TV Review: The Flash

If you've seen Arrow, you know the premise before you even start the episode.  Barry Allen, CSI, is struck by lightning that had been altered by the explosion of a super-collider. It throws him through shelves of chemicals, just for good measure.



When Barry awakes from this, it's nine months later, the woman he grew up with, Iris, is dating the perfect cop, the world has moved on ..... and Barry can move faster than a ray of light.



The interesting part of the show is how they've decided to develop their rogues gallery. The explosion that created him unleashed all sorts of theoretical elements upon the city, warping and shaping various and sundry people in multiple different ways. It's a nice, simple way of pulling this off, and much better than what was initially done on Smallville -- which, if you remember, consisted of radiation from kryptonite creating a host of different mutations on parts of the population -- which was a cheap way of turning Smallville from Kansis into the Hellmouth from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.



The short version is that I like this series.  Character traits are quickly and easily set up. Barry is basically a good kid with a backstory that originally had him as the police department's Mulder. We've got the tinkerer, the misanthrope, the mentor (who's looking a little sinister by the end of the episode) and the love interest who friend-zoned Barry in the first three minutes of the episode.



And there are enough little details to satisfy most people. During a monologue, Barry Allen declares himself the Fastest Man Alive, the tag on half his comic books.  The news station is channel 52 -- like the New 52 of the DCU.  There are minor cops brought in from all over the comic books, One of the reporters is a Linda Park, who married Kid Flash in the comics.  Barry's father is played by the actor from the original 1990 Flash tv show.  Ferris air, of Green Lantern fame, makes an appearance.



There's also a giant gorilla cage broken in the aftermath of the explosion. It's labelled "Grodd." If you've read the comics, I don't need to explain. If you haven't, there's no way I can explain it without it sounding stupid.



The short version: I liked this show. The cast aren't as deep as I would have liked, but it's only the pilot. As it stands right this minute, I'll happily watch the rest of the show. But since this is from the same team that brought you Arrow, we can only expect that things are going to get much better from here.

Bringing Harry Dresden to life, @DragonCon

Remember when I mentioned that The Dresden Files was a tv show?



Paul Blackthorn, currently on Arrow, played Dresden in the TV show. I think Jim Butcher did an admirable job of not going postal.



If you're wondering what I'm talking about, you can refer to previous DragonCon reports, and listen to some of his hesitancy when answering questions about the show itself below.

Breakfast with Saul Rubinek and Warehouse 13 @DragonCon, 2014

The show was fun if you could turn off your brain and just watch it.  Saul Rubinek, though, is a character actor I've enjoyed for years. I also saw Saul Rubinek at breakfast in the Hilton buffet every morning, and I swear he wasn't breaking character.

TV Review: The pilots of the new season, Gotham, Madam Secretary, and more

Some of you might be wondering why it took so long to get some of these DragonCon vides and other blog posts up and running.  Well, I'll tell you. I've been doing a lot of reviews over at The American Journal.  Yes, those people who let me rant and rave and generally carry on cranky.



Anyway, if you've been wondering about some of my rantings and ravings about some of the latest in television watching, here are some links you might be amused by.

.



Gotham: In short .... was I watching a particularly depraved episode of Criminal Minds? I reviewed 1.5 episodes, and felt dirty.



The Pilot, and second episode of Madam Secretary: I've seen worse.  Also better.  At the end of the day, I don't like these people. The writers have some witty banter, but they don't know anything about the political process, or how things work. Period. Avoid.



How to get away with Murder:  This is the worse. More of the same from writer-producer Shonda Rhimes, whose characters are as morally and ethically bankrupt as in her other shows.



Scorpion: This was fun. Just fun. One of the better new shows.



Forever: Also up there as a good new show.



Mysteries of Laura: It's holding up.



Why am I only reviewing six new shows? Because those were the new shows that interested me that aired in September. The October ones are coming up.  However, since the new shows of October are coming up as late as the 24th, don't hold your breath.

Fall TV? Already?

This must have been an interesting season of television in order for things to have gone so very, very strange. Usually, I don't get commercials for the new fall shows kicking around until August. That includes the mid-season replacements.



