Agents of SHIELD season 7 reflections 2
Sep. 23rd, 2020 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urth posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
tori_reviewsAgents of SHIELD season 7: A failure of connection
While there are things about season 7 that work, that don't fall into the trap I'm about to discuss, on the whole this season was especially bad at not establishing a reason why something matters, or using existing touchstones of meaning. The first is actually something the show has done fairly well in the past (not always, but seldom failed to this degree) so the fact that it's so bad here is especially grating. The second however is not a new problem as it is closely tied in with the way this show ignores aspects of its prior continuity, rarely engages with or build on them, and leaves things by the wayside once the story is done with them regardless of how they could/should factor into other stories. And what it does bring back it tends not to explain even if the thing was clearly destroyed.
Let's start with something basic that I expected to at least be referenced for two seasons and never was: the Coulson plaque in the Zephyr. This isn't even like Phil-watch, where I started expecting a big pay off early on, and the payoff needed to be bigger and bigger the longer they put it off. This was just there begging for a reference. Either Sarge or Coulsoid to see it and note it even if it was just a moment; for one of the gang to pause a moment a remember, the way they said the plaque was for; for it to be in the back of shot without the characters even commenting on it but signal that it and he hasn't been forgotten. It's the most basic emotional touchstone they could have included; it's in their main set and they had already spent the time drawing attention to it being put up, so why not give it two seconds of screen time somewhere?
Not that Phil-watch isn't an entry on the list of not supplying emotional payoff, but I've talked about it a lot, and will again.
Back in s3 I was known to refer to Yoyo's cross as the Cross of Significance, because that was how it was treated; it was for plot reasons rather than emotional ones, but it had significance. This season, we get a flashback to what that necklace meant to her, but it's entirely insignificant. Nothing about her family comes into play through the rest of the season, nor do we ever touch base with the necklace itself again. Say my idea about them recruiting past cast members had been a thing and they went back and collected Lincoln and/or Hive, giving Elena a chance to retrieve her necklace as well. It would have been a minor moment in a much bigger plot point, but like the plaque that would be all it needed to be to serve as an emotional touchstone (along with a callback reference for for the show's past as it faded out).
Emotional touchstones aren't just things, but people and relationships; and I know I keep harping on this, but they took away a huge amount of what we had an emotional connection to. Take the show's three main romantic relationships. FitzSimmons spend the season apart and only get references a few times, when being apart should be just as important as being together. Mack and Elena barely matter to this season, their moments are fine when they get them but they aren't given any importance; Elena doesn't end up being involved helping him deal with his parents' death and Mack isn't at all relevant to Elena getting her powers back (not that either of those plots were super well handled, but could have been a way to shine a light on their relationship). And Philinda is...beyond frustrating. S6 may have lost track of May's feelings at times, but it never forgot them or acted like her grief over Coulson wasn't still immensely painful; so the setup of having a robot who not only looks like Coulson but thinks and feels like him, but it may or may not be right to think of him as Coulson was so rife with possibilities it's insane that they didn't do any of them. Instead we have a robotic resurrection of Coulson and a sock puppet of May who is not May in any way that matters but the show doesn't care about that either. So it's fine that this isn't a romance under these circumstances, it probably shouldn't be; but like Simmons being apart from Fitz, the fact that it isn't and can't be a romance should still be important.
And I'll say it yet again; these are not our characters. May is not May; full stop, end of story, and the show doesn't care. It keeps introducing ways Coulsoid isn't Coulson and yet continues not to explore that contradiction or put any weight on him/others deciding he is anyway. We lost years with FitzSimmons, and while yes we still care about them because of the emotional touchstones previously established, but we're not allowed to know them in their new form until right at the end where there's no time to have new connections. That's basically half the cast that we can't use out prior connections to to carry us through this story and it's not like it gets much better with the other characters.
After Enoch dies, none of the characters seem to care about that fact, even ones who learn about it for the first time. While the show does a decent job making us care about the death of Mack's parents, we only needed to care about Mack for that to be effective; we really needed to care about Kora in her own right and they gave us nothing. I'm sure we're supposed to care because she's Daisy's sister, but Daisy flat out rejects her at every turn so that doesn't actually count as a foundation; and because we can't have May be a character we don't play it as any kind of redemption arc (even though I never thought she needed redeeming for Bahrain) or avenue to learn about Kora. Alya is somewhere in the middle; we probably only need to care about FitzSimmons to care about Alya, but because we don't have the same touchstones with FitzSimmons, especially the ones connected to her, I don't care except in a few matters of continuity that I do have connection to, like the fact that she could have had to grow up in a dystopia ruled by Kree (also kind of pissed off that Deke didn't even get to know about her being alive). Daniel almost works, but the writing is clearly torn on whether our prior connections to him matter; because if we care about who he was, we probably care about him and Peggy so the way he's used here is just going to be annoying; but I can't imagine it gives enough reason to care about him if you don't have those prior connections and might miss just how often he's talking about Peggy.
