Agents of SHIELD: Episode 6 – FZZT

Last Week on Agents of SHIELD…

The search for a SHIELD person of interest, a street magician with pyro-kinetic powers, brings Skye in contact with a former flame and fellow Rising Tide hacker. Because of her decisions, she loses the trust of the team when she rushes to his aid but is kept on the plane following her tearful confession to Agent Coulson regarding the search for her missing parents as the reason she ever joined Rising Tide and, subsequently, SHIELD.

Now…

A campfire ghost story goes awry when one of the chaperones is found dead, and suspended in mid-air! The SHIELD team gets to the bottom of this and finds that an alien disease is to blame, but not before our very own Simmons is infected with the same disease that has killed several others.

If more episodes to come are like this, then Agents of SHIELD may have just found its footing. Not only is this the best episode of the series up to this point, it easily ranks as an interesting piece of pop entertainment coming at us in a break neck pace in only forty-five minutes.

Everything I have said is wrong with the show up to this point has been rectified in this installment. Most of the episode focuses on Agent Coulson, along with Fitz and Simmons. Agent Ward and Skye are infinitely more interesting in this episode, too, perhaps because less amount of time is spent on Skye and Agent Ward actually gets to do something heroic as well as something funny, all within five minutes.

Most of the drama of the episode centers on Simmons being infected with the alien disease that has killed every human it has come in contact with. This is a fairly effective storyline considering it doesn’t pop up until halfway through the episode, giving us ample time to see what this disease can do and how it affects people, as expressed through a fairly touching scene between Coulson and a man just about to die. There’s also a number of effective scenes between Fitz and Simmons, given the spotlight for once and a welcome addition to it.

Hopefully, the rest of the episodes from here on out match the quality on display this week.

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