S02.E17: Melinda

[Sakura12]

Russian woman had Super strength, her daughter seemed to have mind control powers along with feeding off the fears of others. 

[xqueenfrostine]

And what was the little girl's power exactly?  They said they didn't put her through the mist because it was too dangerous.  So she had powers on her own, pre-mist?

 

As far as we know, no, the little girl didn't have abilities before going into the mist.  Jiaying said she sensed "darkness" in the girl.  I took that to mean that Jiaying thought that based on the girl's personality that she might have the sort of negative character attributes that you wouldn't want a person with super powers to have.  The Inhumans only allow people who are deemed worthy and who have been trained for it to undergo terrigenesis, and apparently this girl was rejected during their screening process.  Her mother was angered by that decision, and stole the crystals so that the Inhuman elders couldn't prevent her daughter from receiving "her birthright."

Edited April 21, 2015 by xqueenfrostine

[jhlipton]

Russian lady had invulnerability and super strength.  

 

Mom looked fairly vulnerable when may speared her.  I think she only had super-strength.

[kitlee625]

If the show had left it at the little girl just being an Inhuman who had undergone teregenesis using crystals stolen from Afterlife, I would have been okay with it.  It's not a bad idea for us to see why it's so important for the Inhuman leaders to control who has access to the terrigen mist and who doesn't (and therefore why Raina and Skye's transformations are considered taboo).  But taking that story and making it into something about Skye's dynamic with her mom is a bridge too far.  Especially since it's now an excuse for Jiaying to hide her connection to Skye.  There's tying Skye's journey to the other plot lines in the episode, and then there's making props out of other characters' important backstories to build up Skye's story.  This is exactly the sort of stuff that annoyed so many people last season.  It's never a good idea for writers to show such blatant favoritism for one of their characters that they can't give their other characters' stories the time and space to live and breathe independently of what's going on with their favorite.

 

I thought that look was really suspicious looking too. If Skye's date of birth was in November or December of 1988 I might have just written this off as the orphanage underestimating Skye's age by a couple months when they took her in.  But at the age Skye supposedly first entered their care, it should have been pretty hard to be off by 6-12 months.  Babies grow really fast.  Barring some sort of health issue that might inhibit physical and mental development, no one with childcare experience would mistake a 18 month old for a 8 month old.

 

Yeah, so I agree with you about not being thrilled about this example of "it's all connected." Especially because there was not a lot of post-flashback stuff with May. The woman whose story we were supposed to be watching. We didn't get to see how this related to her in the present day aside from her sitting at the desk, look at papers like she was post-Bahrain, and now thinking about Coulson and Andrew keeping a secret from her. How does this affect her trust in Coulson? In SHIELD? In powered people? We don't really know. All we know is that the story is a huge source of pain for Jiaying as a leader. So yeah, not a huge fan of the end of the episode being all about how Bahrain affects Jiaying as a leader but not May as a person in the present day.

 

Also, for the difference in her age: YES! Absolutely. Either they thought that Skye was an abnormally huge/mentally advanced 8 month old, so something is fishy. Or more likely, the writers just made a mistake.

Edited April 22, 2015 by kitlee625

[crystalwearer]

Also, for the difference in her age: YES! Absolutely. Either they thought that Skye was an abnormally huge/mentally advanced 8 month old, so something is fishy. Or more likely, the writers just made a mistake.

Well, Skye's papers were a fiction created by a self-sustaining program buried on a SHIELD server somewhere, and one of that program's rules was "move this baby to a new location every 6 months". Could the documents have been changed with each move? Maybe change the birthdate by a month or two each time until she's been artificially aged a year? She couldn't challenge it herself, the new family wouldn't really know anything beyond what the papers said, and most child services agencies are a bit too overtaxed to dig into documents that are only a little off. And a constantly changing birthdate would make it harder for someone to follow the paper trail.

