Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. [US] ** Spoilers **

Patty O Furniture

keithgeo wrote: »

Lots off good Joss whedon stuff in it, dialogue etc, and Shepard Book making an appearance from firefly! Gunn from Angel too, Whedon really likes to give his past casts work!

Look at the next thing he done after The Avengers, A Shakespeare comedy with Nathan Fillion, Sean Maher from Firefly, cast from Buffy, Angel, Dollhouse etc, as he said he likes to do the opposite after doin a big budget film & it was all done in & around his house as well.

kaimera

Cracking good ep1 imo.

Nice blend of witty and action and for a tv show, solid effects!

Lets hope the rest of the season follows suit

Professey Chin

Patty O Furniture wrote: »

Look at the next thing he done after The Avengers, A Shakespeare comedy with Nathan Fillion, Sean Maher from Firefly, cast from Buffy, Angel, Dollhouse etc, as he said he likes to do the opposite after doin a big budget film & it was all done in & around his house as well.

Now we just need him to do the new Doctor Horrible

wampyrus77

ive wait until friday for pilot, no abc

tvnutz

Good enough, a few things were annoying though. Can't stand the techy British twins already, really annoying. Also thought the car at the end was stupid.

I like how they teased out that we have several backstories to learn,especially Coulsen. I reckon he actually died and is a clone or something. Too far fetched!? :P

larchielads

does stan lee have a cameo in every episode?:P

ScrubsfanChris

Really good first episode. Plenty of humour to along with the drama.
The second part acted like a mini sequel to Iron man 3, along with Starks flying car from Captain America in Lola.

tvnutz wrote: »

I reckon he actually died and is a clone or something. Too far fetched!? :P

Was thinking the same myself just after the line "he still doesn't know"

wampyrus77

no stan lee even so he created marvel, Joss Whedon is director of this series

mymo

I enjoyed it, I love agent Coulson, car bit at end was a bit cartoonish, just didn't fit.
Looking forward to more of this one, and can't believe rte is showing it!

Patty O Furniture

mymo wrote: »

I enjoyed it, I love agent Coulson, car bit at end was a bit cartoonish, just didn't fit.
Looking forward to more of this one, and can't believe rte is showing it!

Yeah i know, its come a long way from showing Glenroe on a Sun & its only up against Fair City/Fair-ly ****ty, so no competition

evilivor

P_1 wrote: »

Great first episode, hopefully they'll be able to keep the standard up.

As an aside, I wonder if were seeing a shift by the broadcasters on this side of the pond in reaction to Netflix and torrenting in their scheduling? Having it on RTE and Chanel 4 within a week of it being first broadcast in the States is a pleasant surprise.

It's also a technology change - once RTE rolled out its FAST file-based Content Management last year it was ready for next-day delivery of shows like Revenge, Homeland. It meant a move away from from tapes to file-based content and the time gaps needed.

mymo

Discussing the new shows on rte with my daughter, she just said "they should of got rid of pat Kenny years ago....look what they can do with his wages"

Optimus Prime

ScrubsfanChris wrote: »

Was thinking the same myself just after the line "he still doesn't know"

I think clone is a bit too obvious for a whedon tv show, my money is on robot heart or something from the robot field.. :pac:

expectationlost

P_1 wrote: »

Great first episode, hopefully they'll be able to keep the standard up.

As an aside, I wonder if were seeing a shift by the broadcasters on this side of the pond in reaction to Netflix and torrenting in their scheduling? Having it on RTE and Chanel 4 within a week of it being first broadcast in the States is a pleasant surprise.

its apparent that a 3 day gap is still too long

Professey Chin

mymo wrote: »

I enjoyed it, I love agent Coulson, car bit at end was a bit cartoonish, just didn't fit.
Looking forward to more of this one, and can't believe rte is showing it!

