Ok everyone, it is official, the tides have turned and the most anticipated television series to come around for Marvel fans has arrived and I am not sure of what to say, so I will give my thoughts about it and I will tell you what I feel this means for the future of the Marvel franchise.
The first thing I need to say is this show is directed by Joss Whedon and is expected to tie in to the Marvel movie franchise, which will probably make this show amazing, just by those factors, the God Director of Nerds directing the ultimate nerd show imaginable. This show might just be just as successful as the Incredible Hulk TV show that aired in the 70s for five years.
The problem though for this show, is that besides the backing of Joss Whedon and the entire Marvel movie franchise, this first episode doesn't have anything going for it that any other crime drama already has given us. It has the Boss, the Red and Green Rangers, the techies, and the rogue. The only thing that this show has that any other show doesn't have is Agent Phil Coulson, played by Clark Gregg at his best, he even gets to demonstrate some drama, showing that even Coulson can get angry in times of stress.
But there is some hope for later episodes, as the other interesting character is Mike Peterson, played by J. August Peterson. That's right, Charles Gunn is back and working with Joss Whedon. What makes this an even more perfect dream is Peterson lives when the show starts in Los Angeles, making this truly feel like after the events of Angel, Gunn stayed in Los Angeles and became the star of this show.
But enough fan speculation, let's talk about his power, and here is where the spoilers come in, since I am writing this review immediately after seeing the episode air in my college dorm with a friend of mine. But since the show just ended it isn't like you can just go see it tomorrow, so you might as well just listen to the Spoilers, since you are going to want to know what happened in this episode to begins with.
What we all expected to be Power Man, aka Luke Cage, is instead Mike Peterson, an ex-metal worker who got injured and replaced at his work. Offered the choice of being a lab-rat, he does so, having literally every super-power in the current Marvel Universe thrown into him all at once That's right, the origin story of the only super-powered character in this show, is he was given every single super-power from the other Marvel movies.
To be clear, he doesn't turn into the Hulk and swing around Thor's hammer, no, that would be just ridiculous. Instead, he has a weird centipede-like machine, made out of Alien technology, pumping a chemical formula that combines the gamma radiation, the Super soldier serum, and Extremis (from the latest Iron Man 3, which was awesome and I will eventually review that) to give him Super strength. I'm not sure about his level of recovery and indestructibility since he only took a shotgun blast to the chest, and that isn't really a big deal compared to what the rest of the Marvel superheros have to deal with.
We do know that this guy has the risk of blowing up like the other guys who had Extremis, so it is likely that he has some level of the heat-based power they also had, but he doesn't turn green or grow at all like the Hulk, so it can be guessed that the Gamma radiation wasn't really being used to power himself. My guess is that the Gamma radiation was being used to power the alien technology that was shooting the super-soldier serum into his system, since the Tesserack was also emitting gamma radiation and Thor's hammer also seems to give off the same blue glow as the Tesserack, as did Loki's magic staff.
Now let's look at the rest of the supporting cast. We have Agent Grant Ward, played by Brett Dalton, as our Red Ranger. He is the best of the best of Black Ops and specializes in terminating threats with extreme prejudice, which makes him a big counter to Agent Coulson's let's make calm and excepting attitude. I'm not really that into his character mostly because he seems all business and doesn't seem to have an ounce of compassion unless you give him a monologue about how messed up the world has become.
A shining moment for him came in his first appearance when he wasn't a member of SHIELD yet. He was tasked with retrieving a piece of stolen alien technology. He demonstrates a particular skill with fictional science fiction technology that seems more at home in Iron Man's world and uses it to break into the man's high-tech safe. What bugs me the most about this scene is that he apparently doesn't need the man's thumb print to open his safe, but that's just a nit-pick.
The shining moment comes from when Agent Ward gets discovered by the Mistress, who just looks so perfectly apathetic. She just stares at him and then stares away looking bored and so used to it you can't help but wonder, just HOW many times as someone broken into his room trying to steal something while she was in there. Then comes the fight scene. Itself wasn't anything special, just a normal many vs one fight in a kitchen and the weapons they use are interestingly creative when taken from kitchen supplies, and it does show just how skilled and brutal Agent Ward really is, so it wasn't pointless.
The rest of the characters are pretty stock. We have the anti-government elitist hacker named Skye, played by Chloe Bennet, though her being a super-hero fangirl is a nice touch and good foil to Coulson's own fanboyism and the two seem to get along well enough. Though it is pretty obvious from tv formula that Skye and Agent Ward are going to hook up since their interaction with one another.
Agent Melinda May, played by Ming-Na wen, is an interesting character, if only because I want to know more about her. She's apparently a big badass among the secret government employees and she's a veteran with a lot of combat experience under her belt, but she seems to not want to be involved in the world, preferring a desk job instead, and getting dragged into SHIELD by Coulson.
The last two characters are Fitz and Simmons, the two techies about the crew and a pair of scientist, specializing in Weapons technology and life science respectively. They have nice quirks are their chemistry is interesting to watch, but other that Iain's lack of desire to get messy and their tech babble when in a crisis, they don't even seem like they have much history together.
Now onto the plot. It is pretty standard, which is pretty normal for the first season. You don't want to alienate knew viewers with an overly complicated first season, since this is where you go and get people wanting to see the next episode and get them committed.
The plot of the series seem to be this, there's a new organization that is experimenting in big research and seems to be able to get access to weapons and powers from every known source, no matter how impossible it might seem. They experimented on Mike Peterson and gave him his superpowers and Skye catches notice of both Project Centipede, the project that gave Mike his powers and Mike himself. Skye gets caught by SHIELD and she helps them find Mike, who is going crazy due to the chemical formula. They manage to subdue him and they all form a team to stop the new evil bad guys that showed up.
The Show has a lot of promise for being a Joss Whedon TV show made with continuity to the entire Marvel movie universe, but the show itself didn't have anything going for it besides that tie in the show does have J. August Peterson in it AND Agent Coulson, but besides the comic book stuff and Joss Whedon himself, I've seen it all from a lot of other crime dramas. I'm still going to watch the next episode when it comes out next week and you should too, if only to give Joss Whedon support and to see what new super-powered plot they are going to involve next. The dialogue is great with the nice comic book humor Joss Whedon is known for throwing in. But if Buffy could be compared to being Joss Whedon's Wonder Woman and Angel could be his Batman, I wonder what kind of superhero this new show is.
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