Marvel's Agents of SHEILD - Season 2: Shadows

The cast of Season 2, who are apparently flat-sharing with the Tomorrow People.

It's a new dawn, it's a new day. SHIELD is in hiding, and in order to operate they need to get their hands on sufficient stealth technology to do so under the radar; to become ghosts, as Director Coulson declares. They also need people - so far their recruitment programme appears to have at best a 50% survival rate - and they need new tricks if they are to survive the even weirder world that is now throwing the Absorbing Man at them from day one.

Teaming up with four prospective agents (a group of mercenaries led by discarding stunt cast Lucy Lawless), the SHIELD remnant goes after the Absorbing Man - a psychopathic assassin who can absorb the properties of any substance he touches - as he tries to steal the Obelisk, an artefact seized from Hydra by the SSR (a cameo from Hayley Atwell, Neal McDonough and Kenneth Choi was a brief but welcome sight.)

More importantly, Skye has found time to get a sassy new do and Ward is growing a manly beard in confinement.

Season 1 of Agents of SHIELD really grew on me as it went on, but the shake-up forced on the series by Winter Soldier means that Season 2 is pitching a brand new game; less espionage procedural and more A-Team in darker suits. One thing I hoped that they would address was the underuse of the adorkable lab double act Fitz and Simmons, and they do; by having Fitz - last heard of in a coma - suffering from brain damage that has robbed him of his genius and putting Simmons on a bus.

You're not starting well, Agents of SHIELD. Elizabeth Henstridge and Iain de Caestecker are still in the cast shot above, so I have some hope that they might make a comeback, but I'm reviewing episode 1 and at present I am unhappy with this direction.

Also, I want them to drop Ward into a very deep hole, not for throwing FitzSimmons out of the bus (the in-series bus, which is to say their plane, rather than the figurative bus that Simmons was put on such that she only appeared as a passive hallucination in this episode) last season, but because then they can stop trying to make me give a crap about his tortured soul and Skye's broken heart or what the fuck ever. It's not a pairing I ever saw any chemistry in (de Caestecker's betrayed bromance face was more heartbreaking than anything Chloe Bennett ever managed) and I am so done with it. I guess the world thinks otherwise.

'Shadows' suffers from trying to introduce a lot of new characters and then make us care that they are in peril. Overall, it felt like there was too little of established characters like Antoine Triplett, Melinda May and even Coulson, in favour of people who weren't even going to make it through the episode.

I'm interested to see where they go from here, and what they do with the concept, but 'Shadows' has basically spent my goodwill credit.