Season 6 ep 12&13 discussion

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Hari Seldon
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Season 6 ep 12&13 discussion Aug 17, 2019 19:59:44 GMT Jemma Simmons and DoTheMath like this

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Post by Hari Seldon on Aug 17, 2019 19:59:44 GMT

Aug 17, 2019 5:26:38 GMT FreeKresge said:

Aug 9, 2019 16:16:27 GMT koos said:

This season wasn't much engineering stuff for Fitz, but to say that he is replaced by Deke or Mack is far from true. They (neither does Benson) come even close to Fitz. And that, again, confirmed also this season.

I am not sure that I made my point clearly. As you noted, there was not much engineering stuff for Fitz to do. I agree. In fact, this is my point. Without engineering stuff for him to do, why is he on the show? What role does he play? What does he do that no other character can do?

Specifically, what has Fitz done this season that Mack or Deke could not pull off? Fitz's greatest engineering achievement was probably attaching Izel's jump drive to the ship. Setting aside that it was Izel's drive, this was no more impressive than Mack attaching a jump drive to Zephyr One. If anything, Mack's achievement was more impressive as he was working in his spare time while being Director. Back when it was Viro's ship, Fitz found a clog in a pipe, repaired heat shields, and rewired controls so that everyone but those in the airlock would be blown into space. None of those things were in the service of S.H.I.E.L.D., and I have no reason to think that Mack could not have done those things.

I do not claim that Benson is the equal of Simmons or Fitz. Benson simply performed the actions that Simmons would have done if she were on earth as Deke performed the actions that Fitz would have done if he were on earth. When Simmons and Fitz arrived on earth, Benson had already been shipped of the show, allowing Simmons to resume her role. Deke still remained and performed Fitz's role.

Mack and Deke are good engineers and Deke is likely very smart too, but neither are capable of designing something new. Mack already said in S2 that he needs designs to make something and that he wished he could be as smart of Fitz. And Deke was capable to build something of a jump drive, but had no idea how it worked. Even not something as simple as how much time it would take to refuel it to jump back to the lighthouse. To be able to build something or design something is a world of a difference. And Fitz can do both. And Fitz can also create the mathematical and physical theory behind it.
In S4 they made Fitz even so smart that I thought: he is going to die because he is getting severely OP. He build the machine that turned a AIDA into a human body and also added a dozen inhuman powers without any conflict together. He also able build this machine WITHOUT ever having read the Dark Hold. AIDA had read the Dark Hold, but wasn't capable of building it herself. And she knew she needed Fitz's genius to build it. Robbie's uncle, Eli, was able to build it but had no idea what he was doing, while Fitz immediately realized that he was just stealing materials instead of creating it.

I am only talking about the sixth season. I do not deny that Fitz was a brilliant engineer in the past. In fact, if I were asked at the beginning of the season what Fitz's role would be, I would have guessed that at least part of his role would have been to be the person who came up with engineering solutions to S.H.I.E.L.D. problems. He did not do that. When S.H.I.E.L.D. needed an engineering solution the most, it was Deke, not Fitz, who came up with the solution. Right now, Fitz is looking like a has-been, as if his skills decayed in the year that he spent hiding from whomever destroyed Enoch's spaceship.

Deke did not design the jump drive, but neither did Fitz. Deke at least used the jump drive to do something useful to S.H.I.E.L.D., bring the anti-Izel wristbands to the field team.

You're entirely missing that their Fitz and Simmons's brains were, successfully, used to invent time travel. And Enoch said that if anyone can solve the mysteries of time travel than it is Leopold Fitz. And Jemma confirmed this. Time travel, so difficult that, a very high advanced race like the Chronicoms can't solve it. You can be save that Fitz upgraded the jump drive and no-one else. Fitz can solve the mystery, he can build the theory around it, he can design a machine for it and he can build it all by himself.

We do not know for certain how the Chronicoms were able to learn time travel, but gathering information from Fitz and Simmons's minds is the most likely explanation. In any case, are you saying that Fitz's greatest accomplishment was giving Chronicoms the means to take out S.H.I.E.L.D.? I do not think that he wants that on his résumé.

