TV Review: Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

By Nathan Young on September 25, 2013

On Tuesday night, ABC premiered Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. The show picks up after The Avengers movie as agent Phil Coulson (played by Clark Gregg) puts together a small team of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents to handle strange new cases. Each case will test the team in cooperation and ingenuity as they try to work together figuring out newly emerging superhuman individuals in the world. The pilot episode was watched by 11.9 million and earned a 4.6 rating in the adult demo and was the highest-rated drama debut in almost four years! So did the show live up to its hype, or was it a disappointment? Below the picture, I will share my thoughts about the pilot episode, so if you have not seen the episode yet, SPOILER ALERT!

To sum it up, the pilot episode was well done! The pilot episode begins with a great montage of The Avengers superheroes before we see a father and a kid looking through a comic book shop window. Then a building nearby explodes! Mike Peterson (played by J. August Richards), rescues a person trapped inside a burning building. By the way, I loved how he leaped out of that building and landed like that! Sadly, he runs away after rescuing the person. The next chunk of the episode got boring for a while, we get introduced to Agent Grant Ward (played by Brett Dalton) while he is fighting guys in Paris with some weird French music playing in the background. Then the most awesome Phil Coulson appears from a dark area, Coulson Lives!

We get to see the secret level 7 inside S.H.I.E.L.D. which has some cool techy stuff! Then we see Skye (played by Chloe Bennet) trying to convince Mike Peterson that S.H.I.E.L.D. is coming after him. Skye’s character is very geeky and nerdy, she really knows her computers and tech stuff! Coulson convinces Agent Melinda May (played by Ming-Na Wen) to go back into the field. Then we see Coulson’s car Lola being loaded onto a giant airplane, as a friendly reminder, don’t touch Lola! Somehow, Skye is broadcasting some classified information about the Rising Tide from a van in an alley. Yep, Agent Coulson finds her and kidnaps her!

Agents from S.H.I.E.L.D. arrives in a building to find any secrets from the hacker group while Skye is being interrogated by Coulson. One scene featured some very cool tech stuff in a form of scanners that scanned the entire building and every item. And we also got introduced to a truth drug. Being Agent Coulson, he first injected the drug into Agent Grant Ward. Agent Ward admitted to mask the pain of the injection to impress beautiful women and to look more manly, yes that stuff works fast! Skye then gets the chance to grill Agent Ward and he had to tell the truth, that was a great moment!

Agent Coulson uses a high-tech smart table to examine Mike Peterson and then the team goes to work. Mike Peterson appears in a hospital room to check on a person. He complains that he is not advancing in life and wants to advance, but he is told to disappear, which he does. The guy is not doing well mentally, mostly because he was fired from his job without workers comp. By the way, I loved the hologram technology we see in this part of the episode! Mike has the Extremis virus and if you have seen Iron Man 3, he has enough juice inside his body to blow up a two city block.

Mike Peterson then barricades himself inside a van then takes over a train station and the agents with Maria Hill from The Avengers tries to stop the bad guy. Mike is strong, several guys tries to fight with Mike, but they are thrown around like toys. By the way, did you catch the part where Mike (who is black) is falling down in front of a mural of black people? Some people have commented that they found that ironic. Then we saw the best part of this pilot episode, a standoff between Agent Coulson and Mike Peterson. Mike is crying out for help, then he is put down by a shooter but it was not to kill him, it was to heal him from the Extremis virus. A good ending!

To wrap up the pilot, Agent Coulson and Skye takes Lola for a spin and the car flies! Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. started off slowly, but the action did pick up at the end of the pilot episode! Disney and ABC are going to make sure this show succeeds! They have poured millions of dollars into the production of this show and they want everyone to like this show. I am willing to bet we will see repeats of this show being aired on other Disney owned channels like ABC Family or maybe even Disney Channel, the show is only rated TV-PG V. I have faith in Joss Whedon and he knows what he is doing! I hope we will get to see a superhero make a special appearance in one episode this season, that would be awesome!

The show will continue to have great ratings throughout it’s first season and I am sure the show will get better! Marvel’s accusation by Disney was a beautiful thing! ABC will be developing more shows from the Marvel Universe. And we will get to see more awesome movies from the Marvel superheroes! The suits from Disney must be smiling right about now! By the way, did you see the Coulson Reveal! He was never dead in the first place, Director Nick Fury faked his death to motivate The Avengers and sent him on vacation to Tahiti with a physical therapist. He was technically dead for eight seconds. Did you catch that?

New episodes of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. airs on Tuesday nights at 8/7 pm central on ABC. Learn more about the show at: http://abc.go.com/shows/marvels-agents-of-shield.

All images copyright from ABC.