Oh, AoS is still aggressively mediocre, there's no denying that.

Of course they're mentioned. Extensively so.

"ethnicity and sexism in a show where neither of those thing are [an] issue"

Yeah, a show where women talk to each other about stuff, without that being the whole hook of the show, is still pretty unusual.

Try to imagine a black kid watching TV, and half the black people she sees on there are gangsters, drug addicts, violent men, or people trying to escape from poverty and being fucked over. How do you think this affects a kid?

Switching between languages during a continuous conversation is indeed a thing bilingual families do.

Considering how callously they treated the salesman, they probably ran over his head accidentally-on-purpuse on the drive out the lot.

Not only did Coulson stun-shoot the car sales guy, he just let him fall unsupported to the ground, probably bashing his head real good on the concrete and getting a concussion.

Hm? Both Athelstan and Porunn are former slaves. I don't think it's something the show avoids.

They have slaves. I figures they have to do everyone's hair.

I don't think there was much of a chance of him recovering from his injuries. Besides the risk of infection, and all the other things that could leave him in constant agony or dead, there simply was nowhere for him to convalesce in peace. They were on a raid in enemy territory.

While I find Shield offensively mediocre, I think when the writers go "and then we time travel away all the big stuff we did so that we don't actually have to deal with it", it completely undercuts the entire episode. The Flash episode was exciting while I watched it, but three seconds after it was over I was already…

It's not "headcanon", it's subtext.

Fury wanted to put the project on hold after talking to Steve Rogers. I got the sense Fury specifically took Steve to see the Helicarriers because he knew that Steve would try to talk him out of using them.

Wow, that was the most fun an episode's been in a long while for me.

Physically, the guy in the shadow looked more like Steven Pasquale, with the longer hair and stubble. I took it to be part of the way Alicia was remixing the men in her life during her fantasy sequences, and an indicator of her interest in Elfman.

Alicia's headspace isn't filler, it's THE POINT. The election is a vehicle by which character insight and development is delivered. Saying that an episode is filler because it didn't deal with the election in a propulsive, plot-centric, staccato manner ("and then this happens, and then this, and then this") is to miss…

Yeah Elijah's stunt was pretty badass. I wonder in what state he'll be next episode. Have we seen vampires, Originals in particular, after something similar?

I can handwave the vampire characters as being strangely blasé about all the murders they commit and horrible things they do to each other, but why again are the humans so accepting of these monsters? That always pulls me out of the show.

Eh, that's really reaching. There's enough there for an interesting analogy, no need to bring in stuff that doesn't fit.