10 things a show needs to produce an awesome fandom

1. Good content that the fans can't get anywhere else
A show that doesn't have it's own clear identity isn't going to inspire that much caring or feedback from viewers to make them into fans. If it's a knockoff, it'll just get written off as "not as good as __", and people will be able to tell if it's happening just because something else was popular elsewhere. That's pandering and it's pointless. People have so many choices in TV now, there's no reason to have two shows that are the same.

2. The idea that the fans are smart enough to keep up and figure stuff out
You've got to trust your audience, not talk down to them, not tell them how to feel about things. One of the biggest things Sleepy Hollow did in it's finale this year (other than pointlessly killing a main character who happened to be a woman AND a poc) was spend a whole act trying to convince us that the stupid thing they'd done was okay. No. Let your fans feel what they feel. And give them stories that are worth keeping up on.

3. A certain "openness"--space for the fans and their ideas inside and around it
Openness in the story for people to fill in gaps themselves. Openness in the show for different points of view. Openness to fan theories and opinions (though not slaves to that). Openness to fanworks and meta. Accessibility of story points, moral stances, and character motivations. You want the fans to feel like they're part of it, not passive consumers with no right to think or say anything

4. Good social media presence
It's great when the actors and writers, creators and producers live-tweet a show with the fans. It's more great when the show's official accounts support fans, answer questions, provide sneak peeks and behind the scenes info, and basically are useful and not just places to sell things. Being on multiple social media accounts at once helps, too!

5. Reliability
Which leads to trust. Trust that the characters will be clearly defined and respected, not bent and deformed for whatever whim the writers or the network wants to follow. Trust that promises made in the story will be paid off, and it's not any sort of 'baiting or intentionally misleading. Trust that there will be good continuity, and not random storylines that are introduced and left dangling forever. Trust that the people making the show know what they're doing!

6. A feeling of collaboration, not competition
A competitive fandom is a fandom that will tear itself apart, so it's better to bring a sense of togetherness and inclusion, and that comes from both the show (or movie or whatever) itself, and from how the official powers handle the people watching.

A feeling of safety around fanworks would be cool, too--no big lawsuits, no weird behavior about them. Either leave them alone, or be respectful.

7. Some sort of positive feels--funniness, joy, playfulness, shippiness, etc--regardless of how the rest of the show goes
A show that is 100% serious all the time is a) exhausting to watch, and b) unrealistic. People crack jokes and snark at other people and say funny things for any number of not-funny reasons. A show that slogs through it's own story like it's a trial will not inspire fans to love it, nor will one that insists on denying it's own best parts as being awesome. Characters who never laugh are no fun. Characters who never fall in love--or at least have the opportunity to-- will be hard to make emotional connections to for a lot of people.

There has to be a break from the heaviness of reality or serious story or dire circumstances for everyone to get a break and get to know the characters.

8. Awareness of the genre-history it comes from, and respect for it
Shows don't happen in a vacuum. Everything had something else before it that either inspired it or gave it something to react to. You have to know your history to do it right, because the fans will definitely know it.

To go back and poke at S2 of Sleepy Hollow: It was insulting because the writers a) didn't seem to be taking any of the things that were the backbone of the show seriously, and b) were directly ripping off shows like Buffy without any understanding of the context or the appeal of the things they were blatantly stealing. Contrast that with Supernatural, which usually respects the stories it's building on and also makes them their own.

It's the difference between acting like your viewers are idiots who won't notice, and respecting that they will and giving them a new take on it.

9. Respect for the fans as actual people and not pawns or product
It's people who carry a show, not numbers on a graph. Treating people like promo-slaves is what bit The 100 in the butt when they killed off Lexa; don't do that. Interact with them one on one, not like a giant media conglomerate telling people what to think and do.

10. Network support
Advertising, so that people know you're there and when to find you. Good media events--especially at cons and related things where the people who make the show can interact directly with the people who watch it. Trust from the producers and network people that the creators and writers know what they're doing and can get it done, so they don't have to try to get it done while navigating interference and meddling. A willingness to let a show find it's feet before dropping the ax on it--XFiles, one of the biggest hits Fox ever had, wouldn't have lasted one season now, with how rough that first season is. A minimum of preemption and no schedule-rearranging without a really good reason and a lot of thought put into it--like NOT putting it up against much bigger shows. No snap decisions!


What do you think creates a good fandom?

Okay, here's the problem with Fox, in ten easy points

1. It insists on buying high-concept, deep-genre shows
2. It allows those shows to be made well at the beginning
3. It launches them with not a heck of a lot of promo
4. It has developed a hairtrigger "whelp, I guess it's canceled" response to anything at all that's not the biggest numbers ever
5. It refuses to let genre shows build an audience
6. It keeps making the same show over and over again, technically*, and then cancelling
7. It doesn't care if people like the show, it's running some sort of biggest-numbers experiment so fuck all of us
8. It fails to see that constantly offering and taking away is giving it a reputation for unreliability
9. It fairls to see that more and more people simply won't bother watching next time for fear of loving it and losing it again from the same channel that already cancelled so many
10. It doesn't listen to the right voices along the way, and keeps making more and more of the same mistakes

*For the last few seasons anyway. Sleepy Hollow was a runaway hit with a crazy british guy, a pretty black cop, and a weird supernatural story. Minority Report was a crazy psychic guy, a pretty black cop, and a weird scifi story. Second Chance is a crazy reborn guy who is a cop, with a pretty Indian scientist, and a weird scifi story. Lucifer is a crazy british supernatural guy, a pretty white cop, and a weird supernatural story. It's like a random story generator, just rearranging things to see what works, but they all work and they're not giving them a chance. It could have been a channel full of shows all in this same niche, but it keeps bumping them instead.

