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| Image Courtesy www.marvel.com |
One thing we need to
get out of the way up front with this review:
“The Well” (1x08) is the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. crossover with Thor:
The Dark World. And if you look at
it as just being a movie tie-in, it stinks.
I mean, I really do not like how it crosses over with Thor: The Dark
World. However, if you leave out the
first three minutes or so, it’s actually not a terrible episode.
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| Image Courtesy www.hollywoodreporter.com |
The episode opens like
a Thor movie: Simmons (standing
in for Odin) gives a voiceover while we watch footage from Asgard and from the
two major Asgardian visits to Earth.
This culminates with the team cleaning up the wreckage from Thor’s
battle with Malekith and the Dark Elves.
While doing so, they banter about the battle and the existence of Asgard
and Asgardians. The funniest part of the
whole scene is Coulson’s line that “It would be nice if, for once, Thor and his
people sent down the god of cleaning-up-after-yourself.” Beyond that, I wasn’t too thrilled with this
tie-in—certainly not when you compare it to their tie-ins with Captain
America: The Winter Soldier and Avengers: Age of Ultron, and even
more when you compare it to “Yes Men” (1x15), which is a much better tie-in
with Thor: The Dark World.
Mercifully, the whole episode is not the S.H.I.E.L.D. team taking out
Thor’s trash.
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| Image Courtesy marvel.wikia.com |
The rest of the
episode is much more interesting: a
“Norse Paganist Cult” is searching for the pieces of the mythological Berzerker
Staff, an Asgardian weapon from over a thousand years ago. The two leaders of the Cult, Jakob and Petra,
discover a tree in a Norwegian park which seems to match up with a rhyme they
found in an ancient myth. Jakob cuts the
tree down, goes partway up it, and cuts out a section, revealing a piece of the
Berzerker Staff. When his girlfriend
Petra touches the staff, the runes carved into it start to glow, and she starts
shaking. Finally she releases it and
lets out a feral cry before giving a park ranger an open-palmed punch and
sending him flying. The S.H.I.E.L.D.
teams responds to investigate, scans the residue in the tree, and discovers
that the staff is Asgardian. Fitz
manages to print off a 3D model of half of the staff piece, which the team
brings to an expert on Norse mythology whom Coulson had consulted previously
when they first discovered Thor’s hammer.
The expert, Professor Randolph at the university in Seville, explains to
them the “Legend of the Warrior in the Berzerker Army,” a warrior who came to
earth wielding a weapon of immense power (the Berzerker Staff) with his
army. When the army left, however, he
stayed behind because he had fallen in love with life on Earth. According to the legend, he broke the Staff
into 3 pieces and hid them. He suggests
checking along Viking raid routes. This
sends Coulson and his team searching for the other pieces, the first of which
they suspect might be in Seville, Spain, under a church which goes back to the
time of the Romans. Ward and Skye enter
the catacombs under the church to look, where Ward runs into Randolph himself,
who is carrying the staff. Ward
accidentally touches the staff piece, which sends him reeling while Randolph
escapes—only to be caught by the Paganists, who take the Staff piece before
Coulson finds him. I really like this
episode premise as well as the character of the Professor. The Paganist villains are rather shallow, but
they aren’t the focus of the episode; that is the Professor.
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| Image Courtesy www.facebook.com/AgentsofShield |
This episode also does
a good job of developing Ward’s character.
After touching the Staff piece, he starts having uncontrollable
rage-fueled outbursts. The best
descriptor would be that he is suffering from ‘roid rage as a consequence of an
adrenaline spike caused by the Staff.
While Simmons is trying to test him, he lashes out at Skye and Simmons
before turning on Fitz and calling him out as not a strong enough man to
protect the team and save Simmons. He
leaves the rest of the team shaken when he goes off to try working out his rage
on the punching bag. While beating up
the bag, Ward suffers repeated flashbacks to his little brother at the bottom
of a well while he is at the top, helpless to save him. He next goes to Coulson and tells him that he
believes himself to be compromised by what happened with the Staff. Coulson, however, says that because Ward told
him, he trusts him to keep it together.
Coulson meanwhile had
been interrogating Randolph to find out what he knows about the Berzerker
Staff. Randolph keeps spinning a tale of
wanting to be the first to study it and prove that the Berzerkers were once on
Earth, but Coulson doesn’t buy it.
