No show did it like Agents of Shield. Episode 1, Coulson does his best to talk down a man having a mental health crisis, proclaiming with every shred of desperation and his own sense of self “It matters who I am!” The show refuses to make Mike another nameless victim, immediately setting it aside from large scale plotlines the avengers deal with. And as Mike screams at Coulson, blaming the agent in front of him for every way the government has hung him out to dry, that it’s not enough to be just him anymore in a word of gods and monsters, Coulson just says softly “I know”
No one did it like agents of shield. No one broke the MCU down into the small stories like it did.
Watched a youtube video essay once that claimed the drop in quality in the mcu is because the heroes live in an ‘empty world.’ Like the civilians are set dressing or props if we’re being generous but they’re always conveniently out of the way during the big battles and don’t ever really interact with the heroes.
I can’t remember the specific points the video made or the examples they used but some of the examples I can think of of heroes in a not empty world are the bridge scene in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man, the train scene in Spider-Man 2, the boat scene in the Dark Knight, the old man refusing to kneel to Loki in The Avengers, the pencil pusher shield agent who refused to launch Project Insight because of “Captain’s Orders” in CATW, and a bunch of others.
That’s part of the reason why I love legacy characters like Miles Morales, Kate Bishop, and Kamala Khan as well. These are people who have grown up in a world of gods and monsters and super soldiers and they chose to take that as inspiration to do their part in making the world a better place.
Most of these kind of characters are empowered by seeing these later than life figures (like in lord of the rings), but then you have people who feel powerless in the wake of all this, which is probably the more common reaction both in fiction and in real life. It’s easy to give in to despair and hopelessness when faced against something so vast and bigger than yourself. But then you have people like Coulson who see their nothingness and run with the idea of ‘if nothing matters then everything I do matters.’ Because if there is no big picture, or if you have no control over the big picture, then what you do have control over is the small moments. The everyday opportunities to be kind, to make someone’s day a little brighter, to save just one person.
What can one powerless person do in the face of gods and monsters and miracles? In the face of crushing and all consuming hopelessness? They can be kind. They can reach out. Small things that might not have any effect on the whole big grand scheme. You’re not curing cancer or saving the world. You’re talking to a man on a ledge and telling him that he’s not alone. You find a young, trouble making woman with great potential and you give her a home, a family, and purpose. You make your small corner of the world a little bit better and that is enough to be a hero. Coulson is an agent of SHIELD and that means something. Not because of the organization itself, but because of what Coulson believes SHIELD is supposed to b, a force for good. So Coulson and people like him are going to be a force for good even if nobody else ever sees the good that they do.