I'm getting more and more salty. I'm sick of it.

Okay, so here's my problem with The Walking Dead...

So, I watched tonight's episode, I watched Talking Dead to work through it, I ate half a pint of icecream, and now I think I can put into words what my biggest problem with this show is.

I've been watching this show a long time. I'm aware that they're going to kill people. But that's also the problem. See, one of the major reasons I gave up on Game of Thrones was that it didn't matter who you loved, they were going to die, and by the second or so season, I just found it very hard to even care--and if you don't care, what's the point of watching.

The Walking Dead has been on for six years now, and my original favs are few and far between, and they aren't really being replaced, lately, by people who are as cool, as likable, or as interesting as the ones they're killing. And every time there's an episode like this one, it brings it up again: if they're just going to kill everyone, why do I bother investing? They feel like they're killing them off more quickly in the second half of last season and into this one, so if I keep investing, it's a form of self torture.

And that brings up a related issue that I've talked about before: if there's no hope ever, if nothing they do gets them anywhere, if there's no chance of setting up a new sort of life, and if every single other community they meet is made of psychopaths and cannibals, what is even the point? What's the point of their struggle and all the deaths and losses they suffer and survive? What's the point of them fighting so hard to establish something useful and maintain any humanity and civilization at all? And, most importantly, what's the point of tuning in? If they're all just going to die anyway, every new baddie is going to be worse and more perverse than the last, and nothing is ever going to get better, then there isn't a point.

If that's all I have to look forward to, as a fan of this show for more than half a decade now, I'm just going to call it quits.

I don't want to do that. I want to watch a show where I care about the characters and they have some chance of doing something that matters and continues and living long enough to enjoy that it matters. I don't want to watch a show where the nature of the show makes it impossible to keep caring. I also don't want to watch a show where the new characters are too idiotic or weak or indecisive or bland to care about.

Will The Walking Dead manage to avoid that hole? I don't know. In this moment, I'm close to calling quits. I was close after Beth, too, and it took a month to convince me otherwise. If anything happens to Rick, Daryl, Carol, or Michonne? On top of all the losses I've already taken? I don't know if it can. Every time it happens, no matter how artistically or how meaningfully, that thread tying me to the show frays a little more, and there's eventually going to be a point where the ends are too frayed to tie together again.

Guys, I'm very upset now.

What did you think? Can you talk me out of this? Do you have a point of view I didn't consider? Share in the comments.

Characters that could have been in Fear the Walking Dead

Caveat 1: I've only been to LA once, when I was very young and didn't really know any of it, but just from watching about it on TV and reading about it in the news, there's all sorts of characters that could have been on this show and weren't.

Caveat 2: Why put a show somewhere and then not use all the options for character and setting that there could be in a huge and diverse city like LA?

I just feel like a teacher and a high school administrator could have come from anywhere and that the options for characters on this show were barely scratched and could have been far more interesting in the set up. We could have had:

• Someone from a poor part of town who wants to make good, who is working his way out of a bad situation--and who has to make the choice when things fall apart about whether he'll fall back on the gang behavior of his old neighborhood, or keep trying to be a more fair person.
• A tour guide who has to keep all those people from far away safe while everything goes to hell around them.
• Actors. Like, any actors.* Someone, maybe, who wanted to be an actor and who was being a waitress, but who had done a lot of research, and come from somewhere else, and knew all sorts of useful things.
• Conspiracy theorists! Tobias was almost one of these, but was barely there.
• Suvivalists who can help or block help.
• Other drug addicts who didn't get rescued by their families, who have to keep surviving on the streets the way they always had, and so will know where the safe places are, the supplies, the danger spots.
• Cops. Any cops at all. Good or bad, they'd be different from Rick or Shane, and their absence is weird.
• People from poor neighborhoods showing up at the gates of the middle-class Safe Zone, trying to get help or information, or just to raid for supplies.
• Rich people with very well-defended homes having to make the decision about whether they'll take in refugees from the city, or if they'll bar their gates--and what happens either way.
• News people still trying to get information out to the masses, who have to jury-rig their broadcasts to make sure they can even be heard when the grid goes down.
• A librarian or museum curator who wants to document this historic event, whether because they're dedicated, or because they're delusional, either would be interesting.
• People on vacation who just want to get home.
• People on business trips who maybe know more about what's going on than they let on.
• Con men! Running cons!
• People barricading themselves in malls or in Costco, and just exactly how that can go wrong.
• Mobsters who have such good control of their territories, that they're practically princes now, since they have peace-keeping methods already in place.
• Surfers and hippies who try to build a floating society out off the coast.
• Motorcycle gangs who can move around quickly, even when there's deadlocked traffic and roads clogged with abandoned cars, and set themselves up as a sort of lifeline for isolated pockets of people on rooftops and in highrises--for good or for bad.
• Fireflighters who keep putting out fires, because if they don't, who will?
• Medical people--doctors and nurses who aren't cold and weird, specialists who are outside their specialty, MEs who have to work on the living because they're the only medical people around, Vets who have to work on people for the same reason, people who lost their licence but who are all that's left.
• Other people from that school who went back there because it's got supplies and is more defensible than their homes, trying to form a democracy of teachers, administrators, families, janitors, and refugees.
• Church people who aren't insane and useless, who have been helping the poor for years, and just start helping more people now.
• Opportunistic criminals.
• Homeless people who can move up into all the abandoned houses, but who are now in neighborhoods that were abandoned for a reason.
• People who were working somewhere on the other side of town from where they live, who just want to get their families back, and spend the whole season going through all these other different parts of town to get back home.
• People who were stuck on a bus in traffic and have to band together even though they're all strangers.
• Public servants who keep working for the public, opening up their homes or offices to people who are trapped or lost or evacuated.
• Hookers or strippers who just want to help.
• Groups of disadvantaged youths who don't trust anyone in control and decide to set up safety for themselves.
• Students from a university who have to study the collapse to keep from going insane, and their professor who holds them together.
• Girlscouts and boyscouts trying to help where there's not cops or soldiers, in a situation that's way above their age-group.
• Criminals from the jail running lose and taking different tactics about what they'll do with this crazy new type of freedom, or trapped in the jail and trying to get out.