And while I liked more than a few shows this season -- and I'll review those a little later -- some of these look like fun. And between Arrow, Flash, Gotham, and Constantine, DC looks like it's going to go toe-to-toe with Marvel on television. You want to place money on who's going to win?

Coming this Fall.

THE FLASH  (The CW)





Oh, all right. Then there's the extended version.









GOTHAM (Fox)



This makes up for the poor, Smallville marketing Fox has subjected us to, lately.





GRACEPOINT (Fox)



It seems that Fox has decided to follow up on limited run series, after the 13-episode run of Sleepy Hollow. I'm only in it for David Tenant.





TRANSPORTER



I could never get into the series. And while I like Statham well enough, I was never his biggest fan. The tv show looks like fun though.







THE LIBRARIANS

This is a "Winter" release.... Yes, I liked the original tv films.  Yes, I'm such a nerd.

Suffer, Jim Butcher, Suffer

Author Jim Butcher, creator of The Dresden Files, is a fan of making his characters suffer.  His hero, Harry Dresden, is usually being beaten up, or having his home / office / car destroyed, and we won't even touch his love life. In fact, when a panel he was on at DragonCon was asked about making characters suffer, he leapt for the microphone, he was so eager to answer that.



When The Dresden Files was turned into a half-assed tv show starring Paul Blackthorne, it was a train wreck -- casting issues, scripting issues, money issues, and the issue that it looked nothing like the novels.



When something similar happened with author Clive Cussler's book Raise the Titanic! when it had been turned into a film, he later went to see Raiders of the Lost Ark, and wept, because that's what his movie should have been like.



And then this happened.







Somewhere, I think Jim Butcher might be crying a little inside....or going into complete homicidal rage. Either one....

The Winter Soldier Bigfoots Agents of SHIELD. It Gets Better.

Yay.  Marvel's Agents of SHIELD has finally gotten really interesting. And I don't mean an individual episode, I mean the entire series, several of the characters who weren't before, and the writing in general.



How did we get here? And better yet, where do we go from here?



SPOILERS FOR CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER AND AGENTS OF SHIELD



So, I was talking with Matt Bowman, the Novel Ninja, and he noted.

Matt: Agents finally woke up and realized "hey, we've had most of a season without real character growth. What up wit dat?"


Me: I think it was "Hey, we can't do anything really because Cap2 is going to come in and step on us like Godzilla. Let's do NOTHING until Cap2 comes out. Hail Hydra"  [Best use of Gary Schandling ever]


Matt: I need to write a blog post on it and then link to your argument on the subject. 


It then occurred to me that I should probably have an argument on the subject.

Obviously, you know where parts of this is going. After an initial start that I felt was kinda positive, they had a steady downward slide, especially when compared to other shows. What was the excuse for Agents of SHIELD's piss poor performance?



"We didn't want to have a Marvel movie tie in series. It needed to build up to that."



And yet, nothing happened until last week's episode, which was a direct tie-in with the new Captain America film. Nothing.  No character development, no character, nothing.  The best episode before that?  THE TIE-IN WITH THOR: THE DARK WORLD! The episode that happened the week after the DVD came out!

And they were "building up to" Hydra as the primary villain? Really? Hydra came out of NOWHERE on this show.  There was no buildup, no hint, no whisper, nothing that indicated that it had survived WW2. The closest they got to Hydra was episode two, where they found a Hydra weapon in Brazil, ripping off a 1970s novel and film, The Boys from Brazil. And it was such a throwaway episode that I found it painful.



Ooooo, but this was the plllaaannnn.



No, Jeph Loeb, head of Marvel television, you don't get to pretend you had any idea what was going on. Chekov's gun says that you have to show a hint of a plot point before you can fire it, and you didn't show us anything aside from some crappy tinker toys. I have been told that they knew about Hydra since Day Two.





