Okay, how does anyone who has seen the movies not realize that SHIELD has existed for a long time? Or does nobody understand the words "I'd like to talk to you about the Avengers Initiative?" Also, SHIELD has been around longer than most of the Avengers have been alive, having been started at the end of WW2 (or was it just afterward?)... Either way, SHIELD's been around a long time and has a lot going on outside of the Avengers. Let's look at the movie universe again. Nick Fury shows up, already the head of a pretty elaborate secret agency. Nobody ever thinks 'Huh, if they haven't been organizing and babysitting the Avengers, what HAVE they been doing all this time?' -- THAT is what the show has the ability to cover. THAT is what I am hoping is going to be the focus once this first-season-pilot-episodes stuff is done and all the characters are established and understood.
Yeah, some shows do a better, faster job of it, but looking at it from a filmmaker's perspective, you can't compare Heroes and SHIELD. SHIELD is covering a lot of established framework stuff in what is already a confusing history for fans of the comics and fans of just the movie universe. Heroes was just a bunch of people who woke up one day with powers. There's no backstory to have to really cover other than who these people were in their daily lives. With SHIELD, there are characters we already are familiar with, but we don't really know. The trick is to uncover their stories and the stories of the rest of the team and keep the action going. I wouldn't say it's been handled horribly, but there are definite things I would have changed (for better or for worse, just because it works in MY head doesn't mean it works on the screen), but I am not writing or directing or producing the show so I'll just take what I'm given.
Now on to the character of Sky and why she really doesn't work for me. The girl is cute as hell and she clearly can't be as horrible an actress as I want to feel like she comes off as, but I have a real problem with the CHARACTER. The above quote about being a high school dropout kinda really sums it up. Sky is what we call a viewpoint character. She is the one that we, the audience, experience things through. That's why most shows of this nature have a newbie to the team, so they can ask the questions like this:
SKY
Why's the alarm going off?!
WARD
Oh it's telling us that we've detected a farkemboop!
SKY
A what?
COULSON
Farkemboop! It's a really bad thing that when exposed to certain kind of radiation, it explodes.
SKY
Oh, so why the alarms?
COULSON
Because the radiation that this superpowered plane gives off is that rare kind of radiation and we are all going to die. And on my mother's birthday and I haven't called her yet!
Now this exchange explains a lot of stuff, because Sky had to ask. We get information about a farkemboop, we find out the plane gives off a rare radiation and we find out that Coulson's mom is alive and he calls her on her birthday every year. All these things can be used to further the current plot as well as plant seeds for future plots. It also gives us a little insight into the characters.
The problem with Sky is that she makes a poor viewpoint character. The role of a good viewpoint character in this sort of show is to be someone that we can identify with. S/he is supposed to ask the questions we as viewers have and do thing things we as humans would probably do, mistakes and all. She is a homeless tech genius who dropped out of highschool but is so very very smart that she's possibly some sort of savant. If she was a good (but not OMG YOU ARE SOOOOO GOOOOOOOD!) hacker with solid skills but had the background to back it up and the team needed to get her in order to infiltrate the whole Rising Tide network, that would be a bit easier to accept. Right now it feels like she's kinda sorta trying to maybe keep her options open because she's not sure she really wants to commit to SHIELD forever and ever, just thinks it's a good idea for the moment. We have no sense of why she's doing it other than that the show requires it. We're not invested enough to even care if she gets kidnapped by the Rising Tide and tortured for info about SHIELD and the agents. In fact, I wouldn't care if Ward went after her and they both died.
I'm going to give this the X-Files treatment. If by the start of the third season I am still less enthusiastic about it than I want to be, THEN I will consider it a failure. But you never know. It might go all X-Files on us and suddenly everything from the first two seasons starts coming together to make an amazing, amazing layered show. PapaJoss has been known to plant seeds throughout seasons that don't pay off for years, but when they do, damn is it good viewing.