Basically, really, we could have had anything that brought people from different areas, social situations, races, or classes together and made them work together or bounce off each other, anything that gave people new opportunities that they had to decide whether they'd take or not and whether they think it's a good idea to, anything that made a good story out of diversity and variety. It could have been complex and complicated before everything went toward the apocalypse, but so far, all of this is hardly touched on, barely even looked at.

We've got a guaranteed next season, and there's plenty of time to shake up the cast and bring in more people from all over the city and all levels of society, but it just would have been nice if this particular one had had more scope and was more open. One family and three people, all from the same other family, they found along the way is not a very good use of the potential such a huge city has to offer. Being inundated by survivors from all over LA and the surrounding areas who were all caught in the wrong place when things went south would fix that nicely.

This is only the beginning of the end. It's been two weeks of disaster, not months and years. People will be trying to regain what they lost, trying to re-contact the outside world, trying to help their neighbors and their families. Where's all the solidarity that can happen in disaster situations? Where's the attempts to band together and make it through, even if those attempts crumble later? Where are the people trying to make sense of what's happening?

NOTES:

*They said on the Talking Dead special that they almost did that, but decided not to--it would be too easy, or something lame like that?

The epic Sleepy Hollow Season 2 Rewrite Pt1

I've made no secret that I've been having issues with Sleepy Hollow Season 2. Even though the episodes started off okay, and ended closer to how they should be, the sophomore slump hit this show hard, and there's just a lot that I can't let lie when I have the power to rewrite it, so here's my Better Than That version of the series.

The rules:

• Keep the main plot points to prove that they can still have made this season, just better
• Remove the most problematic, stupid, nonsensical, and pointless stuff and replace it with something that worked with the plot as established, was true to the characters, included all the characters, and kept the momentum up
• Rearrange some of the points that were underserved so that they could become proper plot details and compelling story
• Everything in season one stands as is, because while it wasn't perfect, in comparison, it was a shining example

So! Act I: Things are worse now...

This Is War

This episode was actually pretty great. We got an epic Ichabbie hug. We got a lot of awesome illusions. We got Jenny being a badass. We got good set up for the season.

So we're keeping:

• The whole surprise-party / Archive / the Key / Henry being a bizarrely adorable captive surrounded by houseplants / it being an illusion thing
• Ichabod getting himself out of the box, especially the part where he records a dying message for ABBIE, not for HIS WIFE
• Jenny getting herself out of the Warehouse and Henry reading her sins to get what he needs, and every second of the Ichabod Drives An Ambulance thing
• Katrina in the cabin stabbing Ol Headless and escaping was pretty cool, so we'll keep that
• Most of the Purgatory scenes, because they were great: Andy Brooks helping her to remember he's human, the mirror-contact and the Epic Hug and so many shoulder and hand-grabs afterward, the double and the key and all of that
• Getting the Key with Jenny, and Jenny hugging Ichabod and reminding him how to function in the underworld

What we're losing:

• Shirtless Headless was the start of him not being an actual villain, and getting totally defanged, so we're ditching that mess
• Katrina being IMMEDIATELY recaptured before she even escapes the room
• Henry being gifted a fancy set of armor instead of being changed into War directly
• Everything about Moloch being in focus, moving normally, and wearing clothes--naked, blurry, not-moving-like-a-human-at-all demon-kings are much scarier and less cheesy

What we're adding / changing:

• Katrina gets out of that room, narrowly avoiding Headless, and hides out in the woods, where she tries to call on her powers and finds she's still weak--and that nature doesn't seem to like her much; things aren't just not responding to her, she's getting weird unnatural results; she's recaptured because she's sort of horrified and lets her guard down, not because she's an idiot who can't do anything. She gets the necklace after she's back inside, and it burns her or something so we know for sure it's bad news, not just letting her see his head--which only looks like his Abraham-head when he's making an effort, and looks like that gross old skull when he's angry, maintaining his villainy and scariness.
• Henry is gifted the mantle, not an automaton, and it changes him physically--and Moloch actually gives him orders.

This way, we have a set up where K is not useless, Henry has a much more clear role as a tool without all the gross grovelling, and there's not that disconnect between him being gifted power in this episode and him being punished in the next for the same thing. Mostly, though, that return episode was something close to what we'd expected from the previous season, and it was great.

Kindred

This one was also not bad, but had some of the seeds of stuff that got out of hand later, so we'll do a little surgery, but also mostly leave it alone. The real work comes later in this season!

