Really well summarized thus time around, Alex. Quality reviews nicely mix and match an assessment of particular notable good (and bad) parts of a show with a little delving into, when appropriate, major themes and philosophies. Of course I don't always agree with you, but as a general rule, I couldn't have said…

Somehow managed to totally forget about that. He was already doomed, but still… should have said that she didn't kill anyone who'd make her need some kind of redemption arc. All the good guys lose their shit and kill Hydra types once in awhile.

This is one of those episodes we get a few times a year where there's very little to say. It's mostly exposition and plot and it speaks for itself, and its climax (ha) is two characters who already made their big romantic breakthrough last week negotiating an escalation in their relationship. One of the big things…

"Secret Warriors" is a heavily hyped thing, and most people are assuming that they'll stick around for the extended future once we sort through this Hive arc. Which they certainly might. But taking just this episode as its own thing, it seems to suggest that our superhero team is too good to be true. The episode…

Like any viewer, I have certain buttons that can be pushed. One of them is to extensively show a character at length dealing with his or her impending death. It's a perfect way for someone to show who they really are, and it's a natural source of… not necessarily sympathy so much as identification. Can't help but…

Enough genre shows have done future events with an element of predestination paradox that it's become a formula in itself. (Coulson's minor geek-out about _The Terminator_ - besides being one of those welcome little moments suggesting that the characters have lives outside of playing out the script - lampshades the…

Perhaps to react to losing two of its most charismatic characters, this week has AoS leaning probably as heavily as it ever has on emotion and character interactions. The episode really isn't about the Watchdogs very much except for when their ideology seduces one of "our" family members. The most dramatic moment of…

Let me be the 5,162nd to welcome you to the big chair, Alex. So far, so good; your reviews are a decided improvement over the last guy's so far.

When trying to parse through Coulson's fateful decision to finish off Ward whilst Fitz yells at him about portals closing, I tried to think back to how it jibed with past opinions. (I'm treating this as reckless revenge because it certainly wasn't a pragmatic, hard call type decision. I'm sure Phil did want to take…

I was thinking about what makes for a really surprising death, since this one came out of nowhere. Like, to the extent where I briefly wondered if it was a dream sequence. The only other deaths I can think of that were this unexpected for me were Ward killing Victoria Hand in S1, and Simmons's near-death…

Looks like I was far from the only one who noted that the little promo thing made it sound like the episode was all about Gemma and Leopold and their respective feelings. Combine that with the descriptions of "4,722 Hours" as crushing the dreams of FitzSimmons "shippers," we have entered the pitfall-fraught road of a…

Wish I had more to say about this one; it more or less speaks for itself. One thing that I'm not sure the show speaks clearly about, though, is the interactions between May and Bobbi as the former works to get the latter back into the field. After weeks of Bobbi not getting her hands dirty, we get a lot of May…

I'm somewhat regretting dismissing Simmons's initial rescue as anti-climactic if this episode was always in the cards. The intrigue was successfully built by alluding to the events of the last six months rather than showing, and then obviously "4,722 Hours" is way more of an immersive and cinemactic experience…

FitzSimmons' whole "we had a system…" thing would be my weekly choice for a common theme that ties the epsisode together. Given that we just did a whole episode about missing absent teammates, it's inevitable and a little predictable to be doing a whole episode about having absent friends back but things not being…

Andrew seemingly has the same advice for every new Inhuman; at least 3 months' isolation and observation, consider integration into the team. Daisy snarks about it a fair amount - probably to be expected considering that, while I don't know exactly how she spent in her safe house and then in Afterlife exactly, it…

This year I'm not quite accepting yet that my ability to write these little rambles on a weekly basis is going to be even more limited than before. Will stubbornly keep trying to get them in, most weeks. I did make a list of S2 re-ratings after second viewings, and here are they:

Daisy was always Skye to me, since I never had any connection with the comic character on whom she was based. So I had a hard time at first just blindly accepting the new name. In retrospect it makes sense since things have changed for her. Last season, Skye was the name she gave herself to keep from literally…

I suppose it's inevitable, but we're officially running into a case of villain bloat here. (Several people have actually mentioned this below, but fuck it, I pre-wrote something about it and I'm going to post it!) Not so much individual villains (or frenemies to our heroes, as the case may be) - Cal can be locked…

Yeah, we can all walk out anytime we want. Skye and Fitz are frequently reminded of this particular policy by their respective shadowy groups. Obviously they're not going to do so, at least not permanently, because then there'd be no story. Everyone, including Skye, operates from the assumption that spending some…

Didn't we just have an episode called something like "Who You Really Are?" Because this episode could totally have gotten that title. "Love In The Time Of Hydra" continues AoS's penchant for finding a theme and relentlessly hammering it home, over and over. Generally speaking, one would expect a genre show like…