To say that the first season of Agents of SHIELD was a bit divisive is putting it mildly.  With the The Avengers knocking it out of the park, the anticipation of “Phase II” for the Marvel Cinematic Universe was only heightened by the prospect of a television series devoted to SHIELD.  And it was going to be overseen by Joss Whedon’s cabal/extended family of producers!  How could it possibly disappoint?

What a lot of Whedon fans seemed to expect was the instant cult classic that was Firefly.  Unfortunately, that also meant that they forgot that Firefly had the benefit of being a bit of a fluke on several fronts, with the limited amount of aired material getting slightly elevated in status by the dearth of in-series competition.  Far more representative were the first seasons of Buffy, Angel, and Dollhouse.  All three series had narrative success to varying degrees in an overall sense, but struggled to find the right balance in their first go-rounds.

It’s also worth noting that staging a television series within the larger context of an ongoing, multi-produced film franchise has never really been attempted to this degree.  The beginning of the season would be running at the same time that Thor: The Dark World hit the theatres, but that film had long been written and largely in the finishing stages when Agents of SHIELD was in production.  On the horizon, in the spring, was Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which had a script in place and gave the writers for the television series a goal to work towards.  And beyond that, coming in August 2014, was Guardians of the Galaxy, which could have intersecting plot elements, but will also be more “cosmic-oriented” as opposed to the obvious implications of The Winter Soldier.

The point is that Agents of SHIELD almost had to be taken with the larger context in mind, with an honest set of expectations based on Whedon’s past history of taking time to get a show in the “right” narrative place, yet very little of such consideration was given.  The uber-high expectations set by The Avengers and Firefly meant that the audience was all but certain to be disappointed if the show didn’t soar right out of the gate.

Agents of SHIELD also had to introduce a new cast of characters to work as Phil Coulson’s team.  In retrospect, each and every character has a narrative purpose, as one would reasonably expect, given the nature of the series and its larger relationships to the overall MCU concept.  But the writers couldn’t simply hit the ground running and have big things happen to people we didn’t know or care about, and that meant taking time to let us get to know the team.  And that wasn’t the most successful of endevours.

WHAT WORKED

The most obvious item would be how quickly the show went into darker, more substantial territory in the immediate wake of The Winter Soldier.  It was almost Agents of SHIELD 2.0, and the kind of massive tonal shift that one typically expects out of a season ending cliffhanger.  But this literally happened in the space between two weekly episodes, with the fallout from the film coming mere days after box office release.  It was the lynchpin of the season, and it was a gamble that paid off beautifully.

Inherent to that shift was the revelation that Agent Ward, the most bland member of the team, was in fact a Hydra mole, working for the very villain that they had been hunting down all season, The Clairvoyant.  Ward’s betrayal was stunning and set into motion conflicts borne of dozens of exposed doubts and fears within the team.

It also took one of the season-long mysteries, the circumstances of Coulson’s resurrection, and turned it into a logical plot point with much larger implications.  It made sense for The Clairvoyant to want to know how Coulson was brought back, and the mystery of who had been running the project cut to the core of distrust that the Hydra revelation engendered.

In turn, the resolutions of the various conflicts served to take a team that had been brought together to be a support or control system for Coulson and turned them into an actual team that could conceivably start to rebuild SHIELD under the ideals that it purported to represent.  In other words, the slow burn of the first season eventually paid off, for those patient enough to wait for the Winter Soldier trigger to be pulled.

WHAT DIDN’T WORK

Ask fans what the biggest issue with Agents of SHIELD was, in the first season, and the answer is almost universal: Skye.  And considering that she was the viewpoint character, in many respects, that’s not a good thing.  While a lot of people will say that it was just the character in general that left a bad taste in the mouth of many, I would be more specific.  The issue was that the writers all too often had characters state how wonderful, important, and special Skye was, without the circumstances of the episodes ever actually showing the audience why they would believe it to be true.

Meanwhile, there was a constant sense that the producers were trying to push the envelope in terms of effects, so that Agents of SHIELD could roughly match the kind of high-powered effects that the MCU has come to be known to deliver.  It simply wasn’t going to happen, and when the audience has seen a handful of films manage to communicate an array of detailed worlds within the confines of a two-hour production, it’s hard to recalibrate expectations for a series that must, by design, have smaller adventures with longer-term implications.

That same issue was true, to some extent, for all the characters.  What might have been managed in 20-30 minutes in a film, with characters such as Pepper, Loki, Peggy Carter, or Black Widow, was getting stretched out over the course of several episodes.  By the time the season really got started with “End of the Beginning”, the faithful were grandly rewarded, but many felt little desire to delve back into a show that wasn’t moving fast enough, in the right directions, to capture general interest.

THE BEST EPISODES

1.17: “Turn, Turn, Turn”

The episode that aired immediately after The Winter Soldier, and the episode that changed everything we thought we knew about Agent Ward.  The series launched into a completely new level by the end of this tense and game-changing hour.

1.20: “Nothing Personal”

Maria Hill gets involved as Team Coulson tries to survive in the wake of the fall of SHIELD, as Ward’s fanatical mindset comes to the surface.  Oh, and the truth about TAHITI is revealed.

1.22: “Beginning of the End”

Nick Fury joins Coulson for the final confrontation with Garrett, and the team comes through the gauntlet with a new purpose for the second season.

THE WORST EPISODES

1.2: “0-8-4”

The first episode after the pilot is often tricky, and this was far too early to start pushing the notion that Skye is someone enormously important.

1.7: “The Hub”

The episode suffered from a mixture of trying to portray a massive SHIELD location with a couple of corridors and problematic CGI and some very dodgy plotting, notably the laughable “infiltration” of a classified area.

1.8: “The Well”

For all that the follow-up to The Winter Soldier was top-notch, the much-advertised tie-in to Thor: The Dark World wound up being little more than a standard episode.  Elements did end up playing into relationships right down to the finale, though, so there was some value to it in the end.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Agents of SHIELD managed to maintain a fairly consistent, if overly-episodic and predictable, set of adventures during the bulk of the season.  It wasn’t terrible or dreadfully average, but it was also not reaching for new narrative heights.  The season changed remarkably in the wake of The Winter Soldier, and one could argue that the series didn’t really start in earnest until that point.  The good news is that the second season has a new goalpost to chase, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, and the audience now can have confidence in what kind of storytelling to expect within the larger context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.