What we're keeping:

• The Kindred, of course
• The dream at the beginning, where Ichabod foresees the ritual of binding, and especially "you must be alike in every way"
• The whole intro of Reyes was pretty great, how she was immediately on the wrong foot with Abbie, but also caring and considerate of the fact that she knew Mamma Mills, and later, how she thinks she knows that the town is having some sort of cartel problem.
• And all those other cops! Look how Abbie knows them all, and they all have things to do!
• Abbie and Ichabod finding and then scoping out the Willow Point Estate, and their various conversations about how they need to stay focused and Ichabod trying to jump the gun and Abbie stopping him
• The argument in the cabin about whether it's worth the whole raising-a-monster thing, and Ichabod just loudly declaring that they will
• The fight Katrina and Headless have about how Ichabod couldn't let Abbie stay in Purgatory more than a few hours, but let his wife stay for centuries, because that's some truth right there (though in his defense, he couldn't help her because she put him in stasis, so it's really sort of her fault), and "Moloch has a plan for us all"
• Visiting Frank in jail and telling him to plead crazy by telling the truth--and him telling them where he hid the Head
• All the bank scene, every second of it
• Jenny getting caught with illegal weapons and getting sent to jail
• The whole scene in the Tunnels, looking for the body and finding it with the booby traps, Abbie's flashbacks, them talking about what their greatest weaknesses are and whether they're actually weaknesses, all of it. That scene was beautiful.
• The "I wanted it to be you, I just wasn't ready to marry anyone" line, because that was good stuff, even if it was a lie. It buys good time.
• The battle with the Kindred against War and Death is pretty great--so we'll keep all that.
• Katrina saying "this is not my world" and Headless saying "it won't last long"
• I guess we can keep "still no sign of the Kindred"--and then later, have it show up when it's needed, because it's bound to Abbie since she said the words
• Reyes visits Frank before Henry shows up, and looks a little sharply at Henry but doesn't listen to all the crazy from Frank; she does, however, make notes in his file

What we're losing:

• That statement that the body is pre-enchanted so all they have to do is say the words

What we're adding / changing:

• Katrina listens actually carefully instead of really obviously and poorly; Henry knows that I&A are coming, but it's said incidentally to Headless, not as a weird threat to Katrina
• The Kindred ceremony doesn't work when Ichabod says the words, but the second time around, Abbie says them and they do work--setting up that she has magic in her somewhere, and that Ichabod can't do magic because he has conflicted loyalties and you have to have absolute will to make it work
• They don't tie up Katrina, they block her into one room with magic, which she then starts to systematically dismantle, proving that she actually does have power and understand how magic works. More strange things happen, but she has to get out so she's motivated.
• After Katrina says she wanted to marry Abraham, and it turns his head from a gross skull to a lovestruck human-head, she says that Ichabod was a mission, something that got out of hand, but she's seeing more clearly now.
• Katrina wants to leave, but Headless is on his way back and she's still trapped; she chooses to stay because otherwise Ichabod will be caught--he doesn't make it all the way in there just to have her refuse him. It's a matter of snap decisions, not of her being a lame-o. He goes, and Katrina gets her barrier down just as Headless shows up and finds her free; she says she wants to help the battle since she enchanted the Kindred to begin with, but the battle is already over. The necklace changes her a little more. 
• When Abbie goes to see Jenny in jail, we'll keep Reyes and her mistrust of Ichabod, because that's great, but instead of Jenny just rolling over and taking it, we'll have Reyes revoke Abbie's guardianship, and give her a note on her record--and send Jenny back to Tarrytown because obviously she's still crazy and dangerous.
• Frank gets his new lawyer, and it's Henry, and it matters that he was hired by Cynthia--but instead of Frank casually and accidentally signing over his soul, they're interrupted by a very angry Jenny being dragged back to her old cell, which they've been holding for her. Jenny and Frank make eye contact, and he doesn't sign anything; he says he's tired and he needs to look it over better later.

This way, we keep the core of the story, where they raise this monster that is the opposite of Death, and they ridiculously don't put it away again when they're done with it, and then we can use it later. We also keep the concerns Abbie has with Ichabod's loyalties, and we make a point of that time when he just overrides Abbie and Jenny and declares that they're going to do this whole Kindred thing. Meanwhile, we build on the idea that Katrina isn't all that she seems, and we give Jenny and Frank something to do when they're out of the picture, so that they aren't sidelined--they've got plot and purpose, and they're together, not rotting in separate cells while the plot continues to move on without them. Also, it stifles Henry a little, and removes a lot of Frank's passivity from this whole beginning of the season.

What're your thoughts on my construction of these first two episodes? I'll be doing two at a time periodically to get me through the break until I have my Season 3--because they totally got renewed! Whooo!

I'm afraid TWD will get too dark

I love this show. I've been watching it since it started lo these many deaths ago, and I've been taken by surprise by every one of the Group who didn't make it, or turned evil, or had to be killed because plot. 

But I'm afraid it's going to get too dark for me.

See, it's already gotten darker. There's less people around, less food, more walkers, more psychopaths. Which is realistic. But the first season we had the hope of reunions and making it to the CDC. In the second season, despite the cluster that was staying in the farm, we had the hope that they could settle and start over. Since then, it's been the hope of the prison dashed by the Govorner, then the hope of Terminus dashed by crazy cultish cannibals, and now there's two major deaths in a row, not soon after several other deaths, and more psychos and less food and more dirt, and I'm just...

