kennyab

Bobbi specifically mentioned the Monolith swallowing her, they know that part for a fact (presumably because of video cameras). They're just trying to figure out what the monolith did to her, and they've been going through possibilities of what exactly it did to her. Until now, Fitz is the only one who's been holding out hope that it did something other than just atomize her.

Finally, just a couple of days away from the premiere! It has seemed so long. Anyway, my Simmons spec -- the Monolith, which is powered by Darkforce energy, transported her to the Blue Area of the moon. In the comics, the Kree installed an artificial atmosphere in an area on the dark side of the moon (which, by chance, was home of the Inhuman city Attilan for a while). I'm guessing that the Monolith was a form of transport between earth and the Blue Area, and they used it to transport Inhumans there for study. If those Inhumans never returned, it was certainly give rise to a legend among the Inhumans that it's a great weapon. So Simmons is hanging out in an abandoned Kree base waiting for her team to come pick her up.

He's got a whole helicarrier team available to him, and it's apparently based off an existing SHIELD design, as he was printing out the schematics in the season finale. As we found out in the show/Avengers, the organization is a bit bigger than Coulson had led the team to believe.

Yeah, it's always fantastic to see Peggy, but interesting to see her on the "wrong" side in a movie. I just knew that other guy had to be Hydra, so fun to see him out of that closet in the present day. Did they know they were going to have a young Howard in Cap when they cast Slattery in Iron Man 2? I'm fine with them continuing to use both actors, but I think there would be an uproar if they ever had anyone other than Hayley Atwell playing Peggy -- I know I'd revolt. I'd love to one day have a Michael Douglas/Robert Downey Jr. face-off. I would totally see MCU Hank being on the anti-registration side in Civil War. There are so many rich characters connections in the universe, and it feels like we have so many wasted opportunities. Heck, other than a line in Avengers, they've never really gotten into the fact that Steve probably had a much better relationship with Howard than Tony did. Oh well, plenty of fodder for fan fiction, I suppose. It wasn't totally out of nowhere. Hope was, um, admiring, Scott when he had his shirt off, and he had definitely taken notice of her. She's like, what, six here? Give it 10 years. Heck, they have half of that planned out already, at least that they've announced publicly. I'm sure they already have ideas sketched out beyond that. Young Avengers could come around late phase 4, early phase 5. That'd give them time to set up the others. I mean, they already have Wanda and Vision making eyes at each other. If they introduce Mar-Vell in Captain Marvel, that's got Hulkling taken care of.

Rachel wanted to tell Anna about her father, but Quinn pressured Rachel into keep her mouth shut. The difference here is that Rachel was on her own and in charge. They even had Jeremy (I believe it was Jeremy) mention the difference in her behavior. She seems to have a bit of a history of letting others control her against her better instincts, most notably her mother and Quinn. She struggles with her ability to manipulate people so easily, and she recognizes from her own past what it's like to be manipulated. She seems to use the show to give up having to take responsibility for her own actions, transferring that to her bosses. But when left to her own devices, when she's the one who has to make the tough calls, she has a tendency towards listening to her better urges. This episode struck me as having a bit of a theme of partially realized liberations. Faith and Amy were able to acknowledge their feelings for one another and start a slow coming out process. But while Faith thought she was ready to fully recognize herself, the closet door had to close back a bit, although it certainly wasn't slammed shut, but rather left slightly ajar. Rachel was able to actually demonstrate empathy without interference. Mary has a different type of liberation. Being able to speak up about her past is good, but the end of the episode demonstrates a false liberation, a destructive one that she thinks is necessary in order to continue on in the game. I feel that the writers cheated a little bit by keeping the decision regarding Faith's confession out of Quinn's hands. They needed the drama that Faith's secret might come out, but that would have veered Quinn way too far into villain territory, so they use Chet even though he hasn't been shown as actively involved in the production of the show at all. I get it, it would have been a hard sell that Quinn wouldn't run with it just as gleefully as Chet, so she's either watered down or she reaches a place that's really hard to come back from. I see you cheating, Show, but I forgive you this once. Just don't make a habit of it.

I had a few extra minutes so thought I'd take a look at this thread, as I'd never perused it. I gotta, I'm a little bumfuzzled at everything I've just learned (and not sure I needed to know). I bet you could put together a heck of a sociology class about this phenomenon. I think I'd have to go all Banksy if I was creating a popular genre work. I bet Ginnifer Goodwin and Josh Dallas are grateful that Snow and Charming's relationship is a bit immune to Fandom Hysteria Disorder.