Car does exist though

http://marvel.wikia.com/S.H.I.E.L.D._Flying_Car

mymo

The Dark Lord Cthulu wrote: »

Car does exist though

http://marvel.wikia.com/S.H.I.E.L.D._Flying_Car

I know, daughter pointed out it was in captain America, and to think I used to read all the comics for years, how could I forget!

pixelburp

I dunno, I didn't love it as much as others. The biggest positive was clearly Coulson; Gregg was fantastic in the role, he's marvellously deadpan and delivers his many lines perfectly. In fact it's clear Whedon loves Coulson too as he gets nearly all the funny gags & zingers. Some of the material was genuinely funny, so props there.

Otherwise though, I thought it was incredibly humdrum and banal. The non-Coulson cast were thoroughly uninteresting (at the moment; hopefully they'll grow on me), and if I might cause mild heresy here, I'm not the biggest fan of Whedon's style of character writing anyway, and find the constant sarkiness from everyone wears thin after a while; sometimes it feels like Whedon can only write for one type of character. Plus the fact the only females on the team are all so glamorous was distracting, and not in a good way.

It also looked very cheap, which really took me by surprise; considering the clout behind this, I expected things to feel a bit more cinematic; take out the Marvel components and it felt like a splashier episode of Fringe really with some pretty pedestrian direction. Hell, it felt like a throwback when you consider how nearly every marquee show tries to make itself look like a movie...

As for the secret about Coulson? Well there's not that many twists on the same concept, so I'm guessing he's a clone of some kind - given all the references to how Tahiti was such a 'magical place', maybe it's a nod towards some form of Asgard tech? Perhaps he's a neural clone, rendered as a hardlight hologram? (hey, I'm pretty good at this sort of thing!)

McLoughlin

I thought is was semi confirmed elsewhere that Coulson is a

LMD (Life Model Decoy)

which explains everything.

CastorTroy

Glad I avoided the trailers after the first one and most news stories about this so had a few surprises like Ron Glass appearing.

The way Coulson kept referring to Tahiti as a magical place reminded me of In Bruges and Bruges being like a dream.

Did enjoy Coulson injecting superspy guy. The techs are hard to understand at times with the way they go on.

And Ming Na Wen does not look nearly 50.

Bacchus

Very enjoyable opening. Nice to find a fresh, witty, light hearted show to watch again. It tied in almost seamlessly with The Avengers and IM3, something the nerd in me thoroughly enjoyed All those little (and big) nods were cool, the Chitauri tech, Extremis, super soldier program.

It has Joss Weedon written all over it, the writing is top notch, there's a great set of misfit characters and there's already hints at a 'big bad' Really interested to find out who those guys are. I assume they were working for whoever funded the centipede project and were the clean up crew.

The other big tease is Coulson himself. I'm gonna go for LDM. Whatever the reason he's walking around, he was great. Everything that came out of his mouth was gold... except that ending with the car, that was a bit too Men in Black / Back to Future. It didn't sit right with the rest of the show for me.

My only complaint would be that the two scientists need to be toned down a bit. Between those two, Sky and Coulson, that's 4 very quirky/witty/awkward central characters out of a main cast of 6. Only the two field agents have a more serious tone. Not that I mind quirky characters (and Weedon does them so well) but it's a lot to have in one show and those two are ones I can see grating on me over time.

Bacchus

Bacchus wrote: »

Really interested to find out who those guys are. I assume they were working for whoever funded the centipede project and were the clean up crew.

I thought it was stated that S.H.I.E.L.D were the ones that cleaned up after the Battle of New York?

Bacchus

Deleted User wrote: »

I thought it was stated that S.H.I.E.L.D were the ones that cleaned up after the Battle of New York?

No, I'm talking about the guy and girl that turned up at the station in the van, the "3rd party" as Coulson called them. I assume their boss funded the centipede experiment and they were supposed to clean up the evidence by killing yer man.

CastorTroy

Anyone else feel they were watching a JJ Abrams movie at points with the amount of lens flare. Seemed to be a lot at the beginning.

