Anghus Houvouras reviews the eighth episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D….
It’s funny when something really right exposes so many wrongs. I felt that way last night after watching the excellent Peter MacNicol appear as a guest star on the latest episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. This episode was billed as a tie in to Thor: The Dark World, and like many I was eager to see how the big screen world and the small screen Marvel universes would work when crossing over. But to call this a cross-over or a tie-in feels almost intellectually dishonest. Unless you consider playing janitor to the carnage wrought in the finale of The Dark World, crossing over.
It turns out there’s some additional Asgardian clean up required after two rebellious Scandinavians track down a battle staff that gives whomever touches it super rage powers. They go on a rampage prompting the Agents to investigate. Coulson (Clark Gregg) decides to hit up a college professor named Randolph who is an expert on Asgardian legend and lore who turns out to have more of a connection to the legendary realm than anyone would have suspected.
SPOILERS AHEAD…
It turns out Doctor Randolph’s expertise in all things Asgard is because he’s an Asgardian. A former warrior who enlisted to go to war on Earth ‘for the travel’. Once the battles ended, he opted to stick around and see what our realm had to offer. MacNicol is such a great presence, and he his charisma exposes a lot of what is currently lacking in the cast of S.H.I.E.L.D.
This is exactly the kind of character the show needs. Someone with a connection to the super-powered world who really isn’t all that super powered. Someone with knowledge of other worlds and potential threats. An Asgardian analyst, if you will.
I like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. for what it is, but once they start to introduce characters like Peter MacNicol’s Doctor Randolph, you start to wonder why the show isn’t embracing its Joss Whedon / Firefly pedigree and picking up strays. Why wouldn’t you be assembling these kind of people into a kind of superhuman think tank. I’m not going to start crying foul like everybody else. I realize that this show is about the people dealing with the superhuman world rapidly expanding around them. However, creatively speaking, is the show under some creative mandate to shed every super-powered/non-human character by the time the end credits roll?
“The Well” was another solid episode for the series. But I’d be lying if I said MacNicol’s appearance hasn’t created a vacuum. For the first time I found myself saying “Why aren’t they doing more of this?” Whedon and company need to figure out how to get him back on the show, or find a way to organically weave someone with a connection to the larger Marvel Universe, because now I’ve seen the potential of having a character like the Doctor Randolph on the show. The absence of that dynamic might start me wondering why the show seems so intent to have only the most spurious connections to a wider universe, rather than embrace it.
Again, I’m not going to start complaining about the lack of spandex clad heroes in the series or bemoaning the absence of the largest icons in the Marvel Universe. However, “The Well” has showed us how much fun the show could be if it got a little bit weird. And what’s wrong with that?
Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker. His latest work, the novel My Career Suicide Note, is available from Amazon.
Originally published November 20, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
