I like how Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. split its season into multiple sub-books this time -- "Ghost Rider" and "LMD" and "Agents of Hydra" -- across and at the end of which we see that the season's Big Bad Villain wasn't Eli Morrow and it wasn't Holden Radcliffe and it wasn't AIDA. It was the Darkhold.
Just because I can't help pondering pieces of the season's end...
Based on his description of this huge planet-spanning war and the nature of that portal he opened to return to it, I have to wonder if we'll see Robby Reyes and Stephen Strange crossing paths at some future point.
And... was that...
Phil Coulson, Agent of S.W.O.R.D.?
Phil Coulson, Enjoy to the Inhuman Royal Family?
Phil Coulson, Man on the Wall?
Whatever it is, it'll be Phil, so it'll be cool. So... back to work.
The Laurie episode. Where she seems to connect as some semblance of the supporting, re-affirming positive-enabler she once was to just about everyone around her. Watching her accept and leave Nora there was hard. Watching her the entire time she was on that boat (after Nora's "elegant" concept) was harder. She seemed so happy just then, almost peaceful. I really do hope that Jill and Tommy's utterly lovable phone shenanigans were lifeline enough, but... leaving it right then... sigh.
The depth of wow just continues to amass, toward what promises to be the oddest of storms...
Definitely enjoyed the final confrontations and resolution. A little hokeyness with the timing of the satellite decoy-handoff, but I much enjoyed just about everything else. Good stuff, good close to the big two-season story arc.
And there was something extra-satisfying about (1) learning that Shepherd was now being prepped for "enhanced interrogation" at a CIA blacksite and (2) Naz would be performing said interrogation. Well, that, and just the whole idea of neutralizing the beacon by electrocuting Shepherd over and over again. Yeeaaahh.
Then onto the two-years-later scene... I have layers of WTH going on in my head. Why is she there climbing walls and communing? What happened? And what happened, apparently all of the sudden, to the team? And Kurt took enough time away from searching for the team to personally come for Jane? Was there really no other way to get emergency word to her? And the box, and... suddenly the tattoos are all glow-in-the-dark-on-command? Whhaaaaa?? It feels rather off-the-deep-end all of the sudden. To date, the show's been mostly pretty strong in its plotting and planning, so I'm willing to give 'em a chance to flesh this out in the beginning of Season Three, but... I'll just focus on the end of Sandstorm and Shepherd (and that smile on Naz) for now, if that's okay.
I was surprised at how much I missed seeing an un-Mirakuku-maddened Slade Wilson. Our introduction to that concept ("it wore off years ago") was a decent explanation, but much too quick; I'd like to have see that slipped in somehow a few episodes ago, and then Oliver finally deciding to take a hopeful-if-desperate chance on believing in it now. But I can get past that. Seeing Deathstroke back in deadly action, with what must now be a terrible loyalty to doing absolutely everything he can to make life up to OIiver (and probably to Thea, too)... I hope he doesn't just quietly disappear next season. We can't just open that door and immediately forget about it like that...
This show can be so hit and miss. I actually found last episode ("Hole Puncher") pretty decent, a bit of an upswing, kinda fun. Then this one. Some good stuff overall, and the characters themselves are their usual fun, but... lots of sloppy plot-execution bits gluing the whole story together. And supposedly taking out one guard in his cell was enough for Murdoc to slip out of the entire Supermax prison?
Sigh.
Pondering whether to tune back in next season...
Is it too much that I almost want Kirkman to designate Agent Hannah Watts's new office as "The Division"?
Now that President Tom Kirkman knows that the terrorist conspiracy wanted him in position as the Sole Survivor and new President, maybe he should hang out with Kurt Weller and compare notes. #SandstormDidIt
I was kinda wondering if we might sometime later see Persephone again. Julia's little sparks trick at the end makes me wonder that more.
I'm just hoping that Winn's new friend doesn't turn out to be some sort of evil plant. Not that that wouldn't work story-wise, but that that approach is just too overused, and that, from what little we've seen so far, she has some potential to be more interesting than that...
Feels like some turning points for Will and Katie: they're going to have some fine-line juggling to do going forward to keep themselves (and the kids) out of serious danger. And I'm not so sure how Maddie'll react if/when they do get caught, or whether Nolan'll support her at all if she tries to help them.
Meanwhile... What the heck are those pods for? And what's so big that those furtive labor camp prisoners think will "change everything"?
Always interesting to see how many threads the writers have woven together for this season, and how they'll all end up tugging each other as they unfold...
Did anyone else find the DOSA agents, in particular, to push the campiness of the show quite firmly over the top? (I know the show leans toward the slightly-goofy campiness, but even so this seems overdone.) I'm hoping that that isn't a new trend for the show -- the idea that government agencies have noticed and started to react to what's going on makes sense and should happen, but those charged with said task shouldn't come off as overdramatized morons. (And they could certainly come up with a better name.) Hoping that line improves...
Woowww.
This was definitely not the season for successfully making deals with devils.
So much thickening of plot, so much dangling over cliffs at the end, so much to look forward to next season.
IMO, in some ways, this may have been one of Supergirl's better episodes so far. So much going on -- alien parasite, J'onn J'onzz's injury and the angst over the not-quite-a-match blood-transfusion (and what that might do to him later), James's dangerous new venture, Mon-El's budding self-discovery, Alex's exploding self-discovery -- and, for the most part, all nicely woven together.
