To be fair, Philip put those seamen to good use, to buck up his emotionally fragile asset, much as he used the doctored Gaad tape to manipulate Martha.

Marvel's planning for the future is brilliant. The Winter Soldier was improved by a number of characters who had tiny low-impact roles in previous movies, like Sitwell and Gary Shandling's Senator whatshisname.

Wouldn't be the first week we sat there, waiting for a better show to show up.

Coulson didn't kill those guards because they were Hydra or because of the alien, since he didn't know about those things when he attacked the Guest House. He also didn't attack the Guest House to stop anyone from getting tortured—indeed, he was trying to secure for Skye some of the same treatment he received there.

I initially read that as "design a prison," which gave me the image of some poor DC comics freelancer living out the plot of Escape Plan.

I think it was more of a permit than a license. Once Coulson and his crew killed their limit, they'd be done for the season.

King's not a great writer, but he's right on this count. The folks who overuse the term "on the nose" often reduce literature to a game of hide-and-go-seek, and if they can spot symbolism on first watch and without accessing their classical education, then the writer has failed. I'd rather see strong symbolism that…

PHILIP: My first question to you, young man, is where was your wig? They identified you immediately!

OK, now I'm laughing at the idea of Henry playing Intellivision at someone's house while wearing a shaggy blond wig and fake teeth.

Still, the look on Elizabeth's face when he played the tape for her was priceless. It was just an amazing "wow, that's fucked up" look.

Since the attorneys are the ones currently telling the plaintiff's lurid tale, and they stand to profit from any settlement Singer agrees to to make this bad publicity go away, it isn't completely irrelevant, however, is it? I mean, it's possible that the plaintiff's story is completely true, and that seeing Singer's…

Millar's superpower—and weakness—is his lack of integrity. There's a thin line between satirizing consumer's appetites for sex and violence and catering to them, and even though Millar always talks himself up as a satirist when this comes up, it's pretty obvious that he doesn't care which side of the line his work…

Somehow, he's become the best-developed character on the show.

"It's impossible to 'beat a polygraph' because there is no such thing as a 'lie detector.'"

"3) Agent Triplett joins the gang. He's already more engaging and interesting than Liar McBeefcake ever was as a good guy."

The thing that convinced me of the double double cross was a bit from the "next time on Agents of SHIELD" where Garrett says something to Ward like, "Welcome to Hydra, boy!" which would mean that Ward wasn't Hydra all along.

Well, she's still an unexplained special phenomenon AND she has a cure-all serum running through her veins. So yeah, I'd bet Hydra is still interested.

"The AWESOME thing to do would just give us a story arc that's basically the events of Winter Soldier through Coulson's perspective.

Agents of SHIELD's integration with Thor: the Dark World was incredibly weak—it didn't spoil the movie because it was only tangentially related to the movie.

Given that the events in the last episode of Agents of SHIELD seem to happening concurrently with the events in Cap 2 (mid-episode Sitwell is sent off to the ship from the opening of the movie, and near the end of the episode there's a disturbance at The Hub that would seem to correspond to the big reveal that SHIELD…