I'm a firm believer that there has to be something to look forward to in a post-apocalyptic story, something to strive for, something to build a new world on, or else we're just watching The Road in drawn-out form. We're just watching the world die. And what the hell is the point of that? That's super-bleak and hurtful; it just becomes an endless string of watching people we like get killed in creative ways, and that'll get old. I, at least, will stop caring about them.

So, this season's dive into yet more sadness and despair? Eugene was lying, but we've got to find some new reason to hope, some new thing to wish for and strive toward, some new reason to keep being human--and now, five years in, I feel like it's a good time to find something real. Not a hope that literally blows up on them. Not a piece of the old world held up by denial or by lunatic dictators or cannibal weirdos. No, we need something that will actually help, that will start swaying others to Rick's side instead of pitting them always against the world, something that gives people a reasons to not eat each other.

I'm not asking for anything unrealistic. I'm not saying it has to be something easy--in fact, it's better if it's hard and violent and dangerous, on this show. I just want them to find something that will actually help, that they can rally behind. And then they can get proactive as the crazies, and save people from the hospital and from places like Woodbury and Terminus. I haven't read the comic past the very beginning, and I know things really just keep getting worse for everyone, but I also think that TV is a different creature than comics, with less recovery-time between episodes, and a wider audience, and people will start leaving if there's nothing to hope for.

Some suggestions:

• Immunity. Someone gets bit and doesn't die or turn. Grass-roots science trying to figure it out. This would be a good thing to give to Judith; she was born into this world; she was never not infected.
• A Cure. This is probably a last-ditch storyline before it closes up shop, preferably in a planned and whole way. But that doesn't mean they can't start looking for one, testing them, figuring out how not to be a mass-mudering fuckhead about it.
• Mutation. The virus was only creating walkers because it was poorly-adapted, and now, two or so years later, it's adapting so that maybe walkers are still conscious. Or are turning into something else. Think of the moral dilemmas. But if it's adapting to not kill the host, they just have to survive.
• An actual community of people that isn't led by a lunatic. Either started by Rick, or heard of by him and they go there, and find that it actually is good--and then they have more to defend than just their own stuff and friends, AND a chance to settle down and rebuild. Maybe it's mobile, a whole town on wheels, and that makes it harder to find and more of a hunt.
• A mission. Something like "find the last CDC scientist" or "build this lab" or "travel to this place" or, hell, "build a rocket and move to the moon". Just something that would make everyone proactive, give them a shared goal other than "don't die". Something that could help the remaining people rebuild.

What would you suggest? How would you give everyone hope? Do you fear it'll get too dark?

Ten Ways to Tighten Up Agents of SHIELD

Obligatory warning: SPOILERS up to current episodes as of writing, so, you know, be smart if you're not caught up and care about that sort of thing!

As we come out of a hiatus, just to go immediately back into hiatus, I think it's time we had a little discussion about Agents of SHIELD. See, I really really like this show, but I don't love it, and I think it's because of the ten points I'm about to talk about. When the season started, I thought this would be the one show of this past new season that I would just adore, but that honor went to Sleepy Hollow (which, to be honest, I thought would be dumb but fun--shows what the commercials can tell you about how great a show is before it airs!), but while I like the set up and I like the characters, there's just this list of little annoyances that keep me from happily adoring SHIELD. I'm here till the end, but I'm also just complaining a little bit, and that's not how I like a show to be.

The most annoying part is that it's all stuff that could be fixed! And that they seem to be actively trying to fix, but that keep sort of backsliding or coming out weird*. I mean, none of us have any real insight into what the writers room, the producers, or the MCU series producers are using the show for, but it would be nice to have a little idea about just what the show's own identity is, that doesn't seem to just...blur away when a new writer starts a new script. But that would be fixed by addressing this list, so let's get to it!

1. Figure out what to do with Skye

Her mystery is fine, but she needs a purpose. In fact, I like her mystery. I think it's mostly been paced well, and I adore that she's a secret hidden thing in and of herself, and that she's both potentially dangerous and worried about it. That's fantastic. And if what's going on right now with the gutshot and the preservation jar goes where I want it to go--into her being a super power of some sort, even if it's a non-offensive power like resurrection or healing or talking to machines or something (see #4)-- it'll be even better.

But up until now, she's just sort of been there. She's on the team but she's now allowed to do anything. She's picked up because she's a world-renowned hacker who managed to breach SHIELD and make a whole lot of injustice public, but she's not being used to their advantage, so why didn't they just put her in jail and then wash their hands of her? She wants to join SHIELD, but then almost immediately betrays them, but then it's not really that bad a betrayal (see #10), but everyone acts like a jerk about it, but she still wants to stay...

I get that her goal is to find her parents. I like that. It's part of her mystery story. I get that Coulson likes her. But May's reaction to her has been wildly out of proportion, Ward frequently looks like a jerk when it comes to her through a lot of the early season, and for several episodes, she's just sort of sitting there, offering to help, and even those who like her are ignoring her, and there's no solid reason why or real confrontation about that.

This past episode did a lot to give her a real place on the team somewhere between Ward and FitzSimmons, and that's perfect, if they keep her there. There's an established divide between the fighters and the thinkers, and if she's a new thing, there's no reason why she can't serve as both. But I'm weary when it comes to her--and wary--because the show just sort of backslides to 'she's here because she's a main character' while everyone else actually has a purpose, and it makes her stand out in the wrong way.