Chronicoms are advanced to the extent that they are advanced technology, but how advanced is the Chronicom society apart from the society that built them? They did not build their warships; they stole them. Did they create the mind device, or did they steal that too? Do they have any scientists in any field harder than anthropology?

In the paragraph after the one you quoted, I noted that I want to believe that Fitz performed great engineering feats off screen. The problem is that it was off screen. We do not know if Fitz came up with the solutions himself or if he simply followed Enoch's instructions. I hope it is the former, but we do not know yet.

To summarize in episode 6 of this season by Jemma's words about Fitz in their academy period "that genius is a tick away from madness". And no way that either Deke or Mack is ever going to replace him.

Mack is busy as Director, so he will not replace Fitz. I also hope that Deke does not replace Fitz because Iain De Caestecker is a better actor and because Fitz is a more compelling character. However, I still see nothing in the sixth season to show that S.H.I.E.L.D. would be better off with Fitz than with Deke, whereas there is evidence that they would be better off with Deke. When S.H.I.E.L.D. needed an engineering solution the most, it was Deke who came up with the solution.

What about all the repairs he did to the alien ship he was on - the one where he was more valuable than the rest of the crew put together? Then he saved that crew by reversing the decompression protocol in a negligible amount of time. Not exactly engineering, but noteworthy that his work on the alien ship was done while speaking an alien language.

FreeKresge
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Season 6 ep 12&13 discussion Aug 18, 2019 5:18:17 GMT Jemma Simmons likes this

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Post by FreeKresge on Aug 18, 2019 5:18:17 GMT

Aug 17, 2019 19:54:02 GMT Hari Seldon said:

Aug 17, 2019 5:30:21 GMT FreeKresge said:

One thing I noticed is that Simmons was very careful not to give away where she got the idea to resurrect Coulson as an LMD.

[emphasis added]

I am glad that she did not reveal her source. I have enough to deal with. I do not need a bunch of Chronicoms pestering me.

She didn't?

I checked the transcript of the episode, and I saw no mention of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Exile or of any particular poster here. However, I have thought a bit more about this. I assumed that she got the idea directly from here, as we all know that Jemma Simmons is active on this site, but it is possible that Enoch is also a fan of this site. Perhaps he is one of the guests or, maybe, he is also an active contributor but hides his identity with a user name. He may have gotten the idea from here and passed it on to Simmons. In any case, if they revealed that they got the idea from me, I would have received a visit from some pesky Chronicoms by now.

Aug 17, 2019 19:59:44 GMT Hari Seldon said:

The problem with big long rants is that details get lost in the jumble. I did mention his repairs on Viro's ship in my second paragraph. Fitz was better than the rest of Viro's crew, but Deke, Mack, and random lab extras #1, #3, and #4 would have been as well. It was clear that Viro did not pay well and treated his employees very poorly. I doubt that any competent engineer would work for him. Also, none of those actions were in the service of S.H.I.E.L.D. This is not a show about a random tyrannical ship captain. My point, which I concede is pretty well hidden among all the other stuff, is that Fitz's role on the show had been to come up with engineering solutions for the team. If Deke comes up with the solutions for the team, what is Fitz's role?

FreeKresge
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Season 6 ep 12&13 discussion Aug 19, 2019 4:32:46 GMT Jemma Simmons likes this

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Post by FreeKresge on Aug 19, 2019 4:32:46 GMT

Aug 9, 2019 19:24:54 GMT ayanami said:

Thought I'd add my own 2 cents after all.

Apologies for the rant!

I would be a bit of a hypocrite if I complained about long opinionated posts.

At this point I’d really like to talk about the final two episodes of the season of one of my all-time favourite shows, which were by no means perfect, and yet had everything one could wish for in a finale. They were exciting, dramatic, heart-breaking and downright cruel at times, but also hopeful and triumphant in other aspects, with a cliffhanger of what might come next, which left me craving more.

