Author: Marc Bernardin

ABC/Justin Lubin

As this is The Hollywood Reporter’s inaugural Agents of SHIELD recap, it seemed like the perfect time to get a couple of things to get out of the way right up front.

1) There will be spoilers. Given that you’re all experienced internet-wielders, I’m sure you understand how recaps work, but if you don’t want to be spoiled, just keep on trucking.

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2) Understand that this comes from a place of love. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Whedonite. A Browncoat, foremost, and on the Scoobies’ waiting list. But nothing that one loves is perfect. Part of love is understanding that. And, occasionally, one is disappointed in the things one loves. So, yes, when something feels off, or unearned, or just plain silly, we’re gonna ding it. Remember…from a place of love. In Joss We Trust, But We Also Reserve the Right to Pick Nits.

So, here we go.

THR’s chief TV critic Tim Goodman has given his official word on the show itself, and I’m not going to contradict him. It’s a good pilot, but not a great one, primarily because of all the heavy lifting it needs to do to set the table for the episodes that will follow.

So, in short order, we have to meet the case of the week, Mike Peterson (J. August Richards), who is totally not Luke Cage but absolutely could’ve been. And maybe should’ve been. (Or maybe will be if SHIELD can remove the cocktail of enhancements that the evil-crazy-crazy scientists juiced him with and gives him a new identity — after all, Luke Cage is totally a made-up name.) He used to be a factory worker before he got hurt. Then his wife left. And went broke. And can’t buy his kid one of the “heroes of New York” toys. It’s very sad.

Then he saves a woman from a burning building by Spider-Manning his way up a wall and jumping a few stories to safety, all in front of Skye (Chloe Bennet) and her enterprising camera phone. Meanwhile, Agent Grant Shaw (Brett Dalton) gets all smashy-smashy in Paris while uncovering some illegal Chitauri tech and a link to a, let’s admit it, silly freedom-of-information band of rebels called the Rising Tide.

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Shaw gets airlifted back to a mysterious SHIELD field office where Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders, prepping for her post-HIMYM life) tells him that he’s been recruited for a response team the not-at-all-dead-probably Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) is assembling with Director Fury’s permission.

And it’s on. They collect a bunch of other team members: the mysterious Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen), who “drives the bus” and “kicks the ass,” and Agents Leo Fitz (Ian De Caestecker) and Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), the comic-relief scientists who will clearly turn evil at some point during season two. A bit of handy-convenient detective work leads them to Skye, who then leads them to the About to Explode Man of the People. Big fight in Union Station, big speech from Coulson, happy ending, flying car.

A lot happens, with the same silky smart sensibility that Whedon — who directed and co-wrote, with his brother and sister-in-law, Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen — gives to everything he does. Everyone’s got some semblance of a character mystery that we’ll explore over the course of the first season, maybe the entire series.

But Whedon has never been very good at beginnings. Every season of every show he’s produced (save Firefly) started very slowly, and took a bit to find its legs. He ends those seasons like an all-star — Angel’s “Not Fade Away,” Dollhouse’s “Epitaph One,” Buffy’s “The Gift” — but he needs some track before he can work up a head of steam. And that’s just fine. This one is good enough to get us to the next one…which is all, ultimately, a pilot needs to do.

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Some stray thoughts:

First Theory About Coulson’s Not Death: He’s a Life Model Decoy, an android that looks, feels and has been programmed to act human. In The Avengers, Robert Downey Jr.‘s Tony Stark tosses off a throwaway line when Coulson interrupts his wee date with Pepper Potts: “Hi, you’ve reached the Life Model Decoy of Tony Stark.” The wrinkle here is that the Coulsonbot doesn’t know he’s a Coulsonbot. Just a theory. (Which is totally what it is. But we’ll play along, Whedons…for now.)