Here's what's going to happen. I'm going to tell you exactly what goes down over the remaining five or so episodes. Ready?  Almost everything that you've seen over the course of this season will make a brief appearance. The Hydra ray-gun from Brazil, the ice-machine guy from the academy, a few lab experiments from "centipede" (which was obviously not-AIM, but now they're going to be Hydra), will all be whipped-out of the Hydra toolkit. The writers and creators will point to these things and say "See! See! We said we had a plan! Really we did!"



Fertilizer! Biofuel! And other variations of crap! Standard Marvel doomsday weapons do not require a whole origin story. That is not a plan! That is not any kind of a plan. That's padding, and hoping that they accept it as a plan.

If there were a real "plan," someone would have invested us in making Agent tall dark and wooden (Ward) a likable person, so when he turned traitor, we would have cared. Instead, they gave him a creepy sex-buddy status with a woman old enough to be his mother, and gave him completely inappropriate feelings towards the woman he's mentoring (teacher-student relationships don't work that way), and somehow we're supposed to care when he exhibits something like feelings towards her? (It's hard to tell, he doesn't emote well... or at all).



For the record, I've had people tell me that they can reverse Ward turning traitor. No, they really can't. He just stone-cold murdered the highest-ranking member of SHIELD. There's no way to spin that unless Victoria Hand faked her death too, and it makes no sense to do that, and it's officially overused at this point.



The original maxim of Chekov's gun is that if you show a gun in act one, you have to fire it by act three; conversely, if you fire a gun in act three, you must show it in act one.  You want to bet that they're going to just take that literally, and it's the gun from episode two? That's where my money is. There has not been a hint of Hydra outside of that lousy gun.



Like I said, this isn't a plan.  At best, it's padding.



The closest they had to advanced planning has been writing in an obvious replacement for Ward -- who is, of course, a young hip black fellow, in an obvious attempt to answer the critics who said that Agents of SHIELD was too white. The only reason that works thus far is because the character, Triplett, is a fun, charming, likable guy who has more personality than any two of the series regulars put together.



At the end of the day, I'm finally encouraged by and looking forward to episodes of Agents of SHIELD. I'm even semi-enthused about season two.



Oh, you didn't realize they were renewed? Yup. They are. And, now that Heroes is being rebooted, maybe Jeph Loeb will go back to NBC, Joss Whedon will finish Avengers 2 and actually do something for Agents of SHIELD.



I can see it now. Save the cheerleader, save Agents of SHIELD.

Review: the tv season thus far

This is going to be a little odd, but this review was inspired by... well, the fact that we have such bloody good television on right now. And I mean surprisingly good, with strong writing, tight plots, deep universes, and intelligent character moments that jump up and bite you.

Walk with me through my television viewing.

Arrow: Where can I start with this show? The writing is great on the character level, the episode level, the season level and the series level (they obviously have a plan here, and it shows).  I started out thinking that this was going to be incredibly weak.  I mean, Oliver Queen? The comic book version was the uber-Leftist twin of Batman who dressed like he was rejected from a Robin Hood remake. The television show, on the other hand ... yikes, what don't they do? This season (#2) has, so far, given every supporting character and guest star some great moments, from flashes of intellect, deductive reasoning and sheer bad-assery (that's a word, really); we've also had appearances by Solomon Grundy, the rise of Deathstroke and Barry Allen, and Ra's al-Ghul has managed to deeply effect the show just by the mention of his name. There is very much a DC universe out there, and it's all out to get Oliver Queen.



And then there's....[more below the break]

Agents of SHIELD: The only weak link in the chain.  You can read my longer review of this show, but it boiled down to "cautiously optimistic." Almost nothing has changed since my initial review, except for some character story lines that are a little strange, and one really strong story that "tied in" to Thor: The Dark World by cleaning up the film's aftermath, then coincidentally handling an Asgardian threat that pops up at the exact same time while also having nothing whatsoever to do with the events of the actual film.



And then, because apparently someone decided that this needed sexing up, someone wrote a love affair between the young hotshot spy (played by Brett Dalton) and the Veteran operative (Ming-Na Wen). It wouldn't bother me as much if it was more like a May-October romance instead of a March-November one (he is 28, she is 50). Now, I don't necessarily have a problem with dating someone older. I'm currrently seeing someone who's 11 years older than I am. A 22 year age difference, though, is when I have issues. (When the actress was first on ER in 1993, he was 7 years old).



