Relationship Spotlight: Alphonso Mackenzie & Leo Fitz (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)

Oh, how I love Fitz and Mack in season 2 – I mean, they’re still friends, but season 2 is when they first became friends, and I think it’s the best showcase for their relationship.  Even before you consider all the plot stuff going on with Fitz at the time, it helps with a much-needed shakeup in the group dynamics, and I like how we get to know Mack through his friendship with Fitz (season 2 spoilers.)

Fitz begins season 2 in a seriously rough spot.  His near-fatal encounter with Ward at the end of season 1 leaves him with cognitive, speech, and motor difficulties, Simmons has left for reasons he doesn’t understand, and rather than leaning on his other friends and colleagues for help, he’s retreated into working through his confused thoughts by talking to an imaginary Simmons.  He’s frustrated that nothing comes easily for him anymore and afraid that he’ll be let go from the team because he’s not quick or consistent enough in performing the work they need.  When he interacts with the likes of Skye, May, Coulson, and Trip, he feels like a) they think he’s useless now and b) they pity him because all they can see is who he used to be and who he is now.

Enter Mack, savvy mechanic and all-around decent guy.  He didn’t know Fitz before the traumatic injury, so he has no preconceived notions about who Fitz ought to be.  Instead, Mack meets him as he is now – struggling but far from incapable – and he treats him as such.  He starts reaching out to Fitz is small, easy ways, offering a pair of fresh eyes on tech stuff and treating Fitz’s agitated idiosyncracies as no big deal.

It could be argued that Mack is brought in as a “Fitz whisperer” and functions mainly to facilitate his storyline, but I think this relationship is so important for what it says about Mack as well.  True, this storyline is Fitz’s, and Mack doesn’t get much of his own plot until the second half of the season.  However, through their friendship, we learn a lot about what sort of person Mack is.

I love Mack’s interactions with Fitz so much.  He doesn’t walk on eggshells around Fitz at all, talking to him straight and not skirting around mentions of Fitz’s disability.  While the others sort of hold their breath and hope Fitz will be able to sort out whatever techy business they need him to do, Mack fully expects that Fitz has a handle on it, even if it takes him some time to get there.  But at the same time, Mack also gets that Fitz does need certain accommodations to get things done and he facilitates those accommodations in a nonchalant manner.  Helping Fitz fill in the words he’s missing due to his aphasia is of course the big one here, but I also like how he’s tuned into other stuff as well, like when there are too many people in the lab and Fitz needs solitude to concentrate.

Truly, these guys become friends, plain and simple.  When Simmons comes back and “thanks” Mack for being so kind to Fitz, you can feel how genuine he is when he’s all, “Um, no thanks required.”  She’s looking at Fitz from a medical model of disability, as someone to help and assist, while Mack sees him from a social model, whereby he’s just a regular guy, albeit one with some unique circumstances.  For Mack, it’s weird to be thanked for befriending Fitz, because he doesn’t view it as some great thing he did.  It’s just friendship.  Fitz starts opening up to Mack about personal struggles, just as Mack talks to Fitz about his doubts/worries with regard to some of Coulson’s orders.  They shoot the breeze and play video games together, and after Mack’s horrific experience in the Temple, being temporarily taken over by some Kree force, it’s Fitz’s turn to reach out, and he tries to get Mack to talk about what happened to him.  Both are able to be there for the other, and both are able to pull each other up.

Favorite Characters: Leo Fitz (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)

Come on – it’s been such a long time since I did Simmons.  Fitz is clearly overdue!  (Fitz-related spoilers.)

The second half of S.H.I.E.L.D. crack science duo, Fitz is the team’s tech expert, forever tinkering with alien gizmos, whipping up cool technology, and doing the typical techie-in-a-genre-show “typing vigorously to dramatic music” thing.  Coulson’s new hand in season 3 is a neverending Swiss army knife of sick upgrades, and I love the ICERs, because inventing a completely incapacitating but 100% non-lethal gun seems like such a Fitz thing to do.  Like Simmons, he delights in scientific discovery for the sake of it, and he’s always looking to come up with handier and more effective ways for the team to use technology in the field.

While Simmons is eager to get out of the lab and into the thick of things at the start of the series, Fitz is a lot more cautious.  An ungenerous description might be “fraidy cat,” but I wouldn’t use it.  I like that being in the field can freak Fitz out, because that makes it so much cooler when he keeps it together and cobbles together amazing tech solutions on the fly under extreme pressure.  It’s been fun to watch him grow by leaps and bounds in this regard over the course of the series.  While season 1 episodes that absolutely require Fitz to do his thing in a dangerous situation invariably give another agent the “babysit the lab geek and make sure he doesn’t get killed” job, he’s come a long way from those days.  It’s a treat to see him sneak aboard the Zephyr with May in the season 3 finale, holding his own fantastically well against a dangerous Inhuman bad guy.

