Agents of SHIELD Season 1

I think it was around January of this year that I finished getting through Buffy and Angel for the first time. I enjoyed both of those shows more than I thought I would, and got a much better understanding Joss Whedon’s career and why I like him so much. They also gave me a reason to stick with Agents of SHIELD, as I had just seen how two shows overcame uneven-to-bad first seasons to become truly great.

When Agents of SHIELD started last September, Iron Man 3 had left me somewhat cool and Man of Steel was devastating (to the city of Metropolis as well) – basically it seemed like we had finally gone too far with super hero stuff and the decline had begun. So the idea of a show centering around Clark Gregg’s Agent Coulson seemed like an act of pure hubris, and Agents of SHIELD took a while to dissuade me of that notion. Thankfully, just as Thor: The Dark World kept things interesting and Captain America: The Winter Soldier reinvigorated the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they also helped SHIELD find its footing.

The first episodes of this season set up a pretty simple formula: Coulson’s team hangs out on their airplane (called “the Bus”) and solve crimes perpetrated by mostly regular people using magical/high tech stuff. It was a regular case-of-the-week show save for the occasional references to Iron Man or the Hulk or “what happened in New York.” It was almost as if the show was deliberately trying to lean away from everything that made it appealing – super hero excitement and Whedonesque character development – to instead try to lure in viewers from Hawaii Five-O.

Not that there weren’t things that worked early on, Coulson remained a really fun character, May (Ming-Na Wen) quickly established herself as an ass-kicker, and cameo from Samuel L. Jackson was really, really fun. But things didn’t really change until about halfway through the season, when they did their first crossover episodes, a two-parter set in the wake of Thor: The Dark World. A super powered villain made things interesting, but it was especially great to have Sif (Jaimie Alexander) show up and really show how well Agents of SHIELD can enrich the movies.

That put the series on a hot streak that continued until The Winter Soldier came and changed the whole Cinematic Universe, and finally kicked Agents of SHIELD into high gear – and one of my most anticipated shows every week. Suddenly everything was clicking into place – Fitz and Simmons (Iain De Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge) became fun instead of annoying, Skye’s (Chloe Bennet) mystery became interesting, and the show switched to a serialized story. Basically they did exactly what fixed Angel‘s first season, and it really worked. Especially with new recurring roles for James Paxton, Patton Oswalt, and BJ Britt.

Also great: the twist from TWS allowed the writers to transition some heroes into villains. Maybe it wasn’t a surprise to see James Paxton (who seemed like he was having a lot of fun) switch sides, but you had to feel for Mike Peterson (J. August Richards) as he was turned into the cyborg killing machine Dethlok. Plus they took the most boring of all the main characters, Agent Grant Ward (Brett Dalton), the resident handsome tough dude, and turned him into an evil double agent. Suddenly everything that made him boring before made him super creepy. It was like the show had engaged me in a rope-a-dope, wearing me down with bad episodes and then knocking me on my ass with good ones.

With the recent announcement that Lucy Lawless will be showing up in season two and all the positive hype for Guardians of the Galaxy, the skepticism I had for Agents of SHIELD has pretty much entirely melted away. It’s a shame it sucked for a while, but hot damn is it fun now. If you care about this super hero stuff at all, I think you’ll find something to enjoy.

24: Live Another Day

Jack Bauer, I missed you. Say what you will about Raylan Givens, Walter White, or Rustin Cohle, there’s been a badass hole in television since 24 ended four years ago. This poor man, who has lost everything time and time again while he’s been busy saving the country (and often the world) remains the best action hero of the 21st Century, and Live Another Day reminds us how great Kiefer Sutherland is in the part. And with a short 12 episode order, Live Another Day gives us just enough of him and the world of 24 to leave me wanting more.

If you missed out on Day 8, basically all you need to know about this season is that Renee Walker, the third love of Jack’s life, was murdered and Jack took vicious revenge, leaving him a fugitive from the United States and Russia’s most wanted. This season opens in London, with Jack resurfacing just in time to get tangled up in a web involving old friends and new enemies. Like every season of the show, there are countless twists and turns and the final conflict bears almost no resemblance to the one that started everything (even though its only been a few hours) and going into any detail would spoil some of that fun.