The Rising Tide. Is not, apparently, a detergent. It’s a young woman. Who probably smells Downy fresh while podcasting a bunch of rhetoric that apparently has SHIELD all in a tizzy. Why? Kind of unclear. Also unclear: Why, if Skye and the Rising Tide is such a problem, couldn’t they find her before…especially if she’s just in a van down by the river? On that, if Skye has the web-fu to erase her own identity and hack into the SHIELD database, why can’t she convince a car dealership’s computers to give her a less-crappy ride?

The Deeper Meaning. It’s buried among all the set up, but that final speech from Peterson/Cage feels like something you’d have heard from a frustrated Freedom Rider. “You said if we worked hard, if we did right, we’d have a place. You said it was enough to be a man, but there’s better than man. There’s gods. And the rest of us, what are we? They’re giants, we’re what they step on.” Those are strong words, good words, but from the mouth of a black actor, they gain more resonance. And I think that’s exactly what the producers were going for.

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Ron Glass. Yay!

Just Once. It’d be nice to see the team of super-accomplished awesome people who weren’t all people who chose not to be supermodels because it got in the way of all that book learning. Yes, this is TV, and I understand the necessities thereof, but I’m all for diversity in casting and I wanna stick up for the ugly people. They deserve their heroes, too.

At least they’re not trying to fake New York. Because TV shows shot in L.A. that try and fake New York never do it right. And yet…they’re not even faking East Los Angeles all that well, either. I’m pretty sure that the street where Mike Peterson gets all heroic is the same exact backlot street where Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer fought it out.

The Coolest Thing in the Episode. Lola. Not just that it’s a hovercar right out of the SHIELD comics — the hoverjets look like they came right off of Jim Steranko’s pen.

Speaking of Steranko…we got the man himself to chime in with his thoughts on the episode and what it’s like for the man who created so much of SHIELD’s magic goodness to see it up on the small screen. Stay tuned to hear what Steranko Says…

E-mail: marc.bernardin@thr.com
Twitter: @marcbernardin

Jim Steranko

Writer. Penciler. Escape artist. Bon vivant. Possessor of amazing hair. There are many titles one can lay at the feet of Jim Steranko, who was a staple of Marvel Comics’ Silver Age in the ’60s and ’70s, but the most enduring is, Creator of Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD. OK, to be fair, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby first transformed the WWII hero Nick Fury into a spy in a 12-page feature in a 1965 issue of Strange Tales. But, by April of 1967, Steranko was writing and drawing the book, adding the style of James Bond, the pop-art sensibilities of Andy Warhol or Peter Max and all the suspense of John le Carre.

(Last week, Marvel released a new SHIELD collection — featuring the complete Steranko adventures for the first time — to coincide with the Agents of SHIELD premiere, in case anyone out there wants to go deeper than the movies and bone up on Fury and his ultra-high-tech investigative organization.)

Now 74 years old, Steranko is uniquely qualified to assess Marvel’s new Agents of SHIELD TV show, as so many of the original ideas flowed from his pen. So he’s going to take part in our weekly recaps, starting tonight. But first, a few words of introduction from the man himself.

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Can you explain, for the uninitiated, how SHIELD first came into your orbit? What were you doing for Marvel at the time?

I was an ad agency art director and simply walked into the Marvel offices at five to five one afternoon. I asked to see Stan and [receptionist] Fabulous Flo Steinberg laughed at me. “Nobody sees Stan,” she said. I wasn’t in the comics biz, but I had samples with me and tucked them under her arm. “Stan will see me!” She vanished for a couple minutes, returned somewhat stunned, “Stan will see you!” We hit it off immediately, and, after about 15 minutes of non-comics chatter, he turned to the rack of monthly comics behind him and said, “Pick one!” I could have had Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four or Thor, but I picked SHIELD, their weakest title because they simply didn’t know what to do with it. It was so bad, it had nowhere to go but up! The rest is history.

Nick Fury had been a WWII soldier beforehand — where did the idea to make him a spy come from?

