For the last couple of episodes, many critics have been talking about how Agents of SHIELD was finally starting to turn things around. Despite premiering to incredible numbers and even more hype, it would be hard to classify ABC’s freshman drama as anything but disappointing. Recently, the show has begun to move beyond its early stumbles, but “Seeds” was really the first episode where I began to believe in what the show could be.

Last week, the veil was finally pulled back on the “mystery” of Phil Coulson’s rebirth. I had long suspected that the story behind that mystery would never live up to the hype; “A Magical Place” definitely proved me right. Moving past the “what” and onto the “why” is the only way to save this arc. Learning the truth about Tahiti, Coulson has begun to develop trust issues, specifically with SHIELD. Considering the rumored plot for April’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, beginning to layer in a distrust of SHIELD’s leadership should not come as a surprise.

This episode’s big reveal was a big step up from Coulson; baby Skye was an 0-8-4 with “powers.” May and Coulson’s investigation lead them to a place that I didn’t think SHIELD would go. Whatever special abilities Skye exhibited as a child that pinged SHIELD’s radar have obviously gone dormant, but now that she – and we – know just a little more about her childhood, I doubt that will be the case for long. While no one made a Smallville-esque “no-capes, no-tights” promise, team Mutant Enemy has always sold this show that features regular humans in a superhuman world. Will Skye develop into something that changes that dynamic?

Dylan Minnette’s Donnie Gill (AKA Blizzard) is the latest entry in Agents of SHIELD’s slowly developing Rogue’s Gallery. I found him easily the most interesting thus far. I appreciated the relationship between himself and Fitz. The whole concept of bad seeds, how the SHIELD Academy’s incredibly capable students can go bad is a theme that I hope recurs in this show down the road. Homegrown enemies are generally more interesting  (see: Solider, The Winter). Centipede is obviously the more immediate threat, but putting out the “seeds” for the future is a good thing.

Notes and Quotes

• “Huh. Bucky Barnes.” I know that many are not big fans of these throwaway references to the greater MCU, but I don’t mind them. This one, though, was a subtle one – perhaps too subtle – of a storyline that will become front and center later this spring: the death of Bucky Barnes.
• Did anyone flash to Real Genius when Simmons brought Ward and Skye down to the boiler room?
• I know that Skye’s never been given a last name, but considering her developing backstory, I’m wondering if that might become more relevant.
• I know the Fitz/Simmons pair has been criticized a great deal on the internets, but they’ve been one of my favorite aspects of the show from day one. Their interaction with Ward and the Academy as a whole continued to solidify that.

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Sadly, Agents of SHIELD has not capitalized on the incredible hype the new series had going into its premiere. Using the Marvel Cinematic Universe to launch a film series was an obvious idea in hindsight. The film series has done phenomenally well, and Marvel has such a large library of characters and stories that would easily translate to the small screen. But SHIELD has tried to put its own stake in the ground and create something new.

But – unlike Iron Man 3 – SHIELD hasn’t shied away from what has come before. Phil Coulson’s arc that started in The Avengers has carried through. The team operates in a world that knows of demigods, iron men and green rage monsters. Chitauri artifacts and Extremis injections and Colonel Nick Fury himself have all been a part of the SHIELD story thus far.

But the show has struggled. Keith weighed in a couple of weeks ago, pointing at the lack of compelling characters as one of the show’s main troubles. He’s not wrong – though I don’t think I’ll ever live down my appreciation for Ron Moore’s “characters” line. While personally I am digging Coulson, Melinda May and Jemma Simmons (I’m a sucker for the accent, leave me alone), I think SHIELD has failed to make either Grant Ward or Skye interesting, despite quite a bit of focus early on.

As much as the collective, royal “we” want Agents of SHIELD and bring us a Mutant Enemy production that is both a critical and mainstream success, it is becoming more obvious that Marvel will be measuring the show’s success with additional metrics. The recent news that tie-ins with Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier are on the horizon should not come as a surprise, but how the movies will affect the show — and vice versa — will be interesting to track.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLWsK1ZFunA

When you step back and take the long view of both SHIELD and what we have begun to learn about Captain America, it is obvious that one is driving towards the other. If Winter Soldier is about SHIELD, then Agents of SHIELD has to tell the same story. On one level, that’s really cool: a story that is interwoven between television and multiple movies, all managed by Marvel masterminds Kevin Feige and Joss Whedon.But could that be a little limiting?

Comparisons to Arrow have haunted SHIELD since the pilot, but it seems that the discussion has exploded this week. As much as we want to love SHIELD, there is no question that Arrow is the better show. Even when you look only at the respective shows’ first seasons, the DC property is still clearly superior. I’d like to think that a great deal of that has to do with Arrow’s pace; this week’s episode and everything to do with Sarah Lance proves that the show is adopting the Julie Plec/CW methodology: the pedal to the medal, no-holds-barred embracing of breakneck storytelling. Arrow shares that same DNA with The Vampire Diaries and The Originals and is all the better for it.

But if Agents of SHIELD has a season one endgame defined by where it needs to be for Captain America to work, then that map could become a pair of handcuffs. Feige and Whedon have figured out a way to weave the MCU films together in a nearly seamless way while managing to tell individual stories. It does not feel like that is happening with Agents of SHIELD. Granted, “FZZT” was a step in the right direction – at least the second half – but there is nothing to say that it won’t be another misstep. I’ve got a great deal of faith in Team Whedon, but that currency is wearing a little thin.

