"Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." Debrief: Episode 1.03, "The Asset"

Okay Trill Believers we’re in the third week here on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and you know what, I was pretty easy on the first two weeks of the show. Going through the 'net seeing the hate & issues with it I just shrugged it off since I enjoyed it so far. Now we get to this week which is when I was actually let down by an episode. It’s not terrible but it was a tad bit silly like Bronson Pinchot as the Prankster in Lois & Clark. 

This episode is titled 'The Asset' and it begins with a large tractor-trailer going down a typical American highway. The driver, Mack, seems to be a stereotypical truck driver but he’s actually a SHIELD Agent. So for real though, they have a SHIELD agent named Mack who drives basically a Mack truck? This is '80s cartoon character naming. The truck, of course, is important and is being escorted by the usual black SHIELD SUVs when out of nowhere the cars are flipped all over the road. Now worried, Mack calls this in as his truck is also flipped in the air in a scene that reminds you of a Magneto scene from the X-Men movies.

Agent Ward is now training Skye in a fairly obvious, destined to be together romantically sort of way. As Skye complains about doing physical training, with punches looking softer than Cottonelle™ toilet paper, the team learns the convoy was attacked and the cargo, a SHIELD scientist Dr. Franklin Hall, was kidnapped.  The person who kidnapped him was one of his old students Ian Quinn that now lives in Malta and is basically starting a bootleg Cobra operation or something. He hates SHIELD and stuff because they are “big brother”. He took Dr. Hall so he could help make a machine (a machine that looks very much like Dr. Octopus’ machine from Spidey 2) to use the graviton particles he discovered. Graviton particles are an extremely rare element that can be used to control gravity.

Now Malta has a law that SHIELD can’t enter its borders so Skye has the bright idea that it should be her to go in and do the mission even though she has no training, she can’t fight, and we learn in this episode she is a high school dropout. See hold up; how is Coulson going to let in someone with no GED? How did Fury let that pass though? Isn’t there a proficiency test? So back to the story, somehow Skye gets invited to a party on Quinn's estate, which will give Coulson the chance to sneak in after her.

So she gets her spy tech and puts on a dress and goes to the party where Quinn is being the least charismatic bad guy in ages, offering her a job with his organization. She breaks character to set up the gadget and crack Quinn's security, all while delivering quip after quip. All the while Coulson and Ward (I don’t know why he was there in this two person team) break into the island and get inside to meet Dr. Hall. Now, see here is where the whole thing gets silly. Dr. Hall planned for all of this, he planned to get kidnapped so he could get here and make the machine work because he was then going to use it to sink Quinn’s house because the graviton particles would be used for evil. Coulson is telling him how he’s wrong because  he might sink part of Malta and Dr. Hall is ok with that since he is willing to die so that no one has this technology. Now Dr. Hall is the villain and Coulson has to get a chemical reaction out of this weird shiny blob of metal liquid. Skye somehow disarms Quinn and jumps into a pool looking like the beginning of that old Mariah Carey Honey video as Coulson ends up tossing Dr. Hall into the blob metal stuff stopping the machine and the house from sinking into the ocean. Quinn escapes for another day. MWAHAHAHAHA! Back in the airplane base everyone is sad because Dr. Hall died and May wants to be back on the action missions instead of just flying the plane. At the last seconds during the credits we see the metal blob liquid stuff and a hand reaches out.

This episode was a mess. It was all over the place. This episode was seriously like some Action Pack late '90s TV but without all the Raimi charm and winks to the audience.  Also I don’t know if doing the post credit thing on TV is good to do all the time. Like with Iron Man 3 it's already starting to lose impact.

Did You Know:

This whole episode was a basically the origin of the super villain Graviton. The episode at points is just retelling his origin story from Avengers #158. Graviton was also used as the first bad guy the Avengers faced in the animated series Avengers: Earth Mightiest Heroes that aired on Disney XD. He is a C-list villain that is pretty powerful. So it looks like the show has its first true super villain.