This week’s episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. titled ‘Eye Spy’ could potentially be the best one yet. It shows that it’s improving, relying less on its Avengers counterpart and becoming something of its own show.
This week’s episode began with an intriguing idea. A group of red masked men, all with briefcases, going through the Stockholm subway. They seem suspicious and they obviously stand out. Akela, the main ‘problem of the week’, steals from them. The beginning of the episode brings intrigue and the promise of a story that will grab your attention. Though the episode manages this for the first part, subsequent parts fail to reach these expectations and it once again becomes an average story.
The plot of this week’s episode was slightly more complicated than we’ve seen in previous weeks. The jewel heist leads to Akela, a rogue member of SHIELD that Agent Coulson himself personally trained, leading to an eye operation and Agent Ward going on a mission to finish the mission to find out what exactly this monitor wanted from Akela.
The masked men seem to get forgotten about after the first 15 or so minutes which might have been a bit of missed opportunity. The show could have done so much with them and they could have meant so much more than a diversion: they could have been members of some organisation, a group out to destroy the world, anything could have been done with them and yet they were underused.
One thing brushed over and quickly never explained was Akela’s attempt at killing Skye, Fitz and Simmons in their van: Did the person monitoring Akela know that they were watching her? Was it an attempt by Akela to make it look like she’d killed them to satisfy her monitor that they were dead and no longer looking for her? Quite sadly, this is probably something we’ll never find out.
There were a few hints dropped towards the end that this could be an over arching plot line and could potentially be brought back later in the series with the episode not really having a clear conclusion as to who the real person monitoring all these people were. There was also another hint dropped by Akela about Coulson that has changed since New York. This is a running theme since the beginning of the series and we do not truly know the reasons behind Coulson’s return, or how they were even able to save him.
We get to see more of the team members acting more and more like a team with less forced banter and more character development. This is particularly true with Agent Ward whom we see ordered to ‘seduce’ a male security guard. We see him more of a character needing to be developed rather than a textbook agent and someone who typically only follows the rules. There was a moment in the van between Skye, Fitz and Simmons that showed to us that Skye fit in well with the other two. That she was, perhaps, the missing part of their relationship. The person to keep them grounded.
As a whole, the episode was enjoyable but not exactly thought provoking. Keeping in mind that it is Friday night television, it did well. As the series goes on, we can get a sense of an overlying plot with Skye and Coulson, on their back stories and what it will lead them to do in the future so lets just sit back and watch.
