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selenayOnly brief notes today, because work fried my brain, but I had to note a couple of things.
Alternative facts! Hydra was founded by Nazis! This whole arc is a giant fuck you to the current real world and to Marvel's comics division, isn't it? AND I LOVE IT.
Also, I knew they were going to go for that "Phil Coulson, agent of SHIELD" moment, but it was still nice to see.
Grant Ward surprised me again, by not being an awful terrible traitor. AGAIN. I keep expecting him to do it, but nope. It's interesting, because I still loathe the version of Ward that we had in the main storyline and I don't want him back, but this version of Ward intrigues me and I might even be sad to see him go. He's the Ward-who-could-have been, the person Ward could have grown into if Garret hadn't arrived at the right moment to twist him into something else. I can't decide whether he's the result of Aida fixing Daisy's biggest regret, although I don't think so, or a natural outcome of all the other changes she made. Without Coulson there, and with Hydra already ascendent, Garret didn't need to find Ward and train him, so Hand got there instead and hey presto, surprisingly non-psycopathic Ward.
I even had a moment of being happy when they revealed the people storming the TV station weren't Hydra, so Ward won't have to die heroically (yet).
It makes me conflicted, actually, because I've been in the habit of disliking Ward for so long and now they're making me question that.
It's also interesting because Ward and Fitz are the two characters being shown who's change moment is from their childhood, and it's fundamentally changed their character. For the others, the moment that was changed was after they were an adult, after they'd become largely the person they were, so the differences were small and shallow. Mace became who he'd always wanted to be. Coulson became the history teacher he'd wanted to be, but he always wanted to be more. May made a terrible choice, but children have always been her weakness.
Scratch the surface of Coulson and May and their real personalities come through. Mace is almost unchanged from his real world version, except he has true powers and he's more confident in them.
Fitz and Ward were changed in fundamental ways at a point in their development when their characters could be radically changed, and we get these opposite characters.
I can't decide how much of that is Aida twisting things and how much is Aida following probability algorithms to their natural conclusion, but I do find it fascinating.
Which is what I say about every aspect of this arc each week. I find it fascinating and I'm sad we've only got a couple more episodes before the end of the season.
Okay, that wasn't actually brief after all :-)
Alternative facts! Hydra was founded by Nazis! This whole arc is a giant fuck you to the current real world and to Marvel's comics division, isn't it? AND I LOVE IT.
Also, I knew they were going to go for that "Phil Coulson, agent of SHIELD" moment, but it was still nice to see.
Grant Ward surprised me again, by not being an awful terrible traitor. AGAIN. I keep expecting him to do it, but nope. It's interesting, because I still loathe the version of Ward that we had in the main storyline and I don't want him back, but this version of Ward intrigues me and I might even be sad to see him go. He's the Ward-who-could-have been, the person Ward could have grown into if Garret hadn't arrived at the right moment to twist him into something else. I can't decide whether he's the result of Aida fixing Daisy's biggest regret, although I don't think so, or a natural outcome of all the other changes she made. Without Coulson there, and with Hydra already ascendent, Garret didn't need to find Ward and train him, so Hand got there instead and hey presto, surprisingly non-psycopathic Ward.
I even had a moment of being happy when they revealed the people storming the TV station weren't Hydra, so Ward won't have to die heroically (yet).
It makes me conflicted, actually, because I've been in the habit of disliking Ward for so long and now they're making me question that.
It's also interesting because Ward and Fitz are the two characters being shown who's change moment is from their childhood, and it's fundamentally changed their character. For the others, the moment that was changed was after they were an adult, after they'd become largely the person they were, so the differences were small and shallow. Mace became who he'd always wanted to be. Coulson became the history teacher he'd wanted to be, but he always wanted to be more. May made a terrible choice, but children have always been her weakness.
Scratch the surface of Coulson and May and their real personalities come through. Mace is almost unchanged from his real world version, except he has true powers and he's more confident in them.
Fitz and Ward were changed in fundamental ways at a point in their development when their characters could be radically changed, and we get these opposite characters.
I can't decide how much of that is Aida twisting things and how much is Aida following probability algorithms to their natural conclusion, but I do find it fascinating.
Which is what I say about every aspect of this arc each week. I find it fascinating and I'm sad we've only got a couple more episodes before the end of the season.
Okay, that wasn't actually brief after all :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2017-04-26 09:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-04-28 03:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-04-28 04:07 pm (UTC)And of course the "They're all Nazis, every single one" was great.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-04-28 05:39 pm (UTC)Ming-Na is a fantastic actor. People rave about her stunt-work with good reason, but I think it's even more amazing how much she can convey through tiny facial movements and subtle body positioning. May is not a wear-your-heart-on-your-sleeve character, which makes her (I think) a much more difficult character to play without making her stiff or cold. It makes the difference between our May and this May harder to convey, too, because it has to be done so subtly and MING-NA DOES IT LIKE A CHAMP. My admiration for her has only increased with this arc.
And of course the "They're all Nazis, every single one" was great.
It was great. And they keep ramming it home each episode :-) Fuck you, comics division, indeed :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2017-04-28 11:15 pm (UTC)I think it's even more amazing how much she can convey through tiny facial movements and subtle body positioning. May is not a wear-your-heart-on-your-sleeve character, which makes her (I think) a much more difficult character to play without making her stiff or cold.
Oh yeah, YES to all that. It's very subtle and she's always done it so well without seeming either blank or brusque, but you really see there's a person in there, even if she's heavily guarded. I would imagine that's really hard to do.
It makes the difference between our May and this May harder to convey, too, because it has to be done so subtly and MING-NA DOES IT LIKE A CHAMP.
SHE DOES. This May doesn't seem flat out disinterested in people, treating them like lab rats, like Evil Fitz, but like she's barely concealing immense pain -- which was weirding me out, til I remembered that way back at the beginning she's doing some desk job and doesn't trust herself in the field at all, and that was after Bahrain. So this May is absolutely full of self-doubt and blames herself for everything, and Evil Fitz is constantly stomping on that. (Evil Fitz is the worst.)
(no subject)
Date: 2017-05-01 01:03 pm (UTC)And when you go even deeper, that May had only been forced to kill one child in Bahrain. A child she knew was dangerous, so she had conflicting feelings about it, but only one. From the hints we've had, although she saved that one child in the Framework, that choice directly resulted in the deaths of dozens--perhaps hundreds--of children in the Cambridge incident. So this is a May with an even bigger load of guilt and self-loathing, who knows she could have prevented such a huge disaster. It's no wonder that she was convinced to join Hydra if they promised to prevent that happening again, but that left her with her an even bigger mess of conflicting guilt and loathing than she had after Bahrain, because Hydra are doing bad things with what she wants to believe are good intentions.
So she's living with a level of pain that the May in our world never had to live with, and she's trying to believe she's doing the right thing even though a voice inside her must be asking whether she is, which could be why she was so quickly convinced to leave Hydra. Evil Fitz stomped on her with no idea of what was under the surface, which is why it all went a bit wrong for him on that front.
Evil Fitz is the worst. WORST.