As for the rest of the deep, character-rich Marvelverse .... actually, it's starting to piss me off with how little there is of the Marvel universe. I want to know how much this has to do with Jeph Loeb being the same silly screw up he was on Heroes, and how much this is Marvel studios insisting on holding back comic characters for ... wait for it ... NetFlix! After the awesomeness that is Arrow, AoS is pissing me off with it's cliche` characters, its weak overall story arc, the cheap and obvious attempt to insert romantic tension, and its inability to incorporate the Marvelverse. Joss Whedon's name has been slapped on this as a selling point, but it's obvious he's not involved in any of the writing, the characters, or anything about AoS, really.

Note to Marvel: Agent Coulson does NOT hold a tv show together all by himself.

Almost Human. This was a straight-up surprise.  The "cop with cyborg partner" has been done on tv before, but this one is surprisingly well thought-out.  There may be an overall plot, but they're not pushing it, and they've managed to make some interesting "new" crimes with science fiction spins to them. Selling organs on the black market? How about mechanical hearts that have been taken from corpses, resold, and rigged to shut off if extortion payments aren't met? It has been a delightful surprise, with a lot of innovative little things that are constantly scattered through the entire series. The little things impress me, mainly because it shows that they're putting an effort in making the details.



As Michelangelo once said, trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle.



I'm also waiting for Karl Urban to say, "Damnit Jim, I'm a cop, not a physician," but that may never happen.



The Black List: This boils down to James Spader playing Hannibal Lecter.  Seriously, it's James Spader as a master criminal middle man who has decided, for reasons of his own, to start helping the FBI go after the bad guys who are so good at their jobs that no one has ever heard of them. And, let's face it, James Spader has never needed to act in his life.  As for the Lecter part... come on, Spader comes with his own glass box here.  It's fun watching James Spader now that he's no longer working with David E. Kelley. The overarching plot is a essentially a sort of mystery that the audience gets to work through as we go along.



Blue Bloods.  This one strikes my fancy because it's a very New York show.  Centered around three generations of a cop family, you have a good strong New York vibe here.  Granted, some of the issues addressed are ripped from the headlines, and they're addressed in some interesting and inventive ways. It's a police procedural, but it's centered around family.  And, strangely, this has gotten to be a better show as the series stops using season-long story arcs, which I find surprising.

Castle: A New York cop show with witty banter, smart writing and even a romance subplot that continues even into the engagement stage?  Oh, hell yes. I can't remember the last time I saw a tv show even try to follow a relationship this deeply. Nathan Fillion is playing (mostly) Nathan Fillion ... though there are times when he or his are threatened, and he becomes dark and angry, and channeling his inner Mal Renolds.  Then there's his co-star, Stana Katic, who is the only woman I've ever seen act with micro-expressions.  It's one of the few shows I've watched in reruns, and I'm still catching things I've missed.



At the end of the day, I think the romance story arc is one of the more impressive things about this show. While most shows decide it's time to end the series when the main characters get together, Castle has decided to just keep going with it into the engagement stage, including getting drama out of relationship problems that frequently come up.  And the secondary cast has been loaded with strong character moments, sometimes devoting whole episodes to the "sidekicks," allowing characters to show different sides of themselves.



Dracula: If AoS is the weak link in this chain, this show was almost dead on arrival.  Too much gratuitous sex, way too much soap opera, almost no action to speak of, this show had three or four episodes before I fully gave up on it. If you look at the show Revenge, which is The Count of Monte Cristo in the Hamptons of the 21st century, you can see everything that Dracula has ripped off: a revenge plotline, the take-down of the week, odd interpersonal relationships, a snarky sidekick.  However, unlike Revenge, Dracula has no charm, an angsty, broody character with no sense of humor, and no one is having fun here.



Dracula was so bloodless, I thought I was watching Twilight.