Only saw a few bits and pieces from the episode but one thing that really stood out was just how cheap it all looked. It was strangely reminiscent of some forgotten mid 90s sci-fi drama shot in Canada on the cheap. I said that the teasers looked cheap but I had expected the finished product to be somewhat more cinematic in appearance.

Thargor

Totally agree, just like Dark Angel or one of those.

Am I the only one that thought this was a steaming turd? Where are all these rave reviews coming from?

ScumLord

I thought it was pretty bland and predictable American bubble gum TV. Very formulaic, everyones too cool for school and really too cool to be the people they're trying to play. Given where American TV has gone in the last few years this is just too middle of the road America to be worth watching.

FreudianSlippers

I thought it was excellent. Good mix of action and humour, good characters as a base who play well off eachother. It was, in short, Whedonesque to its core... and that's a damn good thing. His use of words has always been great - i.e. the Asset/Asshat thing was pretty textbook.

This was always going to be a show that those who didn't like Whedon, wouldn't like. For me, it was perfect. But then again, the only Whedon show I didn't watch was Angel, and Firefly is probably in my top 5 favourite shows ever.

pixelburp

Thargor wrote: »

Totally agree, just like Dark Angel or one of those.

Am I the only one that thought this was a steaming turd? Where are all these rave reviews coming from?

I don't think it was a turd, but viewed as a pilot without all the baggage of Whedon & Marvel, if you removed Coulson it'd be extremely mediocre, and very like the kind of 90s sciFi procedural that Darko alluded to. It just felt so dreadfully dated against the quality of television that's out there at the moment. All it needed was the cheesy title sequence and we'd be set...

FreudianSlippers wrote: »

[...]

This was always going to be a show that those who didn't like Whedon, wouldn't like. For me, it was perfect. But then again, the only Whedon show I didn't watch was Angel, and Firefly is probably in my top 5 favourite shows ever.

Dismissing the critics? that's a bit unfair; I think it's reasonable to ask questions of Whedon; this thread shouldn't be the reserve of Whedonites only (especially as he's not writing most of the scripts iirc), and it's fair to discuss his writing styles & why he seems to fill his casts with the same umbrella-group of archetypes. It's not simply a case of not liking Whedon - clearly the man does a good line in snarky characters that can add zest to scripts - but just for once I'd like to see him try something new, move out of his comfort zone a little. Of course, it'd be completely silly to dismiss a show based on its pilot, but maybe that was one of my problems with this episode - it felt like cookie-cutter Whedon, like he wasn't even trying; maybe that's enough for some, but I was disappointed.

ScumLord

pixelburp wrote: »

if you removed Coulson it'd be extremely mediocre,

This Colson guy means nothing to me, I don't see what was so great about his inclusion? I guess you just have to be into the whole backstory for it to be any good.

Bacchus

ScumLord wrote: »

This Colson guy means nothing to me, I don't see what was so great about his inclusion? I guess you just have to be into the whole backstory for it to be any good.

He's got a bit of a cult following from the fans over the course of the movies.

With regards to the comments saying it looked cheap or dated compared to the rest of TV, I wonder is it just that it is a very bright, chirpy show that it gives that impression? Take a few recent critically acclaimed shows, Breaking Bad, Dexter, Mad Men. They all have varying levels of dark themes and gritty realism.
In Breaking Bad, the tone is obviously dark and even the style of the filming is very muted, with a lot of grey & muddy greens set it a gritty world.
Dexter is in sunny Miami but beneath that there are gritty murders and a very dark humour.
To take something completely different, Mad Men doesn't deal with murder or meth but it's characters are superficially 'perfect' with some serious dark stuff lurking beneath.

My point here is that, maybe we, the audience, have become so accustomed to "dark reality = quality TV" that when a show like this comes along it feels cheap?

I can certainly see how it won't appeal to some people. Even fans of The Avengers may be disappointed it wasn't something grander. I note a few people expected it to be more 'cinematic' on this thread. Well, it ain't cinema. It's TV and in my opinion, it's a breath of fresh air in a season of gritty shows (Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Ray Donovan, Boardwalk Empire etc.)