However, since all that is regarding Swamp Thing, which I saw a day earlier, I will postpone a full analysis on that topic for my next post in the appropriate thread. Instead, I’m just gonna talk about the utter mess that was the season finale (or really the whole season) of Agents of SHIELD.

Honestly , I don’t even know where to begin to complain. I mean, it’s not that the show is outright bad, even at this point. If it were, I would either quit or just finish the rest of the episodes while treating it as a guilty pleasure. But it’s not. 90% of what goes into the show’s production is still amazing. They have good to great actors all around, with some outstanding talents like Iain De Caestecker elevating the whole cast. They have mostly top notch special effects, that continue to deliver, even when you can tell that the budget isn’t quite what it was in the earlier seasons anymore. Plus a team of set designers, composers, make-up artists, etc. that can easily keep up with anything network TV has to offer these days.

I have not seen Swamp Thing, so I cannot judge. I completely agree with you on the rest of what you said.

Then, however, there are the writers. On a good day, those guys and gals have proven time and again that they are capable of amazing things, yet apparently these days are fewer and further in between as time progresses. I’ve repeatedly seen the pledge to “trust the writers” here on this site, and for a while there I felt the same, but recently I’ve begun to wonder why exactly. I mean, we’re talking about the same people here, who built Agent Davis up from a glorified extra to an actual team member over the course of several seasons, only to then give him one of the stupidest red shirt deaths I’ve ever seen! Not just that, but they also had pretty much the entire team forget about it two seconds later.

I will make a confession. Whenever I see someone say, "Trust the writers," I (figuratively) keep my mouth shut, but I roll my eyes. I view the writers as being the obstacle that has kept this show from achieving its full potential given the talent of the cast and the crew. A comic-book show on broadcast television probably had zero chance of winning major awards, but, with writing as good as the acting and the rest, the show could at least provoke critics into complaining about how little recognition this show gets.

What makes this even more frustrating is that the writers are not bad. They have, at times, done great work. I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to describe them. Here is the best that I can come up with. First, they can be lazy. They see where they want to go and will often go there in the easiest way possible even if it means ignoring things like prior characterization or common sense. Second, they have a short attention span. They build up to a moment and then forget about the moment immediately after.

Regarding Davis, I do not have a problem with killing him off. This needs to happen occasionally in order to create a sense that the characters are in peril. My problem is having all the characters but Piper seem not to care afterward. Daisy and Simmons spent a good chunk of the previous year with Davis. Both should have been affected by his death. Instead, the writers built up to the moment of his death and then forgot about this moment immediately afterward.

There is one thing that I have been meaning to say about Davis's death, so I might as well bring it up here. By any objective standard, Davis was not a major character. He ranks 37^th in screen time (scroll about 20% down the page) according to the person who measures that. According to my analysis of character dialogue, he ranks 44^th in dialogue (scroll about 80% down the page). In both of these measures, he falls a bit below Ruby Hale.

Despite this, you are far from the only one who was upset at Davis's death. As you noted above, this cast is fill with good to great actors. I believe that Maximilian Osinski is a major reason why we care so much about a character that we have seen for only a little more than a half hour. Why do we care less about Ruby Hale's death? If I believed that if one has nothing nice to say, then one should say nothing at all; my view of Dove Cameron's acting is...

Then there’s the disjointed mess of the finale, with the Chromicon attack coinciding with Izel trying to enslave the world, yet neither of both parties giving a damn about each other. How’s that for logic? Also, how many times in the past have we heard any SHIELD agent making a reference to “SHIELD protocols”, while making an escape from an attacking enemy? I’m gonna lean myself out the window here and just go ahead with ZERO. They said that zero times. Unless of course said attackers had access to some SHIELD agents’ minds earlier. In that case, everyone will suddenly start to announce that what they’re doing right now is according to said SHIELD protocols. Because, you know, why should this show’s writing include any subtleties? I’m sure the viewers much rather prefer to be hit over the head with what’s going on.

