X-Men: The (fan fic) Series

With this latest episode, AOS takes great strides towards getting there.

One of the banes of the last five episodes is that they where pretty much about Skye and we got no character development from the rest of the group. In FZZT we get some much needed time with Fitz and Simmons, the resident geeks. We learn more about their back story and their strange relationship. There is a lot of love there, and you almost want to ship them as a couple, but they play very well as siblings. I’m honestly not sure if ‘sibling’ was supposed to be the vibe or if they are just that clueless about each other. They definitely have more chemistry than Ward and Skye.

There were some problems with the episode and a lot of that had to do with the speechifying. Ward is especially bad at just stating his emotions/thoughts rather than showing us. Also, as powerful as the scene was with Coulson comforting the dying man, I felt that there was too much inaction. Usually in shows/comics like this, there is more “we have to do something” and less “so yeah, let’s just stand out of the blast zone”. It’s like no one cared that this man was going to die other than “we should comfort him” when they should have been “hey, maybe we should try to save him”.

Then there was the jarring  cut scene between Ward’s rescue and Coulson’s rant. On a technical spectrum, it wasn’t the best put together episode and I have a feeling a lot was cut.

But what FZZT did right, it did exceptionally well. Once I got past the ‘why isn’t anyone doing anything’ when Coulson spoke to the dying man, it was a fairly powerful moment. Coulson died, he knows something isn’t right about that, and it’s slowly eating at him. The show is seriously trolling us, but so far it hasn’t reached LOST level trolling. It’s still the delicious level of trolling. Then we have Coulson’s discussion with May at the end… there is a lot of pain there, and you can feel it.

Also, in contrast to what I said earlier, I loved the level of inaction in this episode when it came to the team dynamics. Most often in these situations, the non-scientist gets sick and the scientist has to save them, this way everyone is doing something. The non-scientist is ‘being sick’ while the scientist goes around solving the problem. But here, the scientist is the one who is sick and is trying to find the cure. All anyone else can do is literally stand around. It’s a painful situation to be in (and Ward got a little speechy about that) but it was extremely accurate. You can identify with the team moreso here than at any other time I would wager.

And the moment Coulson realizes that Simmons is infected, your heart literally sinks.

This is the kind of emotional jockeying that we’ve been expecting and it paid out in spades here. Let’s hope that Skye’s plot line has been shelves for now and move on to some of these more juicier bits.