I want to get off Mr. Kasius’s Wild
Ride
(This review contains
spoilers!)
So…that was an episode. I’ll give it
this, at least we actually got a bit more than just the agents sitting around
and talking in a feeble attempt to move the plot along this week. They actually
had a few action sequences, and yeah, they were pretty great. Other than that
though, this was yet another episode that is suffering from the fact that the
space storyline has grown incredibly tired in just a short time, and we’re
ready to move on to something different.
Coulson’s team are trying to reunite
with Mack on the Lighthouse by flying the ship up there, but unsurprisingly the
engines are fried, requiring them to come up with a new solution. Meanwhile,
Team Mack has made an incredible discovery: Tess is alive…somehow. Through her
they discover that Kasius has booby-trapped the entire lighthouse, so it’s up
to them to disarm the place before it all goes up in flames.
It’s not a bad concept on paper, but
it all falls flat for one specific reason: the direction. I don’t know who
directed this one, but it wasn’t pretty, aside from the admittedly impressive
first shot that made use of the Marvel logo of all things. Things that were
clearly supposed to be tense wound up looking more comical, especially in the
scenes where Coulson and Enoch were flying in the ship during the gravity
storm. They were clearly just bouncing up and down in their seats to try and
make it look like the storm was shaking them all over the place, but it looked
more like they were just getting really fidgety in their seats.
There’s also a scene where Coulson is
walking and a wire falls down from the ceiling and hits him in the face. The
fact that they put this random thing in the episode at all is hilarious on its
own, but what makes it even funnier is that it was shot as an action sequence,
with epic camera angles and everything. It’s so random and out of nowhere that
I can’t tell if it was meant to be taken seriously or not.
This episode also continues this
season’s biggest problem I haven’t really touched upon in these reviews yet:
the constant use of spinning cameras. You’d think that parts of this season
took place in the middle of a carousel, because there are entire scenes that
consist of the only camera angle being just spinning around the characters over
and over and over, and this episode was no different. People prone to motion
sickness be warned.
This episode did have a few good
points, though. Like I said earlier, the action scenes were up to S.H.I.E.L.D par, but nothing really
special. I liked the solution of using the gravity storm to get off the
surface, and I liked the concept behind Mack’s story (but why they thought doing
a reversal on Tess dying would be a good idea is a mystery), and his meeting
with Kasius at the end of the episode was pretty fun. Other than that I’ve
officially checked out of this story arc. It’s just not that fun when the
entire season is just the cast running back and forth between a few different
rooms, unlike the usual globe-trotting adventures of the S.H.I.E.L.D crew. One has to wonder if their budget was slashed
between Season 4 and now, because when compared to how great Ghost Rider looked
last time around the CGI here is especially underwhelming.
If I’m right I think next week is the
last episode before we take a break for the Olympics, so hopefully it’ll finish
with a bang. We certainly haven’t had one of those in a while.
FINAL SCORE
3/10
Bad
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