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Jun. 27th, 2015 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedantherI caught up with Agents of SHIELD this week.
I feel like there was quite a bit of unrealised potential in this half-season. Once they'd mopped up the obviously evil HYDRA they set up a couple of situations where the conflict came not from good people and evil people but from good people and another group of good people with an incompatible viewpoint. There was a lot of opportunities to talk about things like trust and loyalty and the balance between the needs of the many and the needs of the few. But the trouble with a good-vs-good conflict, from a network TV standpoint, is that to really commit to it you have to let the good people on both sides be wrong sometimes, which means you have to let the show's designated heroes be wrong sometimes, and what usually ends up happening instead is that everyone who disagrees with the heroes either sees the light, or dies, or becomes obviously evil (or sees the light and then dies, or turns evil and then dies), and then everything they disagreed with the heroes about can be quietly forgotten.
It's going to be interesting to see where the show goes from here. The mystery of Skye's past has been a big plot engine for the show so far, but it's pretty much been tapped out now. Same for Coulson's mysterious recent history. We've even been given the real story of What Happened to May. They've pretty much cleaned out the supply of mysterious pasts. It's always a tough moment for a show when it resolves the main point of tension it's been running on and needs to figure out what to do next; people always talk about what can happen to a show when "Will They Or Won't They" turns into "They Did", and this is basically the same thing only with less kissing. What I'm hoping is that they do find a new balance, and don't fall into the mysterious-past equivalent of "They Did, but then they kept breaking up and getting back together because the writers didn't know what else to do with them".
I feel like there was quite a bit of unrealised potential in this half-season. Once they'd mopped up the obviously evil HYDRA they set up a couple of situations where the conflict came not from good people and evil people but from good people and another group of good people with an incompatible viewpoint. There was a lot of opportunities to talk about things like trust and loyalty and the balance between the needs of the many and the needs of the few. But the trouble with a good-vs-good conflict, from a network TV standpoint, is that to really commit to it you have to let the good people on both sides be wrong sometimes, which means you have to let the show's designated heroes be wrong sometimes, and what usually ends up happening instead is that everyone who disagrees with the heroes either sees the light, or dies, or becomes obviously evil (or sees the light and then dies, or turns evil and then dies), and then everything they disagreed with the heroes about can be quietly forgotten.
It's going to be interesting to see where the show goes from here. The mystery of Skye's past has been a big plot engine for the show so far, but it's pretty much been tapped out now. Same for Coulson's mysterious recent history. We've even been given the real story of What Happened to May. They've pretty much cleaned out the supply of mysterious pasts. It's always a tough moment for a show when it resolves the main point of tension it's been running on and needs to figure out what to do next; people always talk about what can happen to a show when "Will They Or Won't They" turns into "They Did", and this is basically the same thing only with less kissing. What I'm hoping is that they do find a new balance, and don't fall into the mysterious-past equivalent of "They Did, but then they kept breaking up and getting back together because the writers didn't know what else to do with them".
