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.

Favorite Characters: Jemma Simmons (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)

Superficially, to the extent that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is at least Whedon-adjacent if not part of the technical Whedon oeuvre, Simmons is the Willow, the Fred, the Kaylee.  In other words, she’s the nerdy and/or techie female who’s heartmeltingly adorable and generally considered to be softer than most of her teammates.  The same can be said of all four characters, but just as the other three are still their own women within that archetype, there’s more to Simmons than those surface details (Simmons-related spoilers.)

Looking back over the seasons, it’s kind of crazy how much S.H.I.E.L.D.’s loveable bio-chemist has grown and changed in response to the show’s wild goings-on.  Simmons begins the series insanely brilliant but 100% green, untested in the field but champing at the bit to try.  She’s bubbly in a sweet-yet-awkward way with all her new team members, nothing gets her more excited than science, and she’s ready to dive headfirst into any discovery.  For her, S.H.I.E.L.D. missions provide a treasure trove of innovation and analysis.

It doesn’t take long before the demands of S.H.I.E.L.D. start chipping away at all that brightness and enthusiasm.  Early in season one, she nearly joins the cat in suffering death-by-curiosity, which forces her not to be quite so gungho in her “ask questions first, ensure safety later” approach to field work.  The betrayal of a close team member makes her less trusting, while the serious injury of another and the death of a third affect her deeply.  Her feelings of guilt and helplessness open the door to fear, and when unexplained changes start happening to a fourth team member, Simmons’s immediate response is to be suspicious, to neutralize the unknowable (she softens in this regard later, but moving forward, curiosity and fear still often go hand in hand for her.)

This all might sound kind of depressing, like her major arc is “Simmons hardens and learns to be distrustful.”  This is true (although she does still maintain a fair amount of her scientific enthusiasm and love for her team members,) but as her open artlessness takes a knock, her savviness improves.  The show’s most recent season sees her holding her own on an undercover assignment, something that would have seemed impossible in season one – the woman may be a genius, but in those days, she couldn’t convincingly fool someone to all-but-literally save her life.  She feels she’s been a liability in dangerous field situations one too many times, and so she’s received training from May to protect herself more capably.

And of course, there’s season 3’s biggest test of Simmons:  her harrowing experience of being sucked through a portal and marooned on an alien planet for over six months.  At first, completely alone, she manages to keep herself from losing her mind with isolation and fear, she survives in a harsh wasteland, she hunts, kills, and eats unknown alien fauna, she records her scientific observations, and she does what little she can to try and facilitate any rescue efforts that may be going on back home.  I don’t mind her meeting Will, and I don’t really think it diminishes anything she does there.  She’s already proven that she can survive and keep her head, so it’s not like she “needed a man to save her.”  Will’s companionship is a comfort to her, and even the outdated equipment he has left over from his apparent NASA mission is enough to give Simmons the resources she needs to work out how the portal works in conjunction with the planet and figure out the best way of trying to get back.

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.