Agents of SHIELD, Season 2, Episode 7: the Writing on the Wall
Finally, after a rather wobbly episode and the big untwist about Simmons' Hydra-ness that went absolutely nowhere, we get back into the plot. Both the more interesting sides of the plot: Coulson's big alien carving thing, and the whole Grant Ward/Hydra side, are explored here, which is neat.
So, of course, it stars mainly Phil Coulson, which is nice. For supposedly being the lead actor of the show Coulson doesn't really get much love lately beyond 'oh I'm carving and maybe going crazy'. In a sense that's what kickstarts this part of the plot, since Coulson's carvingness is getting worse, and Skye finds out about some lady, Rebecca Stephens, that was murdered with the alien carvings etched to her body... and Coulson recognizes her as a SHIELD agent, and they find out that she's supposed to be dead. Do like the wham line about how this seems to be just a psychopath's murder (we get the chilling description how the victim died of pain, not blood loss) and then when Skye says about how she used to be dead, oh damn the Tahiti project is larger than we thought.
As it turns out, Coulson has salvaged the mind-memory machine from Raina and Fitz-Simmons had worked on it off-screen for a while, which isn't that big of a surprise, and he intends to dig inside his own head to search for what the hell's going on and why he recognized the murdered lady. I think it's partially driven by his own guilt for being involved in the Tahiti project, and partially driven by his own compulsion to find the answers. He's being shown to starting to unravel and is generally fraying apart, and I do like how newcomer Mack is actually pointing it out.
I'm also a bit weirded out by just how the memory machine operates, and why it's only showing memories selectively and stuff, but I guess it has to do with Coulson's brain being completely fucked up by Tahiti.
A good chunk of the episode is spent in a quasi-flashback as Coulson returns to the past where he's overseeing the Tahiti program... and there's the big reveal that the Tahiti project has been done before. Multiple times. It's a nicely-crafted set of scenes as we go from these agents dying from cancer and whatnot all thanking Coulson for giving them a second chance, and as Coulson tries to describe the scene, one of the women starts going up as if possessed and carving the alien carvings all over the table. What follows is a series of pretty disturbing images as the Tahiti patients just babble and shout and drool and hit the table and we've got this woman's wailing constantly in the background and when this crazy woman tearing at her long hair is being forcibly pulled away by the guards it looks like something straight out of a horror movie. Truly unsettling.
And then there's the scene where someone's on the operating table and I was led to believe it's Coulson, reliving his brain being picked apart by the Tahiti project, but no, apparently every single one of the revived agents all had their brains picked apart by this crazy CGI robot... which looks a lot less fake-CGI than when it first appeared in season one.
And then mixed in-between the crazy people, there's the tattooed man from last episode, who we know was the one behind all the murders. He seems to be the only stable one who doesn't go crazy, but we know that's not the case. We get a scene of Coulson discussing with another SHIELD agent I don't think we've seen before about shutting down the project, and the other SHIELD agent makes the compromise of wiping their memories, allowing them to live a normal life. And like the little we see from the painter lady in the beginning of the episode, she seems to be doing relatively well. I mean she's still drawing the alien markings and calling it 'a Magical Place', but she doesn't seem to be acting as if she's harboring an evil angry demon from hell or going completely mental like Coulson was.
It's a bit of a hard choice, and we see how the tattooed man, Sebastian Derek, go all 'Coulson, you don't need to erase me' but in reality he's just as crazy as the others, if not moreso considering he's carving on his own body. We see him as he's dragged away screaming and cursing at the world and basically going all 'I want to know I want to know' or something along those lines, which is like a madness mantra to both Sebastian... and Coulson, as it turns out, since we get this powerful scene as the Sebastian in Coulson's mind transforms to a second Coulson ranting about how he needs to know the answer and everything. He's basically like a crazed drug addict because after he got out of the memory machine he proceeds to lock Skye up in Ward's old prison cell and head off to catch Sebastian all by his lonesome.
The confrontation between Sebastian and Coulson is not really anything to write home about, but Coulson's heart is definitely in the right place since he's more concerned about protecting the mindwiped agent, Hank Thompson, than finding the answers. I mean, there's the point where he pressures Thompson about whether he's seen the drawings, but he moves on quickly after that.
I thought it was rather obvious from the very first shot of him with that gigantic train model that that is the full form of the alien carvings.
And it is! As the confrontation between Coulson and Sebastian ensues, Sebastian tells Coulson that pain is the way to unlock his own memories so he reverts to his original, psychotic self, and he just tries to cut so deep. Both Coulson and Sebastian are pretty crazy at this point, though Coulson obviously more sane than the villain. We get a little tense face-off, but once they've seen the true, completed form of the carvings they both mellow out.
We get an apology from Coulson for focusing too much about the alien carvings without telling the team what it really is all about, but it's all and well since it happens to tie in with the whole Diviner-Hydra thing.
