Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season Three Premiere Review

     This title needs work...immediately thought of this Skye quote from the season one episode "Repairs": "Why can't we call it something cooler? Like....I don't know, the Welcome Wagon?" Because they basically are going around and talking to people to see if they have Inhuman powers...
     In other words, the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. are back to protect the world from the...much, much weirder world. And when they can't do that, they'll keep them safe. So here's my review of the first episode of season three, "Laws of Nature".

     Anyway, Fitz has gone all Indiana Jones in searching for Simmons; which involved tracking down an ancient scroll(seriously) and taking out an Arab mobster. (Yes, we're talking about Leo Fitz.) So while he's off adventuring, Bobbi's been working the lab while rehabbing, which was odd. Apparently she has a biology degree, too? Still, that was weird.
     Coulson has ditched the suits for jackets and jeans; maybe because it's tough having only one physical hand? And his figurative right hand has disappeared, too; May hasn't exactly gone AWOL, but she hasn't come back from her vacation with Andrew yet, either...
     President Ellis has created a team called the Advanced Threat Containment Unit, or ATCU, in order to deal with all these new Inhumans that have been taking their fish oil since Skye launched the Terrigen Crystals into the ocean a couple months ago....There's gotta be a better name for them that somebody hasn't came up with yet. ("ICER" sounds much cooler than "Night-Night Gun", and "Welcome Wagon" is catchier than "Index Asset Evaluation Report" ....) Anyhow, the ATCU is led by a woman named Rosalind Price, who gets into a witty debate with Coulson on a subway.
     Bobbi and Hunter's on-again, off-again thing is on again, I think...
     Daisy and Mack have been tasked with forming a new team; in order to keep the Inhumans safe from...well, all the people who want to track them, and the world safe from the new Inhumans.  One of these new Inhumans is a gay construction worker named Joey, who now suddenly can liquify a lot of metals when he gets within ten feet. (Which is a strange gift....) Anyway, Daisy, Mack and Hunter get to Joey before the scary men in the black flak jackets do, whisking him off to the New Bus of Zephyr One.
     Lincoln wants to try to live a normal life now(which since he's a doctor, doesn't actually sound all that normal...), but he's on the run with Daisy after they have a run-in with a terrifying wall-obliterating porcupine-maned Inhuman dude named Lash. It was kind of a draw, but they got the worse end of things.
     Ward's off doing who knows what with HYDRA; so he wasn't seen this episode.
     Most importantly....
     SIMMONS IS ALIVE. (But I knew that already. You can't kill her, any more than she was placed on the team because of her ability to lie.) She is stranded on some forlorn night landscape, and terrified of something we can't see because of mist and mountains.

     I think she has powers of teleportation; which would be awesome, since she was so averse to powered people right after Tripp's death, plus she is already a friend of Daisy's and so is used to working with her; and also, except for Jiaying, all the major people involved with the Inhumans we've seen so far are men. (Raina doesn't count.) They need another female perspective on this team besides Daisy's; for great facial expression reactions to stuff if nothing else. (Mack and Joey fall flat in this area, which seems almost to be a general requirement of AoS cast members; part of why this show is so great.) Courtney and I have been debating exactly how this could work all day.
     Clark Gregg thinks that Fitz built Coulson's new hand; which would be awesome.
     And during the cast live-tweet during the show last night, Chloe Bennet hacked into Brett Dalton's Twitter and posted a bunch of stuff like "Chloe should be made Princess of the World!" The official Marvel page replied back, "Aw....Quakey breaky heart?" (Country music S.H.I.E.L.D. puns are the best type of puns in existence.) He then regained his phone and complained, while at the same time Nick Blood had snatched Chloe's phone and was typing stuff like "Nick is SO AWESOME! And he's British. So he should be named King. Like, seriously."
     Anyway, the writing felt really...clunky, for being a season premiere. I know #ItsAllConnected, so things will make sense eventually, but still....you could almost hear the loose parts jangling around in there. There were a handful of good quotes, though: "I have trouble counting when I can't use my fingers, but I'm pretty sure there are more of them than us." - Hunter. / "...So you're a ghost." - Coulson to Rosalind. "Uh-hmm. And you're a corpse." / "I need a bigger gun, I guess....Or my axe. Or maybe a shotgun/axe combination of some sort...." - Mack.

     Next week's episode is supposed to deal with Simmons' rescue, so that should be awesome. AND, it has Ward, and May, and that Asgardian professor they left in Portland after the incident with the Berserker Staff. So...yeah. Watch.

