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“Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” recap (1.1): The world is saved!

Romantic comedies usually always end before things get messy. Before love actually requires much work, before her adorable idiosyncrasies become grating habits, before life gets real life-y. Action movies usually always end right after things get messy. After London is obliterated by a pulsating thermonuclear ray from a Decepticon, after James Bond leads a car chase through Paris that knocks over the Eiffel Tower, after-in the case of Joss Whedon‘s The Avengers– New York City falls under alien attack, and a team of superpowered superpeople reveal themselves to save the day. We never really know what happens after action movies, except for a couple of lines of expository dialogue in the inevitable sequel.

But Whedon’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is a brand new thing: A TV show spin-off that takes place in the wreckage of the blockbuster movie. The world knows about the demigod Thor now. The world knows about the half-mutant Hulk. The world knows about the cryogenically frozen Captain America, and his super shield. Now what?

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., is what.

Agent Coulson, who is alive and well, thank you very much, has assembled an espionage team to track down people with superpowers and contain them/help them/keep them from blowing up anymore major cities. The most campy comics say there are two kinds of people with powers: superheroes and supervillains, but Whedon taught us a different philosophy a long time ago. “Yes, it’s terribly simple,” said Giles. “The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.” To which Buffy replied: “Liar.”

So, it’s no surprise that our “bad guy” in the pilot is a complicated fella named Mike Peterson (Gunn from Angel!), a factory worker who is down on his luck and just trying to make ends meet for him and his son. By the time we meet him, he’s already become someone’s grand superheroic experiment. He’s got a gadget attached to his arm that is pumping him up with pretty much all superpowers combined: super-speed, super-strength, super-courage. He uses it to rescue a woman from a burning building and then things get real weird real fast because all the superjuice amps him up to a place where he’s so enraged he’s in danger of literally exploding.

Into that conundrum wanders our new team of S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. We spend the bulk of the pilot getting to know them. And gloriously, practically miraculously, three of them are women. (Four if you count Cobie Smulders‘ Agent Maria Hill, who will surely be joining this show after How I Met Your Mother ends.) (If this show gets a second season. RIP, Firefly.)

Ming-Na Wen is Agent Melinda May, an no-nonsense veteran pilot who has no interest in (re?)-joining Coulson’s S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in the field. Clearly, she’s been pre-programmed with a tragic backstory. But Coulson adorably tells her she doesn’t have a choice, that she’s got to pilot the giant hulking jet that is their home base. But she’s more than just an ace pilot who can steal your breath in her leather S.H.I.E.L.D. suit and a power suit; she’s also a master of martial arts, which she uses to flatten a goon with a semi-automatic rifle before he can take out Mike Peterson.

OK, and also: Aviators.

Then there’s Elizabeth Henstridge‘s Agent Simmons. She’s one-half of a fast-talking dynamic brain duo – Agent Fitz is the other half – who drops a Hermione Granger reference in her first five seconds on screen, right before she changes into a blazer from the Melissa Hastings Collection, so we know we’re going to like her. She and her partner are the ones who concoct the cure for Mike Peterson after Coulson shouts at them to never tell him anything is impossible!

And finally, there’s Chloe Bennett‘s Skye, and girl is a straight-up nerrrd. She loves superheroes. I mean, she loves superheroes. One time she even cosplayed right out in front of Stark Tower. (Dressed as Captain Marvel, right? Had to be.) She’s super-suspicious of S.H.I.E.L.D., and assumes they want to eradicate the world’s mightiest heroes instead of helping them help the planet. But she’s not just a superhero fangirl; she’s a world-class hacker who lives in her van and accomplishes more stuff on a laptop she won from a bet than S.H.I.E.L.D. is able to do with its gazillions of dollars worth of technology.

By the end of the episode, Coulson has of course won her over to his side, convincing her the world isn’t just good people and Death Eaters, and that he sees all the colors and wants always wants to do the best and fairest possible thing.

The dudes are: Agent Fitz, Simmons’ partner who considers himself an under-appreciated genius, and Agent Ward, an alpha male bomb-diffusing solider who things S.H.I.E.L.D. is beneath him (even though it’s level seven!). Coulson sees promise in him, but I’m sticking with Maria Hill’s evaluation of his character for now: Poop with pointy things coming out of it.

The episode ends with the team fully assembled, Mike Peterson on his way to recovery, and Coulson revealing (in a Back to the Future-style directing homage) that his ’62 Corvette, Lola, can fly. All in all, a very promising start to the series. Pilots are notoriously tricky, but Whedon & Co. did a solid job introducing us to the characters and the world with decent action sequences and plenty of quippy dialogue. Plus, half the kickass agents are women and two of them are Asian-American. What’s not to love?

What did you think of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s pilot episode? (By the way, if this is the first superhero thing you ever watched and you want to use it as a springboard into the awesome world of comics, Marvel’s Secret Avengers exists in this exact universe and has a similar tone, or of course you can always tweet me and I’ll help you figure out where to jump into which comics!)

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