My one gripe was how quickly and easily Dr. Jones (and, BTW, I can't say that name seriously without imagining a fedora and a whip) was brought from the Antarctic outpost to the National City DEO office without any real mention of clearing him of contaminants. Not even some sort of throwaway line that he'd gone through something to medically clear him. It looked like: scary five-millennia-old disease wiped out his whole research team but him, and we'll just pop him right back into a large densely populated city and examine him there. Uhhh, no. That could have been treated better. And much of what ensued depended on that.
But other than that... wow. I think we'll be seeing much more interestingness from just about everyone in the near future.
Fun stuff overall.
Favorite moment, when Barry's talking to Jesse about a lesson, powers, and precision:
"When you enter a new environment, you got to case every inch of it. You never run in blind...."
I was immediately thinking the obvious, appreciating the back-reference to who said those same words to Barry just a couple years ago, and--
"Oh my God. I've become Oliver."
--thank you!
Mack: "Did two fire dudes just drop into a warehouse full of fireworks?"
Coulson: "You had to see that coming."
Niiiice.
Fun Legends twist on a classic sort of plotline. Though I did appreciate the Yamashiro family name-drop at the end. Niiice.
Wow. When Tom Keen goes into something, he really does go all in.
A very different sort of episode than any Blacklist has put out so far, but... wow. Redd.
Turns out there're other reasons for at least some of this last season's choppy abbreviated feel: https://ew.com/tv/the-flash-showrunner-reveals-everything-cut-from-final-season/ :disappointed:
My name is Jack Bauer. For twenty months, I was stranded in a Chinese political prison with only one goal: survive. Now I will fulfill my President's pleading wish: to use every skill at my disposal and bring down those who are attacking my country. To do this, I must become someone else. I must become something else.
Well, I suppose if Mr. Nobody was going to bolster his post-revenge-high mood-crash by getting stoned on blue Curaçao and then stumble-magic his drunken way into a doomed corner (on Danny Street in a psychoactive paintingspace with... them) and then, at his desolate lowest, get pep-talk coached into wresting back enough narrative control to guide everyone else out while forgetting to account for himself...
As I now think back over the many weirdly assorted elements of this episode, they do fit together into a chaotically odd but functional collage. And, think about it: if the seriously wacky-weird world that is Doom Patrol is going to escalate all the layers of wacky it's built thus far into an appropriately wacky and intense climax (too soon?), that does sound about right, doesn't it?
OTOH, as the credits were first rolling, I did have a minute or so of "what in Beebo's name did I just watch?!" going on there.
The improbability drive was working overtime with this one.
After all that, I now have to wonder... Did Flynn lie to Wyatt about who killed Jessica (and Gilliam was just taking an opportunity to mess with Wyatt), or was Flynn trying to show Wyatt something more insidious (and very not-yet-obvious) about Rittenhouse's machinations, or...
Or perhaps Time just doesn't like to be forced into a paradox -- such as Wyatt going back in time to erase the event that formed his motivation to go back in time -- and so has a tendency to Nudge Things in ways that will keep paradoxes from forming, like the barrage of occurrences repeatedly getting in Wyatt's way of distracting Claire and Joel, something else killing Jessica that night to take the place of Gilliam doing so, etc..
And Lucy getting over her own personal "Nooooo! That's not True! That's impossible!" moment and confronting her father like that...
Redd just keeps unfolding new ways to mess up his own world, doesn't he?
(Knew that was coming back to him in some form; looks like it ain't gonna be a small one.)
So much depth of portrayal, all to support and frame the core realizations of the episode which can be summed up with:
"We fucked up with Nora.
and
"Take this thing out of me." "Why?" So that we can never come back to this place again."
This seemed more like a final redemption and righting of Kevin himself than it did of the world-threat Dad believed was coming. (I suppose the implication afterwards is that there was no eventful significance to the seven-year anniversary after all.)
In that sense, this episode also bookends very nicely with the next...
[after watching a short film depicting the newly supercharged I'm-a-real-girl-now Aida learning that Fitz still isn't that into her and having the mother of all meltdown tantrums turning her onto her new everyone-will-burn path]
And this, kids, is why we never allow inhuman children to go through the Terrigen Mist process before they have accumulated significant formative experience learning to deal with the ups and downs of life. Ever. Right, Agent May?
Oh, and, after Cat's rousing fight-back speech to the whole of National City, did anyone else feel flashes of last year's fight-back speech in Star City that led to the taking down of Damien Darhk?
There were definitely some weak plot-connectors in this one, arguably sloppily pasted together bits that felt like someone belatedly realized that the season is almost over and we're running out of time and we have to jam the President in there and this and that and...
The whole Air Force One sequence, the duh-what-did-you-think-was-going-to-happen shooting down of its escorts and then it. Sigh.
I appreciate that Kara wants to give Mon-El's mother a chance to surrender rather than die, but... This is Rhea. Stop seeing her as Mon-El's mother. She's not going to surrender or fight fair or do anything but Evil her Evillest Evil, more like a humanity-threatening disease than anything else, and reeaaally needs to be treated accordingly.
On the other hand...
Note to self: Whenever telling Alex Danvers to meet me outside, be sure to be very clear about what I mean by that. (And that parting shot... #like.)
And... "Do your thing, Artoo." Niiice.
"Uh, anyway, listen, if you'll excuse me, I gotta go find Rene and remove his head from his ass." —Quentin Lance
It would seem that one calls Oswald a "freak" very much at one's own risk.
Why do I feel that Sylvia is going to exemplify why the Poison Room is so carefully guarded?