Grimm. The premise looks like a cross between the comic book Fables and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A "Grimm" in this case hunts down fairy tale monsters, only these creatures are called Wesen, and they have a surface appearance of standard human. Basically, imagine if Buffy had her powers kick in after she had been promoted to homicide detective. For a series that started at the same season as Once Upon A Time (which is just a rip off of Fables), I didn't expect much from this show.  However, it's only gotten better and better as the show has gone on, with strong character back stories, universe design, and great pacing.  It has romance -- with two strangely adorable couples -- and nothing is easy. Someone new trips over the universe of weird? It take at least four episodes to get completely adjusted. Couple meets and falls in love? It takes a year to move forward.  There is a deep and rich universe in here, and they have no problem with taking their time to explore it deeply.



NCIS / NCIS: LA: In the case of both shows, while their police procedural aspect has remained strong, I actually think I like what they've been doing with their characters.  NCIS as a new element that's fun to watch, and NCIS: LA has decided that their "stars" (Chris O'Donnell?  LL Cool J?) are not the primary focus, and has made it much more of an ensemble cast, introducing two series-long romantic subplots and character arcs.  They've got some interesting tricks up their sleeves, and they're having fun playing with the formulas they've used since day one.



The Mentalist: If Sherlock Holmes was raised as a carney, he would be Patrick Jane, the protagonist of this show.  Having joined the ranks of homicide solving cops in order to hunt down the serial killer who murdered his wife and daughter, Patrick Jane made a living as a successful consulting detective.



This season, Jane found the killer, known as Red John, and then ran away from his life. While this would normally be the end of any show, Jane (played by Simon Baker) carries this show with wit and charm, and finesse.  He's a likeable sort, and fun to watch.And let's just say that he allowed us to sympathize with the killer as he's slowly choking the life out of someone....



No, Red John did not get a trial. And I'm fine with it.

Person of Interest:  This one in an interesting show, not just for the premise, but for the people involved. The idea is simple: every bit of intelligence gathered by the US government is filtered through an artificial intelligence that can predict acts of terror, murder, any major crime planned in advance. However, in order to protect the privacy of the population, all domestic crimes are ignored. If you ain't a terrorist, the computer isn't supposed to care. Our heroes have a back door, and they only have one clue: a social security number of either the victim or the perpetrator.  Take one computer nerd, and a SpecOps shooter who should be playing Batman, and you have one fun show. In its third season, much of the character arcs thus far have been shown in flashbacks, to show you how these people used to be.  In this case, that works, because most of the characters are in their late 30s and early 40s, so it makes sense that they were people before we met them.  Now that we've seen who they were, and how they've become who they are, now we get to see how they continue to evolve. Now, major characters are finally allowed to have character development in the present. Though they've recently killed off one of the major players, it's been used to great effect for various and sundry character moments, sometimes from the most surprising cases.



This one is actually one of John Ringo's favorite tv shows. As he put it, the characters are spot on, and he can't see some of these plots coming.



And Jim Caviezel is already playing Batman on this show, why did they get Ben Afleck?



Notice that the first word

in bold is CRAZY.

Sleepy Hollow. This one might just be considered a guilty pleasure. If Ichabod Crane was a British spy who changes sides and joined the American revolution, who "died" while beheading a Hessian mercenary, then brought back in the modern day to fight the same mercenary (still without his head) .... it's interesting. And you can tell that most of the scenes with the headless horseman (who, in this version, is Death, horseman of the apocalypse) have been inspired by the firefight in the police station from The Terminator....



You can understand why more than one review has described this show as jumping on the crazy train and refusing to let go. Despite everything I've just written, the series is surprisingly coherent. It's witty, it's stylish, and, sadly, despite the heavy fantasy elements, it has enough facts about the American revolution to make it qualify as educational. I've got some issues with our heroes being the two witnesses from the book of Revelations (Really? Didn't Dexter do that in season 6?), and let's not even go into the "good witches" concept they have floating around, but I've let it go and jumped aboard the crazy train myself.



Revenge: mentioned above, Revenge is a delightfully evil little show.



