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| Image Courtesy www.marvel.com |
The next episode up in Agents
of S.H.I.E.L.D. season one is definitely not the strongest story-wise, but
it actually does a lot to develop the main characters and their relationships. “Seeds” introduces us to one of the more
interesting plotlines for season two—Donnie Gill—and gives us a very brief
tease of his incredible powers. This
time, however, the episode takes the time to develop his character and turn him
into a very sympathetic villain. I
wouldn’t say that Donnie Gill is the Loki of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., but
his character arc does follow Loki’s:
rough childhood, dismissive father, pushed aside… at the end of the day
you find yourself just feeling sorry for the guy (but not quite as much as at
the end of “Making Friends and Influencing People” (2x03), his episode in
season 2).
Note: Retro-Reviews include potential spoilers for all of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. through season 2.
Before he was a
Macguffin in season 2, Donnie Gill, aka “Blizzard,” was a cadet at the
S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy’s Science and Technology Division. He is their youngest recruit since Fitz and
Simmons, and he is also something of a loner who doesn’t fit in with the other
recruits. However, his one “friend,”
Seth, convinces him to construct a working ice machine which they will sell to
Ian Quinn. Unfortunately, though they
can design a working prototype for their machine, the power source is unstable,
and when they increase its size it overheats and melts down.
In order to solve
their problem, they concoct an elaborate scheme to lure the most brilliant cadet
in Science Academy history back to the Academy to troubleshoot their power
source. Who is this incredible
genius? Fitz, of course. And how do they intend to lure him back to
the Academy? By nearly freezing
themselves into solid ice…? They first
use a prototype of their ice machine to freeze the academy pool, getting Seth’s
leg frozen into it. This leads Agent
Weaver, the director of the Academy, to call in Coulson’s team so Fitz and
Simmons can talk to the cadets and calm them down. During their lecture, Donnie activates a
second prototype ice machine which starts freezing him. Fortunately Fitz and Simmons manage to keep
him alive until Ward and Skye can destroy the ice machine and save his
life. This all leads to Fitz stopping by
Donnie’s room, looking at his various designs, and helping him figure out the problem
with his power source.
Donnie and Seth fix
their full-scale machine and take it to the parking garage, where they call Ian
Quinn, who asks them for a demonstration in the middle of the S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy
before flying off and leaving them there.
The boys start the device, which freezes water in the atmosphere,
creating a super storm. Donnie tries to
reverse the device and stop the storm, but it gets struck by lightning, killing
Seth and knocking Donnie back. At the
end of the episode, Donnie is on his way to the Sandbox when he discovers that
his body now has the ability to spontaneously freeze water into ice.
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| Image Courtesy www.facebook.com/AgentsofShield |
This primary plot has
a whole lot of plot holes—foremost among them the fact that they almost killed
themselves on the off chance that Fitz would come to the Academy. And they attempted to lure Fitz to the
Academy on the off chance that they would get close enough to him to be able to
show him their power source and ask for his help. And they were putting all their hope in
Fitz’s ability to solve their meltdown problem.
If any one of these things went wrong—or if Fitz and Simmons had been
unable to save Donnie’s life—their whole plan would have fallen apart.
However, the main plot
really takes second place to the character development in this episode. We learn a little more about Fitz and
Simmons: they were the popular kids at
the Academy. However, when he first
arrived, Fitz was a quiet loner who didn’t really fit in with the other cadets—similar
to Donnie Gill. We don’t get a lot more
than this at this time, though later episodes fill in some of the details of
Fitz and Simmons’ history together. I
find it interesting that in this episode we first see Fitz as being one of the
popular kids, and then at the end he reveals that he was not always so popular. How did that change?
We also learn a lot
about May and Coulson from their interactions while doing their side mission tracking
down a lead to Skye’s past. The lead
takes them to Mexico City, where they find former S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Richard
Lumley, the partner of Linda Avery, the agent who dropped Skye off at the
orphanage and was killed shortly thereafter.