Like a couple of posters above, I was thinking that maybe Emma made herself disappear, wanting to get away from everyone before hurting them. That way we don't have to worry so much about a search party, and we'll get angsty Emma who wants to sequester herself, but her family won't let her -- and they'll have the dagger, so she can't stop them from keeping her from running. I think that'd be a fair enough payoff to the cliffhanger on both plotting and emotional levels. Especially for this show. I want to see crazy Emma with visions of the future. It seems like that part of Rumpel didn't get brought back when he restored magic to town. But maybe starting off in a new host will bring back that aspect. I'm curious about who the first host was. That has to come up in all of this. If they stick with Arthurian legend, I guess it'll be Morgan Le Fay (most likely to me, and they'd probably try to make her story some kind of parallel of Emma's) or Mordred. If they went with the Morgan angle, perhaps the Dark One-d version of her had a magical kid, and she became a *ahem* Mother of Dragons. Bad joke aside, that could be kind of interesting, Maleficent and Lily being descendants of the original Dark One. I mean, it'd actually give them a reason for bothering to bring Lily in the first place. Or they could take a swerve and try to tie in Beowulf, maybe using Grendel as the Dark One (whose mom, by the way, was a dragon). But I don't think Disney has a Beowulf, and it's probably just obscure enough to the general viewing audience to keep them from bothering.

It also helps that it looks like Ward is going to be the big bad (or at least one big bad). Think about how much time they spend developing the bad guys (Garrett, Cal, Jiaying, Raina) that they don't have to do here. And as it was last year, Mac might as well have been a regular, especially during the last half of the season. I think they've proven that they can handle a cast of this size.

I would have liked Britta to be in on the good-byes at the airport, but with everyone getting ready for other projects, Gillian may not have been available. But one last bit with the four remaining study group members would have been nice. I'd be up for a season seven only if it means not having another cast shakeup. Shirley was in a pretty good place when written out, but I'd hate to see a lack of Britta resolution -- she deserves to get her groove back. And I really can't see the show without Abed -- to me, he's the heart and soul. I also got really attached to Frankie, so I'd hate to see her go the way of Hickey. But if it's a movie, it would have to be a "reunion special" -- so much Abed meta goodness would come out of that. And I'd only accept it with Troy and Shirley in the mix. So, Jim Rash is the only one I haven't heard any post-Community plans about. I'm thinking about a write-in campaign for him to take over Hedwig after Taye Digg's run.

I'm kind of hoping Ward gets some kind of powers so it takes a team Care Bear Stare to bring him down.

Not necessarily. In the comics, Darkforce has always been a bit nebulous and presented in different ways (i.e., Cloak, a hero who is bound to the dimension and uses it to teleport, has different powers than Blackout). And there were what, maybe three years between their discovery of Blackout and and the fall of SHIELD? As big a bureaucracy as SHIELD was, there's no reason to believe that any type of connection would have necessarily been made during that time.

Afterlife is most definitely a recent development. I believe Jiaying stated that she established it after Whitehall dissected her, which would put it after Skye's birth. I'm just saying that if the Royal Family was around on earth, I'm pretty sure they'd be aware of it and would keep an eye on its goings-on, intervening in something like them declaring war on humanity. So I think it's correct to guess, as xqueenfrostine suggests, that there's a good chance that Attilan's been gone for a while. I'm just throwing out the possibility that if the Kree object is indeed some kind of teleportation device, then maybe it has something to do with why Attilan's not currently around. It was discovered about a hundred years ago, meaning that any potential use by the Kree would have occurred before that, perhaps hundreds of years ago. From the outside it would appear to just destroy whomever it consumed, hence the legend amongst the current Inhumans of it being a great weapon. So instead of Attilan removing itself, perhaps the ancestors of Black Bolt and Co. were taken elsewhere, and their society developed in a totally different way from the ones who remained on earth.

Darkforce doesn't really have anything to do with the Inhumans in the comics, but it is used to teleport by a number of characters. The Kree could conceivably use it as a way of getting rid of Inhumans by just teleporting them somewhere else. Since the main Inhumans are so far MIA, perhaps they, or their ancestors, were dispatched by the Kree, and they're hanging out somewhere waiting to be found. I don't expect them to be introduced on the show, but there's some reason Attilan doesn't seem to be on earth at the moment. I can't imagine that the royal family would just lose track of a settlement as large as Afterlife, and they'd seem to weigh in at some point on the SHIELD conflict if they are aware of it. So it would seem that they've either removed themselves or they've been banished, and perhaps this device provides a clue as to how it was done.

I mentioned in the season finale thread that my first thought was the Darkforce dimension, which has been introduced to the MCU already. Maybe this is a hint as to Attilan and the royal family's current whereabouts.

