Character Highlight: Grant Ward (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)

After my write-up of Coulson, I remembered that there was another major Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. character I’d left out:  Ward.  Like Coulson, the oversight was surprising, not because he’s ever been my favorite, but because he’s been undeniably important to the show (Ward-related spoilers – along with Captain America:  The Winter Soldier, by the way, although I think that cat is far more thoroughly out of the bag at this point.)

When it began, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was in many ways a comic-book procedural, and while many procedurals are ensemble-driven, they often have a few very definite leads at the center.  If Coulson was the everyman Agent Dad who assembled the team and Skye (now Daisy) was the audience surrogate experiencing all this S.H.I.E.L.D. stuff for the first time, Ward was the square-jawed hero, the slightly-gruff super-agent who’s used to hangling everything singlehandedly.  Over the first part of the show’s first season, Ward’s story appears to be that of a man learning how to move from being a lone wolf to a member of a team.  He seems to realize that his idea isn’t always automatically the best one, start caring about the geeky science duo he’s often tasked to protect, and develop feelings for his leading lady, rookie agent Skye.

And then, in the back half of season 1, Captain America:  The Winter Soldier happened, and the series stopped spinning on freak-of-the-week procedural wheels.  Hydra had infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. from its inception, and the fascists were finally stepping out of the shadows.  In the movie theater, Helicarriers were exploding over the skies of D.C. and Black Widow was sharing Hydra’s secrets with the world, and on TV, Coulson and his team were in the thick of this madness, trying to combat it even as they’re still piecing together the confused bits of half-conveyed intel they’re getting from inside the belly of the beast.  More serialized storytelling, our heroes on the run, and high, high stakes.  Oh yeah, and double agent Ward.

I can’t deny that it was quite the twist.  I certainly didn’t see it coming (and, based on a rewatch of the early seasons of the show, my gut says that the showrunners didn’t either, at least not until shortly before they revealed it.  I have no proof of this, though, and a quick Google search showed nothing definitive.)  It’s also, inevitably, strong in that it gives the other characters some great material to work with.  I really like Skye wrestling to keep it together when she finds out the truth, desperate not to let on to Ward that she knows, and Fitz’s terror of and fury at Ward in season 2 is really compelling.

Overall, however, I don’t think it serves Ward particularly well.  I mean, not that Ward was the most engaging character to start with, but I think Ward as a villain benefits the plot more than the character.  When it comes to Ward himself, we get some real villain sloppiness, like turning into a psychopathic boogie-man-type figure popping up and thwarting the good guys in inprobable ways.  Like veering pretty haphazardly between twirling his mustache and seemingly-earnestly trying to convince Skye that he’s not all bad.  And, one of my most annoying villain tropes, acting super-shifty the second it’s revealed onscreen that he’s evil, despite playing his duplicitous role perfectly before that.  I dunno – for me, it just didn’t work all that well.  No disrespect to Brett Dalton, who’s fine, but I became increasingly tired of seeing the character with each return appearance to the show.

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.

Character Highlight: Phil Coulson (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)

I realized that I’ve written up most of the major characters on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and yet left out the guy at the head of it.  While the show has had too many great characters for Coulson to be more than middle of the pack for me, he’s still the illustrious leader of the series and, as such, is overdue for his own post (some Coulson-related spoilers.)

Of course, Coulson’s place in the MCU predates Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Marvel’s TV branch altogether.  He first appears in the movies, as a buttoned-up agent who’s our initial window into S.H.I.E.L.D., back before they’ve evidently started using the acronym and still call themselves “Strategic Homeland etc. etc.”  Over a handful of early films, he acts as an agent and S.H.I.E.L.D. liaison with a number of heroes, culminating in his slightly-larger focus (and subsequent apparent death) in The Avengers.  When, not long after that, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. made its debut, a good chunk of the first season danced around the mystery of why Coulson is still alive.

By taking away Coulson’s own knowledge of how he survived, his place as affable middle-management-type agent is kept going a while longer.  He disappears a little into the background of his own show because that’s how he was designed for the films, a tiny slice of mundanity rubbing shoulders with the likes of Iron Man and Thor.  And on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., we initially see a similar dynamic play out.  Coulson is the head of the team, so he’s the one calling the shots and directing the other agents, but the stronger, more defined personalities of the characters around him have a tendency to crowd him out a bit, and he becomes sort of a good-natured dad figure to his team.

