Skipping pretty much the first half of S1, and it's... okay. It's definitely sharpened up a little bit but it's still more Buffy S1/2 than Firefly.
The start of season 4 is at best on the same level as S3 but if anything it's worse. I am a bit frustrated because fan consensus seemed to be that it took a massive leap forward with this season, but so far all it's done is shuffled some pieces around so there's more frustrating bureaucracy to deal with, and replaced the strong 3-seasons-build-up villains with some boring ghost scientists. They've even managed to make Ghost Rider dull. Supposedly they moved from season-long arcs to three or four mini-arcs, but I'm 8 episodes in and it all feels like wheel-spinning so far.
It immediately gets a ton better after moving onto the next mini-arc. The last 14 or so episodes are fantastic. They perhaps weren't playing with the most original ideas - evil doppelgangers, evil robots, a dark timeline where the Nazis won - but they made them their own and made them sing.
S5 is pretty slick, but they're doing a causal loop thing, which I generally find to be a bit unsatisfying and lazy - all you have to do is write weird shit happens because it already did rather than worry about motivations and cause and effect.
They completely give up on the causal loop thing at some point anyway - I thought they were going to use multiverses to get out of it, but they just went "oh, they did something different this time" which defeats the point of the entire concept! It was even lazier than I was expecting. Plus, I didn't really find the setting of the first half of the season very engaging - it felt like a three-parter maximum. The second half was more enjoyable as long as I ignored the causal loop thing and just assumed it was a regular linear threat. I really liked all Adrian Pasdar's stuff, except for the ending which was just such a damp squib.
S6 was pretty much rubbish overall, but it's not bad to start off with. They've got a lead actor now playing a villain (clone or whatever, don't know yet) and a space casino which are well-worn ideas, but they're doing them in a fun way, so that's fine. Also, I like that they've brought an old gay guy in for the science team, played by Barry Shabaka Henley - I don't know what behind the scenes is like, but they handle onscreen POC and LGBT+ rep pretty well, it's there, it's part of the characters, it never feels tokenistic, and it's just a relief not to have another quirkily gorgeous young white scientist in there.
The amount of times I've shouted "use your superpower" at the characters, but also "pay off that joke you set up" at the writers, though...
It goes rubbish once they leave the fun stuff behind, though. Things I wish this show would stop constantly doing:
- baddies impersonating goodies (face-masks, clones, possession etc etc)
- agents being given sensible orders, fucking everything up by disobeying them, and not facing consequences
- one of the two Christian characters saying "there's only one God and He doesn't [whatever]" whenever a 'god' is mentioned
- "Here is a new phenomenon." "That's impossible/weird." "Yeah, but we always deal in impossible/weird stuff."
I can't fathom why they do that last one over and over again. I guess it's because they think the audience are going to be constantly snorting at genre stuff and have to be reminded that this is that kind of show. I don't know why anyone would be struggling with that after five seasons and like 20 movies, but there you go.
The penultimate one was a cute-ish Avengers 1 ref the first time, now he just comes off as a culturally intolerant Christian arsehole.
Also, in one scene where two women face off against each other, their dialogue is like "good to see another woman who doesn't use a gun", "I don't need one", "boys and their toys" [fight starts]. What is this, the 90s? Just cut that shit out completely, save yourself half an hour of shooting time and give yourself ten extra seconds of runtime to spend elsewhere.
It goes rubbish once they leave the fun stuff behind, though. Things I wish this show would stop constantly doing:
- baddies impersonating goodies (face-masks, clones, possession etc etc)
- agents being given sensible orders, fucking everything up by disobeying them, and not facing consequences
- one of the two Christian characters saying "there's only one God and He doesn't [whatever]" whenever a 'god' is mentioned
- "Here is a new phenomenon." "That's impossible/weird." "Yeah, but we always deal in impossible/weird stuff."
I can't fathom why they do that last one over and over again. I guess it's because they think the audience are going to be constantly snorting at genre stuff and have to be reminded that this is that kind of show. I don't know why anyone would be struggling with that after five seasons and like 20 movies, but there you go.
The penultimate one was a cute-ish Avengers 1 ref the first time, now he just comes off as a culturally intolerant Christian arsehole.
Also, in one scene where two women face off against each other, their dialogue is like "good to see another woman who doesn't use a gun", "I don't need one", "boys and their toys" [fight starts]. What is this, the 90s? Just cut that shit out completely, save yourself half an hour of shooting time and give yourself ten extra seconds of runtime to spend elsewhere.
S7 gets off to an okay start but there are some big series decisions they're making that I think are missteps: they killed off Coulson at the end of S5, by having him do a deal with Ghost Rider that meant his original Loki-inflicted wound slowly came back. This perfectly reinstates the pathos of his death in The Avengers by saying 'yeah he came back but only for a little while, he got to be a hero for a while longer, but he still got killed by Loki, and he's not hiding from Tony, Pepper, Cap etc for the rest of everyone's lives'. But then they brought him back, first as an evil pan-dimensional doppelganger (groan!), then as a LMD (i.e. a good robot him), so that's now rendered two Coulson deaths meaningless! I don't know if there were behind-the-scenes reasons for it, but they should have held off until the end of the series then killed Coulson the way they did.
They're pretending the Thanos snap didn't happen, apparently, which is an incredibly weak choice. Leaks say they're going to acknowledge it in this final season and use time-wimey to get out of having to deal with it, but it's just less interesting that way.
And they're doing time-travel again, this time into the past. It's kind of fun, especially the 1955 Area 51 episode (they started with 1931, prohibition and all that, which is always a boring choice), but it's so far off from what AoS has been, I wouldn't have chosen it for the last season. I guess if they come back to the present for the second half of the season and do some classic SHIELD shit that'll be okay, and it does at least match up with Endgame.
Finally got round to watching the last ever few episodes of Agents Of SHIELD. I know the series was continually fucked over by the studios, but wow what a giant mess it turned out as. Boring, faceless villains, protagonists who got revamped or side-lined so often they were hard to care about, and a big nonsensical time-travel jumble that is made even more messy due to the fact that they did it just in time for it to get tangled up in the offscreen existence of Endgame's nonsensical time travel jumble. It was like reading the second pair of Red Dwarf novels.
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