My Final Take On Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 1

Warning: I tried to do this with as few spoilers as possible, but just in case, be wary.

On September 24th of last year, I was more than excited. Time couldn’t pass slower for me until the 8:00 premiere of Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D., and the pilot was just how a pilot should go. In the beginning of the show, viewers were thrown in a big, new fish tank with a blindfold as Agent Coulson was suddenly brought back into the fold with our main protagonist Agent Grant Ward and many others playing the “How are you alive?” game with him. In the few first episodes (as fans in comments on Facebook and Twitter were calling the show “boring”), viewers got to learn more and develop relationships with Agent Ward, Skye, Leo Fitz, Jemma Simmons, and Melinda May. This was more important than what frustrated/disappointed viewers would believe, as the last quarter of the season would later impact people who seemed to relate to each character and make an opinion.

Coming toward the end of the first quarter of the the season, more questions started to arise and more difficulties popped up for characters to overcome. A few questions/concerns fans had: when will we find out how Coulson was brought back? What is Skye? Who are Skye’s parents? And what is S.H.I.E.L.D. hiding from everyone? the questions increased, so did the interest of fans, finally seeing the potential the show had to bring them back for more episodes.

The second quarter of the show contained its first ever big treat, which was a Thor: The Dark World direct tie-in to the show. What more of a connection could you want than that? It was an awesome to see the whole S.H.I.E.L.D. crew cleaning up the mess Thor had after his final fight scene in his own sequel. Yet some more things were added, including a cliffhanger in the mid-season finale that kept us all itching through our own winter vacations and holidays for the show to return.

Once the show came back on, we had those little obnoxious two-week breaks in-between, but we finally got to dig more into Coulson’s deal. From this point forward, fans everywhere started to get ready to say goodbye to our happy, smiling, joke-filled Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. and hello to a darker one. This is when we can quickly refer back to how at the beginning, people kept complaining it was boring. Well that, my friends, was character development. The truth about Coulson was the key to propelling everything from that point forward.

The third quarter was definitely an unforgettable and meaningful one but absolutely the shortest quarter. Once fans totally understood Coulson’s resurrection and the story behind it and the same serum was used on Skye, the fourth and final quarter of the show started to kick in. The scene where Coulson and Skye were talking and he said in so many words that they needed to find out exactly what the serum did to them made you feel in your gut that everything was just going to get better and better. Soon after, we found the gang in trouble, when all of a sudden their own Agent Victoria Hand, a character from the first episode, was trying to take down the crew’s plane.

The fourth and final quarter rolled around after the show’s second ever tie-in, this time with Captain America: The Winter Soldier. With S.H.I.E.L.D. overthrown by Hydra, the idea was put into all viewers’ minds to trust no one, and the show just kept getting crazier with people double-crossing each other, and a test of allies,enemies and more that made the final episode a pure heart-pounding hour. The fans got two guests that appeared earlier in the show, as both Cobie Smulders and Samuel L. Jackson came back for one last hurrah. In the very end, when it seemed like the thing with Bill Paxton’s Garrett would leave fans with a cliffhanger, it was taken care of in quite a humorous way. However new questions arose to prepare fans for a brand new season that will come this fall.

SPOILERS: As we wait for the second season to approach, a few things changed regarding the status quo. Coulson is now Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. He’s also starting to draw those weird drawings that Garrett was at the beginning of the finale, which he described as “big plans.” Ward is under arrest due to his betrayal of the team to Hydra. Fitz is in pretty bad shape due to spilling his heart a bit for Simmons and making a heroic attempt to save her. Mike Peterson (Deathlok) is still out there on his own, and mysteriously Patton Oswalt’s Eric has a twin of some sort because the whole lanyard process is seeming to repeat again. And naturally, trouble is still out there for the S.H.I.E.L.D. group.

The new number one question fans have is what’s going on with Skye. There have been plenty of theories surrounding her that range from actual intelligent guesses with facts to back them up to just plain silly conjecture. A few examples of the latter are that Skye is Spider-Woman (this is plain old silly as there are no facts to back up that point and Sony currently owns the film rights to the character) … or She-Hulk … or Ms. Marvel. As seen via whatculture.com  people are making a lot of different speculations.

The one that makes the most sense to me is Mantis. It is within the show’s budget as mentioned in that article, plus if Skye is indeed somehow related to that alien, the serum could effect her differently than Coulson, who is human.  Just a view that I agree with, however definitely not confirmed.

To wrap this up, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was definitely a thrill ride for me and made me feel the way I believed I should feel — namely, to grow to like the show and care about what happened to the characters through even the roughest of times. Joss Whedon deserves a lot of credit for this one, as it definitely will make his TV comeback strong. Cant wait for the next season, how about you? What are your theories? Sound off below as I’d love to read your beliefs, interpretations, and thoughts on where this could go.