Spoiler alert: I talk about spoilers for the episode.
And Spoiler alert: I thought the episode sucked.
1. If you want to create a sweater, assemble these threads before I walk away
Get it? Like the song? Oh, you’re too young.
So, this episode is all about threads and it is all about those threads coming together. For ten episodes, SHIELD has seeded in these tiny little elements and moments and stories and characters and really just sort of thrown them all out at you in a random order. Now we get the first episode to ostensibly “matter” since the initial episode, with every episode in-between except for the one that introduced Raina now inherently being filler. Which I guess is a mission statement, then? I’m really not sure.
Now we get the episode that supposedly ties it all up, and it’s just a huge letdown. Come on. I want to be in your corner, SHIELD, but it’s like you don’t even want me to be in the stadium.
I like SHIELD. I really do. But the way that it is managing it’s story is quite ludicrous. And I get that this is serialized TV here and that not every episode is going to deal with the over-arching seasonal plot, but, man, not to bring up that argument again, every Whedon show in the past had a nice balance between the weekly grind and what really mattered to the big picture. And even when things didn’t directly relate to whatever the Big Bad was up to, it at least felt somewhat natural, right?
Or maybe it all just looks sunny in hindsight.
2. I’m still calling him Charles Gunn, I don’t care
I really J. August Richards in the pilot. I know some people gave him unfair criticisms due to being cast in literally the most difficult/worst part of the pilot, but I always liked him on Angel and figured that, if given the chance, he could do well again.
For all of this episode’s faults, I think the one thing it did right was bring him back and allow him a chance to redeem himself. That he didn’t, that the character chose to do the wrong thing for the right reasons, simply speaks to the possibilities that the character had, let alone what Richards stood to bring to the show before they — uh. Well.
Y’know, death is an illusion, right? RIP, Peterson. I liked you while you were here.
3. So… that’s our “superhero” stuff, then?
Back to what “The Bridge” did wrong now.
You know what show I like? Arrow. It’s insane to me that I like Arrow; it had a miserable first season that I slugged through because I’m an idiot, but now in its second season, holy crap, it is unreasonably good for a show of this kind. And you know what Arrow does well? Just about everything, all things considered; it’s not a great show and I wouldn’t recommend it to fans of the Wire or Breaking Bad, but in terms of superhero/comic book storytelling on TV on a weekly basis? More, please.
And almost every week, you get something superheroic, action-wise! Yay!
And this week on SHIELD, in the episode where we had our superhero finally, we had less action than we did in the entire rest of the season. What did Peterson do? Stop a crate and swing a single punch before getting stabbed?
And in terms of the villains, they even show a tricked out Centipede’d up super soldier — and then that goes absolutely nowhere. This guy has, like, a zillion centipede modules on him, but it’s all just for show. It’s the equivalent of me wearing a cat t-shirt: you get that I like cats, but it doesn’t matter a damn because it’s not like I have a cat with me so who cares? So Marvel introduced the the cat t-shirt of super villains in tonight’s episode, and ugh, I’m having trouble not just being sarcastic and catty at this point.
SHIELD. Please. Do something I can defend. You were doing so well!
4. The world’s WORST driving sequence
If you thought my previous comments were petty, get ready for this one: remember that scene with Coulson and Ward driving and talking about girls? Remember how they were driving in a straight line through a quiet neighborhood?
Continued belowWhat the fuck was Coulson doing? I wish I knew how to make gifs because I would make a million gifs of Coulson’s inability to know how to drive in a straight line.
I drive everyday. Every single day, I sit down in an automobile and I make it go forward. And for a lot of that time, I’m driving in a reasonably steady line — some twists, sure, some turns even, but for the most part I am driving in one direction and I let the car do most of the work and relax.
I don’t just turn the wheel arbitrarily left and right as if I’m trying to drive crazy zig-zags all over the highway like some drunk driving lunatic who is trying to endanger himself and everyone around him.
Come on!
5. The eponymous Bridge
Last but not least, the important part of the episode — or what I’m referring to as, “No more Coulsons.” It’s an interesting enough twist, I suppose, albeit a rather predictable one. Centipede gets the upper hand, Coulson is taken as a prisoner and … and I feel nothing. Literally, absolutely nothing. I just turned the TV off and went back to work on things that held my interest before remembering I had to do this.
The show disappointed me on multiple tiers this evening, and I can’t help but just be apathetic about it ultimately. I thought that the show was heading in a really strong direction as of late, but now when it gets to where it actually wanted to go as opposed to just continuing to meander about for a while, I can’t wait to turn the TV off and go do anything else. That’s a horrible sign right there, and one that doesn’t bode well for my continued investment in the series.
Which, again, I wish wasn’t the case. I want SHIELD to be the best show on TV — the next Chuck, or at least something worthy of contending with Arrow. Something lighthearted and fun, something with a bit of life to it that can still handle serious moments and issues with its characters; something that doesn’t give you any choice but to just care about what is going on. SHIELD is here because the Marvel Cinematic Universe is here and did so well, and that’s where the reason to watch ends.
The bridge mentioned in the title isn’t really a metaphor, either, which is a bit of a miss. The titles of these episodes are ultimately as meaningless as a lot of the show, but I guess there’s something for offering up surface-level clues; the second you see that actual bridge, you know that something important is going to go down. I guess that’s worth… something.
But, hey, look at that — they managed to bring back my least favorite storyline that has been basically done to death as the main A-plot for what’s about to happen! Oh, yay.
So, if I could be allowed to sum up my entire reaction to this one episode of SHIELD after getting such positive vibes from it in recent memory, my reaction gif would be:
