AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 2 Episode 2
Episode Title: “Heavy Is the Head”
Writer: Paul Zbyszewski
Director: Jesse Bochco
Previously on “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”
There’s a very simple way to make an audience accept a new character into a pre-existing show. If the writer can demonstrate that the new addition deeply cares about something, it goes a long way towards fleshing that person out.
Lance Hunter (Nick Blood) seemed to be a fairly generic mercenary in the first episode of the season. But Hunter took the murders of Isabelle “Izzy” Hartle (Lucy Lawless) and Idaho (Wilmer Calderon) so personally that it made him more compelling in this episode. The danger of bringing in someone like Hunter to replace Grant Ward (Brett Dalton) on the team is that he could easily be as one dimensional as Ward used to be. Instead, it was refreshing that Hunter seemed to be driven by his loyalty to Isabelle and by his desire for revenge against Carl “Crusher” Creel (Brian Patrick Wade) aka The Absorbing Man. But that didn’t completely dull his mercenary drive to get paid.
“Heavy Is the Head” also took some time to focus on the other new addition to the cast, Alphonso ‘Mac’ Mackenzie (Henry Simmons) by pairing him up with Leo Fitz (Iain De Caestecker). As much as I didn’t care for The Sixth Sense style twist about Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) as a delusion of Fitz, it was funny to see that the fake Simmons liked Mac more than Fitz did.
Fitz could still be the biggest problem this season, as his diminished mental state makes him less interesting to watch. But De Caestecker did a better job with it this week and Fitz wasn’t quite as annoying as he was in the season premiere. Another plus was the way that Ward wasn’t forced into the episode. Although the sudden absence of Eric Koenig (Patton Oswalt) was a head scratcher. I guess we’re not going to be seeing Patton Oswalt on a regular basis on this show.
I’m still not impressed by Glenn Talbot (Adrian Pasdar) as a recurring adversary for Director Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) and his renegade S.H.I.E.L.D. team, but it was nice to hear someone call out Coulson for trying to pass off his misfits as a more formidable force than they actually are. Talbot’s pitch to Hunter was also well played, as he seemed more concerned with bringing down Coulson than he was about recapturing Creel.
Creel also worked as one of the better villains of this show’s run simply by being so dangerous. He accidentally transforms a waitress to stone by brushing up against her, which if we’re being honest here, should have infected Hunter during their fight late in the episode. Hunter’s eventual betrayal of the team was expected, given what Talbot was offering. But it was a good twist that Hunter was more interested in killing Creel than in selling out Coulson’s team.
Hunter’s fight with Creel was appropriately one-sided, but it was still one of the more exciting sequences that this show has had. The solution was even properly spread around among the characters, as Mac and Fitz came up with the solution while Coulson entered the fray to administer their latest device to neutralize Creel.
On the downside, Raina (Ruth Negga) is back and she got away with the 0-8-4 obelisk. I don’t get this show’s obsession with Raina and I don’t think that Ruth Negga is a particularly good actress. I was rooting for the obelisk to turn her to stone, but we’re stuck with her as a primary villain… again. Kyle MacLachlan also made his debut as Raina’s boss and Skye’s father. It wasn’t a great introduction scene, but I am curious about why his hands were bloody here and in the first season finale.
It takes some suspension of disbelief that Coulson would keep Hunter around after the stunt that he pulled. But I can buy that Coulson is desperate for some real help and it’s amusing to know that Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen) is going to be holding a grudge against the new guy for a while.
I still don’t believe that “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” has fully found itself as a show, but the first two episodes of the season have been encouraging.
