Agents of SHIELD S03E03 Review: Juggling Multiple Plots

Agents of SHIELD, Season 3, Episode 3: A Wanted (In)Human

Agents of SHIELD’s biggest problems that so plagued the universally panned season two’s first half is that it tries so hard to juggle multiple plot threads… which is great! Multiple stories running at the same time only serve to make this a richer show as a whole. The problem is its insistence to try and weave everything into this one big overreaching web when, well, some plot threads need to be kept separate. This episode does show that the writers do learn from their mistakes, thankfully.

We’ve got several main plot lines running concurrently here, the two main ones being SHIELD and ACTU competing in getting to the Inhumans, in this case poor Lincoln Campbell, who’s on the run – all the while Coulson and Rosalind Price are making deals to not make the two ostensibly good guy organizations at each other’s throats. The second main plot is May and Hunter trying their (still idiotic, IMO) plan to infiltrate Grant Ward’s Hydra and assassinate the dog-killing motherfucker. All the while, we get hints here and there of Simmons’ recovery… or lack thereof, a mystery that’s going to be built up across the next few episodes.

And, well, this episode feels relatively like a filler episode. The May/Hunter Fight Club scenes are the ones that suffer the most, and while none of it are the fault of the actors – Hunter is a funny sarcastic dick like always; May is a no-nonsense badass like always – the amount of screentime they get to a relatively small payoff… that little brutal fight that Hunter had with his buddy, who we’ve never seen before and turned out to be evil… it went for a bit too long and honestly I’m not sure what the purpose of it is. Yes, Hunter’s obsessed with getting to Ward and would take bodily harm just for the chance to avenge Bobbi, but did we really need a half episode’s worth of screentime to have this brutal, pointless Fight Club scene? It really felt pointless. An interesting setup and concept, of course, but one that ultimately fell flat.

Also, did we really need to have the subtitled drunken-accented speech between Hunter and Hydra Man take so long? One or two lines would be enough to get the joke across. Jeez.

The Lincoln bits were far stronger, thankfully. I’ve never really found Lincoln interesting when he’s just a generic nice guy who has no idea of all the evil shit going down in the Inhuman society, but now, as an Inhuman on the run who refuses help from SHIELD… In this episode Lincoln seeks refuge with one of his old buddies, who ends up looking at the TV and seeing that Lincoln is a wanted alien or something. Granted Lincoln really should’ve tried to explain that, oh, I dunno, he’s been framed or something, and he did try to leave peacefully and only aimed for the bat, but the shock still managed to kill his friend and that is absolutely fucking tragic. I really felt for poor Lincoln in that scene.

Also, as someone from the medical profession, the fact that the normally reliable Hollywood Defibrillation™ doesn’t work at all is a nice realistic bonus.

And when Team Skye contacts Lincoln – through a tracker, another betrayal from Lincoln’s point of view – SHIELD ended up being forced to submit to the ACTU because of a deal between Coulson and Price. There is, of course, no way that Lincoln would know that Coulson’s hand was forced to protect Skye, but I thought that this particular conflict was relatively well done. Poor Lincoln. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the trauma he’s suffered through this episode would be the trigger for him becoming a villain, or at least an antagonist, in a future episode.

The bits with Coulson and Price… are good, actually, but I honestly expected something more. Yes, they’re quipping and they’re friendly while pulling out their hidden assets and information and bonding over cars and making deals and telling their men in the field to stand down and do this and that, but honestly it all felt like just setup for them working together than feeling like an actual confrontation...  though I honestly would prefer SHIELD and ACTU to be working together (through clenched teeth in Skye’s case) because this would be like the third time we have the ‘two good spy organizations fighting each other’ plot line I this series. Price’s relative inexperience in dealing with metahuman situations gets picked apart by Coulson, and while he does come off as a bit too smug in pointing out the ACTU’s mistakes, I do like how Price was actually receptive to him. On the same side, people! And I don’t want a rehash of that. The “eyes up here” joke really made me laugh, though.

There’s a bit of Skye confronting Coulson for taking what are arguably rash and less ethical choices during the conflict, but again it felt less like a confrontation and just another conversation. It just feels like all of this is just given way for the status quo of the next few episodes of SHIELD and ACTU working together. I dunno. Pacing problems, I guess, which really could’ve been fixed by shortening the Hydra Fight Club scenes and giving more screentime to Coulson, Skye and Price.

The little screentime we got with Skye and Mack bonding and playing video games together after Sky got frustrated with Coulson is pretty nciely done. Mack's been relegated to basically Skye's voice of reason and the two are, well, basically joined by thehip since they're in a team together, and it certainly makes Mack far more likable than him just being a sourpuss. 

Small problem, yeah, but does the ACTU commander have to be an obvious douchebag? It just feels like a childishly easy way to make the ACTU unlikable.

Before I forget to mention it, there's a fair amount of great visual effects for Lincoln too, particularly the one near the start where he pumped that cable tower full of electricity to rain sparks down on the ACTU mooks… that was pretty awesome. Less flashy was when he shut down that bus, but still awesome.

Simmons is struggling a bit to return to normalcy, and we get a lot of really nice scenes between Fitz and Simmons… well, Fitz. Simmons, being broken, mostly just cries. That scene at the restaurant with Simmons just breaking down under all the kindness really works well. Though when Bobbi ended up confronting her being suspicious and mucking around with research, she apparently wants to go back to the planet. Oh, Agents of SHIELD, you jackass, you. And here I thought we were going to get a relatively drama-free resolution to the Simmons arc! It makes sense, though, since you can’t just have all the weird portal and planet thing and not actually build on it. So it’s definitely going to build up to a return to the hell planet, and depending on how it’s handled it could be either a really awesome event that ties into the bigger story of the season, or end up a gigantic futile distraction. We’ll see.