Author Topic: Agents of SHIELD season 3 - Meet Quake  (Read 28418 times)

Tahquitz

  • Titan Staff
  • Elite Boss
  • ****
  • Posts: 1,859
Re: Agents of SHIELD season 3 - Meet Quake
« Reply #100 on: May 20, 2016, 01:48:15 AM »
I spent the last 48 hours avoiding this thread because I couldn't watch it until now. :O
"Work is love made visible." -- Khalil Gibran

doc7924

  • Elite Boss
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,315
Re: Agents of SHIELD season 3 - Meet Quake
« Reply #101 on: May 21, 2016, 12:01:21 AM »
Spoiler for Hidden:
I actually liked that at the end Lincoln and Hive didn't have some moot fight.  Hive genuinely did care about Inhumans in his own way and he saw no reason to feel any animosity towards Lincoln when it had no purpose.  In fact, Hive seemed to actually admire the fact that Lincoln was willing to sacrifice himself for SHIELD.  And Lincoln seemed to know that Hive was sincere, even if evil, and he understood on some level that Hive was just trying to fulfill his purpose, as Lincoln believed all Inhumans have a purpose.  It felt to me like both of them went out with dignity.

I did like that a lot. He knew it was over and accepted it.

But until I see a body................

Tahquitz

  • Titan Staff
  • Elite Boss
  • ****
  • Posts: 1,859
Re: Agents of SHIELD season 3 - Meet Quake
« Reply #102 on: May 22, 2016, 07:10:32 PM »
Spoiler for Hidden:
I did like that a lot. He knew it was over and accepted it.

But until I see a body................

Warhead in space.  But I know what you mean, Season 4's cliffhanger might have a similar endtag: flash back a year ago as a Hive infected meteorite crashlands in some Inuit village as a Inhuman stops his dogsled and picks it up...  Son of a b--

Although I suspect Brett Dalton will have some recurring appearances past this point, he showed some depth this season.  I was impressed.  Or, he may not leave at all, particularly the reveal at the endtag with AIDA and LMDs on deck: additional "Hydra sleeper cell" busting is possible.  I doubt they would have Ward back 100% without the Hive/Hydra undertones.

Detractors of Agents of C.H.L.O.E. will probably keep hating on Quake, but the insinuation that Quake left SHIELD (not necessarily true: double agent?) may have her potentially still stuck as our Audience Advocate (They are right in that the focus of the last two seasons was mostly on her story) or this may take the focus away from her as B-Plot material to bring others into the foreground. 

The question is when the time jump occurs: at the beginning, midpoint, or end of Season 3.  They could be playing it like the Fallen Agent foreshadow scene that we got when Daisy got the vision of the quinjet moments before exploding.  We might see the steps inbetween.  Why Coulson stepped down... Why Daisy is being pursued... And possibly if Inhumans decide to thumb their noses at the law to cause SHIELD to rein them in (is Daisy an isolated issue, or is it more X-Men like and Inhumans want their own sovereignty?)

And let's not forget since LMDs were exposed... were the Koenig brothers a beta form of it?  Or just identical brothers who all aspired to work in SHIELD at once, which would be really weird?
« Last Edit: May 22, 2016, 07:37:48 PM by Tahquitz »
"Work is love made visible." -- Khalil Gibran

Vee

  • Elite Boss
  • *****
  • Posts: 2,376
Re: Agents of SHIELD season 3 - Meet Quake
« Reply #103 on: June 08, 2016, 10:29:18 AM »
Kinda been wondering for a while if the AoS writers have read Earth-X.  Now I'm really wondering.

Just finished reading all of those. So insanely good (well, Earth X anyway. the others are great too, but have their ups and downs) that I have trouble believing anyone who'd read Earth-X could in good conscience write anything remotely like AoS in the same universe.

Earth X is easily the best thing I've read from Marvel, and given that Kingdom Come is the best DCU thing I've read so far, gotta give a serious hat tip to Alex Ross.

Arcana

  • Sultaness of Stats
  • Elite Boss
  • *****
  • Posts: 3,672
Re: Agents of SHIELD season 3 - Meet Quake
« Reply #104 on: June 08, 2016, 10:13:04 PM »
Just finished reading all of those. So insanely good (well, Earth X anyway. the others are great too, but have their ups and downs) that I have trouble believing anyone who'd read Earth-X could in good conscience write anything remotely like AoS in the same universe.

In general there isn't much resemblance between the two settings of course, but there were a couple of ideas that resonated for me.  The notion that the inhumans/mutants were an engineered weapons system, and in particular the notion that some of them have specific roles: Hive verses the Skull for example.

Vee

  • Elite Boss
  • *****
  • Posts: 2,376
Re: Agents of SHIELD season 3 - Meet Quake
« Reply #105 on: June 09, 2016, 09:00:17 AM »
Yeah the engineering of specific roles is an odd notion, especially since the MCU doesn't have Supremor (yet). It makes sense in both cases to talk about engineering the potential for super powers, and in AoS's case it makes sense to talk about Hive being specifically engineered to join all the powers together since he's so old, but what sort of engineering would we be talking about if we have people being engineered to have specific powers activated by a catalyst(s) over thousands of years? The Inhumans have the 'each of us has a purpose' mantra, but that really seems to be an article of faith on their part, especially since if that were true then a ton of them would just have the purpose of getting killed by Lash.

spoiler tagging the following for those who haven't read Earth X or don't care.

