Personally I like knowing what happened and not at all sure how this is at all a throwback to Agents of Shield S01E01-E13 Case Of the Week Session. Would like to know more in Starship Troopers fashion. But whatever.
There's a bunch of stuff. The stilted dialogue/tell not show thing they have going on (Simmons: "The average person can live 3 weeks without food." Later, perfectly healthy not at all hungry looking Simmons: "Oh Fitz it's terrible, I've been 3 weeks without food and must now kill and eat the strange plant that's been right under my nose this whole time"), the lazy special effects (again, the perfectly healthy looking Simmons who has supposedly gone 3 weeks, exposed to the elements without food), and the utter, utter predictability are all early season 1 hallmarks. They've even gone back to the whole "Fitz likes Simmons and is sad"thing from the first season, which was boring then and will no doubt be boring this time.
It's not the same plot, but it's the same general feel and I'm disappointed in the same way.
Mystery: Is the "other man" still alive?
Yup. End of the episode showed him throwing the now empty gun away. (Incidentally, good example of showing, not telling)
To me, that was the best episode of Agents of SHIELD yet. Though, to be fair, that's probably because Agents of SHIELD has been utter mediocre crap the entirety of its run.
Oh, I won't argue the mediocre crap point. I would have said that episode was perfectly representative of the mediocrity rather than rising above it though.
This way, we saw an arc of Simmons going through things, and quite a lot of development for her.
Did we though? She sat next to a pond for three weeks, then survived after being taught how by someone who already had/made the equipment and learned the lessons necessary to do so. We could have done, had we seen our resident biologist/chemist rigging a field lab to distil toxins out of plants to make them edible/make scary poison darts or something, but we didn't. Frankly we learned more about Fitz, and what we learned there is that he will likely be rocking a suit of power armour soon because it turns out he can make batteries that rival the arc reactor.
They were good about keeping it hidden.
Eh, at least 3 of us in this thread picked it.
Coulson and Rosalind seem to be working together well now, and as of the end of the episode they seem to be literally in bed with one another too. But the teaser for next week shows the whole thing falling apart, and the end of the episode tonight implied that Rosalind's connected with Ward/Hydra (by the way, who was the guy Ward was talking to at the end- has he shown up before?).
I'm still running my Coulson is way ahead of the game and playing her like a fiddle theory, but I doubt they'll write him that clever. He'll just be so shocked, shocked, to be betrayed by her.
Though I suppose Rosalind could be just being duped by Hydra
Given that she has worked at NASA I'm going to bet she was one of the people pushing to send Wills team through the portal, and is associated with the secret society who may or may not be related to HYDRA.
Too much focus on twists and melodrama over plot development that feels natural though, or at least that's my impression.
Yup, that's my take as well. There was almost none last season and now we already have May and Andrew, Hunter and Morse and Daisy and Lightning McMoron. On top of the whole Fitz/Simmons/Will thing. (I'm calling that now by the way. Fitz is completely correct about the secret society being involved in Wills mission, everyone behaves like a fucking moron and dismisses his concerns out of hand because they assume he's jealous after the whole Simmons thing and it bites them in the arse.)
It's a bit of a worry because you normally bolt this sort of extraneous shit to a show when you don't get enough drama out of your main plot to keep it interesting.