Once upon a time, a man was framed for blowing up an airplane, leaving his little girl orphaned and alone. And then she grew up, inherited a boatload of money from owning half the founding stock of Apple, and started destroying everyone involved in the frame up, one at a time.  There will be payback, and we will have fun along the way.  It's one of the more intelligent revenge plots I've seen since The Count of Monte Cristo, only these plans don't go as smoothly as Edmond Dantes' did.



This is another show where the secondary characters have development, and usually along lines that defy the cliche`. At the end of the day, this feels like a spy drama disguised as a soap opera.



There are some other great shows out there, of course. CSI (ok), Criminal Minds (still pretty good), Elementary (good, maybe not great), Hawaii 5-0 (just plan fun),  but they haven't really jumped out at me from their usual awesome performances.



It's going to be an interesting season.

Review: Marvel's Agents of SHIELD

UPDATE: Apparently, I was right. Who knew? The second episode was supposed to be .... that way.  Why?  Because while we all remember that this is a Joss Whedon show, some of us (me included) have quite deliberately forgotten that Jeph Loeb is involved. Who's Loeb?  Does anyone remember Heroes? That was him. We're lucky AoS hasn't turned into a complete train wreck by now.

Loeb in an interview with TV Line states that "Certainly the second episode was intended to be very much like ‘The Pilot, Part 2,’ because it was really the first time [the characters] could all work together and see who they are. Very much in the same kind of way that the audience is getting to know these characters, these characters are getting to know each other as well. That is the mission. “I think the show is absolutely getting better as we go — and we hope the audience feels that way as well,” he continues. “We’ve absolutely found the show; the idea is to keep watching. It’s very much like a roller coaster. You’ve got to go up the hill before you start coming down the hill at 100 miles-per-hour.”

As I said below  .... tell it to Arrow.

So, where does one begin with Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.? Should one say “Coulson lives!” and move on? Does one give it a strange look, cross some fingers and toes, and hope it all comes together? Perhaps one just believes in Joss Whedon as nerd deity and move on.



First: do I really have to say *spoiler alert*?

Then, how about we really start with the difference between criticism, and being a trolling / hipster douchebag? For criticisms of MAOS, start with my colleague Matt Bowman, over at Novel Ninja, as he looks at the first and second episodes. Then, you can look at my favorite punching bag, Tor, whine over every little line (actually, the article had been far worse; the original title mentioned "nerd shaming" and implied that it was insulting their target audience... nerds). Or, one better, we can look at "screen rants" talk about already killing off characters -- and that was written around the second episode!



Me? Well, to start with, I follow the three-episode rule followed by TV guide reviewers. Never judge a show by one episode, wait until the show hits its stride. Obviously, we can't all follow the rule, no matter how hard we try. The new Ironside show, for example, took the original tv show with Raymond Burr (known to my generation as an aging Perry Mason) as a cop confined to a wheelchair, and updated it with Blair Underwood, making Ironside a nickname, and turning him into House with a badge … as I didn't like House in the first place, I was turned off in short order.



So, SHIELD … to start with, I like some of the dynamics they've got going. They've got Ming-Na Wen playing Agent Melinda May – former field operative, and now “just the pilot.” There is “Fitz-Simmons,” two scientists who are obligatorily young, perky, adorably socially inept, and accents so thick you can cut them with a machete. There is the obligatory Agent Ward – loner field agent, good-looking, stoic, and doesn't play well with others. And since we have Ward, we must have – Skye! Hackerchist (hacker anarchist) who has no problems blowing classified operations in progress because The People Must Know (no matter who gets killed).



And then, there's Phil Coulson, badass. He is the little man who wasn't there, you never saw him, never noticed him, until he cracks you over the head and whips out his boogeyman gun. He loves his classic cards, his classic car, and indulges in a lot of lateral thinking. How can you hate Coulson? I can't.



Of the first three episodes, we had a solid pilot, an episode that felt like it was cut off from the first draft of the pilot, and episode three, The Asset, which felt like someone said "enough setup, let's get us a plot." It's got a nice, stable foundation for an ensemble cast.



