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Jamesman posted:I loving love how they introduced Cal and had him be this cartoonish, psycho rage monster villain. Even up to like two episodes ago, he was still this irredeemable (albeit understandable) bad guy. And now they've loving humanized him. I would just watch episode after episode of him and Skye just walking and talking. The way Kyle MacLachlan lights up, you just can't help but love the guy. He's a treasure. I don't think Cal has ever been shown as irredeemable. Whitehall is/was irredeemable. Ward even seems more irredeemable than Cal. We've never seen Cal out to hurt innocent people.
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Apr 27, 2015 17:08
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Codependent Poster posted:We've never seen Cal out to hurt innocent people. Except for that time he broke out those "enhanced" dudes to intentionally hurt high schoolers and even put them into comas just to draw out Coulson so he could hurt him and his team?
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Apr 27, 2015 17:22
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Oasx posted:Shield season one wasn't worse than Arrow's first season, or the current Flash season. In fact i would argue that it had perfectly normal season for most genre shows. That's probably a pretty fair comparison; in terms of writing, acting, production quality, etc. But the one big difference is that while we were sitting through a bunch of mediocre early episodes, there wasn't really much of an ongoing plot or or ongoing character development or anything to keep us interested, which is not true of Arrow or Flash. Sure, Early AoS had stuff like the ongoing Clairvoyant/Centipede plot, but it always felt like it was never going anywhere 'cause we could never find out that it was really about Hydra. So despite having some ongoing stories, none of them really developed, and it still felt like total wheel-spinning. And nothing of interest was really going on in between the characters that I remember either, which is an even worse sin that they have absolutely no excuse for.
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Apr 27, 2015 17:22
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Fatally wounding Trip to make a getaway doesn't count?
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Apr 27, 2015 17:23
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ApeHawk posted:Except for that time he broke out those "enhanced" dudes to intentionally hurt high schoolers and even put them into comas just to draw out Coulson so he could hurt him and his team? Look, mistakes were made. I'm sure he
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Apr 27, 2015 18:10
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I might be getting characters mixed up, but the first time we saw Cal on screen, wasn't he literally dripping in gore? And the first time he gets to see Speaking of the Clairvoyant, it's kinda trite now how everyone was like "Please, there's no way someone can see the future, why kind of science fiction nonsense do you think we're living here?  "
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Apr 27, 2015 18:15
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There's some revisionist history going on because I just watched season 1 like last week and the first 12-13 episodes were offensively boring. Like sure the show wasn't total dog poo poo but it wasn't compelling at all.
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Apr 27, 2015 18:42
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The argument keeps getting rehashed in this thread every now and then. There's a big difference between binging on dull average episodes Netflix and those of us who tried to watch AoS as it aired. We'd wait weeks for a new episode and then it would be offensively boring. I gave up on the show twice during the season. I still don't know how I ended up coming back to it before Cap 2 considering there was a hilarious stretch from January to March where they aired only 3 episodes because of the Olympics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agents_of_S.H.I.E.L.D._(season_1) Just look at those gaps. Thank god for Agent Carter this year both for being awesome and for saving us from the whims of broadcast TV scheduling.