As a contrast in this show; s4 made a point to introduce things that would happen in the Framework ahead of time. I'm specifically talking about Fitz's dad and Hope; we'd already seen how the absence of these characters lingered with the real versions, so in the Framework we saw what changed with their presence. We understood that losing Hope had stuck with Mack, so we both understood why that was what he would want changed in his other life and why he'd be so reluctant to give it up even when he knew it wasn't real. I have my own thoughts on why Aida zeroed in on bringing Alistair Fitz into Fitz's life (I also have thoughts on why she figured Coulson's desire was to not be in SHIELD) but that's tangential to my point here; what we knew long term mattered to how we saw the characters in the Framework (really the whole plot only worked as well as it did because of emotional touchstones from seasons past) and what didn't have long term reasons the writers at the time made sure was known about at least a little bit before it became relevant.
I referenced a few time throughout the season that I think I would feel more for some scenes if I had a connection to the Lighthouse as home-base for these characters. And I still think some of that is on me; I never liked the set so I never developed an attachment to it as the main setting of the show. There are plenty of shows where the main set feels like home, where the setting is one of the first things that comes to mind about the show. This show never quite had that, but I definitely had more connection to the Bus and Playground, and even sometimes the Zephyr (I have a somewhat complex set of feelings about the Zephyr set) than I do the Lighthouse. But because I can see how some pieces would be more effective if I had a connection to the Lighthouse, I will say that they at least kind of used it as an emotional touchstone; to visit it in times when it wasn't their home or to see it destroyed by invaders,
I will not make the same allowances for the Swordfish set. They keep coming back there, and up until the end I would have put that down to practical and plot reasons (of course that's where Enoch hung out, and so it was also where he built stuff that matters in the finale); but having the last group scene there kind of implies that we were meant to view it with some kind of connection, but I don't have any. It's just a bar, a boring bar, that I don't think the entire team was ever together at, so why should I care about them coming back to it in the end? And I get that there is a problem in that; even if they could have used the Bus set, that wasn't home for the whole team either. Even if they had the Playground, where would be a place where the whole group felt at home; maybe the common room but even that's iffy. Really the set that feels the most like the family gathering point is probably the hanger on the Zephyr, but there would be a host of problems with using that too (not the least of which being that it was where they did Coulson's goodbye scene; which given that I never questioned that setting means it was the right place to set that scene, so they have understood this before).
But that is the problem; they don't have enough emotional touchstones in general, they don't form a coherent pattern where we can catch on to them, and then you don't know if they actually remain important touchstones for very long. The show actually spent time over the years establishing how Coulson felt about his hand not being able to feel anything; but it never gave Elena the same reflection (certainly not since s5), then expected us to have lots of feelings when she got hands that could feel, then didn't ever comment on it again, in fact had her basically forget about it with the Diviner. And no this isn't a new problem either, remember last season when they had May (or Izel as May, it was never clear) looking at Coulson's badge; I raised the question why not have a photo of them in Tahiti that was personal and a memory of all he had been to her, and I do still wonder that, but I guess it's like the plaque and an opportunity the writers didn't think to employ.
And that's where Phil-watch comes back into the analysis. Yes, this matters to me more than it probably does to most people, but I still think it's a clear example of the writers just not getting it when it comes to things they themselves set up. It wasn't something I expected going in to s6, if anything I didn't make quite such a big thing about May calling him Phil until she didn't in s6 (but then I look back and note that she almost never did in front of other people, and it was kind of a big deal when she did); but even as s6 was going on I didn't think it had to be a huge deal. I figured she'd slip and use Phil's first name around Sarge, and the writers were keeping that in their back pocket for a point when they most needed to show how hard it was for her to be around him. But the longer it went on the more it felt like a deliberate writing choice; that they weren't just saving it to be a spotlight on some moment, but that they had a specific moment in mind when it would matter to an even higher degree. So maybe I built it up in my head, but that just means I was giving them too much credit for understanding that they had set up something that meant something. When she does finally call Coulsoid Phil, it just feels like that's his name so she's willing to use it (we don't know if she feels anything about it at that point either), but not like it means anything or even the spotlight I assumed it could be last season.
