Episode Title: "The Girl in the Flower Dress"
Episode Grade: B-
Last week, I expressed some irritation that Agents of SHIELD hadn't really taken advantage of the Marvel universe's full potential. The context established by the blockbuster Marvel movies of the last few years presents some serious challenges for a television series set in the same universe.
There's a longer, standalone piece to be written about those challenges and the various ways this show can address them. A review's not really the proper place for that sort of macro-level thinking, but "The Girl in the Flower Dress" indicates one possible way forward.
Agents of SHIELD has been reluctant to become "the superhero show," and for a number of understandable reasons. And its ability to craft a compelling, long-term arc has been limited. "The Girl in the Flower Dress" tackles both of those issues, and reasonably well.
Some of the execution here is lacking, a reality that starts with the decision to make the show's first true superhero a fairly generic fire-starter. You've got to have a fire guy, apparently, but that doesn't make this particular superpower any more compelling.
If budgetary concerns constrain the show from really exploring the full range of visual effects that tend to arise from superpowers, there are some smaller stories that still can be pursued. The psychology of superpowers has been pretty well explored in modern comics, but it remains a fairly compelling topic for a TV show set in the Marvel universe.
"The Girl in the Flower Dress" tries to get at the motivations driving Chen Ho Win, the Hong Kong street magician who reveals his pyrotechnic capabilities when approached by a beautiful woman in a...um, flower dress. Sure, the woman, named "Raina" and played by Ruth Negga, has a couple guys in hazmat suits knock Chen out and drag him back to a laboratory.
But she also plays expertly on Chen's ego, his sense of destiny. In these early scenes, with Raina trying to persuade Chen to give in and help her organization, Chen comes off as a little desperate, but not truly troubled. He is, instead, a man with a remarkable gift and an awareness of it that makes him vulnerable to Raina's persuasion. When she hooks him with a promise that everyone will know his name, it's a powerful moment, and it truly resonates. That we're all a little desperate for recognition isn't some grand sociological insight, but combining such a desire with Chen's destructive capabilities is compelling television.
Still, I mentioned earlier that while I liked the ideas of "The Girl in the Flower Dress," some of the execution was less effective. This is most clearly seen in Chen's little arc here. Louis Changchien, who plays Chen, does the best he can, but the writing takes the character to extreme places with little justification.
Raina's organization ("Centipede") betrays Chen, of course, and we saw the evil doctor from the pilot return as part of a plot to use Chen's fire-resistant platelets to complete the organization's super serum and prevent it from causing all the soldiers to spontaneously combust. This is actually reasonably clever.
What works less well is Chen's reaction after being saved by SHIELD. Again, Chen doesn't come off as a bad guy early in the episode, but by the end of the hour he's ranting and raving like a mad man. That power corrupts is an old cliche, but it usually doesn't wok this quick. Chen goes from mild-mannered street magician to power-mad lunatic with remarkable celerity. Chalk it up to the super serum if you'd like, but that's too much of a hand wave for my tastes.
This does lead to an interesting ending, where Coulson and Melinda May once again get to be ruthless SOBs, which is a look that works well for both Clark Gregg and Ming-Na Wen. Gregg's line, "We don't want to hurt you. But we have to," is genuinely chilling. And there's a cold brutality to Ming-Na forcibly injecting Chen with the unstable super serum.
This story finally gives us a little more development on the larger, season-long arc that was nodded at in the pilot, which is good. It's hard to evaluate that arc at the moment, but it's nice to see Agents of SHIELD indicate a little more ambition.
The other plot here is the revelation of Skye's betrayal, which is met with some mild irritation by the rest of the team but doesn't really seem to affect the group dynamic too much. We've known Skye's been working as a double agent for the Rising Tide since the second episode, of course, but while Coulson seems appropriately angry no one else really registers an emotion.
The details of the revelation here are fairly unimportant. Skye helps SHIELD track down the guy who hacked into their data stream, thus putting Chen in danger, only to stymie them in lovely Austin, Texas, as it turns out the hacker is her old boyfriend. They have sex, Agent May is waiting outside the bedroom door (for how long, one wonders) and the truth comes out.
The hacker boyfriend is a disposable part we'll never see again. Skye tells Coulson at the end of the episode that all she's really looking for is information on her parents, which doesn't seem terribly interesting at the moment. She found a document redacted by SHIELD, and so Coulson, instead of throwing Skye off the plane in the middle of the Pacific Ocean as he probably should, decides to keep her on and even offer her help.
I don't know. We'll see. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about the potential for this or the inevitable introduction of Skye's shockingly alive parents, but I suppose it could lead somewhere reasonable.
For now though, I'm content with an episode that took several steps up from last week's dull affair and actually brought some new elements into the fold.
Notes
- Ruth Negga is absolutely phenomenal in this episode. She's quietly menacing when she's not being the perfect salesman.
- Coulson mentions to May that, before the alien spear went through his heart before the Battle of New York, he never would have trusted Skye. "You sure it didn't go through your brain?" "You don't really do comforting either, do you?"
- "I'm really sorry." "Noted." Stony Coulson is the best Coulson.
- Raina dubs Chen "Scorch," which he eventually comes to embrace. "Ah, crap. They gave him a name."
- Chen ends up killing the evil scientist/doctor from the pilot. There's some fairly impressive visuals in that scene.
- Beige Drywall Emotion Watch: This week, vague annoyance at being betrayed by Skye.
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