Thursday, September 22, 2016

Oh, The Metahumanity! (9/20)

FEEL MY SADS
The fall superhero season officially kicks off with Agents of SHILD's fourth season premiere. Luke Cage next week, then the CW kicks into gear in October and I have to decide about Legends of Tomorrow for real.

Agents of SHIELD: "The Ghost" (10% Stupid)

This is the kind of first episode I expected after last season's teased time jump. We check in with everyone and see where they are, and introduce the new elements of the season.

What I wasn't expecting was to start the first episode with Ghost Rider. Just BAM GHOST RIDER. Daisy, now fully Quake and doing the vigilante hunt-down of the Watchdogs thing, encounters him when they go after the same group of thugs. Over the course of the episode, she tracks him down, and fights him at the end. This portion of the plot comprises pretty much the entirety of the stupid, as Daisy gets ao overly sexy suitup sequence to start the episode, and gets the "hero has a sads and a deathwish" trope at the end. Feh.

The rest of the team has been broken up and shifted around to parts of New Shield under New Director, and none of them are happy about it. Coulson and Mac aren't supposed to be going after Daisy but are anyway. May is training and leading strike teams and enabling Coulson and Mac. Simmons is essentially infiltrating the new Director by gaining his trust, which pits her against the rest of the team who are just garden-variety rebelling. Fitz is mostly moping and helping Weird Robot Doctor build his sexy naked Life Model Decoy, Ada. Yoyo is grabbing Mac's dick, working with Daisy, and is chafing against the Sokovia Accords.

And then there's the plot. A mysterious ghostly women who possesses people and drives them crazy or makes them kill each other. Some vague version of Triads try to get a box with her in it not knowing she's in it and she escapes and bad things happen and SHIELD captures the Triads and she's probably possessing May.

That's a LOT of moving parts. The episode handles them competently, but there's so much going on very little of it has a chance to shine. Hopefully, with the scene setting out of the way, we can start letting the plot and characters breathe a little and remind us why we care about them.

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