I found a couple of references to S.H.I.E.L.D. protocols during hostile actions. One was after the quinjet crashed in "The Patriot" when Coulson said, "Whoever came after us anticipated the protocols, knew we'd fly to safety." Also, during the Real S.H.I.E.L.D. coup, May said, "They know all of our protocols. We handed Mack the schematics to our base." (Remember when Mack was an antagonist?) In other words, the characters refer to opponents knowing S.H.I.E.L.D. protocols in emergency situations about once every even-numbered season.

This is probably BS, but I have a theory about the sixth season. When the fifth season was completed, the writers thought that there would not be a sixth season, but they were not certain. Just in case, they had an idea for a sixth season in their minds. The problem was that the sixth season in their minds was a 22-episode season with two or three pods. When they received a renewal, but only for 13 episodes, they decided to stretch the first pod into the 13 episodes and skip the other pods. They reserved most of the substance for the end of the season, so the first half of the season dragged. At some point during the season, the writers learned that ABC wanted a seventh season. They then had to squeeze the setup for at least one more pod into the end of the sixth season, which led to awkward jumping between Chronicoms and Izel in the finale.

In my first post on this thread, I noted that the Chronicoms were attacking S.H.I.E.L.D. just as S.H.I.E.L.D. was battling the individuals responsible for the destruction of Chronyca-2.

Speaking of subtleties, or any lack thereof: I just HATE what they’ve done to Deke this season. I really cared about him so much last year and was accordingly psyched to hear that they’d made him a regular. But, honestly, by now I kinda wished they hadn’t. Not only has he degraded even further into the comic relief, but it seems as if everything around him just stops making sense.

I was not enamored with Deke even in the fifth season. I would have been happy if, in the sixth season, he were in just a single episode just to show that he did not simply disappear out of existence.

Fitz was able to figure out a way to stop Carl Creel back when he had severe brain damage, yet doesn’t realise that the way to go after Izel and to block her powers is with sonic frequencies? Huh, who would have thought...

SPOILER: Click to show

Should have prepared the right spells!

I think that it is safe to say that this bugs me a lot as well. If Fitz had been a valuable S.H.I.E.L.D. agent across the season, having one slip would not be an issue. Nobody is perfect. However, due to the search for Fitz arc dragging out for 2/3 of the season, this was about Fitz's only opportunity to show his worth to S.H.I.E.L.D. The writers instead decided to give this lone moment of glory to another character.

Deke being able to bring his whole posse into the secret base without anyone noticing anything. Just... I have no words anymore. This would be embarrassing to happen on The Flash, but on AoS? You know, maybe it IS time for this show to die...

Lazy writers taking the quickest route without bothering to think about common sense.

So, according to his rant, Deke is apparently still crazy about Skye, and yet, just a few episodes ago when they were on that truck with the bomb, staring certain death in the face, he’d rather focus on the chick he met two seconds ago than so much as glance at Skye. For real?

I think that what the writers were trying to show is that Deke has given up on any possibility that Daisy would be interested in him. Instead, he has taken after his grandmother and loved the one he was with.

Oh, speaking of Snowflake, anyone filed an M.I.A. report yet? You know, if she’s gone, I’m gonna take that flatscreen TV from her room. Just saying.

I understand that the budget probably did not allow for the actress to appear in the final, but a line of dialogue on her fate would have been nice.

Speaking of not-Coulson. I mean, I know how that guy came to be. The energy of the destroyed monoliths came into contact with the real one back in S5, creating a copy that then ended up on some other planet out in the universe. Okay. But what about Flint then? First of all, how is he connected to Mack and Yo-Yo’s deepest fears? I mean, sure, they cared about him, but at the end of the day he was some kid in the future who they haven’t seen in over a year. So what gives? And also, how can he be a real person if he is only based on Mack’s and Yo-Yo’s memories? If he came from them, can he really know anything that those two don’t? Seems like a stretch to me.

My guess was that Izel assumed that Mack and Elena feared that the monoliths would return. This fear would cause the monoliths to manifest themselves. Instead of fearing the return of the monoliths, either Mack or Elena feared that the person with the capability of reforming the monoliths would appear.