Of course, on the flip side of not paying off something I can't tell if they really intended to be a thing, when they do try and return to a previously established touchstone, you get what they did to Lola. And...just no; NO NO NO NO NO. I do not accept what this show did to Lola. And as I discussed in reactions, it didn't have to be that way. If they wanted it to be about accepting that change can be good, they have to show it; they could lean into the metaphor, but they'd have to give us and Coulsoid a moment of being unsure (or, you know, have May there so one of them can spell it out) before going with some version of 'let see what she's got,' or 'let's see what's out there,' or something. I might still disagree, because I want Coulson and real-Lola not Coulsoid and new-Lola, but at least it would show it in a way that was consistent with the story I think they decided they were telling.
And really the finale just sucked at this. It sprung Alya on us at the last minute instead of having established her or even Simmons missing her as a part of the story ahead of time. When they go back to the Lighthouse they don't re-encounter the bodies of people that died and they didn't/weren't able to save (like Trevor, and Deke's people or the fact that Davis is probably still pretty freshly dead...hey, why couldn't they just plug these people into the healing pod anyway?). They don't add anything by seeing the events on the Temple from a new angle, even the revelation that it was a time loop that served as Simmons' backup seems almost there to cover a plot hole for people like me (also if they're going to start using time loop logic, I get to go back to questioning what 'originally' happened on Earth, and FitzSimmons don't look great in that view). And then there's the Cavalry thing. That could have been a really great moment, of May reclaiming the nickname she spent so much time hating; only we haven't heard that name used in seasons, because May hates it and Coulson would never let it be a thing in new-SHIELD. We haven't seen her continue to face it and what it means and have it culminate in this moment; and even if we had, it wouldn't matter when she couldn't and doesn't have feelings like guilt and sorrow about what happened. Plus there was no reflection of Bahrain in what she was doing here so there's not even a thematic parallel.
This is why I'm not sure I'm going to get to the big s7 failure of character analysis I was expecting to do. I keep getting pissed off every time I think about how bad this season was and I haven't even unleashed the full force that would come out in that ball of rage.
While there are things about season 7 that work, that don't fall into the trap I'm about to discuss, on the whole this season was especially bad at not establishing a reason why something matters, or using existing touchstones of meaning. The first is actually something the show has done fairly well in the past (not always, but seldom failed to this degree) so the fact that it's so bad here is especially grating. The second however is not a new problem as it is closely tied in with the way this show ignores aspects of its prior continuity, rarely engages with or build on them, and leaves things by the wayside once the story is done with them regardless of how they could/should factor into other stories. And what it does bring back it tends not to explain even if the thing was clearly destroyed.
Let's start with something basic that I expected to at least be referenced for two seasons and never was: the Coulson plaque in the Zephyr. This isn't even like Phil-watch, where I started expecting a big pay off early on, and the payoff needed to be bigger and bigger the longer they put it off. This was just there begging for a reference. Either Sarge or Coulsoid to see it and note it even if it was just a moment; for one of the gang to pause a moment a remember, the way they said the plaque was for; for it to be in the back of shot without the characters even commenting on it but signal that it and he hasn't been forgotten. It's the most basic emotional touchstone they could have included; it's in their main set and they had already spent the time drawing attention to it being put up, so why not give it two seconds of screen time somewhere?
Not that Phil-watch isn't an entry on the list of not supplying emotional payoff, but I've talked about it a lot, and will again.
Back in s3 I was known to refer to Yoyo's cross as the Cross of Significance, because that was how it was treated; it was for plot reasons rather than emotional ones, but it had significance. This season, we get a flashback to what that necklace meant to her, but it's entirely insignificant. Nothing about her family comes into play through the rest of the season, nor do we ever touch base with the necklace itself again. Say my idea about them recruiting past cast members had been a thing and they went back and collected Lincoln and/or Hive, giving Elena a chance to retrieve her necklace as well. It would have been a minor moment in a much bigger plot point, but like the plaque that would be all it needed to be to serve as an emotional touchstone (along with a callback reference for for the show's past as it faded out).
