Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S1 Ep06 – F.Z.Z.T.

After a short break, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is back. And this episode delves a little more into Jemma Simmons’s character and, through her, Fitz as well. Fitz and Simmons are two of my favorites—to be honest, anyone is better than Ward and Skye—so I was glad to see a little more about them. And character development is something this show has been desperately missing. It wasn’t a perfect episode—there was some weird pacing and things felt uneven—but I liked it, especially since it gave more emotional scenes to the two characters who are usually used as comic relief.

Of course you knew that Simmons wasn’t going to die (this might be a Whedon show, but it’s a bit early for that), so that took away some of the suspense. But the scenes between Simmons and Fitz were poignant nonetheless. Their relationship is something that has always been taken for granted, and I wish that had been explored more here, but we still got an interesting look at them under pressure. How can they live without each other? Well, it looked like Fitz didn’t want to answer that question because he went into the quarantine with Simmons to help her and was willing to jump off an aircraft to save her. Fitz clearly has a thing for Skye, but he loves Simmons in a different way. Why, we still don’t know, and that’s where my disappointment comes in. When will they explain how these two came to be considered one entity? I would like that now, please, so that we can move on to bigger things. But other than that, we know that they care a lot about each other, enough to risk their lives to save the other. Simmons knocked Fitz out in order to jump off the plane and save everyone, so it’s definitely not just Fitz who cares.

But Simmons still felt a little flat as a character. She’s bubbly, smart, and English, we’ve got that, and now we know that she’s ready to sacrifice herself to save others, but what else is there to her character? She’s got her quirks, but they seem to be just that, and there are times when she and Fitz are treated as half-characters because they work as one unit, so we still haven’t gotten much deeper beneath the surface for them. Her impression of Ward was hilarious—I was more impressed with hers than with Fitz’s simply because she managed to get down the voice of a different gender pretty well, though Fitz’s of course was awesome too. But she’s still just half of FitzSimmons. I loved getting to see them interact in a more serious situation, but I’d also love to see them work more independently, to see them as individuals, or failing that, to see just why they are always working together as a team.

It’s also starting to grate a bit that almost every story so far has been related to the Marvel movies. I get it, it’s the same universe, and it’s fun to see everything connecting, but I’d love to see something that I haven’t seen before, something new, or rather something different from the greater Marvel universe. I like that the world is still recovering from the attack on New York and how it affects everyone now, but spread out your references, guys. Don’t cram them all into the first episodes. Give us something new, or stick with one thing from the movies and develop that deeper. Don’t hop around from the Chitauri to Extremis to the Tesseract. We know about those already, so either go deeper or move on to something else.

And don’t get me started on the difficulties present in trying to use alien DNA to make an anti-serum that would work with humans. Let’s not go there.