2. Give us just about anything about may that comes from May

She's the team tank, which is great, because she's so little and pretty but still so utterly badass. She's battle-scarred and didn't want to go back in the field, which is also great, because the fact that she did shows a lot about how much she respects Coulson and trusts his judgement. But as I said above, her reaction to Skye borders on irrational for a large chunk of what we've seen, and literally all her backstory comes from Coulson telling us--almost none of it comes from her, whereas everyone else has had their own chance to feel and emote and respond to their own stories. She's holding back so hard that she's a blank wall, and though there have been a few moments in this second half--when she told the interdimensional guy what Coulson told her in that failed Op, when she held Ward's hand this past episode after the train, when she actually played a joke and smiled--where she's had her own opinions and feelings about things, she's mostly just hostile all the time about everything.

Ming Na Wen can kill a person with her side-eye, and that's fabulous, but she's really only been given the chance to play off Coulson fully, and it leaves her sort of...lacking.

This one, too, has been addressed some as the season progresses, but if it ends with us still not having any idea why May is so against Skye (it feels personal, but there is literally almost no reason why it should be, since they've disproved most of the theories about why that should be), if she doesn't loosen up enough to get her own story from herself, she's going to wind up uninteresting, and that would be a terrible shame.

3. More espionage, and make it weird

In the comics, SHIELD did a lot of espionage. It was a spy organization. It was awesome. The episodes where our team gets to spy on stuff and go undercover--the one where Ward and Fitz go out into wartorn Eastern Europe, and this past one with the train--are some of the best episodes, and I think it's because when someone's undercover, everyone has a specific job to do AND they're outside their comfort zones / allowed to have leeway that can't have when they're at the office / play off each other in new combinations depending on what's needed for each op instead of being teamed up exactly the same ways every time they go out in the field.

This last one is the most important, I think. Characters in any show (or anything at all with characters, really) work best when they're allowed to bounce off each other, work with each other, react to each other, conflict with each other, and some excuse to keep changing up how they function while demanding that they trust each other explicitly is exactly what this show needs--it's when the characters, and, I'm willing to bet, the writers, pull together and make sense as a team, not just these random people that Coulson happened to like and put in a plane together.

Plus, espionage puts the team as a whole, and SHIELD in general, into situations with other world organizations, lots of other operatives on any number of other sides, and broadens the world. When they're out there doing their jobs, they're not just five or six people tracking down weird widgets, they're a crack team of special operatives who are good at their jobs, know what they're doing, and exist in a wider world of complicated social, political and semi-paranormal allegiances. And it's awesome.

4. More powers--whatever their excuse--and don't kill them off by the end of the episode

See, this one annoys me, and has since the beginning. We're introduced to Coulson in the movies as someone who does his job politely and kindly while these crazy-powerful weirdos are busting shit up, and then when he gets his own show, there's no superpowers around? I understand why they'd want to keep the team normal--the show was sold to us as these normal people who deal with the weird stuff--but there's absolutely no reason why they can't come into contact with more special people over the course of their work. And no reason why they have to all be shuffled off at the end of the episode never to be seen again, or never to be encountered again.

Akela? Back in the fold, so bring her back. How totally badass would it be to see her working beside Nick Fury or Maria Hill, or as part of some other crack team that we don't see on a daily basis (because these guys can't be the only one, right? Right? Even Stargate had other teams, and lots of them, and we got to see them and know them, some.)? Or even just our own cozy team, since she's already known to Coulson, and she's known him since before whatever changes happened to him, and she has an awesome cyborg eye that once had a direct connection to one of their current Big Bads and would be a big help... See where I'm going with this?

Extremis victims? We know not all of them explode and / or burn up. We know that some adapt. We also know that Tony Stark has first hand experience dealing with the disease / toxin / whatever it is because of helping the one person he can't live without get past it. I understand that Tony doesn't play well with others, that RDJ is probably too busy or expensive for a TV show, and that no one on the Avengers knows that Coulson is alive yet, so we're unlikely to get Tony, but Gwyneth Paltrow has guested on TV before so we could have Pepper** offer her advice (see #5). Or SHIELD could have just 'appropriated' Tony's research. Or someone could just mention that Tony is a place they could go to get help with this problem. I mean, it's kind of a big deal that several of these dudes recently went bonkers all over the planet, but SHIELD is still acting like we know nothing about them; someone has to get with the program.

In general, it's been a very important couple of years for normal people in the MCU--a big green guy takes out part of New York, a frozen supersoldier is discovered and revived, a god levels a town in New Mexico, a very visible very rich guy openly admits that he's a super hero, another god beings aliens down on New York... There's got to be lots of alien tech laying around. There's got to be scientists and tinkerers who were already getting close to creating cyborgs and super suits and bio-weapons and cures that create powers and whatever else, and now they all have this huge, looming reason to try harder. Either as goodguys or as badguys. And there should even be normal people without powers but with strong morals or no morals who go out in masks and do stuff. The Marvel comics are packed with hundreds of side characters, throw aways, displaced team members, wild backstories, forgotten old heroes...why are we seeing so little of them here, with the people whose job it is to literally deal with this stuff?

5. Cameos! By anyone!

We got Stan Lee this week! That means this is really and truly part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe after all! And there's rumors of Lady Sif showing up sometime, which would be awesome.

But I mean, there are piles of Heavy Hitters in the world now. And each of them has people around them who aren't the stars of those movies, but are important and are recognizable, and are often played by actors who don't shy from showing up on TV. This is the perfect place for those characters to have a little more life between their movies--for them to report something weird going on, for them to answer a question the team has that we know they'd be able to help with (ahem*Pepper*ahem), for them to even just be in a recording of something that they team is looking into now!