Emotional touchstones aren't just things, but people and relationships; and I know I keep harping on this, but they took away a huge amount of what we had an emotional connection to. Take the show's three main romantic relationships. FitzSimmons spend the season apart and only get references a few times, when being apart should be just as important as being together. Mack and Elena barely matter to this season, their moments are fine when they get them but they aren't given any importance; Elena doesn't end up being involved helping him deal with his parents' death and Mack isn't at all relevant to Elena getting her powers back (not that either of those plots were super well handled, but could have been a way to shine a light on their relationship). And Philinda is...beyond frustrating. S6 may have lost track of May's feelings at times, but it never forgot them or acted like her grief over Coulson wasn't still immensely painful; so the setup of having a robot who not only looks like Coulson but thinks and feels like him, but it may or may not be right to think of him as Coulson was so rife with possibilities it's insane that they didn't do any of them. Instead we have a robotic resurrection of Coulson and a sock puppet of May who is not May in any way that matters but the show doesn't care about that either. So it's fine that this isn't a romance under these circumstances, it probably shouldn't be; but like Simmons being apart from Fitz, the fact that it isn't and can't be a romance should still be important.
And I'll say it yet again; these are not our characters. May is not May; full stop, end of story, and the show doesn't care. It keeps introducing ways Coulsoid isn't Coulson and yet continues not to explore that contradiction or put any weight on him/others deciding he is anyway. We lost years with FitzSimmons, and while yes we still care about them because of the emotional touchstones previously established, but we're not allowed to know them in their new form until right at the end where there's no time to have new connections. That's basically half the cast that we can't use out prior connections to to carry us through this story and it's not like it gets much better with the other characters.
After Enoch dies, none of the characters seem to care about that fact, even ones who learn about it for the first time. While the show does a decent job making us care about the death of Mack's parents, we only needed to care about Mack for that to be effective; we really needed to care about Kora in her own right and they gave us nothing. I'm sure we're supposed to care because she's Daisy's sister, but Daisy flat out rejects her at every turn so that doesn't actually count as a foundation; and because we can't have May be a character we don't play it as any kind of redemption arc (even though I never thought she needed redeeming for Bahrain) or avenue to learn about Kora. Alya is somewhere in the middle; we probably only need to care about FitzSimmons to care about Alya, but because we don't have the same touchstones with FitzSimmons, especially the ones connected to her, I don't care except in a few matters of continuity that I do have connection to, like the fact that she could have had to grow up in a dystopia ruled by Kree (also kind of pissed off that Deke didn't even get to know about her being alive). Daniel almost works, but the writing is clearly torn on whether our prior connections to him matter; because if we care about who he was, we probably care about him and Peggy so the way he's used here is just going to be annoying; but I can't imagine it gives enough reason to care about him if you don't have those prior connections and might miss just how often he's talking about Peggy.
As a contrast in this show; s4 made a point to introduce things that would happen in the Framework ahead of time. I'm specifically talking about Fitz's dad and Hope; we'd already seen how the absence of these characters lingered with the real versions, so in the Framework we saw what changed with their presence. We understood that losing Hope had stuck with Mack, so we both understood why that was what he would want changed in his other life and why he'd be so reluctant to give it up even when he knew it wasn't real. I have my own thoughts on why Aida zeroed in on bringing Alistair Fitz into Fitz's life (I also have thoughts on why she figured Coulson's desire was to not be in SHIELD) but that's tangential to my point here; what we knew long term mattered to how we saw the characters in the Framework (really the whole plot only worked as well as it did because of emotional touchstones from seasons past) and what didn't have long term reasons the writers at the time made sure was known about at least a little bit before it became relevant.
I referenced a few time throughout the season that I think I would feel more for some scenes if I had a connection to the Lighthouse as home-base for these characters. And I still think some of that is on me; I never liked the set so I never developed an attachment to it as the main setting of the show. There are plenty of shows where the main set feels like home, where the setting is one of the first things that comes to mind about the show. This show never quite had that, but I definitely had more connection to the Bus and Playground, and even sometimes the Zephyr (I have a somewhat complex set of feelings about the Zephyr set) than I do the Lighthouse. But because I can see how some pieces would be more effective if I had a connection to the Lighthouse, I will say that they at least kind of used it as an emotional touchstone; to visit it in times when it wasn't their home or to see it destroyed by invaders,
I will not make the same allowances for the Swordfish set. They keep coming back there, and up until the end I would have put that down to practical and plot reasons (of course that's where Enoch hung out, and so it was also where he built stuff that matters in the finale); but having the last group scene there kind of implies that we were meant to view it with some kind of connection, but I don't have any. It's just a bar, a boring bar, that I don't think the entire team was ever together at, so why should I care about them coming back to it in the end? And I get that there is a problem in that; even if they could have used the Bus set, that wasn't home for the whole team either. Even if they had the Playground, where would be a place where the whole group felt at home; maybe the common room but even that's iffy. Really the set that feels the most like the family gathering point is probably the hanger on the Zephyr, but there would be a host of problems with using that too (not the least of which being that it was where they did Coulson's goodbye scene; which given that I never questioned that setting means it was the right place to set that scene, so they have understood this before).
