Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Series End

I was going to start my Norn9: Var Commons blog series this week, but realized that if I did, I wouldn't have a chance to talk about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. while it was still timely. So Norn9 will begin next week.

So, I want to say first that I am not much of a TV person. I do watch a fair bit of anime, but I tend to have difficulty sitting through an hour long show. Watching a Western drama becomes appointment viewing where I have to block out an hour of time. It's very difficult for me to follow more than one series at a time.

And by that, I mean more than one series during its entire run. The only other series that I watched all the way through since I started Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was Agent Carter, which was aided by having a very limited number of episodes. There's a trail of partially finished live actions shows in AoS's wake that I eventually dropped because I find it difficult to watch more than one, even over the course of seven years. If two shows dropped new episodes at the same time and I was busy, then the less popular one would lose, never to be caught up.

Which is my roundabout way of saying that I really enjoyed Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. It had a rough first season. I wasn't sure about the characters, the stories were very much monster of the week, and I hated Skye, but I wasn't watching anything else at the time so there was no competition.

Then the second season got better. They introduced the Inhumans and ran a single overarching story arc throughout the season. The writing team even managed to completely rehabilitate Skye, moving her from being the rogue hacker character to a conflicted young woman who was learning about her (very complicated) family for the first time.

The fourth season was my favorite. Despite being broken up into three mini-arcs between Ghost Rider, LMDs, and the Framework, each one was extremely well plotted and surprisingly managed to build on each other.

After watching year after year, I grew attached to the characters, so the show was always must watch viewing for me (especially since I don't subscribe to any services that would make it easy to catch reruns). Some seasons weren't as strong as others, but like any good serial, it was fun seeing where the characters would go next.

I don't think Season 7 is one of the better seasons from a writing standpoint, but knowing that it was the final season, you can see the writers had a lot of fun with it, stuffing in references to previous seasons and the greater MCU. If you're gonna do your swan song, might well put on a good show.

And they did.

While I'm not entirely sure I like the Daisy x Daniel Sousa romance (I'm not sure what the age gap is, but it feels like it's on the large side), I do think bringing Sousa into the last season as a recurring guest star was one of the best surprises the show did. I'd liked him on Agent Carter and bringing him forward in time to avoid his otherwise necessary death (which still sort of happened in an attempt to perserve the timeline) allowed him to fill a role as a pragmatic novice who doesn't understand some of these newfangled things. That's not to say he doesn't pull his own weight, he does, but his toolkit is distinctly different from everyone else's.

Aside from Fitz being absent most of the season (due to his actor working on other projects), it felt like everyone got a chance to do something, and even robo-Coulson didn't turn out as static a character as I thought he would.

After I finished watching the finale, I ended up wandering around the internet looking for interesting trivia (and finding a really fun table read video on YouTube) because I was saddened that it was really and truly over.

I don't watch many shows, so the few that I do, I tend to remember well. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. will be difficult to replace, and I loved that it had both Ming-Na Wen and Chloe Bennet, giving us two Asian woman with unrelated characters in the cast!

I'm sure people will recommend other shows to me. There's so much to watch out there, but I have no plans to pick up anything else right now. I figure something will fall into my lap eventually, but it's difficult to find something that will scratch just the right itch when you're looking for the one TV show you plan on watching for the next seven years.