1.11: The Magical Place

[Queen E]

Looks like we might learn some answers about "Tahiti."

Discuss.

[Lola m]

"Is that a Roomba?" Ha!

I'm loving this team-feeling - everyone has their part, everyone is working to find Coulson. And I'm keeping my eyes on May to see what's really going on and who to trust. I think May is playing a deeper game that Skye realizes - she answered just the question asked and no more "is she of use to us on this plane" - Sky should hang tight. Agent Hand? I'm not seeing a lot of confidence in her from May but not outright objections yet, so I'll go along with a wait and see thing.

Coulson! I think their memory-grabbing machine might have ... issues extracting info from him, 'cuz I think the memories are being hidden from him already.

I like how they just gave Skye the hint and let her figure out how and when to move.

Fitz is having a bit of a reaction to things, isn't he?

OK, the mannequins they have in Coulson's room-cell and scattered about the ghost town? Creepy!!

Heeeee! I love Skye's make-it-up-as-you-go-along techniques. The golf club typing and then pretending to be May. ;-)

"If we're lucky" is not a phrase I like when it comes to saving Coulson! "No single agent is that important." Grrrrr!!

Yeah, torture-dude. We all saw that phone-zap reprimand coming.

"You let her get tossed." Dude, do you even listen to yourself? She didn't just "let" her get tossed, May practically engineered getting Skye the room to maneuver that she needed.

Raina is a very good villain character - nice element of gray morality and "your organization is just as evil as mine" speeches. Mock-friendliness and (I think) not-so-mock delight in what she's doing. And I love that the info she wants (or says she wants) is - what happened to Coulson. How can he (and we) not want that too? But at what cost, eh?

Heee! Love the guy being all "see, I have an assistant to do this for me" as she has the security guard do the actual work.

Raina appears to be playing him well, but I still have faith in Coulson - both in his faith in S.H.I.E.L.D and his ability to play her right back.

Simmons, you are not that good of a liar.

Why can't Hand realize that there is an importance to them taking Coulson. That maybe it's not just that they all love Coulson (which they do) but if the highest ups at S.H.I.E.L.D. want him back there's probably a goood reason for that and maybe making it a bit of a priority would be the smart thing to do. Also? Retrieving Coulson would be a blow to Centipede just as much as all the hunting for them is. After all, they went to a lot of trouble to grab Coulson so the bad guys also think he's important.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep! The "please let me die" scene? Eeeeeeeeep!

Man, I love Ron Glass. He's so good in this moment in the car, talking to Coulson.

I knew it!! I knew that the other person Raina was talking about was Mike Peterson! And he's got one of those horrible eye instruction things. :-(

[beccaelizabeth]

Thanks to channel 4 over here finally restarting the series I just watched this episode,
and with that ending, all I'm thinking is :-(
and #grouphug# for Coulson

He needs all the hugs.



I'm... vastly unsure about where they're going with this. I mean, I might hate it. There's many interpretations where I hate it. But then again they could do something interesting with it. So I'm hoping for the rest of the series to be the good bits version by my personal standards of good bits.

The thing is, the show is neither surprising nor especially deep. If I'm not several pages ahead of the characters that would be the only surprising bit. So what I'm worried about is that they will attempt deep, and do the writerly equivalent of diving in the shallow end. Because there are big questions about medical ethics and identity and memory and how far you can go for a friend and they might, maybe, be setting up to explore them, but then again they might just sort of skim right past, or ignore the bits I'd consider central, and then, problem.


Y'all are probably enough episodes ahead to have an opinion, but I have been spoiler avoidant. Which has been easy, since nobody I know kept talking about the series after the break...



The only thing I did see in advance was that J August Richards' character had actually survived. Which is good because usually if they kill the black guy again (again again) I give up on a show. This time they haven't killed him, just enslaved him and gone for some kind of body horror with disability thing. The thing where he was already calling himself a monster, and the track record of comics with how it treats disability, that leaves me somewhat concerned about that whole corner. But not enough to just stop watching here.


... because Coulson. I want to see things work out alright for him, whatever shape alright turns out to be.
And I want to be specific about that because I have read series recently thinking I wanted to see how it ends when really I wanted to see how they fixed it, and then they didn't. So, there are many and varied ways it could turn out that I do not want to see. But I want to see Coulson be okay in himself and figure out where he stands with SHIELD and maybe draw a better line for SHIELD in the future.


What I worry they'll do is they'll compare the good guy and bad guy versions of using much the same techniques and then decide the good guys are good because they're nice. Like, they care about each other, aw, sweet, so clearly all the ethical problems are no problem really when it's the nice people doing them. That would be inadequate. Free will would be the dividing line. SHIELD doesn't seem to know that. Also rule of law would be nice. Not torturing people. No fake executions. You know, basic treaty stuff. Like, it's bad when bad guys do it to Coulson, but it's also just bad. I remain unsure the writers know that.



Other things... last time that Hand was around I thought she was needling Coulson, testing him maybe, because Tahiti. Like, she knows something epic happened, but she's not sure what, so things were weird. This time I got more of an impression she proper doesn't know what's going on, and finding out is more important to her than looking after people.


Specific memories of Tahiti... yeah, that was creepy, pasting over things like that. And now he can't trust the inside of his own head. He can't trust the retrieved memories either, humans are fun like that, they can make up all sorts of stories and not remember the making them up part. So now he doesn't know what SHIELD did to his head, brain, thoughts, memories, and what they did to his motivations, his reasons for being. They were trying to give him 'back' a reason for living. They pasted in something that central. So he's very 2.0 now, whatever they intended. They wanted someone back, but they had a specific idea of who that person was, so that's who they got... whether he was in there to start with or not. Waaaaaaay creepy.

I like Coulson, but which him am I liking?


Also, where has the Clairvoyant got eyeballs on SHIELD?
And did they scan the hell out of Coulson when they got him back? Because all the bruising around the eyes is of some concern.
Did they scan him before that for comparison purposes anyway? I mean, the x ray specs woman could see something about him, but his team don't know what's up with him, so possibly not? That could be problem.
But I'm going with the theory that Clairvoyant means seeing from afar and doesn't require anything we haven't seen already - the eyeball tech, in enough places to make him seem omniscient. So he knows private stuff about Coulson, including the girlfriend stuff. ... who the Avengers movie suggested had left him before the being dead thing, and who the Avengers know about, and Ward, that we've seen. It would be fun if one of the team have extras built in. But who else? Epic superpower, owning the keys on that network.

I kind of forgot to like the team between episodes. It's not that I dislike them, it's just aside from Agent May pictures on tumblr I haven't thought of them. Probably not what the writers were going for.
Skye kicks a lot of arse but it makes SHIELD look incompetent.
Ward said 'my team' and May did a looking at him that suggests there's a conversation going to happen.
Agent May fighting, yaays :-)



Coulson needs all the hugs. All. :-(



I will be watching next week. With some trepidation.