SHIELD is presented in the movies as this wondrous international entity that can show up anywhere at any time, and already knows about everything, and then they get their own show and they're always a step behind, aren't using the resources we-the-audience know for a fact they already have, and then in Phase Two movies, they aren't even showing up. It's...inconsistent, since there's no reason they should really be behind like that, and it's annoying since there's no reason.

And, worst of all, it makes the show look like the unwanted stepchild of the MCU when it's set up to be this glue between movies, incorporating all the new info, adding layers of meaning and story, using the new weapons and reseach, connecting this team of super-powered movies between the times when they're needed to connect themselves. Where are all these people?

On a side note, though, the Hidden Asgardian story was great. Because they've been in contact with earth for ages and there really isn't any real reason why there shouldn't be people like him around sometimes. I hope he comes back.***

6. More stories directly related to what happens in the movies--not just an awesome one-liner

Although that line about the God Of Cleaning Up Their Own Mess line was amazing.

Okay, so Thor 2 happened in, like, five minutes of real time or something. Maybe SHIELD needs more than one day to get to where the Big Bads are busting stuff up or whatever****, sure, but the episode where they went to handle cleanup--which I'm sure SHIELD as a whole has to do a lot of--was a missed opportunity, pure and simple.

The end-titles thing had a giant frost monster running loose in London, chasing birds and not even trying to hide. If that's not the thing that SHIELD's favorite top agent would take his team to investigate, why are they even there?? Maybe the show's budget can't handle a giant frost monster. Okay fine; show the aftermath, where they're all covered in slime and something huge is being carted off under a tarp. Mention the damned monster. Don't be the biggest source of inconsistency in the MCU. I mean, really.

Ahem.

On the level of pure story, SHIELD is the one that anticipates, addresses, and deals with aliens, powers, evil geniuses, villains, whatever, in this version of the Marvel Universe, since heroes are new and teams of heroes haven't yet formed on their own. There should be all sorts of stuff that SHIELD is getting from the fallout of the movies that we aren't even getting hints of--all it would take is a half-mentioned thing in a communication from Headquarters, a quick image that gets shut down in a file, mention of another team who did whatever with that thing that we found after so-and-so. I mean, Coulson does a lot of name dropping already, so probably not from him, but in the worldbuilding for the show, there should be near-constant hints at the tech, the research, the intel that's coming from these events, and there are a lot of them now. Some of them big enough to make Tony Stark a cult icon in foreign countries.

This is all a big deal, and we're hearing so little of it and seeing even less.

7. Stop letting the commercials explicitly promise more than the episodes deliver--or deliver more

I'm pretty sure the show-people have little to no control over what the network says about it in a trailer, but SHIELD's commercials have been overselling as much as Bones' and the Mentalist's used to. If they're going to call an episode 'devastating' it had better be devastating, and the revelation that Skye is a possibly-freaky unknown object in the form of a rescued baby? That's not devastating; that's cool. Which is great, except that telling the fans that it's going to be one way emotionally and then delivering something else entirely is just putting the emotional investment of the show in an out-of-sync alignment. You want your fans to feel the way the show feels, not being told how to feel and then delivering something else.

But another way to deal with this is to just deliver what you promise. The show has so much potential for big emotional drama, and there's a certain amount of leeway for borderline melodrama when you're dealing with topics like these, branching off of movies like those, and they're frequently just not using it. This goes directly into #10, so I'll pick it up there in a bit.

8. Give us more real emotional connection with the core team, and that includes between the team members

This most recent episode did it right. I'm withholding saying that they finally hit that groove where it all works and makes sense, because last time I thought they did--the one where Simmons jumped from the plane to save the team--they were back to fractured not-quite-there-ness the next ep, but I'll just go ahead and stay that that's what we want. The way everyone connected with everyone else and the interpersonal draws and blocks and ties all pulled tight--that's how it should be. Everyone on the team lives in the same place, functions in dangerous and should-be bonding situations with each other, and has lots of different directions all of this could go in, emotionally.

We should see this all the time. And the best way to show character and character development, is to get this stuff all the time. The best way to get viewers emotionally invested in the characters is to let the characters get emotionally invested in each other, and they finally did that for the whole team, and it was beautiful. I'll have to write a whole post about the developing ties in this show (with a chart!) to really get into it, but everyone was invested this time, and the show just sang along.*****

9. Have their unknown items be more than one-shot deals

They find a lot of weird stuff that no one has seen before and no one knows what to do with, and then they just pack it up and never think about it again. Take two or three episodes to figure out what they are and exactly how to best pack them up and keep everyone safe. Have it take a while to learn how to neutralize them. Make their effects on the team slower and over the course of a few eps, especially in things that should linger like that Staff of Awful Rage that really should have left Ward more angry and unhinged than it did, even after the actual effect of it wore off. Show them researching stuff after the episode they find them in, or, if they're determined to not be the ones who do the intensive research, have Simmons be reading up on them, or have Fitz be talking to whoever IS doing the research, or have the camera come in on Coulson catching the squints up on what's been discovered since they handed the artifacts off. Have Fitz tinkering with unsanctioned widgets based on what he learned by looking at the things they found three episodes before.

