Game OverThinker: "DUMBER ALIVE"

Whose Side Are You On?

And here we go...



What's impressive to me immediately is how much the in-trailer narrative here feels designed to alleviate concerns that this is more AVENGERS 2.5 than CAPTAIN AMERICA 3. Obviously, the ancillary marketing and pop-cultural "presence" will be leaning harder into "Hey guys! Here's The Avengers again - many with slightly-redesigned outfits so you have to re-buy some figures!," but as an introduction-trailer this drives home the idea that this is a natural continuation of the Steve/Bucky storyline with everyone else onhand because, hey, this is their social-circle.

In Bob We Trust: WHO'S THE BEST MARVEL VILLAIN?

Really That Good: SPIDER-MAN 1 & 2

Well. This took forever (over an hour long this time - wow!) and Sony immediately issued a YouTube copyright claim on it. Said claim is now in dispute, so watch this while you can! :)

TV RECAP: Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D Season 3 - Episode 8: "Many Heads, One Tale"

Well... that was pretty unexpected.

A weird thing about how AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D has evolved as a series is that the more both the series and the audience seem to have accepted its position as the redheaded stepchild of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the more cavalier it's gotten in playing around with the worldbuilding. Throughout most of Season 1, when the audience was still assuming/hoping that the series was going to be a mythology-packed weekly geek-out setting up dominoes for the movies to knock down, it operated strictly on the fringes of its own universe until it was more-or-less forced to use the good silverware because CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER's storyline made it unavoidable.

But now, with the audience effectively resigned to the idea that AGENTS is mostly going to do it's own thing as "NCIS: MARVEL UNIVERSE" and not have any real noteworthy impact on the movies (example: Multiple friends/colleagues of The Avengers know Coulson is alive now, but not The Avengers themselves for absolutely no good reason) ...the show is somehow now more emboldened about play with what feel like big, essential moving-parts of the Universe that you'd think the movies would get first-dibs on messing with: Last season got to introduce The Inhumans (whose movie doesn't come out until 2019) and start early on Marvel's long-term goal of turning them into Mutant/X-Men replacements; and now along with continuing that work Season 3 now gets to re-write a huge part of the MCU's history (on Earth, anyway) with a single conversation.

Specifically: HYDRA, the villainous group whose shenanigans have driven the plots of (so far) four movies and lurk (retroactively) in the background/mythos of all the rest, now has a brand-new, way way out there origin-story - which could be a signal that the movies are done using them or that the movie and TV sides of the MCU are about to start playing nice(er) with eachother.

SPOILERS FOLLOW:


"Many Heads, One Tale" is, like last week's "Chaos Theory," for the most part a plot-plot-plot affair (we are now racing toward the mid-season finale) with some long-awaited character moments dropped in for seasoning: Fitz/Simmons finally cry it out and kiss, Coulson and Price both show all their cards, we get official confirmation that Gideon Malick is the Security Council member Powers Boothe played in AVENGERS and a HYDRA bigwig to boot, we (apparently) learn what the ATCU is (and isn't) actually up to and May and Lincoln bury the hatchet...

...oh, and it turns out everything we thought we knew about HYDRA, one of the essential building-blocks of Marvel's continuity-experiment, is not only wrong - they're actually up to something that sounds (conceptually) like the biggest-scale villain plan any MCU villain has had outside of whatever Thanos is up to.

So let's get that out of the way first: As revealed to Ward by Malick, HYDRA is actually over a thousand years old, with The Red Skull's "Nazi Deep-Science Division" incarnation being merely HYDRA's "thing to do" in the 1940s. As it turns out, HYDRA's actual origin is a cult that worships an unnamed all-powerful Inhuman from ancient times who was exiled from Earth using The Monolith - their entire purpose, encompassing everything the organization has ever done, is to find a way to bring this Inhuman "god" back to Earth so he (she? it?) can conquer it.

...alright, then.

In light of that, the major revelations otherwise almost seem kind of perfunctory - even though they're directly tied-in: The ATCU has been run by HYDRA via Malick the whole time, but (apparently) without Rosalind Price's knowledge - oh, and they aren't "curing" Inhumans, they're working to make and conscript as many of them as they can. Astronaut Will's portal-crossing mission? HYDRA as well, with heavy implication that the shape-shifting, mind-controlling entity that bedeviled Will and Simmons on the alien planet is the unnamed Inhuman "god." Lash? Now in Malick/Ward/HYDRA's hands, seemingly on-track to be re-weaponized. So... a lot going on to deal with.

On the non-plot side, the reveal that Price has been played by the outfit she was supposedly running felt so weirdly clunky that I almost want it to be a double fake-out. I mean, seriously? All this time she's been confidently/assertively running an operation whose supposed sole reason to exist (warehousing and attempting to cure Inhumans) she was just "taking on faith" as existing because the work was being done in a room she wasn't supposed to go into? That's dumb.