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Apr 27, 2015 19:11
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I don't see what's so difficult about this. A lot of TV shows have trouble early on before they figure out what works with the pieces they have and what doesn't. Good, even great shows have had rocky starts. It's nearly inevitable. TV is loving hard to make. You don't have as much money as you need, you have much less time to do a single episode, hell multiple episodes, than you would a film, and you're much more likely to get interfered with by guys in suits than you are on a film. So you do your best, stumble into some good ideas and some lovely ideas. if you're lucky enough to last long enough to adapt you throw out the poo poo and emphasize the good and start getting better. Agents of SHIELD ain't the first show to have trouble figuring itself out right out of the gate. Hell, it ain't even the only Whedon show to do so. Buffy, Angel, and Dollhouse all took a while to get going. Firefly was better, but got tampered with by guys in suits, then never got a chance to grow. Hell, maybe its better to start off slow if you've got a Whedon involved! Babylon 5, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, that's three shows off the top of my had that started sucky and got better. I'm sure I could dredge up dozens of examples if I could be bothered to do some research. It's what happened for Agents of SHIELD too. The show started slow, but got better. I've gone back and forth on whether AoS or The Flash is my favorite superhero show right now, but over the last couple of episodes Flash has been deteriorating somewhat (casually tell Barry's ID to anyone you feel like, up to and including Captain loving Cold, but "WE CAN'T TELL IRIS!"  ) so I've been enjoying AoS more of late.And hell, I'd rather a show start slow and get progressively better than start strong and then jump off a cliff at the end! (I'm looking at you Lost and Battlestar. )
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Apr 27, 2015 19:26
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I think the problem is that even this 'figured out' version of the show isn't as good as it could or should be, in large part thanks to the legacy of the first season. Star Trek: TNG started with a solid foundation and kept refining its elements until everything clicked. Agents of SHIELD doesn't have the benefit of a good foundation and so we're stuck with awful legacy plots and characters like Grant, Hydra Brainwashing, Skye, Grant, and Fitz.
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Apr 27, 2015 19:47
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Rip Glee. Your first few episodes were great.
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Apr 27, 2015 19:47
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Irish Joe posted:awful legacy plots and characters... like Fitz. Too far, Joe!
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Apr 27, 2015 19:52
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jng2058 posted:I (casually tell Barry's ID to anyone you feel like, up to and including Captain loving Cold, but "WE CAN'T TELL IRIS!" Captain Cold found out due to torturing Cisco's brother.
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Apr 27, 2015 20:07
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jng2058 posted:And hell, I'd rather a show start slow and get progressively better than start strong and then jump off a cliff at the end! (I'm looking at you Lost and Battlestar. Arrow is approaching the cliff at breakneck speed. It may have already gone over and just hasn't noticed yet, Wile E. Coyote style.
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Apr 27, 2015 20:15
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Yeah currently binging this show on netflix thanks to having finally caught up on Arrow, Flash, Daredevil, and others. First season isn't bad and definitely has some fun moments in it but I could easily see people giving it a pass while it aired. If nothing else it's heads above Arrow, since it doesn't have the nonstop flashbacks turning it into a complete slog.
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Apr 27, 2015 20:16
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Spergatory posted:Arrow is approaching the cliff at breakneck speed. It may have already gone over and just hasn't noticed yet, Wile E. Coyote style. Hey maybe we'll make it across the canyon like Bart and Homer in the movie.
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Apr 27, 2015 20:18
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Honestly I kinda love the first season just for being ballsy enough to build all this normalcy and kinda milquetoast toast play by the clichés kinda world for so long just to blow it all up. I think honestly going through it they way it did made it all the more shocking that what we've seen happen has happened and has made it more fun but that's just me and I enjoyed tuning in every week from episode 1.