I'm with you. And I didn't even realize there was fan pressure for a Simmons/Fitz pairing. Granted, I tend not to voyage out into the larger world of fandom (especially anything on Tumblr). Fitz and me -- er, Mack -- forever! :)

I'm wondering if it's a Darkforce thing. They've already introduced the concept in the show, and it's from one of the few first season procedurals that hasn't fit into the larger narrative. Or, and this is a HUUUUUGE stretch and would never actually happen, but I'm going to say it anyway. Now that Spider-Man's part of the MCU, black alien symbiote.

Unfortunately, we humans have a very real history of pretending that dangerous compounds aren't water soluble. You'd think we'd know better by now, but we keep letting it happen.

I love that while Ward is planning his great revenge towards SHIELD, none of them give a crap about what he's doing because they have real stuff to do deal with. And I'm hoping he has a "Real SHIELD" plot where the Real Hydra shows up and tells him just where to stick his daddy issues.

Again, though, this was prompted by Gordon teleporting into a secure SHIELD facility with Raina, a known enemy. I'm against mandatory indexing, but that was enough provocation for SHIELD to insist on meeting with the Inhumans. Skye couldn't explain why they were there, so SHIELD had a right to try to get answers about that. I agree that they handled it wrong after that, but it would have been irresponsible of them not to follow up on that trespassing.

I'd love to see Captain Britain, but I want the real Brian Braddock. No offense to Hunter, I actually really enjoy the character and actor. I'd assume that Marvel has the rights to Captain Britain, Excalibur notwithstanding. I wonder about Betsy, though. I know Psylocke was in The Last Stand and will be in the next one, but I could conceivably see her as a dual rights character like Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. MCU could stick with her original appearance while Fox uses her Asian likeness in their movies. They could obviously do Captain Britain without her, but I like the two of them together.

The problem is that SHIELD could change, or someone within SHIELD may decide to take advantage of the Index. Just because Coulson's a good guy doesn't mean the Index will never fall into more nefarious hands. The Inhumans are still people. They may be descendants of genetically modified humans from thousands of years ago, but they're still people. While I think it's reasonable for SHIELD to want to understand more about the Inhumans as a group, I think that the indexing of someone who hasn't committed any type of crime is a big rights violation. And SHIELD has no authority. It's not like this is even a UN-sponsored initiative or anything. It's one rogue group deciding to track all superhumans. I don't have a problem with Coulson and Co being a freelance peacekeeping spy organization. But they have to accept now that status and recognize that they can't always act unilaterally, especially on an issue like this.

I felt pretty meh on the Cap 1 the first time I saw it, but I rewatched it just before Agent Carter began and enjoyed it much more. I still don't find the Red Skull portion of the movie that interesting, but I have a new appreciation for the character work between all the good guys. And now I can't get enough of Peggy, so the movie bumped up on my person MCU ratings list just for that.

I think people have grossly exaggerated Whedon's antipathy to the show's position in the MCU. I mean, he created it and meant to be more actively involved, but Age of Ultron kept taking more of his time. He never said that he didn't accept the TV show as canon, he just meant that it would derail the movie's narrative to go off into the side business of Coulson being alive, so he found it best not to address it in the movie. Honestly, people who don't watch the TV show probably didn't even think about Coulson while watching the movie, so why bother bringing in yet another plot point and a film that already stuffed to the gills? It would have just been a distraction. I think people have conflated his decision not to bring Coulson in and his statements about AoS initially ruffling some feathers in the movie department to mean he disavows the show. But reading his comments in context, it seems pretty clear that he was talking about the Winter Soldier's creators, who were about to dismantle SHIELD and didn't want the show to mess with their plans. So they had the problematic first season where they couldn't really do anything until the movie came out, and then the show took over being the primary outlet for telling SHIELD stories. But I think his decision not to deal with Coulson's resurrection is the movie was valid. There was no time for it, it would have just been one more thing wedged in, and people would have complained about that. It's a no-win situation for him. He just has a very Whedon-y way of answering questions, and I think that through some bad headlines and article summaries, he's been pinned with some kind of maliciousness towards the show.

This all started because Gordon transported Raina, a known SHIELD enemy and untrustworthy character from before they knew she was an Inhuman, into SHIELD HQ. That doesn't exactly scream, "We just want to be left alone and live in peace." It was inadvertent, as Gordon didn't know they were going, but how could SHIELD not read that as an act of provocation. It was up to the Inhumans at that point to do damage control. They trespassed first, and it's justifiable for SHIELD to want to know why they were there. I don't agree with all of SHIELD's actions in this episode, but they were reacting to a known threat.