The Asset: Recap

Credit: ABC

Recap and review of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – Season 1 Episode 3 – The Asset:

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. continues the process of building its characters and its world, even providing incremental progress in what is likely to be an arc that lasts at least half the season: with each passing episode, it seems more apparent that Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) at least suspects that Skye (Chloe Bennet) has continued ties to the Rising Tide organization, and this question of loyalty and ambiguous allegiance informs much of Skye’s growth as both a character and agent. Can she be trusted? Is she even qualified for what they’re asking of her? “The Asset” is very much Skye’s episode, and Chloe Bennet does a remarkable job with the material, which itself is likely to be some of the more exciting TV on a major network this week.

Credit: ABC

“The Asset” in question this week is scientist Franklin Hall (Ian Hart), who’s been abducted by Ian Quinn (David Conrad), an industrialist with lofty ambitions. Quinn is looking to use Hall to harness the gravitonium energy he’s acquired and assembled into a 12-foot machine. Mere inches of the element are enough to lift a semi, so it’s unlikely that allowing a ruthless man like Quinn to have access to such a large amount of gravitonium will end well for anybody. To this end, S.H.I.E.L.D. is dispatched to perform a rescue mission — a task in which Agents Fitz and Simmons are particularly invested, since Hall is their former mentor. However, the best chance they have of infiltrating Quinn’s compound is via Skye, whose hacking reputation with the Rising Tide has just nabbed her an invitation to the shady businessman’s party. All systems are go, but there’s one problem: Skye isn’t exactly combat-ready.

Ward (Brett Dalton) is particularly leery of sending Skye out there on her own, feeling she isn’t fully committed to being an agent. He also has enduring suspicions about her possible continued affiliation with the Rising Tide, a consideration Coulson mostly shrugs off (again, because it could very well be that he hired Skye precisely to exploit her connection to the hacker group somewhere down the line). Ward tries to get Skye on-task for the mission, but she’s very quippy and unfocused. In a great bit of subtle characterization, she and Ward have their back-and-forth while he holds the heavy bag for her, and Skye’s unenthusiastic punches tell us all we need to know about her level of commitment without actually having to explain it. Ward tries to convince Skye that no one has these skills innately, and reveals that he used to get beat up by his brother all the time until he decided enough was enough and began developing the skills to protect himself. But Skye just doesn’t seem all that dedicated to what’s being asked of her, and it’s an interesting route to take, since the “Refusal of the call” characterization in any “fish out of water” story tends to work better in film than on television. Yet Skye’s likability doesn’t really suffer for this portrayal, as Bennet does a pretty good job making her endearingly downtrodden.

Credit: ABC

However, Skye’s apparent lack of engagement with her duties as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent belie her actual talent for field work. When Quinn discovers Skye snooping around outside his office, she gambles on talking her way out of the situation, pretending to be a double agent for the Rising Tide. It’s a well-executed series of sequences that isolates Skye from the rest of the team and forces her to sink or swim on her own, and the character shows remarkable ingenuity in ditching her initial earpiece to earn Quinn’s trust, then using a backup comm device embedded in her makeup case to actually gather the intel S.H.I.E.L.D. needs. And once her cover is blown, we realize she actually learned a lot more from Ward than she ever led on, disarming Quinn and turning his gun on him. Of course, she doesn’t actually have the stomach to fire, and so she bails on the situation which, conveniently enough, coincides with Ward making his way into the compound along with Coulson, who manages to reach Hall.

Credit: ABC

This is where things go haywire, as Coulson discovers that Hall actually allowed himself to be kidnapped in order to destroy the gravitonium machine to keep it out of Quinn’s hands, as there’s no telling the amount of destruction he could do with a machine that powerful. He intends to sacrifice himself to achieve these ends, and this results in a terrific zero-gravity sequence in which Coulson tries to talk Hall out of his suicide mission, all the while trying to figure out a contingency plan should the scientist refuse to desist. Ultimately, Coulson improvises by shooting the floor out beneath them, causing Hall to fall and become consumed by the gravitonium powering the machine. With Hall having been absorbed into the energy, the machine deactivates. Simultaneously, Ward bails Skye out of a dicey situation with Quinn’s bodyguards, using his hand-to-hand skills to take down the enemies as the gravity around them starts to slip. The shaky-cam filming leaves a lot to be desired, but that’s ultimately one small gripe with an episode that largely hits the right notes.

Credit: ABC

As the episode concludes, we also get a little more insight into Skye’s backstory, as we learn she’s a child of the foster care system, having been moved around from one home to another throughout her youth. This, in effect, explains her inability to truly commit, in addition to her inherent mistrust of government institutions. It’s a fairly rote backstory to give a character, but it works for Skye, since so much of what we can see about the character is couched in terms of distrust and skepticism — which is ironic, since she’s completely willing to believe in the extraordinary and the supernatural, whereas not every citizen in this world is willing to go that far.

With that said, if the show is going the romance route with Ward/Skye, I hope they hold off for a while. I like them much more as a platonic, mentor/protege pair than as a potential coupling, and I don’t really see the need for a love story at this stage of the game. However, one thing the show does introduce in the closing moments of the episode that is more than welcome at this point is the possibility of the show’s first supervillain. As the gravitonium machine is stored away in lockup, we see a hand reach out from the gravitonium energy at the center, confirming that Hall is still alive in some fashion, and could very well return to wreak havoc at some point in the future. Of course, this can be inferred from the fact that, as studious Marvel fans will have recognized, Franklin Hall is the true identity of the villain Graviton. It should be interesting to see how this S.H.I.E.L.D. team handles a threat of big screen proportions.