Episode Title: "The Asset"
Episode Grade: B-
For most of its running time, "The Asset" is a thoroughly mediocre episode of television, an hour or so that passes without much of note occurring and elicits nothing more than a shrug. It only reaches its modest heights as a result of some moderately intriguing character work and a direct, unsparing resolution to its central conflict.
"The Asset" launches with a dynamo action sequence, the sort of thing that really shows the resources backing Agents of SHIELD. A semi-truck is rolling down a Colorado highway when its schlubby, dirty-looking driver makes a call to some friends, who turn out to be SHIELD agents. They're escorting some precious cargo that the driver is transporting, and everything seems fine.
And out of nowhere the vehicles are lifted by some invisible force and thrown straight into the air; first, the escort SUVs, then the truck itself. The driver, who is himself a SHIELD operative, survives having his truck thrown into the asphalt from a few dozen feet in the air, which is kind of bullshit, but OK, whatever.
The "cargo" he was transporting turns out to be a rather fussy-looking gentleman by the name of Franklin Hall. He's a distinguished professor of...whatever the hell generic field sounds "science-y" enough for this show, and he was kidnapped by an old friend, Ian Quinn. Quinn, played by veteran "Hey, That Guy Looks Familiar" David Conrad with his usual slick charm, wants Hall's help turning the rare element "gravitonium" into something productive and profitable.
Quinn is actually a fairly intriguing character, and the show deserves credit for not turning him into a cliched corporate villain. Openly and unabashedly interested in profit, Quinn is also an information idealist who sounds more like Julian Assange than a mining magnate. There's little in the episode to indicate that Quinn's soaring speeches about the free flow of information and the evils of government intrusion are lies or hypocrisies; instead, we have a portrait of a bad guy with a message that is genuinely compelling without coming into conflict with his villainous actions.
And so we're off. "Gravitonium" is a classic screenwriting ploy, a little bit of nonsense used to hand wave the large nonsense that drives the plot. We need something with broad, generic powers to "suspend the laws of gravity" within a given area and throw trucks around while plausibly possessing the ability to also do massive, profitable things like moving lots of cargo around and acquiring oil without drilling, so we invent an element and give it a cliched, vaguely ominous-looking massive gyroscope machine to contain it.
"The Asset" attempts to advance the relationship between Skye and Agent Beige Drywall, and if it does so in rather clumsy and unskillful fashion, well, you take what you can get. Agent Drywall is training Skye to be a field agent and is apparently doing a poor job of it. Skye, for her part, is more whiny than committed and complains about the physical requirements of the training.
This is amusing (what did she figure field agents did?), even if all we see of the training is Skye and Drywall punching a heavy bag. But it finally does give Drywall's churlishness some reasonable motivation. Skye isn't taking any of this seriously, and while her jokes are pretty entertaining for the audience it's not hard to see how they can drive a serious agent up the wall.
Most of the training scenes go to pretty uninteresting places: Drywall gives us some vague backstory about protecting his younger brother from a violent older brother, he lectures Skye about "defining moments" and commitment, he teaches her a move to disarm a man wielding a gun that we know we'll see her use before the end of the episode, etc.
Because Quinn's operation is located in Malta and SHIELD can't swoop in without violating international laws, Coulson agrees to send Skye in to Quinn's mansion/compound (she uses her mad hacker skillz to acquire an invitation to his party).
This particular plot is mainly notable by its admirable unwillingness to play into the fake seduction act we often see in these scenarios. Instead, Skye fools Quinn into believing that she's betraying SHIELD out of a shared set of values (which doesn't require much acting), then succeeds in shutting down the magic laser wall surrounding the compound.
Still, this is mainly lockstep plotting (we're supposed to think that Skye is genuinely betraying SHIELD, and that's never a serious possibility) until Coulson (along with Agent Drywall as part of an extraction team and still wearing his suit, for some reason) tracks down Hall in the laboratory basement of the place.
As it turns out, Hall arranged to have himself "kidnapped." Worried about the consequences of Quinn's research into gravitonium, Hall leaked his location so he could get close to the facility and destroy Quinn's work.
It's a reasonably clever twist, if nothing particularly shocking. But "The Asset" plays the situation out to a logical and brutal conclusion. Hall puts the massive gravitonium generator into overload, which will sink the entire facility to the bottom of the sea, destroying Quinn's research for good but also killing everyone at the mansion.
He's not swayed by Coulson's pleas, and he doesn't ever waver from his course. So when the science team tells Coulson that the only way to stop the generator from exploding is to induce a chemical reaction within the elemental field, he chooses the only real option: shooting out the floor underneath them and letting Hall himself fall into the generator.
It's not entirely clear how that achieves the goal, but set that aside for now. It's a solid moment, unsparing and ruthless without being cruel, and it (mostly) doesn't attempt to escape the logic of the plot. It also gives Coulson an interesting character beat and a chance to actually be a bad-ass, do-the-job-at-all-costs government operative.
"The Asset" still isn't terribly impressive, even with this satisfying conclusion, and it's discouraging that Agents of SHIELD has, through these last two episodes, failed to live up to the promise of its pilot. Joss Whedon's presence is sorely missed, and the writing lacks the edge and wit the pilot promised. But there's enough going on to raise this episode slightly over "O-8-4," last week's disappointing effort.
Notes
- Yes, Skye gets to use the disarming move to take Quinn's gun away from him. There's a funny moment afterward, however, when Quinn asks, "But do you have what it takes to pull the trigger?" "Nope." *flees*
- Coulson struggles to dismantle a gun in the field and complains that it should be "muscle memory." He's still struggling with it on the plane after the mission. This is probably related to his mysterious post-death interregnum after The Avengers.
- "I saw plenty of action with The Avengers." "And you died."
- Melinda May hands Skye a massive binder of communications data. "Do you want me to bench press this?"
- Someone's going to tell me that "gravitonium" is a real thing, aren't they?
- A brief programming note: I obviously didn't review How I Met Your Mother yesterday or Rome on Sunday. You can blame Braves' postseason baseball, but that's not going to be an issue from here on out. Look for a Rome review later this week. As for yesterday's How I Met Your Mother, I give it a B-.
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