If
you’re anything like me, you want to love Agents
of SHIELD. You want it to sweep you off your feet like Captain Malcolm
Reynolds in a scruffy, brown duster. And it’s true, the series picked up at the
end of its season, but it doesn’t feel like dating Firefly. It feels like
dating Firefly’s less interesting cousin, who keeps insisting she’s fascinating
because she kayaks and because Fitz and Simmons kissed.
Quick
question: what are your top five favorite lines from Agents of SHIELD? Can you even remember five? How about compared to
a show that’s really good, like Firefly? Or Community?
I
thought so.
Most
of us don’t love Agents of SHIELD or
hate it. It’s just there, like that friend from high school who filled a chair
next to us at lunch. I think his name was Keith.
All
I’ve done is demonstrated that Agents of
SHIELD is mediocre television. And that’s all I care to do, because at the
end of the day, I like to like things. The show’s not bad, but it disappoints
us because we all felt it could be more. Why? Part of it is that it’s Marvel
and I would like to bear Stan Lee’s children, but the bigger part is that it
has Joss Whedon’s name attached to it, and that name has a Pavlovian impact on
the nerd brain.
Whedon
is good at a very particular type of fiction, and that’s the misfit ensemble.
And Agents of SHIELD has failed to do
the core thing you need to in any misfit ensemble: characterization, and more
explicitly, characterization that leads to conflict and fluid relationships
among the protagonists.
Put
simply: they don’t fight enough.
Not
a fake fight, like when the one guy is secretly a Nazi for specious reasons
that we all agree are ridiculous. The sort of fight you have with your
coworkers about immigration, income taxes, or whether it’s okay to masturbate
in the restroom stalls (yes, but don’t take up the handicapped stall, that’s
for emergencies).
Agents of SHIELD
disappoints us by spoiling the formula, and it lies to us, because the misfit
ensemble has Important Things to Say to us in a pluralist society. Let’s take
these two problems in order.
WHY
AGENTS OF SHIELD DISAPPOINTS
Let
me remind you of one of the greatest sequences in television history. Episode 4
of Firefly, “Shindig,” features Captain Malcolm Reynolds and Kaylee—a pair of coarse
spacers—at a fancy planetary party. It’s a fantastic fish-out-of-water moment,
which we only get because Mal and Kaylee have relatively immutable characters.
Their personalities, their dysfunctions, they drive the humor and the tension.
Agents of SHIELD
operates on a reverse principle. The characters do not drive the plot and
conflict, the plot and conflict drive the characters.
Agent
Ward is introduced as a “loner” and Skye as a “rebel.” These are great
archetypes, but we soon discover that Ward is only a loner because he is aces
good at hitting people and sometimes hitting the room with the people he is
hitting (plus, as a Nazi ploy, I guess); Skye because blah-blah-blah secret
documents and parents. Underwhelming stuff, and they both toss those archetypes
out the window after a few episodes. Those aspects of their personalities are
treated as a disease for Agent Coulson to heal, not as a dysfunction for him to
manage, and for the audience to enjoy.
The
story is reduced to forcing our misfits to change in order to fit into the
group, when a misfit ensemble is usually about learning to get along in spite of our differences, or even
about leveraging our dysfunctions for the weird strength they bring (see: every
underdog sports movie ever, which might be where the misfit ensemble was born).
The
characters are weak in Agents of SHIELD
precisely because they won’t cling to their dysfunctions when they are
inconvenient. Skye isn’t a misfit, she’s just an awkward fit. Compare her to a
staunch, well-rendered television rebel—Britta Perry, from Community—and it’s obvious how much less character drives the story
in Agents of SHIELD. The reason Ward
isn’t a loner after episode three is that he’s not selfish, like Jayne or Jeff
Winger.
As
a writer, you need dysfunction in your characters, you need immutable values
and interests that don’t quite line up with those of others. That’s how you get
insubordination, fluid alliances, back-biting, friendly teasing, unfriendly
teasing, sexual tension, meaningful sacrifice, and those strange moments when
the character you usually hate becomes the character you adore.
We
might hate Jayne Cobb for how he treats River, how he betrays the Tams, but on
Unification Day when those Alliance pricks start (“start” being loosely defined
as a term) a bar fight, we want Jayne at our side. That’s the power of the
misfit ensemble, and that’s what Agents
of SHIELD is sorely lacking.
Instead
of a cast who have diverse values and interests, Agents of SHIELD gives us characters with diverse accents.
WHY
AGENTS OF SHIELD LIES TO US
At
its heart, Agents of SHIELD is less
interesting because it tells us a lie that Americans don’t usually believe:
that you’re with us or against us. That your dysfunctions have to be erased in
order to participate in the world. But most of us feel—deeply—our own
dysfunctions and differences, the places where our broken edges don’t line up
with everyone else’s. We all feel like misfits, and misfit ensembles teach us
that we’re allowed to be weird, that we’re allowed to disagree, that if we can
do the job, our colleagues will tolerate us.
When
your team looks like a diversity poster, but everyone gets along, that’s
shallow. Jonah Goldberg – a conservative columnist – made famous the gripe that
Clinton hired a rainbow coalition to his cabinet, but they were almost all
liberal lawyers from the same top schools. In other words, Clinton had a lot of
diversity but not much pluralism. It was supposed to be a big deal, for
instance, when Obama tried to nominate some Republicans.
Pluralism,
here, is defined as “kind of like diversity, except with lots of screaming.”
You know, the interesting kind. People have disparate views and values, so they
clash.
In
the series, there aren’t any real assholes or rogues who we’re meant to like.
Ward goes Full-Blown Nazi, and this is increasingly how our politics work.
Those who aren’t with us are … Nazis. But that’s not the real world. The real
world is full of rogues, rivals, misinformed saints, and self-interested
sinners who just so happen to be on our team. They have no Pierce Hawthorne,
and if they did, they’d spend three episodes fixing him with Coulson acting
like a superhuman HR guy (“if we just
did enough trust falls, surely Pierce would stop being so racist…”).
This
cleaned-up version of reality where everyone holds hands and sings is a
problem, because it teaches us to expect people to agree with us eventually.
Otherwise, they must not have been good guys. But misfit ensembles teach us the
reverse—how to get along with (and sometimes like) useful assholes. How maybe
sometimes, we’re the assholes.
A
journalist colleague of mine was notoriously flaky if he was your backup on a
long-term feature, never producing on time. He never ran a comb through his
hair, something alive in the heap on his desk may have been stealing my lunch,
and he was tackled by the Secret Service (“When they say stand inside the
ropes, they really do mean it”). He used to take photos of congressmen at the
exact moment they looked down at my crotch, then blow them up and tape them to
my computer monitor. But he was a hell of a Gonzo journalist and had the best prose
on staff. He had a bulletproof vest on the back of his chair, because he would
beat the cops to a shots-fired call, and the DA was afraid he’d get killed. I
hated that guy.
But
I wish they’d hire him on the cast of Agents
of SHIELD.
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