I get the purpose of the fake-out: Get the audience all riled up to see Coulson pull a stone cold "Gotcha! I played you before you could play me!" move, then yank it away by contriving a scenario where Price was actually duped and acting in good faith - making Coulson (kind of) the asshole this time... but there had to be a better way. On the other hand, the actual reveal of this was a fine acting turn for both of them. It's always uncomfortable, in a modern context, to see a "good guy" doing the 60s James Bond seduce-to-manipulate thing; and it's especially strange when the perpetrator is a character like Coulson who's typically played as a boyish do-gooder. Credit that they pulled off what's a pretty dark turn (Coulson basically used and manipulated Price in an overall pretty cruel way in order to get at intel she wasn't hiding and didn't know herself) in a way that leaves new places for characters to go rather than just ruining the character (Coulson) forever.

Elsewhere, the "let's go undercover" infiltration scene with Hunter and Bobbi was fun, but it's also the kind of well the show has gone to too many times when it needs a "fun" was to dump a bunch of exposition and place-setting. Apart from the "Oh, it's HYDRA again and they're making their own Inhuman army" discovery, we get the debut of a new recurring Inhuman villain in Mark Dacascos "Giyera;" and while Dacascos is one of those hardworking B-movie martial-arts pros action fans are always glad to see (depending on your age/region he's immediately recognizable as either Wo Fat from the newer HAWAII FIVE-0, The Chairman from IRON CHEF AMERICA, Mani from BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF or Billy Lee from DOUBLE DRAGON) it's a little dissapointing that his Inhuman power turns out to be "Magneto, just without the name and outfit."


BULLET POINTS:

• Who/what is the ancient Inhuman that HYDRA has apparently been trying to bring to Earth this whole time? I don't know. I still have trouble believing that it's going to be one of the marquee Inhumans at this juncture, and it really could be any Cosmic Marvel fixture not yet claimed by the movies re-worked as "actually an Inhuman." So for now I guess everyone from Immortus to Death is on the table ("Ma'Veth," Hebrew for "Death," is the title of the mid-season finale.)
• That having been said, it could more narrowly be The Unspoken, who was the Inhumans' king before Black Bolt. OR, if we're supposed to glean anything from HYDRA's logo apparently having evolved from a ram skull, Pazuzu technically exists in Marvel as well.
• THAT having been said, some of the dialogue from Fitz/Simmons laying this all out mentioned "inspiring legends of devils." I wonder... could this be where/how we get an MCU version of Mephisto (who is not technically *the* devil, in the comics)?
• Over in Entertainment Weekly, Clark Gregg (Coulson) coyly refers to talk of the (now pretty obvious) emerging storyline of S.H.I.E.L.D and HYDRA both having Inhuman armies as "a war of some kind that will not be civil in nature, while at the same time being very civil in nature." Heh.
• But wait - it won't exactly be a surprise if AGENTS has to mention/incorporate the events of CIVIL WAR similarly to the way WINTER SOLDIER and AGE OF ULTRON worked, but does this mean S.H.I.E.L.D and HYDRA are taking "sides" in it? Hm. In the comics, "Civil War" was an organic ideological schism, but I can see the movies going with "HYDRA did stuff to trigger/escalate this fight."
• See also: Bret Dalton (Ward) has been teasing a "WINTER SOLDIER-level" twist for the mid-season. But short of "Coulson has been evil this whole time, somehow" I'm not sure what's left to do that could meet that challenge (and that would be stupid.)

NEXT WEEK: Nothing, because Thanksgiving. But the week after next brings "CLOSURE," the penultimate episode before the series breaks for Winter (and Season 2 of AGENT CARTER.)

TV RECAP: Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D Season 3 - Episode 7: "Chaos Theory"

Apologies, once again, for the delay. It won't repeat for tomorrow's show.

So! Once again, AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D puts a big chunk of it's internal mysteries on the table and drops in a bunch of new ones. Clever storytelling? Side-effect of only having a general sense of where your story is "allowed" to go week to week? Who can tell, at this point...

SPOILERS FOLLOW!

We knew Andrew Gardner was Lash as of last episode, and now as of this one we know how he got that way (Jaiying rigged some of her personal-effects with Terrigen booby-traps, leading Andrew to be exposed and discover that he has been an Inhuman this whole time) and everyone is on the same page about it; with Lash himself now filed-away in the ATCU's holding-facility - which, under the circumstances, Daisy is now feeling less self-righteous about unilaterally opposing. Well, isn't that convenient.

A strong episode overall, though (apart from the aforementioned May/Andrew business) a little light on the character work in favor of the plot. It's nice to see the pieces continuing to move so quickly, since at this rate it feels like the current scenario(s) could well be totally upended by the time the AGENT CARTER break arrives; potentially giving us yet another new status-quo to look forward to in the second half. It would be in keeping with the speed at which things have moved this season, and I'm starting to wonder if we can actually hope for a significant CIVIL WAR lead-in.