[xqueenfrostine]

But she didn't artificially age herself a year.  She de-aged herself a year, which seems like it would be harder to pull off.  Unless it happened in the first few years, a kid's going to notice if they don't get older because even if birthdays aren't a thing, there's school.  Besides, why would they be constantly changing her DoB and not her name?  Skye said the nuns gave her her Mary Sue Poots as a baby.  If you're going to be changing anything on documents to hide someone's ID, the name is usually more commonly changed than the DoB.

Edited April 23, 2015 by xqueenfrostine

[CoolMom]

Somethings not adding up about the whole Skye origin story.

 

We've been told that Skye (as a baby) was discovered to be an 084 (I'm still curious how SHIELD discovered that Skyebaby was an 084 and needed to be protected at all costs) and that everyone in the village in China including all but one member of a SHIELD team were killed defending Skyebaby against two monsters/powered people/whatever.

 

 It's not adding up at all.

 

As soon as Cal started telling Skye the story of her birth my daughter said, "he got it wrong".  I told her I missed what she caught because I thought it was close like two people telling the same story in their own way.  But she insisted, then Cal said 1988 and Skye was all Oh I am 26 after thinking forever she's 25.  DD said see he's not telling the truth.  My husband said he thinks her mom is NOT her mom or at the very least they are not being honest about stuff.

[ChelseaNH]

I'm thinking these writers are not known for being incredibly detail-oriented.  These are the same people who specified Skye's life-threatening injuries as damage to the stomach and intestines -- injuries which are highly treatable, as long as she didn't bleed out on her way to competent medical care.

[John Potts]

I noticed that over the course of the episode Skye went from 25 to 26 (surprisingly, both are more than Chloe Bennet IRL - she's 23 at time of posting). No idea if this is meant to be a clue that Cal & SkyeMommy are lying, fudging the issue for some reason or a straight up mistake.

 

May's backstory was kinda tragic (and I totally buy the idea that it caused the breakdown of her marriage). Even where the two principles do love each other, the loss of a child is a very common cause of marital breakdown IRL. OK, she technically didn't "lose" a child, but it's apparent that this was the event that meant she decided not to have any of her own. But I disagree with FurryFury - she hasn't really missed her window on having kids if she changes her mind. Even if she's too old to have kids "naturally", there's always IVF, without even going into the various "miraculous" Comic Book pregnancy options (though they tend to bring problems of their own). And Eegah - if you don't like the "Woman rendered sterile" plotline - probably best to avoid Avengers: Age of Ultron (to avoid spoilers I won't elaborate as to why)!

 

tankgurl73  "oooh, the little girl is actually the big bad and is the woman is just one of her victims/minions and May is going to have to kill the little girl.  That would do it."

 

I was sure the girl would be killed - I didn't expect her to be a chip off the crazy block. I'm not sure you're right in describing the kid as the big bad (I'm pretty sure she wasn't mind controlling her mother) but I guess that's a perfectly valid interpretation until Word of God pronounces on the issue (one way or the other).

 

tankgurl73 I think, if I'm interpreting things right, that May believes that Bobbi is sincere in her belief that she's doing the right thing and she doesn't hold it against her, even if she (May) believes that she (Bobbi) is in fact wrong.

 

That was my interpretation too. I'm glad they're not making the divide between SHIELD and Real!SHIELD into one where it's clearly Good v Evil, because like Marvel's Civil War, both sides had a point. Of course, we can only hope TPTB tell it better than the comics did because (if rumour is to be believed) TPTB wanted the Pro-Regs to be "right" and the anti-regs to be "wrong", while their readership took pretty much the opposite view!

 

VCRTracking Holy crap, that was one scary little girl! Probably the scariest of all horror movie little girls.

 

Have you seen Orphan? Isabelle Fuhrman plays the titular character as one scary kid (and she was only 12 at the time)!

 

jhlipton Wasn't Amy Acker only in one episode?
Chicago Redshirt Pretty sure there is going to be an episode at some point in which Coulson's love interest finds out that he's alive.

 

I would imagine it's almost inevitable.

 

ETA: Did love SkyeMommy going "Don't worry - you can't hurt the mountain, and we don't give a crap about the mundanes at the bottom of the mountain." Or did she just forget to mention the last part?

Edited May 14, 2015 by John Potts