Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Agents of SHIELD, Hyping Up

(What part of "not dead" is eluding you?)

Man, this part of the blog sprint is coming down to the wire, huh? We have my midget doppelgänger to thank for the late posting time today. He decided that before calling me to come change his diaper (like I do every night at this time) to mix things up. In this case, mixing things up is not really a figure of speech and is more a literal visualization of him tugging his diaper down and stuffing both hands down his poopie butt-crack. And he must've had a wicked bad itch, too, because he really got it under his finger nails. We both spent the last hour washing thoroughly and screaming hysterically over a late night bath, but you might want to Lysol your keyboard anyways.

May is the month of the nerd, it seems. I picked a portentous time of the year to resurrect my blog--or perhaps the alignment of nerd elements picked me. In any case, Joss Whedon's next donation to all nerd-dom is giving us a few glimpses this week. Yes, finally we get to see trailers for Agents of SHIELD, an upcoming ABC action drama that will be showing the "other guys" of the Marvel universe. Here's the first full trailer, in case you haven't had a chance to see it yet.



Oh glory. This is going to be epic. EPIC, I dub thee. The Marvel cinematic universe is finally becoming what it should always have been--big, awesome movies featuring its headliner heroes with television drama filling in the gaps between the movies with Marvel's huge roster of awesome characters meant for smaller stories. Agents of SHIELD is going to be the X-Files of the Marvel universe, and since it won't be on Fox there's a good chance it will be allowed to thrive. Yay!

So, first and foremost amongst the cavalcade of nerd-bait in this trailer is the revelation that Agent Coulson lives--which Whedon himself had announced in an interview a while ago, but people still find excuses to be surprised. As a creative decision, this was pretty much pre-ordained. A show like this needs at least one actor to anchor the television series to the movie franchise, and Clark Gregg is already a television veteran with a hugely popular every-man approach to the SHIELD agent role. And, maybe they'll pull Cobie Smulders into the show from time to time as well, because I love me some Maria Hill--she brings the sexy back to being a hard-line SHIELD bureaucrat. As a plot twist, Phil Coulson's survival was practically written into the Avengers movie. You have it spelled out that Fury lied to the rest of the protagonists about him having Captain America's trading cards on him when he died, and it was Nick Fury who pronounced Coulson dead to the rest of the team. If you factor in that Nick Fury is a lying liar who lies (for great justice), then it's barely even an assumption that Fury just told Coulson to heal up, lay low, and he'd totally bring his trading cards right back. So yeah, love on the fact that Coulson is back, but don't be surprised or get all "ooh, what are they resurrecting him?" "maybe it was a life model decoy Loki killed" "maybe this Coulson is an LMD" "what if he's just a hologram?" "Coulson is the 12th Doctor!" No. Maybe. No. Heck no. Get out.

And that hoodie-wearing guy at 0:52 in the trailer is totally Luke Cage, because he's the only guy in the Marvel universe able to dress like a hobo and crater pavement. Which means that this show is definitely going to incorporate some beloved street-level heroes in addition to its roster of men-in-black. So even more awesome. If they work Bobbi Morse--aka Mockingbird, Hawkeye's on-again-off-again squeeze--I think this show might frakkin' unseat Firefly from its hallowed plinth in my heart as favorite TV show.

"...I love me some Maria Hill--she brings the sexy back to being a hard-line SHIELD bureaucrat."

My only reservation is that I really hope the show doesn't fall into a villain-a-week format that many of the cheesier super-shows of the past did--like Buffy and Smallville, for example. Those shows might have had great success doing it, but I feel that the baddie-a-week leads to cop out gimmicks to pad out the plots and it might bring down the fidelity of the show relative to the movies. Also, the best SHIELD plots are more about conspiracies, organizations like Hydra and AIM, and unravelling plots over the course of extended mini-series and meta-plots. Heck, it'd be great if season 1 of the show tried to tackle their own version of Secret War, which is probably one of the coolest plots in the Marvel universe where all the big-name heroes are totally manipulated by Fury and SHIELD. In any case, I think I know what I'll be doing with my Tuesday nights come this Fall.

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