All throughout the episode, the Shield is divided into two groups, one handling the Coulson situation and another hunting down Grant Ward. Skye gets the most screentime and characterization for Team Coulson, being the one that interacts the most with Coulson, but beyond being ever-loyal and making a couple of deadpan jokes and the prison scene, I don't think there's really much to talk about. I guess she's kind of trusting enough in Coulson's judgement to use the machine? Though I suspect a harsh talk-down from May once she gets back. I think the scene where Mack goes 'man, a half-alien' and Skye just makes an awkward face also warrants a mention. Oh, and obviously the nonchalant way she goes 'hail hydra' at the end.
Fitz, Simmons and Mack make up the rest of Team Coulson. Simmons gets the least screentime, being mostly functional -- do the autopsy, Simmons. Handle Coulson's vital signs, Simmons. And there's a bunch of moments where she makes little jealous glances at Fitz and Mack, and I think she makes a sarcastic comment at Mack one time? Girl's jealous of Mack taking her man, which is funny because that's what Fitz was worried about in season one, just with a different black dude. Also, I do like how Simmons basically does what Coulson, Skye and May did in three or four episodes in under a minute, deducing practically everything about how the carvings, hypergraphia, Garrett and GH-325 were connected. I think if Coulson had brought in Simmons instead of Skye, the mystery might be solved a lot earlier.
Mack's basically the only sane man in the team, playing along with everything he's ordered to do but not particularly happy about the whole insanity. There's a hilariously stupidly incompetent moment where Fitz and Mack are playing on Koenig's X-Box while Skye is just being trapped in the cell... where did Koenig disappear off to, by the way? Did I miss something? We get the fun moment where they apparently waltz in and steal a corpse off-screen. Fitz goes on about how an agent's memories cannot be deleted, they can only be hidden or archived or something, going on about backup memories... and the camera lingers on his face long enough to be some kind of foreshadowing.
Hopefully Fitz makes a discovery, or maybe Simmons will take it upon herself to find that discovery. The two haven't exactly been handled well all throughout season two, beyond the big bomb in episode one that Simmons has left, which, as I kept mentioning, doesn't amount to jack shit. Maybe Fitz will use the GH serum on himself? Certainly would be an interesting development.
Anyway, the carvings are apparently a map to some kind of super-complex alien city, and it's curious just what the blue alien is. The alien is apparently really old, predating the Pyramids, so how is that going to tie in to everything? I mean, the Asgardians and the Jotuns have visited Earth before, and there's the Ravagers from Guardians of the Galaxy... would certainly be interesting to see how this will tie in to the whole overreaching plot. Is he a Kree? A Jotun? Or whatever race Yondu is from, which isn't the Kree but he's blue-skinned anyway? Or something new?
We also get a reminder that the Tahiti project was built in case of a fallen Avenger, so maybe that's a way out if Captain America or someone does actually die in Age of Ultron? Extremely interested in all these stuff, though knowing Agents of SHIELD, we probably won't get to find out about a lot of them until the halfway mark
The other team, made up of May, Mockingbird, Hunter and Triplett, are hunting down Grant Ward. Triplett finally gets some dialogue and some extra things to do beyond just standing in the background, which is cool. We get a scene between Mockingbird and Ward on the bust that drags on a bit too long, and kind of plays down Mockingbird's superspy status by having her not turn a page... and that hilarious scene with Hunter in a cowboy backup... I guess Bobbi's being deliberately subtly misleading to get Ward to be suspicious and therefore let his guard down from the second agent? There's otherwise nothing remarkable from any of the SHIELD agents here, though.
Grant Ward gets the biggest spotlight as we are left to wonder just what his big agenda is. Initially he meets up with Sunil Bakshi in a bar, talking about how he can bring Bakshi close enough to Coulson to put a bullet in his head... and instead of working together with Hydra again, Ward apparently kills everyone present, offscreen, and leaves Bakshi with 'For Coulson' on his mouth for May to find. It's a funny scene, I grant you. Pun not intended.
We get a few more nods to how Von Strucker is higher up the Hydra food chain than Whitehall, which has been a question that's bugging me... why are there two Hydra leaders? Now we know. Baron Wolfgang Von Strucker is like absolute supreme commander of Hydra, and Daniel Whitehall, the man from the past, is second in command to him, just a bit more active at the moment.
I thought the scene with Ward talking to the mother-and-child ran on a bit too long, but it shows just how Ward, and in extension his actor, can put up that mask that fooled his team and the audience for half of a season.
The stinger reveals that Ward is gunning for Big Brother Ward, of course, which doesn't really come as a surprise, and seems to deliver Bakshi for... reasons? I mean, one of it is so that he can give Skye a call like the creepy-ass stalker that he is, but I'm curious to see just where the show-writers will take Ward after this.
Overall a nice step-up after a series of relatively disappointing episodes. I do like how the constant theme of a 'missing piece' is simply the addition of a third dimension. I just hope all this stuff being built up over time doesn't all fall apart when the big revelations start to come.
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