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Apr 27, 2015 20:43
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bobkatt013 posted:Captain Cold found out due to torturing Cisco's brother. Who cares? The problem is a supervillain knows Barry's ID! Which means that since Barry was raised by Iris' dad in Iris' house, she is already in danger. Hell, she's BEEN in danger since Reverse Flash threatened Joe with that picture of her with a knife in it. Look, the usual excuse for a secret identity is that "my friends and family will be in danger if my ID is revealed." But Barry's ID is already out in the world. Cold knows it. Heatwave and Golden Glider may know it. They may tell who knows how many other people. Reverse Flash knows it, and has already threatened Iris' life. Not to mention that since Iris is the "girl who knows the Flash" Iris is even more of a target! So all you're doing by not telling Iris is 1) making sure she doesn't know in advance that people like RF and CC may come for her in the middle of the night because they know she's important to the Flash and she doesn't, and 2) ensuring that when she DOES get kidnapped she doesn't know that all she needs to do is text Barry for help! There is literally no good reason to keep Barry's ID away from Iris and several good reasons to reveal it to her. Eddie is totally correct, and the fact that he hasn't been allowed to reveal it to Iris makes a dumb plot flat out moronic. And I recognize that they're almost certainly saving it for a season finale reveal, but that I recognize the plot contrivance doesn't make it any more fun to sit through. Irish Joe posted:I think the problem is that even this 'figured out' version of the show isn't as good as it could or should be, in large part thanks to the legacy of the first season. Star Trek: TNG started with a solid foundation and kept refining its elements until everything clicked. Agents of SHIELD doesn't have the benefit of a good foundation and so we're stuck with awful legacy plots and characters like Grant, Hydra Brainwashing, Skye, Grant, and Fitz. We'll have to disagree here. I think the current incarnation of Agents is fun. I enjoy Evil Ward. They've done something interesting with both Damaged Fitz and Possibly Evil Simmons. I'll concede that some of this "Real SHIELD" business feels kind of like the show marking time until Age of Ultron, but at least it hasn't dragged. I was fully expecting them to have Skye hide her powers for most of the season but nope, they got 'em out in the open in like two episodes. Could the show be better? Yeah. Is part of the problem having to put on the brakes before the new movie hits? Probably. Still, nothing in AoS makes me want to put my fist through my TV the way some of the stupidity that Barry's been showing in the last couple Flash episodes has. I never did get into Arrow, despite the crossovers, and don't get me started on Gotham. 
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Apr 27, 2015 21:33
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To me this isn't a show that has gotten progressively better. It drastically improved with the Cap tie in and S2 has been consistently high quality. This is a show that could've been good at the start but they chose not to.
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Apr 27, 2015 21:37
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quote:To me this isn't a show that has gotten progressively better. It drastically improved with the Cap tie in and S2 has been consistently high quality. This is a show that could've been good at the start but they chose not to. I dunno about the chose not to do it bit - to me AoS was a rushed idea to leverage off Coulson's fan popularity and it got kneecapped by that and the whole they had to wait for Winter Soldier to unleash the crazy. Plus a horribly broken up broadcast schedule. They did learn from those mistakes and we hence got Agent Carter, Daredevil and a vastly improved second season of AoS as a result. We can argue about how they could have done better to begin with - but the fact remains they actually did learn from season 1's mistakes and we are now getting pretty drat good viewing now.
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Apr 27, 2015 22:09
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ApeHawk posted:Except for that time he broke out those "enhanced" dudes to intentionally hurt high schoolers and even put them into comas just to draw out Coulson so he could hurt him and his team? I actually still don't understand how this did not become national news and basically start a nation-wide crisis. An entire stadium full of high-schoolers suddenly became comatized and no one asked how it happened? I would have appreciated if Talbot at least contacted Coulson and asked what the hell was going on and he was being hammered by the media or something.
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Apr 27, 2015 22:09
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I think the first half of Season 1 of SHIELD would be remembered a lot more fondly if it had actually had a decent air schedule.
