It’s Wednesday, and you know what that means: before your shop opens so you can get your comics, you have to visit Multiversity Comics to read our thoughts on last night’s TV! And if you’re done being wowed by the spectacle of The Flash over on the CW and/or Brian’s column, join me as we talk about SHIELD‘s most grounded entry into the new season yet in an episode where people take off their faces both figuratively and literally.
The title of the episode is an obvious metaphor with multiple meanings, but I’m not going to spell it out for you. That said, there are of course spoilers for last night’s episode in this post.
1. Go Team SHIELD
Lets get the bad out of the way first: the entire B-Plot with the SHIELD team sans Coulson and May? That was pretty filler-riffic. It felt like the show itself didn’t know what to do with all these leftover characters it had, so, OK, here’s a good enough crisis to casually deal with. That said, one of the highlights of this episode was seeing the team dynamic in action. The opening sequence in which everyone served a unique role on the mission (aside from Triplett) followed by the team figuring out who could do what when shit hit the fan in the Bus later in the episode was great, and is really doing a lot to help heal the wounds of the previous season where we were watching the Coulson and Friends Variety Hour.
Plus, the banter has gotten a lot better. Like, a lot better. We’re finally hitting those beats in interaction that the show has been missing to “feel” like a Whedon program.
2. Being Glenn Talbot
If this episode did one thing for me, it was show that I’ve been counting out Adrian Pasdar pretty heavily. Introduced last season as Glenn Talbot followed by repeat appearances this season, Pasdar has been pretty low key on the show. While Pasdar has never really been an actor to wow me (I liked him on “Heroes,” but can’t tell you a single memorable thing he has done since — voice work, I guess?), this episode that featured him playing two versions of himself at least offered Pasdar a chance to be something different, and he went for it. When Talbot first shows up he’s instantly unrecognizable, weird and jittery and off, and while Coulson as a character doesn’t seem to notice because that’s how you build drama, just being able to see Pasdar remove some of his ticks and general habits (pun intended) while playing Talbot added a believable little wrinkle to the whole ordeal.
Granted, I was a bit sad it wasn’t, like, a shape-shifter or something behind it all. Can’t win ’em all.
3. The Way We Were
The biggest focus of this episode (aside from showing off Coulson’s upper chest) was the relationship between May and Coulson. Coulson we know a good deal about already, sure, but through the undercover mission we’re also given quite an interesting look at the type of person May is, or could be but doesn’t want to be. May is a character that lets so little out, and we learned last year that she used to be a bit of a prankster in her younger days, but the colder and more hardened May we’ve come to know doesn’t laugh, doesn’t smile, doesn’t do anything for a good time — and that’s the exact opposite of who we saw tonight.
Of course, that was all part of the mission, assuredly. And on top of that, we got to see someone impersonating May, which added its own set of wrinkles to the equation. But to me, the most interesting aspect about the Coulson/May dynamic was saved for the very end as they discussed Coulson’s issues and he made her promise to kill him if — no, when it gets too far. This is the part where we see May at her least guarded, her most honest; she denies a direct order from a superior and claims she has a better solution, which is something the May we thought we knew would or could never do. But as we see different parts of her throughout the episode her final thoughts ring pretty true to her character, which makes Coulson’s response all the more heartbreaking.
Continued belowWhich also brings me to…
4. The Raid 3: May v May
Ming-Na Wen basically stole the show entirely last night. Like, not just the episode — the entire program, the whole season, all of it. Wen has always been one of the better aspects of the show at least in terms of delivering action, but man, this episode did it in spades. The choreography of May fighting herself was impeccable, and that finishing move actually gave me a rather vocal “OH, SHIT!” reaction. I can only imagine the amount of work that went into creating a fight as visually engaging as that, and I take my hat off to the entire crew and Wen for the clear amount of work done.
Of course, Wen is great through the whole episode. She breaks in and out of character at the drop of the hat, flipping between the bubbly undercover persona and her real hardened one like a light switch. I’m not sure anyone has shown as much dynamic range on this show ever in the past, at least in such close proximity, so I guess what I’m saying is: I’m ready to back Agent Melinda May as new director of SHIELD.
5. Fitz’s Simmons Shell
The last thing I wanted to touch on in this episode was Fitz and his imaginary Simmons. I noticed last night while watching the episode that, in a weird twist of how my brain works, I hadn’t really been properly quantifying Elizabeth Henstridge’s role in this season due to the fact that she’s only appeared once as a non-imaginary rendition of herself, which is weird. I’ve been focusing so much on what Iain De Caestecker does as Fitz, especially since he has to pretend he’s talking to himself while there’s another person in front him, that I kind of didn’t take into account how good Henstridge’s performance as her imaginary self was until last week, when Simmons appeared “for real.”
It’s an interesting dynamic, though, and one that was pretty understated in the first two episodes. You think, “Oh, Fitz is just broken now, and that sucks.” But in actuality, he’s not broken so much as he’s just divided. What Henstridge does that is so incredible here is that she acts like De Caestecker, she acts like Fitz and not Simmons, and while flashes of the “real” Simmons are there (I use real in quotes because, well, she’s a fictional character), it is so much more obvious in this episode that she is playing an idealized version of herself brought on by Fitz’s affection for her, which is coupled by Fitz’s final line about a girl.
Not that this is a revolutionary thought on the show or anything like that, sure. I just thought it was interesting spending an episode with the real Simmons and then seeing this one again in an episode where two other members of the cast have to play different versions of themselves. “Face My Enemy” clearly references the Talbot/May dopplegangers, but Fitz and imaginary Simmons certainly play a part in that as well — though with a much more loose definition of “enemy,” sure.
