The third episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. kicked off with a bang and immediately got me interested. The beginning action sequence was reminiscent of X-Men: The Last Stand and Magneto’s jailbreak of mutants from a moving truck. That simple sequence, which I’ve seen before, got me interested in what was to come, and forget the lackluster previous episode.

Scientist Franklin Hall is kidnapped by a fellow colleague who wants Hall to work with something called gravitonium, a new element that helps control gravity. Which leads the team in a tough to get him back as they can’t enter the country, so they need to turn to new team member Skye who also needs to learn how to be an agent. The bad gu is, a Julian Assange type character attempting to defy governmental overreach, overall kind of a weak character and nemesis.

There’s some interesting twists and turns as far as story, but for as good as they are, I can’t help but circle back for the need of Skye to chuck her smarts and use her sexuality to entice the bad guy. It demeans the character a bit, especially when she supposedly has all these other talents.

Tonally this third episode is much more reminiscent of the first episode, which is a good thing, because the second deviated and was really bad. The episode wasn’t as good as the first, but much better than the second. A cool moment though is what might be the origin of the classic Marvel villain Graviton during the episode.

An improvement overall, the episode has me back interested in what’s to come.

Writer: Joss Whedon, Jed Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen Director: Joss Whedon
Overall Score: 6.75

Take the large than life Avengers and the Marvel movie universe and condense it down to fit the television screen and you have to wonder if it’ll work. Joss Whedon and his team have the mixed and difficult task of doing just that with Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Whedon has experience taking a movie and shrinking it down to fit television, he’s done it before with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a successful series that spawned a cult following.

Much like the film it spins out of the first episode of this series is all about gathering the team. It’s a motley crew of characters, each with a mysterious past and personalities that match the god like beings from the movie franchises. The first episode mostly follows up on plot threads from Iron Man 3 with extremis being used to power up individuals and creating ticking time bombs. The plot is ok, nothing particularly stood out to me about that. What the first episode was all about was the characters and personalities.

The quick comments, the sly statements, the situations they put each other in, that’s the draw of the show so far. There’s some great moments of the show, but that’s juxtaposed with action sequences or moments when they’re investigating which don’t quite hold up as much. It was great mixed with average.

But, for us fanboys and fangirls, there was a lot there. There’s hints as to Agent Coulson’s resurrection (I’m guessing life model decoy), the term “journey into mystery,” lots of references to the movies and then there’s the hover car. There’s a lot to geek on.

I think the show is summed up by the ending with the discussion as to how man is supposed to be important or succeed with gods walking among them. And that’s how I feel about the show. With the movies to compare to, the show has high hurdles. Much like man amongst gods, the show must find its own path and find its exceptionalism. There’s hints of it here, but it doesn’t quite nail it yet.

Writer: Joss Whedon, Jed Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen Director: Joss Whedon
Overall Score: 7.75