Spoiler for Hidden:
There's the sense in Earth X of Skull having the specific purpose of being able to bring the powers together, but that's from Uatu's point of view that the specific players are morally neutral but inescapably teleological. He sees the Skull as being a necessary step to protecting the earth only because of his belief that everything is part of the plan and necessary to it, despite the randomness of the mutating seed and the fact that the Celestial's 'plan' has started too early. If anything, the Skull is counterproductive to the 'plan', both because his birth killed off the telepaths who actually could have united the earth against threat (as Xavier had actually done, uniting the entire earth to foil an invasion long before) but also because his selfishness and lack of imagination ultimately helped lead to the destruction of the Celestial seed. Uatu can see that individual actions are morally neutral vis a vis the Celestial purpose, but doesn't see that they're also necessarily teleologically neutral thanks to the randomness of the means the Celestials set up to protect the earth. He has an odd faith in the plan similar to the AoS Inhumans, but theirs is a faith in the absence of evidence. Uatu has some pretty damning counter-evidence - knowledge of the failed attempts with the Eternals and Deviants on Earth, not to mention all the failures on planets destroyed by Galactus, yet still somehow believes the Celestial plan to be infallible so long as it's allowed to play out.

Arcana

  • Sultaness of Stats
  • Elite Boss
  • *****
  • Posts: 3,672
Re: Agents of SHIELD season 3 - Meet Quake
« Reply #106 on: June 09, 2016, 06:25:34 PM »
spoiler tagging the following for those who haven't read Earth X or don't care.

Spoiler for Hidden:
There's the sense in Earth X of Skull having the specific purpose of being able to bring the powers together, but that's from Uatu's point of view that the specific players are morally neutral but inescapably teleological. He sees the Skull as being a necessary step to protecting the earth only because of his belief that everything is part of the plan and necessary to it, despite the randomness of the mutating seed and the fact that the Celestial's 'plan' has started too early. If anything, the Skull is counterproductive to the 'plan', both because his birth killed off the telepaths who actually could have united the earth against threat (as Xavier had actually done, uniting the entire earth to foil an invasion long before) but also because his selfishness and lack of imagination ultimately helped lead to the destruction of the Celestial seed. Uatu can see that individual actions are morally neutral vis a vis the Celestial purpose, but doesn't see that they're also necessarily teleologically neutral thanks to the randomness of the means the Celestials set up to protect the earth. He has an odd faith in the plan similar to the AoS Inhumans, but theirs is a faith in the absence of evidence. Uatu has some pretty damning counter-evidence - knowledge of the failed attempts with the Eternals and Deviants on Earth, not to mention all the failures on planets destroyed by Galactus, yet still somehow believes the Celestial plan to be infallible so long as it's allowed to play out.

Spoiler for Hidden:
I don't think its purely a matter of faith that Uatu talks about how mutants evolve, since he has knowledge about how they ultimately evolve - i.e. cosmic cubes.  I think mutations are random in general, but they have guiding principles like birds flying in flocks.  The typical mutation might be random, but programmed into the mutant gene are the command safeguards.  The more powerful mutants become the more controllable they become.  I think the Skull is one level of that control: as mutant-kind becomes more commonplace and more powerful it encourages the birth of a being like the Skull.  You could even argue that the Skull was just the ultimate expression of the psionic control mutation: the more mutants there are, the more powerful they are, the more the gene is encouraged to express increasingly more powerful psychics.  At a critical threshold a psychic is born that is so powerful it wipes out all the other psychics that are competition for it, and becomes the primary control mechanism for the mutants.

The Skull is the first in a line of Celestial safeguards.  After the Skull, if mutants continue to evolve into more powerful forms they begin to get control over their own selves, then they evolve into manipulating reality, but they also become susceptible to suggestion which controls their forms and personalities i.e. the Asgardians.  Finally, they gain ultimate control over reality but completely lose their own personalities, becoming cosmic cubes.

In that sense, the Skull has a purpose, but not literally every single mutant has a purpose in the grand scheme, except insofar as the grand purpose requires mutants in general.  It is possible that the Inhumans in AoS have a similar purpose: there is a grand scheme, but how detailed that grand scheme is and where every single inhuman belongs in that scheme is more a matter of perspective.  The Kree certainly engineered Hive.  But they may have been more general in their engineering of the Inhuman gene.  It is possible the Inhuman gene has feedback loops in it that express certain features based on the environment.  Many species have genetic codes that alter the probability of an embryo becoming male or female based on the current populations.  You could say that males and females have a purpose and the gene tries to fulfill that purpose (by balancing them so that breeding the next generation is easier).  In that sense, it is possible that every Inhuman has a purpose that the Inhuman gene itself is trying to express, but not even the Kree would necessarily know what that purpose was for each and every Inhuman born.