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Apr 27, 2015 23:01
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jivjov posted:I think the first half of Season 1 of SHIELD would be remembered a lot more fondly if it had actually had a decent air schedule. ...it did, though. The really weird scheduling didn't start until it got back from the winter hiatus. Anyway, here's Whedon elaborating a bit on Coulson's absence from AOU and the intra-Marvel politics between Marvel Studios and Marvel Television: http://au.ign.com/articles/2015/04/27/why-the-marvel-movie-guys-are-annoyed-with-joss-whedon Barry Convex fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Apr 27, 2015 |
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Apr 27, 2015 23:03
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Martout posted:Then again the first Avengers clearly showed that SHIELD was messing around with stuff they shouldn't etc. In a universe where extremely advanced aliens frequently visit our planet to dump weird poo poo there, or fight each other, or just gently caress around with us; there is no good reason not to experiment with the technology they haphazardly leave lying around. I don't really care what Joss Whedon was trying to say with that scene, it was wrong and dumb. XboxPants posted:Sure, Early AoS had stuff like the ongoing Clairvoyant/Centipede plot, but it always felt like it was never going anywhere 'cause we could never find out that it was really about Hydra. How could a person be watching this show before seeing Winter Soldier and think this. Are you a time traveler? counterfeitsaint posted:Speaking of the Clairvoyant, it's kinda trite now how everyone was like "Please, there's no way someone can see the future, why kind of science fiction nonsense do you think we're living here? Just because one weird thing is real doesn't mean every weird thing is real. And SHIELD apparently studied this extensively. "Huh, an alien invasion. Now we need to start an agency to hunt vampires." is not a natural or logical reaction. The Sharmat fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Apr 27, 2015 |
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Apr 27, 2015 23:39
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XboxPants posted:Sure, Early AoS had stuff like the ongoing Clairvoyant/Centipede plot, but it always felt like it was never going anywhere 'cause we could never find out that it was really about Hydra. The Sharmat posted:How could a person be watching this show before seeing Winter Soldier and think this. Are you a time traveler? No, you simply misread the sentence. The "'cause" clause is explaining why the plot wasn't going anywhere, not explaining why we felt that way. Like, if your husband is sneaking around and it makes you think he's being unfaithful, but actually he was just secretly planning a surprise party for you, when you look back on it you might say "I felt like my husband was cheating on me because he was planning a surprise birthday party". No time travel involved. (yeah, the way I wrote it could have been interpreted either way, but if the way you read a sentence seems to break the laws of physics, try to go back and see if there's another way to interpret it) The Sharmat posted:Just because one weird thing is real doesn't mean every weird thing is real. And SHIELD apparently studied this extensively. Also, even the inhumans say this is totally unprecedented and are pretty surprised and excited about it. XboxPants fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 00:40
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XboxPants posted:No, you simply misread the sentence. The "'cause" clause is explaining why the plot wasn't going anywhere, not explaining why we felt that way. I didn't really think it wasn't going anywhere though. I mean if there's a reason to watch the first half of season 1, that's the reason. I guess maybe you could think it would be an eternal cocktease like Lost or BSG or something but I usually don't get that cynical that quickly.
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Apr 28, 2015 01:10
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The Sharmat posted:I didn't really think it wasn't going anywhere though. I mean if there's a reason to watch the first half of season 1, that's the reason. I guess maybe you could think it would be an eternal cocktease like Lost or BSG or something but I usually don't get that cynical that quickly. Fair enough, I also assumed it was going to get somewhere... eventually. Maybe a better way to say it is that, even if it had an end goal it was trying to reach, to me it didn't feel like it was making progress towards it? It's fine if you disagreed but based on what I've seen, a lot of us in this thread felt this way, specifically I've seen the phrase "spinning its wheels" thrown around a lot. And, yeah, it was also exacerbated by scheduling issues, so that even when TRACKS moves things forward a bit, then we have to wait a month for another episode. So going back and marathoning will leave a better taste in your mouth than when it originally aired. It still won't completely fix the problem, though. I can't help but wonder whether making the show even more episodic would have actually been in their favor, because then there wouldn't have been an expectation for the overarching narrative to move forward with each episode. You still need to establish CENTIPEDE/Clairvoyant for when everything turns to poo poo, but maybe they should have been given even less focus instead of treated like a mystery that the team was maybe going to get more info about at any moment, and kept very far in the background.
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Apr 28, 2015 01:21
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That would have really pissed off people that really like episodic stuff instead of serialized stuff when it went pure serial probably, wouldn't it? I'll agree the pacing could have been better but I don't think it's because the writers didn't know how to move that plot forward, it's because they'd decided to be really episodic during that period and the monster of the week stuff usually didn't give the overarching plot the time to breathe. It moved forward in lurches in episodes like "A Magical Place" and "T.A.H.I.T.I." instead of gradual increments, for the most part.