Is it perfect? No, I've got some problems...

Yes, problems.

[More below the break]

Problem #1: Where's the Marvel Universe?

Before I start, let's look at another comic book tv show that's doing surprisingly well: Arrow, centered around DC comics' Green Arrow. The first SCENE in Arrow has an image of Deathstroke's mask with an arrow through it, and that episode has a sister nicknamed “Speedy” with a drug problem, and Dinah Laurel Lance as a girlfriend, and a Merlyn as a character; the second episode has one of DC’s B-team heroes (Lao Fei), as a major player. For anyone who has ever looked at the comic books for an hour (I may have spent four minutes), it's clear that someone has paid attention. No, it's not fan service, fan service, fan service faithfulness to the comics – Green Arrow has no sister, Speedy was his addict sidekick Roy Harper, and Deathstroke and Green Arrow had a different first encounter, but there was enough to show that, yes, the writers are respecting the original material without being chained to it. With Laurel Lance, while she has not become the superhero Black Canary, there are enough in-jokes to support any fan who might kvetch.



And then there's Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, whose first two episodes had referenced the rest of the Marvel universe by citing Hulk's gamma radiation, the Extremis virus of Iron Man 3, a certain hammer, and Hydra... Mariah Hill and Nick Fury showed up for two minutes...and that's about it. Which is sort of strange, don't you think? Marvel has seemingly endless B- and C-list characters to draw on, and they used … no one.



But, but, it's the first episode! And Whedon! And Avengers!



Oh, please, if the nobodies at the CW can whip up a fun souffle like Arrow, with a half-dozen nods to the comics in the first episode, you can not make any such excuses for Joss Whedon. (And yes, I said nobodies – if they were somebodies, wouldn't they be writing for any other network?). If we're going to cross our fingers and In Joss We Trust, shouldn't we hold him to at least the same standard as CW writers? There's an entire universe to play with, and Joss did so very little with it.

Counterpoint: HOWEVER, after their pilot episodes (yes, plural. You can't convince me that ep 1 and 2 weren't originally a single two-hour pilot), ep 3 had The Asset, which created a supervillain, even though no one knows it just yet. I think it was their best episode thus far.  Why? Not only did it have character, it had the weird that is the MCU, and an origin story to boot. Not to mention that it had the premise that was founded in the first episode-- dealing with problems that the rest of the world can't handle. The Pilot had a version of that, so did the third, while the second had it as strictly a human, non-weird evil.  It was ... off.

Problem #2: The Primary Cast

If you look at the Screen Rant link above, you'll note that it's whining about the main cast because it's not DIVERSE! Because DIVERSITY.



While I don't really need ethnic diversity, at least differences in body types would be nice. On Buffy, we had a redhead, a tall brunette with a microwave tan, a short blonde, a tall older gentleman, and short pale and psychotic (Faith).  Right now, I'd settle for making one of them a blonde or a redhead.  Hell, I'll even settle for brighter clothing that doesn't come from Hot Topic... But would it kill them to have someone who isn't either American or from the UK?  I'm a New Yorker, a monochromatic room makes me edgy.



At least give Coulson a tan he might have picked up in "Tahiti."



But as for the rest of the cast, its problem links back with problem #1. Let's think about this for a minute. I’m surprised Joss had to make his own original characters. Marvel has a pilot named Wyatt Wingfoot... we needed Melinda May? Is the Punisher not available to Marvel Studios at the moment? (I could just see a Joss-modified Frank Castle as being a slightly older field agent who “had a little breakdown a while back, he's better now.”) Instead of creating Melinda May, he couldn't have used, oh Spider-Woman? Silver Sable? Jessica Jones? All of whom were deep, complex, yet badass females who do not have powers, (Spider-Woman has been de-powered so often, no one would blink if she didn't have them on the show).



Is there one reason that Skye couldn't have asked for her lawyer, Jennifer Walters (She-Hulk)? They can barely air a Hulk film, so I doubt there’d be conflict (then again, they’re filming an Ant-Man movie right now, so I have no idea what might be next). I know Marvel has Daredevil back (okay, he might be too street-level for MAOS, but still– lawyer).



