It should be noted that Shoot "hooking up" doesn't necessarily mean sex. It could be some hot steam-iron-and-ziptie action.

I always thought Root would die very specifically to protect, or teach, or motivate her God at a critical juncture in the Machine's development. I'm still a bit in shock that she didn't.

The most gut-wrenching part, perhaps, of "Ozymandias" is that a man must spew out words of hate that come directly from great love, and that it annihilates him to do so. The end of "The Day the World Went Away" shows a man who's held on to compassion and humanity throughout the worst that both man and machine can…

The extinction burst is a sudden upsurge in the unwanted behavior that one is conditioning against. Say you've quit smoking: after a week without a cigarette and the initial cravings having subsided, all of a sudden they return with great strength - but if you can hold out through the burst, the cravings will return…

Just thirty, forty seconds of a big and little spoon. That's all I ever wanted - no "last night was great" kinda talk, just physical closeness as an expression of the intimacy these characters have never been able to share with anyone.

*sigh*….Now that's my idea of romance.

I think it's "So?"

And now, Shaw's constant is gone. What will she live for, what anchor does she have in the world?

There sure as heck was something going on behind her eyes - a glimmer of emotion? A struggle to find meaning, or reconciliation of realities? - but we're left as puzzled as to what as Reese is in his reaction shot.

Amy Acker bathed in bright morguelight, those enormous, expressive peepers staring at the infinite - I couldn't help but think of the beatification of St. Root, The Light in the Grove. Driving backwards while shooting out the engine block of an SUV certainly would count as a miracle.

The look on Shaw's face when she gets the news is…I don't know what to say. I'm as puzzled and as intrigued as Reese is in the cutaway shot, trying to read an unreadable expression. But there is clearly something going on behind those dark, dark eyes, something that isn't finished moving around yet.

AAAAAAAGGGGHHH!!!

This sounds like a case of dueling anecdotal evidence. You seem to hit a lot more AoS specific sites than I do, so I can't speak to those, but all the more generalist comics/sci-fi/pop culture sites I visit, whenever there's talk of the show there's talk of shipping, even from the smallest tidbits. Heck, the AVC…

That's completely untrue.

Grudging upvote.

Okay, I like the show and think it's unjustly bagged on, and agree that it's way more than a 'ship launch, but c'mon, you're ignoring FitzSimmons (they even had a friggin' love triangle!), Coulson and Rosalind, even May and Andrew.

Well, of course they have to cast an unknown. That's part of what would make a movie even greater - it'd be an amazing opportunity for a young actor of color, and perhaps enough of a media splash of a choice to put an unknown young brown person, in the role of a Muslim-American, as the starring role of a tentpole…

You know, Ricky, I just realized that you're a lot like a Stephen King protagonist.

Or the Kamala movie.

Man, I miss the Black Bolt gimmick account.