Agents of SHIELD - 0-8-4

Say what again! I dare you!

So, last week was the big opener, and now we have the first 'regular' episode of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD (in which I am not going to bother putting the full stops anymore, because it slows my typing right down and because simply capitalising is a perfectly acceptable convention for acronyms), 0-8-4 (apparently SHIELD's code for an object of unknown origin).

I confess, on this one I was a little underwhelmed, in part I think because it was sort of a continuation of the pilot. With the team thrown together from highly disparate parts by Coulson, this is the 'coming together as a unit' episode, and honestly I would have liked to have seen this as part of perhaps a longer pilot episode, or further into the season following a longer establishment of the initial divisions within the team. I also recognise that there are concessions to be made to the conventions of the format, but part of me suspects that they threw in Nick Fury at the end of this one as a nod to the fact that it felt like a necessary episode, rather than a stand out.

There was a lot to like here, don't get me wrong. I felt that they established both the divisions in the team and the individual strengths very well, especially given the time constraints, and in particular they navigated a difficult path in having the team initially get played without making them look like complete chumps. It then proceeded to give pretty much everyone a chance to shine (Skye looked like being stuck with being an informed badass until the save with the safety card, which was a nice touch).

There is a risk still of setting our leads up to look like fools, with Skye being revealed as a Rising Tide mole this early, but I am willing to cut the series some slack.

0-8-4 is not an awesome episode, but for an essentially utilitarian episode we could have got a lot worse.