Marvel even has their own reporter for superheroes … so why didn't we just have her be the Skye character, only with social media instead of dead-tree media?



I can go on for awhile, but you get the idea. I’d love to know where the bleep Whedon thinks he’s going, but he should be a little bit less focused on the cameos, and more focused on melding the *general* world of weird that is the MCU in with his show. But the second episode boiled down to … Nazis in Latin America? Please, Joss, I know you were warped by The Boys from Brazil when you were growing up, but don’t do that again. Pretty please?



Episode 3 was a great touch, and please do more of that ... but why couldn't Joss do that with the main characters? Did he want people from the Marvel universe, and Marvel Studios told him "no"? That would be stupid, considering he's now in charge of "phase 2" of the movies.

Conclusion (what they've done right)

Now, does that mean I hate the show? No. There's a difference between trolling the show and being critical of it.  As it is, it's an OK show. But I want some of the Whedon wit and vibrant characters.  Even Xander of Buffy the Vampire Slayer had more character in the pilot than most of these folks do right now.  They're sort of white bread ... and by that, I mean bland and generic, not Caucasian (which there are, sans May).

Skye and Ward already seem to have some character development under way, and they better, because they had the most screentime over episodes 2 and 3.  But it seems that tonight's episode 4 promises to be a May-centric episode. I can't complain about that, because that's what ensemble casts are about -- rotating the focus.  I can't wait for the focus to be on Coulson the whole episode.



The Fitz-Simmons mad scientist duo will, hopefully, develop some quirks aside from the usual ones.  Real geniuses have real problems interacting with people -- not "I'm so in love with la grange points," but "I'm sorry, did you ask me something five minutes ago? I was busy in my head." Einstein had problems grasping the concept of body soap and then shampoo, instead of just one soap.  Mark Twain couldn't figure out his home alarm system. The WW2 codebreaker Alan Turing was all but caged in a backroom during the war so he wouldn't wander off. Fitz-Simmons don't come off as geniuses, they come off like awkward high school kids.



Right now, the saving grace of the series is Agent Coulson, and he's what has me coming back week after week. The other interesting character? Ming-Na's Melinda "The Cavalry" May. Like all good shows, it seems that the one we know the least about is the most interesting. This means either they should get more screen time, or everyone else should get more interesting, fast.



My verdict: optimistic. It is not yet the stand-out show I expected, but it may be building to it.  I'm just looking for the booby traps.

A Writing Rant: Cliches you may have never noticed.

I suspect that this, at the end of the day, qualifies as a rant. But it's a rant about writing, so I think this makes for an acceptable blog post. Comment if you think it doesn't.

*******

I live in a family of readers. We tend to write TV episodes as we watch them on television. Obviously, we record everything, otherwise we'd never hear a word. Sometimes, the writers out-think us, sometimes we like our endings better than the ones on the screen. And then, sometimes, we catch only an image, and we sigh, and we know exactly where everything starts to go downhill...

Have you ever wandered into a TV show, and without knowing anything of the story thus far, a mere thirty seconds can tell you more than you wanted to know? In fact, you know so much from that brief glance, you can, without any hesitation, write the entire episode?

This is pretty much how it goes in our house whenever we see a almost any Christian clergyman on television. If it's some sort of religious figure, he's the murderer / pederast / psycho / bad guy. In fact, if there's a guest star who shows up as a priest, the only way my family is surprised is if the priest is not guilty of something. Also, if there's a choice between an old-fashioned, grouchy priest, and a hip, young good-looking priest filled with charisma, we know whodunit—the old guy, because killers are never charismatic, are they?

Now, unless someone can correct me, this rule only applies to some variety of Christian group, but, more often than not, it's a Catholic priest. Even on the television show 24, where Muslims terrorists were involved (literally) every other season for the first six years, no Imams were involved. I have never seen a Rabbi involved in a crime anywhere on television.

Under the heading of “these and other stupid things,” there are some interesting facts.
[More below]