Is Marvel's Agents of SHIELD all Tahiti? (Captain America : the Winter Soldier) SPOILERS

Does Captain America : the Winter Soldier's total indifference to Agents of SHIELD point to something.. magical?

I don't rate Marvel's Agents of SHIELD tv series at all, but seeing Captain America : the Winter Soldier yesterday makes me think the season finale might be something quite daring for a network tv show.

First off,  Captain America : the Winter Soldier. 

Never mind the super hero stuff, Winter Soldier is the best pure action film since Skyfall, and would make possibly even more money as a standalone action film than it would as just part of Marvel's Phase Two. Astonishing that the directors, Anthony and Joe Russo, are more know for directing episodes of Arrested Development. I would guess they will be big names henceforth.

On a Marvel movie level I would put Winter Soldier above Avengers, just below the first Iron Man film. I could write much more gushing praise but there are plenty of other reviews and discussions of the various geeky plot points available which I will not revisit here. Here I am more concerned with what Captain America : the Winter Soldier suggests about the runt of Marvel's litter, the mysteriously dull and involving Marvel's Agents of SHIELD tv series, supposedly written by master tv writer and director the of the Avengers, Joss Whedon.

I have come to loath Agents of SHIELD. This was my reaction to the heavily hyped episode which tied-in to Thor : Dark World (which I loved)

Agents of SHIELD is the worst thing I've ever seen with Whedon's name on it.
I'm sick of defending this show and the 'tie in to Thor The Dark World' was my final straw. It was two minutes of kids tv fronting tagged onto an 'Asgard'
story that could have sat in a box of reject scripts from the Man From UNCLE for 40 years.
Right now AoS is juvenile garbage and makes The Avengers look like The Seventh Seal. There is too much other good stuff on to be wasting time on it.

Having given the revelations of Captain America : the Winter Soldier some thought I think we might have to re-evaluate Agents of SHIELD. It may be disconnected and silly for a reason.

Remember the event which kicked off Marvel's Agents of SHIELD is the death and apparent resurrection of Agent Coulson in The Avengers. That, and Coulson himself, has remained pretty much the centre of the show. Since then the tv series has been mainly criticised  for having next to no connection to rest of the shared Marvel universe - the only major characters to have guested on the show so far are Asgardians (Lady Sif, Lorelei) in the close orbit of Loki, god of mischief and illusion, who is co-incidentally the villain who killed Agent Coulson in the Avengers. Interestingly Loki kills Coulson with the staff he uses to warp the minds of several other characters in the movie.

Meanwhile in the film world, Captain America : the Winter Soldier seems to have next to no connection to Marvel's Agents of SHIELD tv series despite being primarily about SHIELD. (The only reference to Coulson in the movie apparently is a briefly glimpsed poster in a SHIELD office that says "COULSON LIVES!"). 

If we take Marvel's Agents of SHIELD tv series at face value Coulson has been running around the world on assignments for a while now and none of the Avengers so traumatised by his death have become aware that he survived.  Emotional plot points left hanging unused like that? This is all very un-Joss Whedon and quite quite mysterious.

I've not been paying full attention to Agents of SHIELD for a while and I'm sure those that like the show will say that Coulson's death and resurrection has already been sufficiently explained (really?) but fans of Ben Kingsley's inspired performance in Iron Man 3 and the new One Shot All Hail the King might respond that these Marvel writers like a plot twist, and are not beyond twisting it right back again.

Another thought - 

we now know after the HYDRA revelations in Captain America : the Winter Soldier, that a more accurate title for the tv series  would be "Marvel's Agents of Nazis". Are they going to re-title it or does this show have a deliberately short shelf life?

What is Joss Whedon up to ? How 'real' are the events in Agents of SHIELD? Fans of Buffy and Dollhouse will know that Whedon loves messing with the reality of his characters and the mind of his audience...

The Prisoner in Los Angeles, Joss Whedon's Dollhouse reassessed

<ok - i'm in a pub, The Hemingford Arms, drinking because my central heating has broken down and even though it is the first day of spring it it is still -0 outside. I'm going through notes on my phone and found this from some time ago. Allusions to The Prisoner do seem a bit of stretch from this distance but maybe if I watched it again.. >

I'm an enormous fan of Buffy and bought about four copies of the Firefly boxed set for friends and family. It was fantastic to see Joss Whedon get all the credit deserves for writing and directing the Avengers. So ..here is a surprise ... Whedon's forgotten tv series, Dollhouse, written off as a creepy perv fest at the time of broadcast , is arguably the best thing he's ever done. I've just finished watching S1.  Plot is a very dark take on Charlie's Angels and Joe 90 but much better than that sounds.. Imagine Charlie's Angels where Charlie is actually Dr Tyrell from Blade Runner.