...or not. In any case:

New mystery #1: What, exactly, was Lash trying to accomplish? Before he went down at May's hands (great performances from Blair Underwood and Ming-Na Wen, once again) his dialogue seemed to imply that he was going after Inhumans who'd done something "wrong." In the comics, Lash's deal is that he kills those who've turned without "earning" it whom he deems unworthy after the fact, but this doesn't appear to be that - particularly since he claimed to be using Jaiying's genealogy-charts as a hit-list. At this point, it would be a very "signature" AGENTS' moment for Lash to turn out to have been wrongly-fighting a yet-unknown threat, so...

New mystery #2: Who is Gideon Malick and what does he have to do with the ATCU? Last time, we learned that the (apparent) head of the S.H.I.E.L.D-overseeing Security Council played by Powers Boothe has a name and is apparently a bad guy (he's reached out to Ward and Nu-HYDRA.) Now, just as Coulson (and maybe the audience?) was getting ready to trust Rosalind Price - Daisy saving her life during a fight with Lash and all that - we (but not Coulson) learn that Malick has been in contact with her the whole time. Is he calling ATCU's shots?

New mystery #3: Who were the Monolith's pre-S.H.I.E.L.D owners? Should've seen this angle coming, but did not. So, good on you, writers. While continuing to look for ways to bring Simmons' astronaut boyfriend Will back to Earth with the Monolith/portal destroyed, Fitz lands on a big clue: A near-match to the insignia from the old castle where the device was hidden at some point before S.H.I.E.L.D had it appears to have been hidden in the design of Will's mission-patch, suggesting that it wasn't (only?) NASA backing his mission but some remnant of the occult-esque secret society that was using the Monolith for unknown purposes back in the day. Okay, so maybe there are more people out there who know about the portals and how to use them... but who are they?

No need for bullet-points theorizing this time, since it feels to me like they're heading for all of these stories to converge this time around. Here's the thing: We know that whoever the Monolith-cultists were, they were men of means and position. We know that S.H.I.E.L.D had the Monolith after them, but apparently no one we've yet met was high-grade enough to know when they got it or how. Now, we know that at some point at least 15 years ago, it was used in conjunction with a NASA mission likely at the behest of those same cultists. So it feels like a pretty easy guess that said cultists are connected-to S.H.I.E.L.D in such a way that they could use The Agency's "keep an eye on alien stuff" directives to hide the thing. Seems like something Malick would be involved with, if not in charge of, yes?

So who are they (the "cultists," that is)? Well, another tangent HYDRA seems like the obvious call, but maybe too obvious at this point. AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D could use a fresh(er) regular antagonist, so even if they are HYDRA I'd imagine they'll be a "related" branch that goes by a different name. My guess? The Serpent Society. Either way, I maintain my earlier guess about Malick being a "re-imagined" version of Albert Malik, aka the second Red Skull.

Extrapolating further: A big part of the post-CIVIL WAR Captain America comics involved the real Red Skull "possessing" a high-placed military/industrial figure, so it already wouldn't surprise me to see that plotline come up somewhere in the MCU in the near future. If so, I'd bet Malick isn't so much "Red Skull II" as the O.G. Skull, Johann Schmidt, wearing a new face. Keep in mind: The one thing we know about these people is that they owned and figured out how to control a space/time portal - wouldn't it be something if Schmidt (who was zapped off to who-knows-where by the similarly portal-centric Tessaract in FIRST AVENGER) found his way back that way and has been hiding out ever since? 

The cast and writers have been teasing a "WINTER SOLDIER-level" twist for the Winter Break, after all, and Powers Boothe pulling off his face the reveal that The Red Skull has been secretly hanging out this entire time would certainly qualify. Plus, if it means the Skull might concievably become available for the movies again (maybe as a secret CIVIL WAR heavy, dare I hope??) I'd be all for that. In the comics, Red Skull serves the vital purpose of providing a "baseline" of evil to give every other villain a degree of relative nuance (i.e. "Sure, I'm a pretty bad person - but that dude is, literally, a NAZI!") and it'd be fun to have an agitator onhand who's just bad for bad's sake if you need to get a plot going economically: "Why are they trying to blow up The Rainforest, exactly?" "Nazi With a Skeleton-Head!"

NEXT WEEK:

Coulson and S.H.I.E.L.D are apparently double-dealing against ATCU even still in "Many Heads, One Tale." (okay, that title makes me feel even more secure in predicting The Serpent Society.)

UPDATES 11/16/15

Just a quick update: This last week (and counting) has been murder on my schedule, which is why a recap for S.H.I.E.L.D from the previous week didn't end up running. It will run sometime later this evening, and the regularly-scheduled one for tomorrow should run on time. Apologies for the delay.