Agents of SHIELD: Episode 5 – The Girl In The Flower Dress

Last Week…

Coulson and the gang saved a former protégé of his from mind control by a shadowy organization before any further diamond heists could be enacted. Coulson’s belief in his past is vindicated. Meanwhile, more “romantic” tension occurs as Skye checks Ward out with x-ray spectacles (in a scene that would be creepy if it were a man performing such an act on network television, but I digress).

Now….

A girl in a flower dress (titular character of this episode) approaches a street magician capable of creating fire into the palm of his hands with an offer he can’t refuse. An offer that he accepts and takes him off the grid, something that our SHIELD team doesn’t take kindly to. Concurrently, Skye’s loyalties will finally be exposed as confused when a former flame gets mixed up in the main plot.

Agents of SHIELD has sure been busy in building up this parallel story line to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In setting up this group of individuals who make up the “grunt work” as opposed to the word-threatening super plots that form the basis for the movies, the series has its work cut out for itself every week in making us care about what is going on when there are decidedly more interesting things going on with the main heroes adventures. So far, the series has been very hit and miss, with certain storylines zipping by with swashbuckling exuberance while some of the characters come across as pale retreads of past archetypes. This fifth episode crystallizes everything good and bad about the series in general up to this point.

It intertwines elements from the movies (Extremis has been mentioned several times now, along with vague references to the big characters who have yet to make an appearance on the show, and probably never will) in such a way that maintains interest. This episode does the most interesting one to date, where a street magician is taken in because of his body’s resistance to fire and used by a shadowy organization (there is quite a lot of those in this series so far, naturally) to come up with a cure to all the pesky side-effects from the Extremis serum, as shown in Iron Man 3.

I’ve been saying this a lot since the series began, unfortunately, but it’s just that the only major place this episode stumbles in is when it focuses on anybody on the team who isn’t Agent Coulson or Melinda May. I’m sorry, I just don’t really care about Skye and find her somewhat annoying at this point, especially when her subplot with a fellow hacker/former love interest makes up a great deal of the episode’s running time. She’s our window into this world, too, so the fact that her character doesn’t register as anything above a few witty remarks is troubling going forward.

My patience with the show is founded on solid ground for the time being, as I’m excited to see where this goes, at least up until the release of Thor: The Dark World, as much anticipation for that movie has lent the show a great deal of weight in my mind up to this point.

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