#whedons

I just realized that in the Pilot of AoS we hear Mike ask “What are we?” the response from his son, Ace, being “A team.”

and in Avengers just the year before, Bruce Banner on the helicarrier asks “What are we? A team?” and then he clarifies, “No, no, no... we’re a chemical mixture that makes chaos... We’re... we’re a time bomb.”

And this is all too fitting because Mike, in the Pilot, is in fact, a literal, walking time bomb full of chemicals.

Season 5 was definitely a rollercoaster. I enjoyed it, overall, but unfortunately I’m closing this season feeling like it wasn’t without its flaws, despite some incredible highs and artistic originality, brave choices and wonderful acting. On balance, this is I feel the first time I don’t feel this season is the best of all that’s come before, as I did when coming to the end of seasons 2, 3, and 4.

For me, although there were other weaknesses that I may address in future pieces, the glaring problem with the second half of season 5 was a symptom of its timing and status as a possible series finale. The writers, sensibly enough intending to try and tie up as many loose ends as possible, decided to reintroduce many elements from earlier seasons as a callback and perhaps even a thanks to fans who’d stuck with the show that long. In many ways a positive...but it also proved to be a double-edged sword, because the characters, setting, and so many other things have changed so much since season 1, and the way they were incorporating the older elements imply didn’t, or didn’t strongly enough, reflect that.

This is a show that’s become progressively more complex and darker, even within this season, introducing dark!Fitz and to an extent Simmons, beaten and enraged Mack and Yo-Yo, and a May who starts to seem like the only one of the crew to retain her existing moral code and beliefs in the face of everyone else’s despondency. And unfortunately...the second half of the season seems to forget this, it goes out the window, only to be brought back sporadically when needed for ‘dramatic’ moments. May’s faith, unchanged from season 1, but only seeming stronger compared to everyone else’s despair is retconned into an almost mystical or religious belief narrowed down to focus on Phil Coulson as a man. The complicated ideology conflict between Fitz and Mack is reduced to a black and white morality war of who is right and who is wrong. Jemma Simmons, who spent the first half of the season as a major player and well able to stand on her own two feet and contribute spent the last three episodes of the season in a lab, bossed around by Daisy and May and reduced to being Coulson’s nurse. Daisy, after four and a half seasons of character development to stand on her own two feet and to learn to lead, is reduced to a little girl lost, needing to rely on her father figure - literally, in the denouement, as the ensemble team show that’s been built up since season 2 shrinks in on itself in the last ten episodes to primarily focus on Phil Coulson as the head of this body politic and everyone else acting as his limbs, hopeless without him. It’s a fair metaphor, thematically, but it undercuts the four seasons’ worth of work they had seemed to be methodically undertaking to make sure these characters would be able to stand out alone, each of them developed and compelling enough to act as leads in their own right, whether on SHIELD still or in other properties when inevitably the mid 50s Clark Gregg decided he no longer wanted to be a TV action hero.

I personally hope whether or not Coulson comes back they drop, or at least start to lay off so heavily on these cheesier 'found family' elements the second half of season 5 started to ham up. It felt to me like the intended audience shifted back to younger than they had been targeting in the previous season and the first half of S5. I found that it broke my immersion and ability to take most of the characters seriously, that as experienced agents facing up to an extinction level event with plenty of advance warning, they would take such high stakes risks to save the life of one man who by all accounts didn't have long left anyway and didn't himself even want to be saved if that was the risk and the price.

So with that in mind I'm a little wary as to where season 6 will go character and plot development-wise. Character trajectories have spun off in different directions to what was being seeded for the previous four seasons at the end of season 5, with Mack suddenly being recast as always right and sensible instead of having one idealistic and perhaps naive perspective, Yo-Yo as reckless instead of measured, Daisy as an extremist and ultra-focused on her own interests instead of the idealistic hero template she had been who was learning more and more every season to be pragmatic, and so on and so forth.

I'm glad they have a break to decide where to go next because these are some very large bumps they're going to have to get over to either bring the characters back on the paths they were on, or reconcile these new characterizations with the eventual paths they want their characters to take and the destinations they want them to reach.

Given that she never ‘snaps out of it’ when in the Framework, nor does she remember anything about the real world. Instead, it’s the faith she has in Phil and Daisy that allows her to take the plunge, a literal leap into the unknown to escape the virtual world.

More Updates From What Could’ve Been in Joss Whedon’s Batgirl Movie

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Image: DC Comics. Batgirl #1 art by Rafael Albuquerque.

J.J. Abrams has his Star Wars: Episode IX script. Meet Mrs. Whatsit in a new Wrinkle in Time clip. Another member of the Doom Patrol joins Titans. Roy Harper returns in new pictures from Arrow. Plus, tons of new looks at Tomb Raider, and Netflix’s Sabrina show casts a major villain. To me, my Spoilers!

Batgirl

Warner Bros. VP…