Those two live for the tech and the science and the weirdness there--I have so much trouble believing that they'd just wave goodbye and never mention the stuff again. I feel like they'd just be collecting up information and diagrams and notes, and saving it all up for when they could use it later, that there'd be periodic moments where they're trying to solve a new problem and one of them shuffles through the stuff on their desk and pulls out something they aren't supposed to have, and say that it's because of how that one thing did this neat trick that they thought they could retro-engineer into this new thing and...

Basically, I just want the Objects of Unknown Origin to have more direct impact on their lives, what they think about, how they react in the future, and what they go into the field with--physically and emotionally--than they have been having, because if Skye is going to be one of them, there really needs to be more resonance. And just from a purely story-based PoV, there needs to be more consequences, more usability to the fact that they find these things and often fall prey to them. And that it's their job.

10. Stop pulling punches

Things that are set up as super-emotional--the reveal of what they actually know about Skye, revelations of betrayal, character-bonding or un-bonding moments--should actually be emotional. The banter is amazing, but the purpose of witty banter is to lighten the weight of heavy dealings, and the show, so far, hasn't really had any super-heavy dealings.

Skye cried and Coulson comforted her, but we didn't hear what he really said to her or what she said after, and there's still no reason for why May is so mean to her even though she's shown that she knows exactly what use Skye has on the team and that she thinks she's best used as a free agent.

Skye seemed to be selling them out early on and then we immediately found out it wasn't that at all, and it wasn't that big a deal, and they took her back-- but then everyone was mean to her as if it had been a big deal, and it took forever for her to win back trust she hadn't really won to begin with because this happened so early on, and she whined about it a little but never got really honestly outraged like I'm sure most people would.

Ward was possessed by an alien-god staff that brought up all your personal demons and fed them to the rage and power, and they were explicit about how it lingers, and then it totally doesn't and he hasn't had any anger issues since--AND the shared trauma pushed him and May together but didn't throw any light on her, really, and the combination of their personal neuroses hasn't yet caused any trouble or shown any stress on their selves or their stories. Not even as little glances or shrugged off things; Ward might be insecure about it and unsure of his feelings, but he hasn't even mentioned that it was pain and rage that got them together to begin with. That's a lot of trauma to just leave untouched.

Although a lot of these emotional disconnects would be solved by fixing #1, 2 and 8 up above.

And then, plotwise, there's all the... well, the best way I can describe it is isolationism of the series. I understand that they want it to stand on its own, but it's explicitly part of the movie continuity, and withholding information we already know, denying that movie-based answers exist to show-based problems, and pointedly not connecting those dots just feels like a cheat. Add to that that we have three major character mysteries (what is Skye? what happened to Coulson? what does May even think or feel about anything at all?), and it comes across as willfully not using what we know is already there--drawing things out, not giving the promised payoffs for our patience, holding off on the potential. All of which also counts as pulling punches.

You can't have a series this tied into the wider universe and make it only look internally for answers; Coulson alone should know more than some of these situations are letting on, and it's frustrating when the big shiny call-backs--the Extremis stuff, especially, and the Supersoldier stuff--have such obvious resources at their command, that Coulson knows personally, and then he's not even mentioning them or giving a reason why he can't use them. The team may not know that he's familiar enough with Pepper that she knew his first name, or that Steve is his idol and now works for the same company, but WE know, and Coulson knows, and those plot-punches need to be loosed.


And I'm not even going to dignify my constant complaint about various hiatuses by putting it on the list because that applies to EVERY DAMN SHOW right now, and we already know that SHIELD is confirmed for a second season. But it stands. Complex shows require consistency to watch, and having months between episodes is dumb; it starves the audience, which does increase anticipation, but also creates annoyance and frustration, and that means any flaws will gall all the much more. But I know that that isn't really the fault of the show, so we'll just put it over here with the rest of the fire and be done with it.

I guess it looks like I have a lot of problems with this show. And I sort of do. But I also love it and wish it could be as good as it promises--as good as it's set up to be and as the series that spawned it is--as good as it obviously can be, since there are two or three episodes where it's locked-in and just shines. It's the frustration of liking it so much and then seeing all the things that could have been handled better, that could have been so much more epic or touching or consistent that makes me make lists like this.

But this has gone on way longer than I thought it would, and if you're still reading, you deserve a say in all this: What do you think about the series? Where does it bother you and what do you think are its strengths? Discuss!



Notes:
* I shouldn't use 'weird' in an article about SHIELD; there's too much i-before-e conflict in one piece!
** In Iron Man 3, Tony says he's saved her--but I don't think he said he'd cured  her. I really want her to turn out to be living with these violently explosive powers, doing her CEO job, not being a freak of nature or a villain or a superhero, but able to properly understand the problem and help others understand it. Because I mean, damn. What a wasted opportunity, otherwise.
*** In fact, I'd add him to the show. But I'd also add almost everyone I like to the show as a regular and we'd wind up with a core cast of twenty characters after a few seasons. Though, really, that would be accurate to how established Marvel teams like Avengers and X-Men handle recruiting in the comics, so...
**** Though I don't buy it because they were at the hammer in Thor 1 before Thor even got there, and he was specifically looking for it.
***** Did you see how Simmons just jumped in front of what she thought was a grenade to save Fitz, without even thinking about it?? Did you see how heartbreakingly upset Coulson was when he found Skye?? Did you see even May being afraid??? And did you see Ward worrying that May was flirting with Coulson and Coulson warning Ward about messing stuff up and Fitz being sweet and cute to Skye and Skye trying to live up to Coulson's example, and and and...??