Just in time for the announcement that ABC was moving Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to a 9 p.m. time slot for the show’s second season, the MCU’s first television series finished off its premiere season with a bang. Well, a few bangs, a couple of explosions, several melee combos, and a rib stab. Yeah, that’s right. Someone face got stabbed with they own rib on primetime. While much of AoS’ first season tended to fall apart in the beginning, it started to stabilize again around the mid-season break, and continued to really kick it into high-gear with episode 17 – around the release of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. With last night’s season finale “Beginning of the End”, AoS stuck the landing as well as it could – considering the really shaky flight paths.
It should be stated up front that it’s going to take a lot to silence the inner-child in this Disciple long enough to write an objective review of a show like this. My adult-self recognizes many of the problems of the show — which I won’t get into here seeing as to the rest of the internet has already; but it’s hard not to be in awe that, not only do we live in a time where we have an ongoing Marvel movie universe that is artfully serialized and interconnected, we have a big-budget television show with supplemental storylines that are directly affected by what happens in that said universe.
Can we just be grateful for that for just one second? Sure it could have been better, but it could have also never existed? It’s better to have loved then lost. Er, maybe that isn’t the right context.
When in Rome?
That being said, it was definitely tough to see the name Whedon attached to a TV series about a rag-tag group of adventurers on a flying craft not be amazing. It was even tougher when there were complete sections of the season that weren’t even good. Granted, Joss Whedon has had his full attention on Age of Ultron — and it’s awfully difficult for any show to find a strong tone and voice in the first season. So just imagine how impossibly amplified that task was for a show that’s affiliated with some of the biggest movies of this generation! That being a double-edged sword, Agents was really allowed to finally blossom because of the Hydra-turn in Winter Soldier; which has given the eponymous Agents, and the show as a whole, a clear mission – a mission that was beautifully setup in the finale.
“Beginning of the End” is not really that apt of a title for this final episode. It’s a cute play on “End of the Beginning,” the title of episode 16, but we all know that nothing really ends in the Marvel Universe, it just kind of becomes something different and in this case S.H.I.E.L.D isn’t really ending, it’s going through another origin story.
The episode begins with the really underwhelming reveal of who’s been pulling the strings of Mike Peterson (J. August Richards) — a.k.a. Deathlok — and the other eye-controlled soldiers: Cybertek industries. The scene mainly serves the purpose of transitioning to the main characters while setting up the fact that Cybertek has been “incentivizing” it’s employees; which is played as a joke in the beginning, but when it’s revealed what those incentives actually are, it makes these employees feel sicker than the writers probably wanted them to be. That’s when the episode picks up where the last one left off…
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