"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Character Highlight: Lance Hunter (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)



I wasn’t over impressed with Hunter my first time through season 2, but I wound up really liking him the following season and found that his earlier stuff improves a lot on rewatch.  Now, I see that there’s plenty to like, and I can’t even pinpoint what I didn’t care for him at first.  (Some Hunter-related spoilers.)

Hunter’s introduction to the team, as a mercenary who hooks up with S.H.I.E.L.D. through Hartley, is somewhat at odds with who we discover he is.  Some of the others (especially Coulson and May) are wary about his loyalties, figuring his allegiance only extends as far as his payout.  They treat him with skepticism and have this perpetual air of waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the day he’ll sell them out to someone with bigger pockets, and to an extent, Hunter encourages this line of thinking.

But really, Hunter isn’t a detached hired gun only in it for the money.  Neither, however, is he a loyal agent to the cause (a major reason he so often crosses swords with May.)  His first priority lies, not in the cash or the work, but in the people.  His first big clash with Coulson comes after Hartley and Idaho are killed in the field, feeling that Coulson sent them in too blindly and then put Hartley’s life second to the mission once it was clear she was in serious trouble.  And I’d wager that the main reason he stays on after that experience is due to the relationships he’s already started developing with others on the team like Trip and Mack.

While the show continues to play up the “is he trustworthy?” angle for a while, this is what Hunter’s really about.  That’s why he tells May in season 3, “I’d take a bullet for any one of you.  Not for the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo on the wall, for you.”  His first interest is pretty much always in his intense, messy relationship with Bobbi, but he cares a lot about all of them.  But like I said earlier re:  May, that can be weirdly discomfiting to some on the team, because it means Hunter’s actions are less logical than a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent’s necessarily should be.  He’ll go off-mission to follow a hunch, protect a team member at the expense of the objective, or chase a personal vendetta.  Even though, if we’re being honest, everyone on the team is pretty emotionally compromised much of the time, it seems to throw them off more with Hunter, probably because they still tie him to that idea of a mercenary.

Skill-wise, he fits right in with most of the other field agents.  Formidable (though generally preferring guns to hand-to-hand stuff,) smart, gutsy, and improvises well (just not the way Coulson would always want him to.)  My personal favorite of Hunter’s skillsets, though, is his undercover work.  He’s not sleek and seamless at it like Bobbi or May, but Hunter is always the most entertaining person to watch undercover.  He does it with such laidback dismissiveness, dropping easily into character with this don’t-give-a-damn air about him.  I love it when he enters the ATCU as a blasé hacker on a federal leash – despite his complete lack of computer savviness – and I get a kick out of how stubbornly he maintains the story that he and Bobbi are just a pair of vacationers on a late-night mushroom hunt (for soup, doncha know) when they’re caught by Russian military outside a secret base.  Now that he and Bobbi have parted ways with the team, that’s what I miss most about him.

Oh, and I was thrilled to see Hunter’s brief return earlier this season to help Fitz out of a jam, and that thrill is a testament to how much I’ve come around on his character.  The two guys have such different sensibilities that it’s a blast to see them improvising missions together, and I love that Fitz gets Hunter’s attention by ragging on his favorite team with letters to the editor in football (soccer) magazines – too perfect.

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