Television: Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., "Aftershocks"

For as excited as I was for this show to come back, it sure didn't hold my attention for very long.

You may or may not remember that we ended with Skye and Raina "evolving" while Tripp died in that underground temple. So we pick up with Skye in quarantine and Simmons piloting a team to clear the rubble, possibly find Raina's body (though we all know that's not going to happen). Meanwhile, with Whitehall dead, the leaders of Hydra are looking for Bakshi to possibly take Whitehall's place. And Skye's dad is still out there being crazy, too.

We get a flashback of Skye's mom helping a young man named Gordon who also evolved, it seems, but ended up with no eyes. But, hey, he can teleport! He just can't see where he's going! (I'm guessing in the long run there's an ESP element to him "seeing." I don't know much about these things, though, since I didn't read the comics.) Since he grows up to be Jamie Harris/"Reader" per IMDb . . . ::shrug::

Anyway, Raina is upset that she's ended up with thorns all over her body. Evolving made her ugly, and that makes her mad and sad and stuff.

And Skye can make earthquakes happen. This is somehow really underwhelming.

Other plot points involve the systematic murder of all those Hydra heads. But . . . When you cut off the head of a hydra, don't lots more grow back? You have to set fire to the stumps or something, right?

And then there's the whole Skye-isn't-normal thing. This is where the show skews off a bit in my opinion. Simmons gets it in her head that these people with powers are diseased and need to be put down. Her argument is that too many people have already lost their lives because of this "contagion." Which just goes against her character so much that I have trouble swallowing it. She's a scientist. And I can understand that she's finally reached the point where she's tired of losing people she cares about, but she must have known when joining S.H.I.E.L.D. that this was what she was signing up for. Genocide? Simmons? I don't buy the shift in her perspective.

More realistic, and much better handled, was Fitz's anger at Tripp's death. Fitz is quickly becoming one of the best characters on the show. And his shielding (har!) Skye by swapping the DNA results with old samples was completely in character, and it was touching, and it forms a nice bond between the two of them.

But honestly, though I absorbed a lot of what was happening, the show on the whole did not command my full attention. So I'm sure I'm missing some stuff. Thing is, none of it feels important enough for me to care that I'm missing any of it. I don't know what can be done to change that, on my part or that of the show's writers. But it's always a bad sign if a show isn't holding one's interest.