Dolls, human hosts reprogrammed with other personalities by a shadowy organisation, are used to prolong the lives of the dead, to house the personalities of recalcitrant employees, to act as nannies that fully believe they are the mothers of children, and to reenact the lives of serial killers. Eliza Dushku, Faith, from Buffy, is the main character, Echo, a drug addled terrorist given a chance to wipe her record clean by donating her body to the Doll House for a set term.

It is probably some great allegory of actors and acting (and contracting?)  to be taken here but much like that tv classic the Prisoner it is a prism through which a lot can be seen.  Human identity and individualism is a central theme in The Prisoner and this is the best tv exploration of that theme I've seen since.

Like JW's other classic neglected show, Firefly, this is a tough hill to climb initially. It has typically awful opening titles, for a JW show, like a lurid trailer for a paedophile adventure show and  the first two or three episodes are a quite predictable modern take on Charlie's Angels.

It has 8 main characters only two of which are actually likeable. Two in particular , DeWitt and Topher, become more sympathetic but remain essentially hate-able (and eventually doomed). It's Dark. Like most Whedon world the forces of law and order are totally compromised and rarely interfere in the goings on. There is no Scooby Gang or Firefly crew. The Actives are confessed criminals turned into abused innocents. The childlike love affair  between Sierra and Victor is treated with almost detached cruelty. 

The motives of the FBI agent investigating the Doll House are questionable. He knowingly had sex with one of the Actives as a Doll, and appears throughout to be fixated on Echo. And perhaps Doll House lost a lot in its setting. Los Angeles as "the city of Devils" was mined out as a concept in Whedon's Buffy spin-off Angel. Dollhouse deserved a different canvas. It has a cold blooded cruelty worthy of David Cronenberg , it was probably filmed in Canada, why not set it in Montreal?

Like Firefly has one big set and makes the most of it and Whedons trusted rep company are joined by some of the acting talent from Battlestar Galactica. Eliza Dushku is just about good enough to carry off a role that should have made her a real star. It's an actors dream, playing multiple personalities and roles every episode. She is Exec producer on Dollhouse at a time when Whedon was still distrusted in the industry after the network murder of Firefly, so we have to give her credit for keeping the show on at all.

I'll be honest though, I still miss Faith.

<I watched series 2 eventually, very good but typically with JW a tragically rushed ending.. >


Sent from my iPhone

Joss Whedon, Avengers Connections

When Buffy The Vampire Slayer ended one of the mainstream critics (in  The Times) was clued in enough to say that with its comedy, charm and martial arts it was the modern equivalent of the  British Avengers tv series of the 60s and 70s.

For those in the know this shouldn't be a surprise. References to the Chris Claremont X Men comics are littered throughout Buffy, notably Willow being decribed as going "Dark Pheonix", and that classic comic storyline itself is influenced by an infamous episode of the Diana Rigg classic.

So it's nicely ironic that the much maligned and mistreated creator of Buffy has just broken box office records with the another Avengers, the American collection of Earths Mightiest Heroes.


Whedon is now effectively God of the Marvel universe (The Watcher?). Studio suits that previously looked at a series of books and thought wow we have three or four stories to wring out of this now have a almost unlimited source of material to adapt. He won't be doing any more tv, so time to savour what he has done. I'm about to start watching one of his interesting tv failures, Dollhouse.

The Filmspotting podcast covering this subject suggested the success of the Avengers is that it plays like a tv miniseries, perhaps as a series finale to this...

"Avengers Assemble"—Evaluating the 9-Hour Cut 

'SnakeCharmer' here has edited together all of the prequel marvel movies (plus connecting scenes) so they play chronologically as
First part of Thor, then
Captain America
Iron Man
Then events of Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, and Thor happening concurrently.

.. And apart from odd stylistic juxtapositions they all apparently play better, particularly the bad ones (Iron Man 2), which suffered most from pointless episodic indulgence when released alone.

Aside from this 8 hour miniseries edit, the "prequel" movies now look much better in context, (though stylistically only Thor stands out) I've just watched Ang Lee's Hulk and even that is 10% better having seen the Avengers, interestingly nothing in the Ang Lee film is particularly contradicted in the official films and I think Whedon re-introduces some of the ideas from it, like Banner only surviving his Gamma accident because of the "other guy" within him.

They and we should be grateful to Ang Lee, if he'd not made such ambitiously arty flop the rights to use the Hulk would never have reverted back to Marvel to be able to use the character in Avengers! (Compare with fate of endless Spiderman/Daredevil/Fantastic Four sequels and reboots)

In the course of returning to what we are now calling "The Prequels" I also watched Daredevil again, the superior Directors Cut even. Don't make the same mistake, unless you subconsciously want to give the whole subject of movie super heroes a serious rest...

UPDATE: re: the Claremont X-Men and the Steed/Peel Avengers, this covers the subject in more detail
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/05/23/swipe-file-steed-and-mrs-peel-0-and-the-x-men/