up, and audiences ate it up while waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Then they pulled the rug out, threw out the hook, and were like, "There's entirely reasonable explanations for that because he's an entirely reasonable guy." And all we were left with was the interesting character we'd spent several episodes getting attached to.

F*cking genius, is what that was.

AIDA doesn't need the roller coaster because she's not a character guaranteed to be hated from the moment she steps onscreen. She's quite the opposite: easily likable. She's a learning computer with an attractive interface who fans have spent literally years waiting to see appear in the show, a feeling enhanced by a few episodes about how she needs to be protected from Mace. She's S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Baymax. Everything about her screams, "BEST NEW CHARACTER".

Which only makes it that much more of a perversion of character when the Darkhold sends her spiraling down an ugly path. One she both is and isn't likely to come back from. The thing about AIDA is that while she isn't beyond the Moral Event Horizon, she HAS crossed the line where coming back is complicated. She straight-up murdered an agent. You don't get to turn around and go, "Whoops, my bad!" at that point.

I mean, season 1 had that misstep with the...Guest House, was it?...but the show's been pretty good about that, up to and including the one thing Coulson and Mace have ever fully agreed on: that Robbie is an Enemy Mine, not an ally, and that they would need to find a way to bring him to justice in time. And his victim wasn't even close to the level of horrific that murdering a law officer in cold blood approaches.

But she's also a robot, which means it's not impossible that they could fix her programming or something. And she's not so far gone that Redemption Equals Death is out of the question, either. It's just not likely that she's going to return as a full protagonist, and if she does, it probably won't really be her.

edited 9th Dec '16 5:47:01 AM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

I noticed that apparently Fitz's greatest fear is specifically the Joker.

Forever liveblogging the Avengers

I wonder what they're going to do with the Darkhold, once they've taken care of Aida I mean. They definitely can't keep it inside the base, so they have to send it somewhere, because I don't believe it can be destroyed. I just hope this isn't the end of magic being on the show. I really hope they consider bringing in Man-Thing, since his origins do have ties to the SHIELD organization. Maybe next season they can use him, if we get another season that is.

Tis the great art of life to manage well The restless mind

I'll second that, just for the sake of seeing if they have the guts to say Man-Thing.

Hell, I want to see if they'll reference Giant sized Man....

<Ducks a brick>

One Strip! One Strip!

I'm guessing the season will end with them finding out about Doctor Strange and giving it to him.

I don't think either Mace or Coulson would be willing to give the book to any person at all. It would probably be best to put in a capsule and bury it extremely deep underground or underwater. It's too bad there's no portal to Maveth anymore, that would be a nice disposal area to put it.

Tis the great art of life to manage well The restless mind

Isn't it implied in the Strange movie that the book came from Kamar-Taj to begin with? It would be more like giving it back to its original keepers. Shield was fine with Thor getting the Space Stone back provided it was taken to Asgard.

The book is from Kamar-Taj. I'm just not sure how they would even get it back there. It's very unlikely we'll get a Doctor Strange or even a Wong cameo, so I don't know how Shield would return the book to where it belongs, unless one of those initiates that was training there somehow finds out that Shield has it. Even then, they wouldn't just hand off a book this dangerous to some random person who claims to practice magic. At least Thor was taking the Tesseract offworld, and it's not like they could have stopped him from leaving with it anyway.

edited 9th Dec '16 6:06:43 PM by clockworkboy

Tis the great art of life to manage well The restless mind

Actually, the show has said Man-Thing. Back in Season 1, after Maria Hill had done talking to Congress after the fall of SHIELD, she mentioned how hard it was to explain that one of SHIELD's assets was called "Man-Thing."

Good Insert Deity Here, I hope the writers remember they made that joke and incorporate it into the plot.

They already said "Man-Thing" in season one. Observe:

I'm actually hoping that they'll find Johnny Blaze and give it back to him and he and Robbie will team up and that will lead to a Midnight Sons show.

New six-episode spin-off, Slingshot, comprised of three to six minute short episodes. Pilot will be directed by Joe Quesada

Hopefully Yo-Yo doesn't make a deal with Mephisto in that.

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

Or have sex with Norman Osborn.

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

...I thought Gwen Stacy did that.

Did Comics!Yo-you do that?

I'M MR. MEESEEKS, LOOK AT ME!

No, it's a joke about Joe Quesada being an idiot. That's stuff he did during JMS's run on Spider-Man.

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

He had sex with Norman Osborn?

I feel like I shouldn't be excited about this spin-off, or cautiously optimistic at the least.

I'M MR. MEESEEKS, LOOK AT ME!

Technically, JMS wrote it, Quesada only did the art. Even though Quesada mandated it, JMS could have, you know, said no, but he didn't.

I thought Quesada was the editor-in-chief of Marvel at the time?

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

seeing as his Quaseda was his boss, I doubt it would have made s difference if he said no.

Quesada did the art on OMD, not Sins Past.

He seems to have mellowed a bit on a married Spider-Man...still won't let it touch the mainline canon but has no problem with stuff like Renew Your Vows lately...and the fact the newspaper strip has kept Peter and MJ together all decade pretty much renders OMD's long-term significance sort of null and void.

edited 13th Dec '16 5:55:38 AM by Zarius

The Slingshot miniseries dropped online and it can be viewed on You Tube. I just watched it and overall, I think it was kind of meh. Not outstanding, but it was entertaining enough as a little side story. Just wish it was longer, to be honest.

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

I like Yo-Yo a lot, but I wish we'd started with a scene of her and her brother. She's too shut down until the last two episodes, and we don't really care about the villain, so we need to be invested in how personal this is for her right from the word go.

Kind of wish this had actually been in the first episode of the season. I know it happened months before then, but it feels like something we needed to see. The show's always better when there's that sense of connection to the events of the movies.

I would've preferred two or three more episodes to flesh it out a bit between Yo-Yo and that Ramon fella.

As it stands, Ramon is so flat, boring, and inconsequential that he's now officially the worst villain in all of the MCU. Malekith has been usurped.

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

At least him and Yo-Yo acted off of each other pretty well. That's what I'm talking about when I say that it's more important for Yo-Yo's conflict here to have more of a presence. The villain was never going to matter, under the circumstances. He's just a one-off villain in an episode where he doesn't even show up until the last five minutes.

Chris Eccleston just seemed like he was having a hell of a time acting out from under all that makeup and costuming. Malekith doesn't have the excuse of being minor— he's destroying the universe, we really should care about this.

edited 13th Dec '16 1:36:20 PM by Unsung