Though the moment he spots May Lumley runs away, fights her, and starts
climbing the fire escape on a nearby building to get away, as soon as Coulson
uses Lola to hover up to his level and identifies himself as S.H.I.E.L.D.,
Lumley starts to relax and agrees to come in with them. Lumley explains the mission: a senior agent called in an 0-8-4 which an
entire village was destroyed protecting, and a team was sent in to get it. He and Avery were part of the back end team,
and when they lost contact with the team, they went in to find them. The whole team was dead, and the senior agent
was found bleeding out from a neck wound and clutching the 0-8-4—which, to no
one’s surprise after seeing season 2, turns out to have been Skye herself. They escape to America, and the members of
their team start getting killed. Avery
fakes a Level 8 clearance and puts Skye into the foster care system with
instructions to move her every couple of months. According to Lumley, “Wherever she goes,
death follows.” Then they agree to drop
him off somewhere along their route instead of bringing him in to S.H.I.E.L.D.
because, Coulson says, “I’m not sure S.H.I.E.L.D. is the safest place for you
right now.”
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| Image Courtesy www.facebook.com/AgentsofShield |
All of this is a lot
more interesting to the main plot than the story at the Academy. May and Coulson’s banter on their stakeout is
an interesting look into their respective characters and their history
together. Coulson calls her out on
talking so much, and she turns it back on him, calling him out for remaining
silent. He is pensive because of
everything he learned in the previous episode about the operations that brought
him back to life. He doesn’t know who to
trust, he’s afraid that they messed with more of his mind than just his
memories of Tahiti, and he wants to get rid of all the secrets. May soothes him, telling him to trust that
she would know if they had changed things like his personality because they
have known each other so long. It is
clear that Coulson relies on her a lot, and with good reason; we learn in
season 2 that he was her handler before Bahrain. In fact, of all the relationships on this
show, I think that in many respects May and Coulson have a much stronger bond
than Fitz and Simmons, even though Fitz-Simmons seems like two halves of a
single whole (in season 1). Seeing these
close relationships in action is really what gives the mistrust, betrayal, and
intrigue from season 2 all of its heart:
we see how it can work at its best in season 1, and that makes it all
the more powerful when we see that broken in season 2.
I find Coulson’s
comment that Lumley may not be safe with S.H.I.E.L.D. to be interesting. Does he suspect S.H.I.E.L.D. of some
involvement with what happened? If so,
then why? And if not, then why would he
think S.H.I.E.L.D. is unsafe? I think
that at this point Coulson might suspect that someone in S.H.I.E.L.D. fed
information to the “monsters” that killed the other agents, but I think that’s
as far as his suspicions go. It is not
until later that he realizes that the Clairvoyant is a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent (…
spoiler alert?). However, this whole
thing is a nice bit of foreshadowing, hinting that all may not be right within
S.H.I.E.L.D.
When May and Coulson
return to the team at the Academy, the first thing Coulson does it to tell Skye
everything that they had found out. We
see her face starting to change as Coulson tells her it is worse than anything
she could have imagined. We see the
tears start. We see her put her face in
her hands and start sobbing. I actually
think that scene might have been Skye’s best of the season to-date acting-wise
because we could see the raw emotion of having learned that her parents, a
Chinese village, and a S.H.I.E.L.D. team were all killed because of her. Her whole world—or rather, the fantasy
parents she had created for herself—was crashing down around her, and we could
feel it happening. However, she
surprisingly moves on to find the “bright side” of the situation relatively
quickly. As Skye stands by the Wall of
Valor at the Academy and touches Linda Avery’s name, Coulson explains that
instead of dwelling on all the death, she recognizes that S.H.I.E.L.D. had
actually been protecting her for her whole life. She belongs with S.H.I.E.L.D. more than she
has belonged with anyone since she was first taken to the orphanage. And it is this personal relationship that she
has formed with S.H.I.E.L.D. which makes all the events at the end of season 1
and then at the end of season 2 so difficult for her.
Even though the main
plot of the episode felt on the second viewing like a thinly-veiled excuse to
get the rest of the team out of the way so Coulson and May could go off on
their own, it did introduce a sympathetic “villain” in Donnie Gill. The episode gave us a lot of good character
development by furthering our understanding of some of the relationships. And we got a huge data dump on Skye’s
background, which sets the stage for season 2.
Not bad for an episode that would have fallen flat if Agent Weaver
hadn’t called Fitz and Simmons in for a school assembly!
What did you think of
“Seeds”?
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