That framing has shifted a fair amount over the seasons.  The mere fact that Coulson is alive when he ought to be dead needs to be dealt with, and that naturally involves putting Coulson into the center of the comic-book craziness he’s usually brought in to clean up.  There’s a mystery to unravel, complete with trigger phrases, Kree symbols, and manufactured memories, all of which start to give this elevated background player his own more typical comic-book origins, even if he never has superpowers.

Though it’s been a while since anyone mentioned Tahiti, that journey still informs the character Coulson has become.  He hasn’t lost his liaison role, often having to convince the military why they should take a step back and let S.H.I.E.L.D. maintain control of this or that operation, and he’s still a bit of a dad to the agents on his team.  But he’s also seen more, experienced more manipulation and disillusionment, and lost small pieces of himself along the way (to be traded, in some instances, with cool, tech-enhanced replacements!)  And that leaves him shrewder, steelier, prepared to step up and make the tough decisions when the circumstances call for it.  If, at first, Coulson looks a little like a pleasant but slightly-boring suit in the middle of a group of quirky scientists, orphan hacktivists, and badass pilots with brooding backstories, he’s now more fully incorporated into the group and has a more fleshed-out place of his own.

Character Highlight: Antoine Triplett (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)

(Spoilers for seasons 1 and 2 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)

I don’t feel I got as much of a chance to know Trip as I would’ve liked to, and I’m not quite sure why.  In general, I think it’s tough to be the first new member brought into the team of an already-established ensemble, so I may have been less inclined to get to know him than later newcomers like Bobbi, Mack, and Hunter.  Is that the whole reason, or is he also somewhat less-defined than many of the other characters on the show?  Unfortunately, although I do enjoy him, I lean toward the latter answer. 

Trip is brought in during the second half of season 1, just before the post-Winter Soldier blowup with the team learning of the big Hydra reveal and, more important to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the show revealing Ward’s double-agent status.  Trip serves a few useful plot purposes here.  First, Simmons’s obvious appreciation for him highlights Fitz’s growing attraction to his best friend and colleague, using Fitz’s jealousy of Trip to prime the engine for his end-of-season declaration of love.  When the Hydra hits the fan, Trip – the recent sort-of addition to the team who’s been working alongside our trusted ensemble – seems set up to be the perfect candidate for a secret Hydra member.  We the audience haven’t known him long enough to get attached to him, but Ward knows him from past assignments and Simmons has taken a liking to him, so it’s reasonable enough to think the team would be shaken by the revelation that he’s Hydra.  When the real bombshell drops, though, and it comes out that it’s Ward who’s Hydra, then it works out nicely that Trip has the same “specialist” training as Ward and can fulfill much the same function when he steps forward to fill the gap left in the team.

This is a lot about what Trip is for rather than who he is, and I think this is kind of how Trip is regarded, at least from a writing standpoint, for much of his time on the show.  The reveal that his grandfather was a Howling Commando (and that Trip kept it a secret so as not to be treated like a “legacy”) is interesting, but we really don’t explore that much.  More than anything, it facilitates a way for the team to have access to cool Marvel spy gadgets when they’re on the run without resources late in season 1, since Trip is able to get a trunk of his grandpa’s old S.S.R. toys.  Even his death in the Temple in mid-season 2 is less about him and more about a) Skye blaming herself for it and b) Simmons having an inciting reason to be so freaked out about alien biology and enhanced people, just in time for Skye’s Inhuman transformation.

Obviously, every character on a TV show is there for a reason, but with Trip, it can feel like the show is more interested in the reason than the person, and as a result, I have less of a feel for him than I do for, say, Fitz or May or Bobbi.  What I do know of him, though, I like.  During his time on the show, he often feels like the most low-drama person on the team.  With the exception of his early episodes, with Fitz’s jealousy and people questioning his loyalty in the wake of the Hydra discovery, he doesn’t really clash with anybody on the team.  He’s a dedicated agent who rarely questions his orders, he generally meets intense situations with an easy unflappability, he jokes and gets along with pretty much everyone, and despite everything he’s seen working for S.H.I.E.L.D., he’s still a mild-to-moderate skeptic when it comes to the really crazy stuff.  In season 2, he and Skye seem on their way to forming a good working relationship, but she’s probably the closest he has to a significant connection with someone on the team (from a narrative standpoint, anyway.)  What’s there is all good, but it feels a little flat, and that disappoints me, because I think there was a lot of potential in this character that could have been better explored.