Coulson tells him that he’s had previous experience with aliens, but
that it didn’t work out well, to which Randolph’s reaction is a mixture of
surprise and realization. In the end,
Coulson chooses to set Ward loose on Randolph and see what happens. Ward attempts to stab him to get answers, but
Randolph catches the knife barehanded and bends it into an unusable clump, at
which point Coulson walks in with a knowing grin. I suppose Randolph couldn’t possibly have
expected to keep his secret from someone like Coulson who has spent time with
Asgardians. The rest of the team is
watching on the monitor—leading to an interesting moment when Simmons excitedly
talks about cutting Randolph open a little to take some tissue and fluid
samples (creepy…). Coulson and Ward push
him to explain his story, which is actually pretty funny. Eventually, Coulson coerces Randolph into
revealing the location of the final Staff piece by threatening to reveal his
identity to Thor himself. I can imagine
that Thor wouldn’t take too kindly to learning what Randolph had
done—particularly letting the Berzerker Staff fall into the hands of evil
mortals who want to use the Staff against the Asgardians themselves!
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| Image Courtesy marvel.wikia.com |
Based on Randolph’s
intel, the team goes to an Irish monastery, where he shows them a sacred Bible
which has a picture of him as a saint.
He brings them to the box where he placed the final Staff piece, but
Jakob arrives and attacks them with the final staff piece, stabbing Randolph in
the chest and proclaiming that “to a defeat a god, you must become one.” Ward grabs the Staff piece in Randolph’s
chest, uses it to give himself super strength, grabs Jakob and sends them both
tumbling over the balcony railing. He
defeats Jakob followed by a dozen of his followers, before collapsing to the
floor, exhausted. When Petra comes in
with a couple more men, Ward resignedly starts to get up, but May tells him to
stay down while she takes care of Petra.
May grabs 2 pieces of the Staff, defeats Petra, puts the Staff back
together, and knocks Petra across the room.
The fight scene wasn’t the most impressive of the series; most of Ward’s
fight was interspersed with his flashbacks to the eponymous “Well.” May’s fight with Petra was painfully
fast. But I liked the way that they used
the “Well” to flesh out Ward’s back story and how he got to be the way he
is. After seeing the horror in his past,
I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that he turned out the way he did.
While Ward and May
dispatch the Paganists, Fitz, Simmons, and Coulson save Randolph’s life. Coulson reaches into his wound and physically
holds his heart together to give his body’s natural healing abilities a chance
to patch him back up. I’m pretty sure
that scene was the most graphic of the season, though most of season 2 puts it
to shame.
The episode ends with
Ward sitting at the bar and telling Skye a little about his Staff-induced
visions. However, he leaves her there
and instead goes upstairs to his room, where he makes a detour to May’s room. At the time I thought that Ward hooking up
with May was something completely unexpected, especially after all the hints
they’d been dropping of Ward’s attraction to Skye. However, after the fact I think it makes a
lot more sense. He tells Raina later on
that he did it to give himself some leverage over May, who was the greatest
potential threat to his mission. And
now, his fling with May has become a major driving factor for both of their
characters, driving her to try to kill him every chance she gets (“Hell hath no
fury…”) and driving him to try to take her out to prevent her from killing
him—which led directly to Kara’s death in “S.O.S.” (2x21-22).
The biggest shocker of
the episode may have been Coulson’s dream at the end of himself waking up on a
massage table in Tahiti. The masseuse
tells him that “It’s a magical place,” and he immediately wakes up in a cold
sweat. At this point Coulson’s questions
about Tahiti are at fever pitch, but they aren’t going to be answered for
another 3 episodes.
This was not my
favorite episode, especially the opening.
However, the rest of the episode is pretty interesting and introduces us
to a character that I really want them to explore further in Professor
Randolph. I wonder if Coulson might
coerce Randolph out of retirement to join Skye’s “Secret Warriors” team in
season 3. Doubtful, but it’s always a
possibility. The other option is for him
to reappear in season 5 when Thor: Ragnarok comes out.
What did you think of
this episode and its tie-in with Thor: The Dark World? Do you want to see Professor Randolph again?
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