But that is the problem; they don't have enough emotional touchstones in general, they don't form a coherent pattern where we can catch on to them, and then you don't know if they actually remain important touchstones for very long. The show actually spent time over the years establishing how Coulson felt about his hand not being able to feel anything; but it never gave Elena the same reflection (certainly not since s5), then expected us to have lots of feelings when she got hands that could feel, then didn't ever comment on it again, in fact had her basically forget about it with the Diviner. And no this isn't a new problem either, remember last season when they had May (or Izel as May, it was never clear) looking at Coulson's badge; I raised the question why not have a photo of them in Tahiti that was personal and a memory of all he had been to her, and I do still wonder that, but I guess it's like the plaque and an opportunity the writers didn't think to employ.
And that's where Phil-watch comes back into the analysis. Yes, this matters to me more than it probably does to most people, but I still think it's a clear example of the writers just not getting it when it comes to things they themselves set up. It wasn't something I expected going in to s6, if anything I didn't make quite such a big thing about May calling him Phil until she didn't in s6 (but then I look back and note that she almost never did in front of other people, and it was kind of a big deal when she did); but even as s6 was going on I didn't think it had to be a huge deal. I figured she'd slip and use Phil's first name around Sarge, and the writers were keeping that in their back pocket for a point when they most needed to show how hard it was for her to be around him. But the longer it went on the more it felt like a deliberate writing choice; that they weren't just saving it to be a spotlight on some moment, but that they had a specific moment in mind when it would matter to an even higher degree. So maybe I built it up in my head, but that just means I was giving them too much credit for understanding that they had set up something that meant something. When she does finally call Coulsoid Phil, it just feels like that's his name so she's willing to use it (we don't know if she feels anything about it at that point either), but not like it means anything or even the spotlight I assumed it could be last season.
Of course, on the flip side of not paying off something I can't tell if they really intended to be a thing, when they do try and return to a previously established touchstone, you get what they did to Lola. And...just no; NO NO NO NO NO. I do not accept what this show did to Lola. And as I discussed in reactions, it didn't have to be that way. If they wanted it to be about accepting that change can be good, they have to show it; they could lean into the metaphor, but they'd have to give us and Coulsoid a moment of being unsure (or, you know, have May there so one of them can spell it out) before going with some version of 'let see what she's got,' or 'let's see what's out there,' or something. I might still disagree, because I want Coulson and real-Lola not Coulsoid and new-Lola, but at least it would show it in a way that was consistent with the story I think they decided they were telling.
And really the finale just sucked at this. It sprung Alya on us at the last minute instead of having established her or even Simmons missing her as a part of the story ahead of time. When they go back to the Lighthouse they don't re-encounter the bodies of people that died and they didn't/weren't able to save (like Trevor, and Deke's people or the fact that Davis is probably still pretty freshly dead...hey, why couldn't they just plug these people into the healing pod anyway?). They don't add anything by seeing the events on the Temple from a new angle, even the revelation that it was a time loop that served as Simmons' backup seems almost there to cover a plot hole for people like me (also if they're going to start using time loop logic, I get to go back to questioning what 'originally' happened on Earth, and FitzSimmons don't look great in that view). And then there's the Cavalry thing. That could have been a really great moment, of May reclaiming the nickname she spent so much time hating; only we haven't heard that name used in seasons, because May hates it and Coulson would never let it be a thing in new-SHIELD. We haven't seen her continue to face it and what it means and have it culminate in this moment; and even if we had, it wouldn't matter when she couldn't and doesn't have feelings like guilt and sorrow about what happened. Plus there was no reflection of Bahrain in what she was doing here so there's not even a thematic parallel.
This is why I'm not sure I'm going to get to the big s7 failure of character analysis I was expecting to do. I keep getting pissed off every time I think about how bad this season was and I haven't even unleashed the full force that would come out in that ball of rage.