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Apr 28, 2015 01:30
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The Sharmat posted:That would have really pissed off people that really like episodic stuff instead of serialized stuff when it went pure serial probably, wouldn't it? Oh sure, I agree it was a deliberate act, at least to some extent. You can see with Ward's parody of himself that the writers were definitely self-aware of some of what they were doing. It's even arguable that their weird strategy was a good decision, if you're talking in a very big-picture sense. But what I'm saying is that even though the early episodes and characters were intentionally milquetoast, and that made what came later more interesting, it still doesn't somehow retroactively make those earlier episodes less milquetoast.
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Apr 28, 2015 02:07
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Yeah I agree with that. And while it's pretty interesting it's probably a really bad idea as a hook.
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Apr 28, 2015 02:10
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The Sharmat posted:Yeah I agree with that. Yeah, the idea isn't inherently unworkable, but the start of a series when everyone's just figuring things out and all the growing pains are still showing maybe isn't the best time to ask your viewers to sit through the most boring part of your season. That was another thing that made it worse - besides the frustration at lack of progress, there were also a lot of very genuine complaints with show quality. Also, 5 episodes of "everyday routine" probably would have worked nearly as well as 10, and would have been far more tolerable. Of course, that wasn't an option.
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Apr 28, 2015 02:22
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"You know what iritates me about this show I don't really enjoy? It's not on often enough."
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Apr 28, 2015 04:46
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Heathen posted:"You know what iritates me about this show I don't really enjoy? It's not on often enough." What's it like not understanding the concept of pacing?
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Apr 28, 2015 04:50
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Doctor Spaceman posted:What's it like not understanding the concept of pacing? HBO shot pacing in the leg. You get ten episodes in ten weeks, twelve tops. Netflix slit pacing's throat and let it bleed out. Now you get all thirteen episodes at once, and if you don't watch 'em all by the weekend you're poo poo out of luck for spoiler protection. If you take as much as a week, you're glacial.
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Apr 28, 2015 05:03
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Not to interrupt pacing chat, but I got to see Ming-Na Wen and Hayley Atwell in person on Saturday and it was, to quote Cal, the "best day ever." Agents May and Carter just hanging out being total badasses. When asked what word she would like applied to female characters more often, Ming-Na immediately said, "take-no-poo poo." I just needed to share this with someone because it was the highlight of my MCU fandom. Back to your regularly scheduled posting.
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Apr 28, 2015 05:10
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HBO's schedule is reliable, Netflix's is used-controlled, and both are far superior to the random, clunky breaks that AoS had in its first season. There's a 3 month period with 4 episodes, and nothing in there was a strong enough cliffhanger to use as an endpoint (unlike Skye's transformation before the mid-season gap this time).
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Apr 28, 2015 05:14
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Doctor Spaceman posted:What's it like not understanding the concept of pacing? I understand pacing just fine. I don't understand someone finding a show so offensively boring that they give up on it twice in one season then complain about the wait for the next episode. That's not a pacing problem.
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Apr 28, 2015 05:22
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Heathen posted:I don't understand someone finding a show so offensively boring that they give up on it twice in one season then complain about the wait for the next episode. That's not a pacing problem. The schedule should absolutely affect how the show is paced for a broadcast viewer (hence things like Sky's transformation right before the midseason break), and it's one of the many things they hosed up in S1.
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Apr 28, 2015 05:37
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Charles Gnarwin posted:Not to interrupt pacing chat, but I got to see Ming-Na Wen and Hayley Atwell in person on Saturday and it was, to quote Cal, the "best day ever." Agents May and Carter just hanging out being total badasses. When asked what word she would like applied to female characters more often, Ming-Na immediately said, "take-no-poo poo." That's pretty cool dude. I follow Hayley Atwell on twitter and she was posting pics from the convention and it looked pretty rad.
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Apr 28, 2015 05:38
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It's not as if humans beings never stopped watching a TV series out of boredom before Netflix came around.
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Apr 28, 2015 06:03
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