I will say that they brought back exactly the right people. Secretary of Defense Heller (William Devane) is now the president, and his staff includes his daughter Audrey (Kim Raver), the only woman who Jack ever loved who is still alive. Any longtime fan of the show knows how exciting it is to have these characters back, and how complex their relationship is with Jack. And for everybody else, well, you get to enjoy the fine, fine work of William Devane. The only other CTU vet to return is Mary Lynn Rajskub as Chloe, because it wouldn’t be this show without her. It’s weird to think she wasn’t in those first two seasons.

Newcomers include Yvonne Strahovski as this day’s agent who is good at stuff, Michelle Fairley as a terrorist, and Stephen Fry as the PM of the UK, so that’s pretty great. I want to give a shoutout to Stanley Townsend for playing a really slimy dude and also having one of the worst beards ever put to film. Just look at this shit:

I have never seen the “hair just around my mouth” look before. It’s almost a goatee, but it’s not.

Like I alluded above, Live Another Day basically gives you everything you’d want out of a season of 24 and not too much else. There’s light political commentary, plenty of shootouts, a few (most torture-free) interrogations, and lots of hard decisions to make. You’ll hear “within the hour” uttered more times than you might like, but hey, it keeps things tense. And the stuff that goes down in the back half of the season is so great I was someone left wanting even more. The show’s over! I should be satisfied! Why do I care so much about Jack Bauer?

Hannibal Season 2

It’s been an unusual year for the blog, we’ve been writing less as we as a group finally fully transitioned away from being students. Well, I guess not totally and completely, since Colin is still taking improv classes, but at this point in time, we all have all the degrees we’re planning on getting. With the demands of adulthood weighing on all of us, it’s hard to justify writing on this tiny, almost forgotten blog. But, just like the podcast, I still love the idea of having this artifact of who we all were and what we were like at this point in time, and so I press on.

Normally I would have reviewed a bunch of things earlier, but I was pretty busy trying to graduate. Then I should have talked about those things on the best of the year so far podcast, except technical difficulties have introduced the possibility that episode might never be released. So I return to the keyboard for a chance to write about some of my favorite things this year, that I might be able to remember them come December. Not that I imagine I’ll have any trouble recalling the second season of Hannibal any time soon.

I caught up with Hannibal just as its second season began, and at the time I was not nearly as diehard a fan as many of the NBC show’s small audience. I enjoyed how artistic the show was, and how it told a story about a manipulated descent into madness, and the promise that there would be less self-contained episodes this time around, but I didn’t come into this season loving the show. As you might guess based on all those stars up there, that changed.

What caused that change? Well, for one, I think watching a show once a week definitely does make me more invested in it than a marathon. It forces me to savor every minute I get and gives me questions to dwell on, since I know the only thing that can answer them is time. It’s what forces me to read AV Club reviews and even check the comments, maybe even go as far as to find the Hannibal subreddit. I’m not saying marathoning is wrong, in fact, some shows (especially Netflix ones) actually really benefit from condensed viewing. But Hannibal might not be one of them.

But really, I think that Bryan Fuller and everyone else involved in Hannibal just stepped up their already great game. The season opens with an amazingly thrilling fight sequence and ends with almost the entire cast on the brink of death. Along the way we see people get sewn together, sliced into vertical sections, and eat their own faces. And that’s just the stuff vague enough to write about, some of the tableaus we’re shown over the course of the season are so original and disturbing I’d hate to spoil them here.

That element spills into every part of the show, as we see Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) try to unravel the situation the first season left him in. As certain we are that Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen) is always in control, always plotting everything that happens, Will becomes a wildcard, increasingly difficult to read. The season basically unfolds in two halves, but both are unified in the duel between Hannibal and Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) for Will’s soul – and it’s a delight to watch. Other shows have done similar arcs, Dexter and True Detective come to mind, but it’s rare to see an ostensibly good character to completely embrace the dark.

There is a slight diversion in the later stages of this 13-episode run with the introduction of Margot and Mason Verger (Katharine Isabelle and Michael Pitt) that might rub some people the wrong way. Was it a distraction? Yes. But what they did with it was impressive, and it just added more to Dr. Lecter’s character. Really, if any character was underserved this season it was Caroline Dhavernas’ Alana Bloom, who finds herself in a terrifying position but is never given a real chance to shine and comes off as dumb or annoying, which probably wasn’t intended.

Hannibal gets away with more disturbing imagery on basic cable than I’ve seen on the likes of HBO and Showtime. That has to be because everything it attempts is expertly done, a swirling maelstrom of compelling writing, strong performances, and amazing production. To borrow from the voice of our generation, Kanye West, this is a beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy and I’m just glad I get to watch it.