Right now, we only have Mack and Elena's word that Flint is real. I do not know if they would know, nor do I understand what they mean by being "real." For the moment, I am assuming that this Flint is not the same as the Flint we saw in the fifth season. I will continue to do so unless this Flint shows knowledge that neither Mack nor Elena would have but can be confirmed by someone else, presumably Deke.

All in all, I think this is probably the weakest season of the show to date with a finale that’s even worse than that of S3. Season 5, especially 5b wasn’t all that great, either, but at least they really redeemed themselves with a kick-ass finale. This time, not so much.

Right now, I think that I will rate the sixth season ahead of the first two seasons, mostly because the first two seasons did not have an episode as good as "Inescapable." The third, fourth, and fifth seasons rank above the sixth season.

No matter what happens in the seventh season, I will miss the characters after the season ends. However, if the seventh season is not a significant improvement over the sixth season, a large part of me will be glad that there will not be an eighth season.

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Jemma Simmons: Right? I always think the same thing when I see a movie that was adapted from source material but has been changed so much that it's unrecognizable. Nov 24, 2024 23:08:46 GMT

ayanami: I gotta admit that "World War Z" is an incredibly cool name, but still, seems a bit pricey if you're just gonna ignore the whole rest of the novel.

Nov 24, 2024 23:10:42 GMT

Jemma Simmons: Exactly!

Nov 24, 2024 23:11:32 GMT

ayanami: The book sounds really cool btw. It's about one guy 10 years after the zombie outbreak gathering different perspectives from a bunch of survivors, so you have like a dozen different stories/settings in the novel. Plus, the author is actually Mel Brooks'... Nov 24, 2024 23:12:58 GMT

ayanami: ...son and apparently there's an audio book version of the novel featuring a bunch of Hollywood talents! (Gotta have connections in life!

) Nov 24, 2024 23:13:41 GMT

Jemma Simmons: What?! That's wild! I'll have to check into it! Nov 24, 2024 23:14:18 GMT

Jemma Simmons: Sounds way more interesting than the movie, anyway! Nov 24, 2024 23:14:32 GMT

Jemma Simmons: Oh, just FYI, next weekend is a holiday weekend here, so I won't be able to be around.

Nov 24, 2024 23:15:41 GMT

ayanami: Absolutely! Which makes it even more bewildering that they went with such a lame clichéd Hollywood story instead. Which, btw, is actually getting a sequel next year. Who'd have thunk it?! Nov 24, 2024 23:17:08 GMT

ayanami: Ah, alright, thanks for the heads up. Nov 24, 2024 23:18:07 GMT

Jemma Simmons: Yeah, that's something I've noticed lately too. Why the sudden need for sequels for 20-30 year old movies? Most of the time they're crap and I'd definitely rather see new material. Nov 24, 2024 23:20:11 GMT

ayanami: I think I'm gotta call it a night now, though. I've got kind of an early morning coming up tomorrow and it's getting late over here. Nov 24, 2024 23:20:18 GMT

Jemma Simmons: Alrighty! You have a good couple of weeks then!

I'll be spending next weekend with some family I like and trying to avoid any remotely controversial conversations with others that I spend the rest of the year avoiding

Nov 24, 2024 23:21:10 GMT

ayanami: Tbf, World War Z is "only" from 2013, but yeah, I get your drift. Answer: Hollywood producers are all a bunch of chicken sh*ts, who only want to invest money into stuff with a recognisable name and a good track record, so only sequels, prequels and reboots Nov 24, 2024 23:22:41 GMT

ayanami: From now until eternity!

Nov 24, 2024 23:22:53 GMT

Jemma Simmons: Heh, yeah that sounds about right! Nov 24, 2024 23:23:16 GMT

Jemma Simmons: I will make an exception for the new Gladiator movie. I've heard it's actually pretty good! Nov 24, 2024 23:23:33 GMT

ayanami: Yeah, I hope you have a fun few weeks and a nice family time. And don't choke on the turkey! I'll see you around, bosslady!

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Jemma Simmons:

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