Thursday, September 26, 2013

Marvel's Agent of Shield, impressions written down as things were happening.

Impressions of Marvel's Agent of Shield (spoilers of course, though quotes are probably not exact):

A woman doing voice over.

So far the only characters other than her with speaking parts are a black man and his son.  Perhaps this won't be as white as feared.  And he's a superhero.

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White guy fights people.

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Agent Hill.  I like agent Hill.


White guy who fights people: "I'm clearance level six, I know Agent Coulson died before the battle of New York."

Agent Coulson walks out of the darkness. "Welcome to level seven." Beat. "I'm sorry.  I couldn't help myself.  The corner was dark and... I think there's a light out."

Shepard Book is in the show.  A doctor in this incarnation.

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"With great power comes... a ton of weird crap that you are not prepared to deal with."

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"You're really just asking me to drive the bus?"

Coulson "I'm not asking.  But it's a really nice bus."

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So far I count 4 women and 5 men as characters.  That's a Firefly ratio.  Of course there's no way to tell whether they'll stay in the series and so far no woman has spoken to any other woman.  Random white guy who fights has spoken to both Coulson and the tech support team which includes a guy.

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Hey women do talk to each other in this show.  It only took half an hour.

It took less time than that for them to kidnap someone with the black bag and everything.

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Coulson just injected his own guy with a truth serum and is letting the person he kidnapped interrogate him [the guy Coulson injected, not Coulson himself] so that she'd be able to judge for herself if they were evil or not.  Which is seven kinds of wrong but also a fun way to get someone to trust you if you take into account that it's a fictional world where not everything is meant to be taken seriously.

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And fuck.  Black guy played by Gunn from Angel is definitely not going to turn out to be a regular on this show after a scene like that.  I mean there are ways, but that's generally not how you introduce a regular.

Which drops us to 8 people who may be sticking around with equal representation between genders but the question of whiteness is still... yeah.  Because of those eight Shepherd Book and Maria Hill look like they'll be in the background, meaning that of the main six there's definitely a lighter skin tone even if not strictly Caucasian.

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And if Shield doesn't find a miracle it's going to turn out that the black guy does die first.

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And we're having a decent, "The American dream turned out to be a lie," speech.

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And the black guy died first.

Wait.  No.  But he's still not going to stick with the show.

Coulson's car is from Back to the Future.

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And as a final note, I stopped recording too early.  I didn't miss anything of great value, just the next time bit and the credits that ran concurrently, but I record the credits as a matter of principle.

I thought the "Mutant Enemy" thing ran after everything else was done.

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And, also, the lone hacker who can punch through any security system with a laptop ze won on a bet is, in fact, someone with superhero level powers.  She'll be a regular.  The show has:

Agent Coulson: Badass Bureaucrat who, by all appearances, is going to stop being a bureaucrat to run the team.  At least he still understands that guns aren't usually the solution and thus should be saved for last resort.

White guy who is antisocial and fights people.  Also may have grandmother issues.

Recently hired --as in she accepts the job sometime after the episode ends, but less than ten minutes after-- woman with the superpower of HACKING!  Yes the capital letters and exclamation mark are necessary.

Former agent who retired from field work to be at the place where Coulson speculates that the red tape is made.  She's the one who he got to drive the bus (which turned out to be a plane.)  She does not end up standing on the sidelines.

Tech support.  A man and a woman.  Both geniuses.

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Agent Melinda May, the formerly former agent, played by Ming-Na Wen is the only non-Caucasian in the main six.  (Mane six?  Could these be ponies?  I don't know enough about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic to really know.)

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If I have many more posts on TV series I'm going to have to stop sticking them under the "movies" tag and make a "tv" tag.

5 comments:

  1. I have an icky cold that is disrupting my sleep, and I very much appreciate this ambiguously promising summary.

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  2. Also, Ming-Na should possibly portray Melian in the Tale of Beren and Luthien effects-laden fantasy blockbuster Froborr and I started casting on FaceBook.

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  3. Overal impression here: kind of fun, but also kind of meh. The Author's Message should be slightly better hidden, even if this is being written for stereotypical comics fans.

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  4. Actually, Skye's actor is half-Chinese, so there are two non-Caucasians in the main cast.

    ---Redcrow

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    Replies
    1. I had no idea. (I'm actually very bad at recognizing race in general.) Thanks for the correction.

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