Season 1 Fitz is entertaining and techie-adorable, but season 2 Fitz, who’s very slowly recovering from physical and mental injuries suffered in the previous season’s finale, really comes alive for me.  Yes, to look at Fitz now, you’d never know all he went through, but season 2 has him really messed up for a long stretch of the season.  He has difficulties thinking, remembering, speaking, and using his hands, virtually everything in his job description, and he doesn’t like the thought of being kept around if he can’t do what needs to be done.  He works his butt off to regain his full faculties and motor skills, and in the process, he also has to adjust to the way his friends and colleagues treat him differently, forging new relationships with agents who don’t have the same expectations of who he used to be.

After all he goes through there, Fitz comes out on the other side braver, more determined, and more resilient.  It gives him what he needs to weather all terrible crap that goes down in later seasons, making him a little steelier and more formidable.  However, he’s still not immune to all that life in S.H.I.E.L.D. has to throw at him – in particular, the last stretch of season 4 does a hell of a number on him.  The fact that it’s his scientific curiosity that enables Radcliffe’s work with Aida to go as far as it does is bad enough, but he’s wrecked by what he goes through in the Framework.  While many of his friends experience being part of the underground rebellion against Hydra, Fitz’s Framework self is on the other side.  And unlike May in the Framework, Fitz isn’t even a loyal Hydra soldier (albeit a high-ranking one) who doesn’t flinch from killing in the field – Fitz is running the show in brutal ways, capturing Inhumans to torture them in the name of science.  Yes, much of what he actually does is due to Aida’s influence, but it’s who he is in the Framework that allows him to do those things, and coming out of it again, it isn’t easy to dismiss that Fitz as “not him.”  I think we’re in for quite a heavy storyline with him going forward, as he tries to reconcile who he’s tried to be with the dark capabilities he’s discovered inside himself.  That’s a guilt that’s not going away anytime soon.

Relationship Spotlight: Jemma Simmons & Leo Fitz (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)

No post yesterday - shameful of me, I know.  Have two tonight.

Although Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has gotten palpably better as time has gone by – season 1’s post-Captain America:  The Winter Soldier episodes were a big improvement on what came before them, and it’s been decidedly cooler this season – it’s still not everything I hoped it would be (either as an Avengers satellite or a Whedon-adjacent property.)  Given the pedigree involved, this show could have been one of my favorite things ever, but as it is, it’s only a reasonably enjoyable piece of genre TV with a comic-book bent.  However, one place where the show has delivered on almost every level is with the team’s resident nerd duo FitzSimmons.

 

Bio-chemist Simmons and tech expert Fitz have gone through the S.H.I.E.L.D. ranks together.  When they’re introduced as the lab geeks in Coulson’s team of agents, they’re both brilliant but green, untested in the field.  They’re also nigh inseparable – everyone discusses them as a unit and refers to them by a portmanteau.  The two smartest people in any room, they’re on the same finishing-each-other’s-technobabble wavelength in almost every aspect of their work.  The instant one has a spark of inspiration, the other will be snapping their fingers in epiphany, and before anyone else even knows what’s happening, both are off and running to scan, analyze, or invent.  They share the same utter delight in science.  Both live to ask questions and solve problems, and they squee ecstatically over things that no one else can wrap their heads around.  

 

That was a paragraph composed entirely of plural verbs, which should give you an idea of how in sync they are.  Don’t think, though, that they’re essentially the same person split into two.  Simmons is much more of a risk-taker than Fitz; while she’s eager to spread her wings, he’d be content to stay in the lab.  But of course, side by side is how they roll, so he faces up to his discomfort and follows her into the fray.  Likewise, they’re both rather awkward, but his expresses itself in nervous verbal fumbling whereas she’s maybe-tries-a-bit-too-hard bubbly.  These differences allow the two to have a nice give-and-take between Simmons’s need to expand her horizons and Fitz’s desire for safety and consistency.

 

Though I obviously love FitzSimmons together (or I wouldn’t be writing about them,) I like that season 2 has placed them more in different spheres.  Not only does the divide allow them more dramatic material when they are together, but it’s also very valuable in defining each character separately.  Now that I think about it, it’s a lot like Poussey and Taystee on Orange is the New Black, who are developed apart in season 2 after being joined at the hip in season 1.  The circumstances of the separation are wildly different in each case, but as with Orange is the New Black, it seems to be facilitating a richer narrative here and better chances for the actors to shine.

 

(Warning:  this last paragraph contains some spoilers.)  I said above that FitzSimmons deliver on almost every level, and while I was starting to see hints of it late last season, it was still disappointing to have Fitz declaring his love for Simmons.  Oh so many reasons – 1) why do the most important relationships so often have to involve romance? 2) since Simmons hasn’t given any indication of returning his feelings, I’m not sure how well they’ll be able to weather it, and perhaps most significantly, 3) I love their scenes together, but if they were best friends, work partners, and lovers, I think they’d fall into this FitzSimmons vortex where they’d pretty much only interact and have plots with each other, and I like both of them with the rest of the team too much to want that.