A Few Thoughts on Simmons in Season 2 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Simmons’s plot in season 2 of Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. intrigued me the first time around (mainly the second half, but I’ll be touching on the first half, too.)  After the cheerful, adorable science nerd of season 1, it was interesting to see her wrestling with some tough issues and reacting in what seemed a rather un-Simmons-like way.  It stood out to me even more when I watched the season again, and I wanted to take a minute to examine it (season 2 spoilers.)

For the first one-and-a-half seasons of the show, you’d never guess Simmons would be the one talking about Inhumanness like a plague, freaked about containing it and having a “by any means necessary” attitude towards stopping those affected by Terrigen.  This character, who has always explored scientific unknowns (including alien ones) with unbridled curious enthusiasm, wants to shut this Inhuman stuff down.  She immediately starts coming to Coulson with concerns about wanting to create a separate Index for those with alien DNA and try to find a way to “fix” it.  Naturally, this Inhuman-phobic behavior crops up right around the time Skye (we’re talking season 2, so I’ll stick with calling her Skye) is realizing she came out of the Temple different.  She’s scared about what’s happening to her, she’s desperately trying to hide it from her friends, and one of them is talking about a plague.  Nice and encouraging, right?

And yeah, when it comes out that Skye is now Inhuman, Simmons in no way wants to “put her down” or treats her like a monster.  However, she does treat Skye like being Inhuman is a problem.  Her way of helping her friend is to throw herself into making Skye a high-tech pair of gloves that inhibit her abilities, not realizing that the gloves are physically hurting Skye.  She speaks in her most smoothing voice as she talks to Skye about her quest to find a way to reverse the process.  While pretty much all the other characters go through a hard adjustment period and similarly try to “help” Skye in well-meaning but misguided ways, most of them also get at least one big moment where they demonstrate how thoroughly they’re in Skye’s corner, no matter what changes she’s gone through.  Simmons doesn’t really get a scene like that.  Combine it with her hard time relating to Fitz after his accident – compounded by the fact that 1) she left the base for a while and he felt abandoned and 2) she never addressed his declaration of love for her – and Simmons has it rough in the likability department this season.

All that said, I think the show does a great job maintaining a balance with her and showing why she feels the way she does.  Her Inhuman-phobic period comes directly on the heels of Trip being killed by the Diviner in the Temple.  Although the team has been in plenty of danger before and Simmons herself has nearly died on more than one occasion, this is the first time that one of her friends, someone she works alongside everyday, is killed.  She’s devastated and looking for someone to blame, and along comes this strange, alien device with its alien mist in an alien temple.  Normally, she’d be squeeing with excitement at that much unknown stuff to examine and research, but it’s not Happy Science Fun Times anymore.  Trip is dead, and when Simmons looks at the Kree artifacts, all she sees is the thing that killed him.  It rots the entire thing for her, and so when she learns that Skye is Inhuman, she only sees harm.  Her brain is going danger-danger-danger! and her only instinct is to somehow get Skye away from it.  Remove the alien DNA if she can, hide the effects of it if she can’t.  It’s not right, but I can get why Simmons’s grief could open the door to letting fear and prejudice take over.  And ultimately, Simmons is a person with a lot of compassion, and as the storyline goes on, she starts to understand how much more complicated Inhumanness is.