I’m still watching the show because despite how terribly boring it is, the mysteries they’ve set up have me curious. Each episode has had a little tidbit about Coulson that reinforces the point that he’s not the same person that we saw in the movies. It’s a little on-the-nose maybe, but it’s at least interesting. Also, I’m kind of curious as to the timing of the series. We know it takes place after The Avengers, but I’m also thinking it takes place before Iron Man 3 because Extremis seems to be wildly unstable. Will we get an Aldrich Killian cameo?
Thus far, S.H.I.E.L.D. episodes have fallen into one of two categories, hunting for an artifact, hunting for a powered human. Episode 5, “Girl in the Flower Dress,” falls into the powered human one. There will be spoilers aplenty, but no ones watching the show so who cares!
SCORCH
That’s a dumb fuck of a codename. Chan Ho Yin is our baddy of the week. He can fire bend which is pretty neat, but he’s got a major chip on his shoulder. He’s all pouty face because his S.H.I.E.L.D. handler won’t let him show off his pro bending skills. So he makes a living as a street magician which goes about as well as you’d expect. Things turn around for him when a pretty girl in a flower dress, Raina, asks him to show her his fire power. So of course, she’s evil and kidnaps him.
He wakes up in a secret facility and is like “What the fuck bro.” But Raina appeals to his ego promising him that she’ll help him harness his strength and boost his abilities. So of course, he’s doomed. She gives him the dumb fuck codename and his fate is sealed.
Chan turned out to be kind of an asshole. It’s possible that the strain of Extremis he got amplifies a person’s inner shithead. All I know is that when he got his booster shot, he became completely unsympathetic. Skye constantly berated her hacker fuck toy for possibly endangering Chan, but I didn’t really care at that point. It’s like as soon as Raina gave him the name Scorch, his secondary mutation was asshole.
The part that really surprised me was the torching of the doctor. I thought that she would be the big bad for this season or at least a major player in the big bad organization’s plans. Nope. Chan torched her. Leaving Raina as our only connection to the big bad organization. I’m guessing it’s AIM, but that goes with my theory that this show takes places before Iron Man 3.
So yeah, I kinda wanted to like Chan because he seemed like a victim of circumstance. But he was a little too much of asshole for me to give a shit about him.
Skye
The real reason for this episode was to reveal more about Skye and her motivations for joining the Rising Tide. The Rising Tide hacked a S.H.I.E.L.D. database and leaked the information online which lead to Chan’s kidnapping. The hackers responsible for the leak is Miles who’s totes L337 #eyeroll. The dude who plays Miles comes off more as a burned out hippie than an L337 H@XXORZ but since Skye is this show’s idea of a girl-in-a-van-haxxor, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Miles is Skye’s fuck buddy who apparently helped her out when she was in a low place. So they fuck. And then Melinda May finds them together and Skye’s cover is totally blown.
Except that EVERYONE KNEW SHE WAS LYING! I guess that also goes along with Coulson being a different person because absolutely no on the show trusted her except for him.
guh.
Whatever. Turns out that Skye became an L337 H@XXORZ to find out more about her parents. All she could find was a redacted S.H.I.E.L.D. document. So she tried to infiltrate S.H.I.E.L.D. to find out more. And now that she’s on the inside, she decided to fuck everything up by lying to everyone.
This is an interesting feature in a lot of Joss Whedon shows. The good guys always lie to each other. They hide things from each other. The villains usually tell things straight up, although Raina completely lied to Chan so that bit doesn’t hold up. Good guy lying leads to a lot of conflict and misunderstanding and general awfulness.
If you’re a Skye fan, this episode had a lot of stuff for you. Oh, you also get to see her in her underwear which honestly, kind of dragged the episode down.
TL;DR
The short version, episode 5 gave us more questions about the “Scorpion” organization and more answers about Skye. I suspect a lot of this will all come together at the end, but we’re halfway through Season 1 and I feel like it’s still dragging its feet a bit.