Stan prompted Jack Kirby for a take on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV series, and he generated two sample pages of The Man Called D.E.A.T.H. — the precursor of SHIELD. And why not a WWII vet? If General Eisenhower could move up in the ranks, why not Fury?

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Looking back at Marvel in the ’60s, it was a place of great invention, of crackling ideas flying fast and furious. But for all of the iconic characters that were developed, there were a ton of concepts that didn’t survive the crucible of time. Why have Nick Fury and SHIELD endured?

When I charted the series, the title had wretched sales, so I created a myriad of devices — literary and graphic — to make Fury compete with the superpowered, costumed heroes. Apparently, it worked! That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Fury himself has changed quite a bit over the years — of the character traits that have remained, what are you proudest of?

I gave Fury my tailor’s address — and my attitude!

Had you been watching the Marvel movies when SHIELD was introduced? What was your take on how they’ve been portraying it?

There were no Marvel movies before 1965, when SHIELD was intro’ed in Strange Tales #135. To date, the secret organization has been a minor aspect in the Marvel movies — but all that’s about to change with Agents of SHIELD.

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How do you feel about Samuel L. Jackson playing Nick Fury? Does he capture the essence of the character, in your eyes?

Jackson’s a fine actor, but I’m deferring judgment until his solo feature. He looks good in an eye patch, but I recommend he abort that black leather coat. Laughable!

Finally, what do you hope Agents of SHIELD gets right, in the portrayal of extraordinary humans dealing with extra-human threats?

The one thing I always expect from SHIELD is the unexpected. And it has to kick ass with imagination and style. That’s Fury’s rule, not mine!

“Arrow”

The CW’s Arrow is nudging itself ever closer to its comic book origins by introducing a member of the Suicide Squad — villains pressed into service by a shadowy arm of the government into carrying out missions they probably won’t survive — and one of the DC Universe’s most popular heroines, Black Canary, Oliver Queen’s great love.

Talking about how Oliver, played by Stephen Amell, would be “going from the Arrow in season 1 to being Green Arrow in season 2,” executive producer Andrew Kreisberg — joined on stage by Amell, Colton Haynes (Roy Harper), Katie Cassidy (Laurel Lance), David Ramsey (John Diggle), Emily Bett Rickard (Felicity Smoak), executive producer Mark Guggenheim and executive producer Greg Berlanti — revealed that the second season’s premiere episode’s title is “City of Heroes,” and that it refers to “not just Oliver and Lauren, but to everyone” reeling after the destruction of Star City’s Glades district.

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When asked if we’d see any more DC heroes on the show other than Black Canary — teased ever so brutally in an action-heavy teaser built from a mere four days of shooting — Kreisberg revealed that Brother Blood, a New Teen Titans villain, will play a role in season 2 (and will be played by True Blood’s Kevin Alejandro). He also said that Suicide Squad member Bronze Tiger — who also belongs to R’as Al Ghul’s League of Assassins — would be played by Black Dynamite himself, Michael Jai White.

And the fact that John Barrowman crashed the panel halfway through points to his Malcolm Merlyn returning in some fashion, but no one would say precisely how. “If I do get invited back,” Barrowman joked, “it’s more than the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who has done.”

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As for Black Canary’s introduction in the sizzle reel — and she seems to have been played by a new actress, a departure from the comics-prescribed trajectory for Cassidy’s Laurel Lance — Kreisberg and his writing staff have some trickery up their sleeves: “The first Green Arrow we saw wasn’t Oliver; chronologically, it was Yao Fei,” Kreisberg said, “the first Deathstroke we saw wasn’t Slade Wilson; the first Merlyn the archer we saw wasn’t his father, it was Tommy.”

No reason to think that Cassidy won’t get to don the crime-fightin’ fishnets, but nothing happens overnight.

Here’s the teaser trailer:

E-mail: Marc.Bernardin@THR.com
Twitter: @marcbernardin