Binge watching the streams and eye-balling the books falling off the shelf. What a life.
Finished the fifth season of the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D and I’m wondering how much to the Hydra well they will go. I like that each season builds on that never-ending threat, sort of, but constantly making S.H.I.E.L.D destroyed by the lop off one head, two more take its place thematic is getting scripturally claustrophobic. And there’s the time travel goto that seems more a what-do-we-do-next necessity than an inspired creative exercise. I liked the first season more, where there was a solo episodic feel to the stories instead of a multi-threaded continuing narrative as the team came together with Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg–just sublime in the role, really). That team has the requisite techie nerds/hackers du jour/problem solvers duo of Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons (lain De Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge), May (Ming-Na Wen) the martial arts prone pilot with a grim past; Ward (Brett Dalton) the dashing and heroic agent who turns out to be…but that would spoil it for you; Mack (Henry Simmons) who provides the moral compass and some solid knuckles; and Skye(Chloe Bennet) who can whip up a quake in a second. Interestingly, you can find some similarities between the Skye and Jane Doe (Blindspot) characters. Luke Mitchell, who plays Lincoln Campbell, an inhuman here, and Roman, a mean human in Blindspot, also generates a similar ambivalence in both of his characters across the two series.
Surrealestate is back for its third season on Hulu. A novel touch has a real estate group tackling the more paranormal aspects of their properties with August (Maurice Dean Wint), the nerdy guy who builds their ectoplasmic-fantastic gadgets to deal with the supernatural; the good hair guy, Luke Roman (Tim Rozon), who leads the group and can sense through the ether and talk to ghosts; his partner Susan (Sarah Levy) with her telekinetic and pyrotechnic abilities; and Clytemnestra (Elena Juatco) or just Lomax for short, who seems the more grounded-to-the-ordinary side of things person among them. Zooey (Savannah Basley), former receptionist and office manager, but now law career-minded–one foot in, one foot out–character, rounds out the main cast. There was Phil (Adam Korson), a former priest who worked with the group, but he was in seasons one and two. Being a Canadian production, like the X-Files first five seasons, it has that narrative je ne sais guoi quality that differentiates it from American television storytelling. At first I thought a show about ghosts every episode would be redundant, but Surrealestate goes the heavenly highway route as seen in Touched by an Angel, Highway to Heaven, and Ghost Whisperer. But, and it’s a big but, it manages to avoid the saccharine aftertaste and leans more toward sinister shenanigans that need to be excised. That’s not to say that each story doesn’t wrap up to a white light ending, but in these stories, the characters and storylines are presented with more salt and less sugar.
After four seasons of Blindspot, now on Netflix, I can say the show, like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, keeps to the main protagonist’s iterations each season, but given it’s an FBI against terrorists theme, with pumping music and a drunken camera approach that loves closeups, it does keep the adrenaline high for each episode. The premise of a woman without a memory winding up in a large duffle bag in Times Square is a grabber right off the bat. The kicker is that she’s tattooed all over with cryptic symbols, numbers, and letters. Soon she and the FBI discover that her tattooed body contains clues to dozens of crimes in process or about to happen. Great mystery to start a series with for sure. Every episode reveals a new tattoo with a new crime to solve. Brilliant, to a point. There’s still some temporal logic with it all that I’m not comfortable with yet: like how the discovery of a tattoo’s meaning chimes so well with the timing of the crime’s apex or stuff like that. The woman, Jane Doe (Jaimie Alexander), starts helping the team of slick FBI agents trying to sort it all out. There’s lots of character and relationship-driven angst and growth (or backward sliding) that keeps each episode tied to the main theme pushing the narrative across stories, while creating solo ventures and sub-threads that can be tied up within the hour or make the next hour more interesting. Kurt Weller (Sullivan Stapleton) is the lead agent of the group. His wide-eyed grizzly look and combat-hardened demeaner keep him lean and mean until he starts softening up around Jane. The main puzzle-solver is the very computer jacked Patterson (Ashley Johnson), who can whip up a brilliant solution before breakfast and hack into anything before lunch. Natasha (Audrey Esparza), is aptly named as she starts out as FBI, but slides to CIA, becoming a double-agent with equally challenging shifts in loyalty. Reade (Rob Brown) starts out as an agent on Weller’s team, but then takes over as director, bringing in some baggage to be handled with kid gloves. For the opposing team there are some nasty and murderous adversaries. Shepperd (Michelle Hurd) leads the bad guys (and gals) against the FBI with country-level destruction in mind. She oozes evil and nastiness and makes for a formidable adversary. Her son, Roman (Luke Mitchell) is even worse. He’s her right hand of woe and keeps pushing those tattoos as a way to control the FBI and Jane. The fifth season does a 180 and leaves the team in jeopardy, just when everything seemed to have settled down.
By now you may have picked up on the recurrent necessity of having a techie or two onboard each team. Even Tracker uses nerds who can whip up a hack in seconds, solve complex encryption in a minute, crack passwords with ease, and find surprisingly informative secret information within minutes. And don’t get me started on the ubiquitous use of CCTV and PODs (closed-circuit television and police observation devices) to find essential clues or starting points for each case. At least the over-used air-vent passageway used for escape or ingress seems to have dropped in popularity. That’s something, at least.