Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Review

The first fifteen episodes are close to unwatchable, a case of the week format in which a diverse team investigates an anomaly and Clark Gregg smiles about it, weighed down by a mandate to advertise a film nobody could talk about yet. Then that film arrived, the agency was revealed as compromised, and the show got to burn its own format down. What follows is one of the strangest survival stories in modern television. Freed from having to serve the movies, the writers took it into space, into a nineteen fifties diner in a time loop, into a virtual reality season that is genuinely bleak, and eventually into a full time travel farce, and it kept working because the ensemble had become worth watching.

Iain De Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge turn a lab partnership into the emotional engine, and Ming-Na Wen never gets the credit she deserves. It always looks cheap, the network fight scenes are lit like a hospital drama, and the villains outside Hydra rarely land. But it earned its ending.