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Agents of SHIELD did pretty damn well in its premiere last week. ABC touted its 12.12 million viewers as the best primetime drama premiere since V’s 2009 bow (However, I seem to remember Elementary doing quite well last year, and so does that show’s Wikipedia page). Regardless, any new pilot’s second episode is going to be a much more accurate picture of what the show is going to be. Tonight’s ratings will be equally important; how many people like what they saw and came back for more?

Update: The Fast Overnights are in: SHIELD 8.4 million viewers, down 30% from last week’s 11.9 (both numbers unadjusted). It also lost 26% of its 4.6 share, falling to 3.4. Last year, the only show ABC picked up for its second season, Nashville, lost 25% of its overall viewership from week one to week two.

The marketing got in the way of everything the show’s creative team has been saying from day one. Joss Whedon has compared SHIELD to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “The Zeppo,” which followed Xander on his own adventure, concurrent with a mission that Buffy and the more powerful Scoobies were fulfilling. While being connected to it, SHIELD is mostly going to stand alone from the movies – Sam Jackson’s cameo tonight notwithstanding. For it to be successful, it’s going to have to … but only if audiences don’t skip town before realizing what the show is can be really great.

It is obvious that we are working towards these six individuals becoming the makeshift family that is the touchstone of most of Whedon’s work. But the familiarity with his previous work could become a negative. If Firefly was about solving crimes in a world with superheroes, it would be called Agents of SHIELD. I scoffed at the similarities between Coulson’s “Bus” and Serenity last week, but “0-8-4”’s deeper exploration of the plane makes them harder to ignore. Much more important, though, are the similarities between the crew. There’s no 1-to-1 analogy between the individual characters, but the soul of one is readily apparent in the other.

Notes & Quotes

• “And technically, Skye’s a member of the Rising Tide. She hacked our RSA implementation.” – Ward
  “Twice. On a laptop. Imagine what she she’ll do with our resources.” – Coulson
  “I am. That’s exactly what I’m imagining during this frown.” – Ward
• OK … we’re now on the third “Tahiti/It’s a magical place” bit. Maybe those theories that Tahiti really is a magical place aren’t that far off the mark – or it is to be a big red herring.
• “Usually, one person doesn’t have the solution. But 100 people? With 1% of the solution? That will get it done.” – Skye
• To that guy I got into an argument on reddit a couple of weeks ago about the likelihood of Sam Jackson showing up, I concede, random-internet-guy, your rightness and my wrongness. Bastard.
• In certain circles, there has been a bit of a discussion on whether or not the show and organization should be referred to as SHIELD or S.H.I.E.L.D. For a couple of reasons, most of which don’t really matter to most folks, we are going with the former.

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Unlike most new pilots, ABC and Marvel decided not to provide the press with a screener of the highly anticipated Agents of SHIELD. They did screen the episode a couple times this summer, but most of us were left on the outside of Marvel’s cone of secrecy (Though I’m still not sure I understand the point of restricting access to the pilot once it has been screened publicly). Regardless, SHIELD arrived in fine form tonight, reminding us that Joss Whedon was kicking ass on television long before Marvel came knocking on his door.

A decision that I wasn’t quite sure about was the casting of Ming Na as Melinda May. Despite Na’s underappreciated work on Stargate: Universe, I still have difficulty disassociating her with her work on ER. But those fears were unfounded. While Coulson was definitely the featured player in the pilot, there was something about Na’s performance that sticks out. Coulson brings May along as a way of starting some kind of redemptive arc for the character … even though we don’t know yet what in her past caused her current state of “brokenness.”

One of my biggest problems with the third Iron Man film this summer was that it nearly ignored the events of The Avengers. While Tony Stark suffered from PTSD, we saw very little of how the Chitauri invasion changed the greater world. Thankfully, SHIELD seems determined to fill that gap. From the Avengers “Heroes of New York” to the alien technology left behind by the invaders. I’m looking forward to how the show explores a post-Avengers world. A great deal was revealed to the world during the attack; from aliens to monsters to gods, the game has definitely changed.

Agents of SHIELD represents some of that change. This isn’t the first time a movie franchise has found its way to the small screen, but it might be the first time both mediums have been part of a continuing story in such an elaborate way. Whether or not SHIELD will be as successful as the Marvel Cinematic Universe remains to be seen; the show has some pretty stiff competition, including television’s most watched show in NCIS. Despite going head to head with Agent Gibbs and his team, I have a feeling that Agent Coulson will hold his own.

Notes & Quotes

• I attributed tonight’s episode to Joss, but it is really his uber-talented brother and sister-in-law Jed and Mo Tancharoen that will be handling the showrunning duties.
• It’s not lost on me that Shannon Lucio has been saved from death from George O’Malley on Grey’s Anatomy and now here on SHIELD.
• “What does SHIELD stand for, Agent Ward?” – Maria Hill
  “Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.” – Grant Ward
  “And what does that mean to you?” – Hill
  “It means someone really wanted our initials to spell out SHIELD.” – Ward
• “I don’t think Thor is technically a god.” – Ward
  “Well, you haven’t been near his arms.” – Hill
• “With great power comes … a ton of weird crap that you are not prepared to deal with.” – Skye
• Project Pegasus?
• “She might as well be one of those sweaty cosplay girls crowding around Stark Tower.” – Ward
  “What?!? I would … one time.” – Skye
• “Don’t ever tell me there’s no way! It’s on you; get it done.” – Agent Coulson does not screw around
• It’s not just that SHIELD explores a post-Avengers world, its that it is grounded in the MCU (with all the easter eggs) in ways that Iron Man 3 seemed to want to distance itself from.
• J. August Richards and Cobie Smulders got all of the hype this summer, but the news that Ron Glass (Firefly’s Sheppard Book) has a role stayed oddly under the radar.

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