Middle of September

     Well, let's see....the Okmulgee Public Library's annual book sale was last weekend, and so we got about three hundred books. On Saturday read through The Hidden Life of Dogs by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and When God Doesn't Make Sense by James Dobson.
      I think somehow I must act as an animal magnet. It's strange, but nice. Rags, Captain, Banjo, Darcy, Glory, Jellybean, Drysa....it's just "Wesley! Pounce!"

     In school stuff, I found that I don't particularly care for Edgar Allan Poe all that much, and was somewhat ridiculed by the teacher for never having read him before. Much Ado About Nothing back-to-back weeks, first for Lit Traditions and then for Shakespeare. That was good. And so I watched the amazing Joss Whedon adaptation at least six times in two weeks, plus reading the actual Shakespeare script several times, as research for two papers. As You Like It doesn't have much of a plot at all, and so it's hard to follow what's happening, but there are a lot of good quotes throughout. Drive Me Crazy is a 90's romcom that follows Shakespeare's general rules for structure pretty well. Melissa Joan Hart is the lead, and her dad is Stephen Collins(Eric Camden of 7th Heaven).

     Ordered the season two DVD of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. from Amazon; and bought Mom the first season DVD of Agent Carter as a birthday present. Season three of S.H.I.E.L.D. begins in eight days(not that we're counting the hours or anything...)  
     This weekend there was a (very small) arts and crafts show on campus, so I bought some art for my apartment, since it's a little sparse on decorations right now(I haven't even hung up Amanda's basketball hoop yet). And also, it would have been Mimi's birthday, and she loved arts-and-crafts shows, so that was kind of nice.

     The RSU BCM was showing The Princess Bride last Monday night, so I sat way in the back and quoted all the lines of the script to myself; finding out that, yes, I can do it accurately the entire way through. That was good to know. Reading through the William Goldman novel again right now.
     The Friday before that, they talked me into coming with them to a conference called Momentum in Moore, which all the schools go to, kind of like the Falls Creek retreat in spring. That was okay. It was fantastic to spend time hanging out with Annie, Bucky, Daniel P., James and Ja Li Si again. They were just as glad to see me as I was to see them. But I guess it's like 2018 now in our Pawnee Parks Department....which is sad. No amount of waffles and steak can fix that. Nor coffee runs. And it was very good to see Bob and Deb again. They taught a breakout session on trusting God through the difficult times, which was wonderful. Just the way their faith has carried them through everything over the past year...amazing to see. I mean, I knew it before, but they're the kind of people you want to emulate.

     Talked with Amanda for a while the other night, which was good. And Jon is using a picture I took of Abby Lee years ago as the cover for the new Heroes At Large single. The continued evaporation of the GBC congregation is worrying and disappointing.

Homework Swamp

     As You Like It is NOT one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. It does have good quotes throughout, though.
     Much Ado About Nothing is funnier. And the Joss Whedon movie - Clark Gregg and Reed Diamond are having the time of their lives. (They later played Phil Coulson and Daniel Whitehall on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) Also, it has Sean Maher(Simon from Firefly) as the villian, Nathan Fillion(Mal from Firefly) as the constable and Ashley Johnson(voice of Gretchen Grundler on Recess, waitress in The Avengers) as one of the maids. Plus a lot of other familiar people I can't quite place.

     Poetry is really hard and very unnatural to write.

     I'm probably not getting enough sleep.

When September Begins

     Lots and lots and lots of homework....also, Taming of the Shrew is rather hard to follow. Did manage to cram in Michael Crichton's sequel to Jurassic Park, The Lost World, in there. And lots of Edgar Guest poetry, which is good schoolwork.
     And also introduced Elizabeth and Susan to the "Felines of New York" Facebook page; that was pretty fun. They had a great one on Wednesday, the caption was "We moved around a lot when I was younger, so I never really bothered making friends." "Do you have any friends now?" "The other cat that lives here is my friend. I think."

     Rewatched Sleepless in Seattle on Monday night; I had an assignment for Poetry Writing, so I guessed what happened to Sam, Annie and Jonah after the credits rolled. It was a pretty terrible poem, but I was in a hurry. And it's a good movie that was about to go off Netflix.

     We're now at fourteen fire alarms in three weeks....and Dalton moved out; he said the cockroaches were too much to deal with. (I haven't seen/killed any more than usual, one or two a week.)

     Euripides' Medea is horrifying...but definitely worth reading. That'll be an interesting discussion tomorrow morning in Lit Traditions. Dr. Mackie was in Massachusetts all week, so a lot of online poetry assignments, and for American Lit we watched and studied a movie called Smoke Signals, which was pretty good.

     The inside of my fridge looks like Jemma Simmons'...only instead of consisting solely of siriacha and beer, it's buffalo sauce and Diet Coke. And half a pizza. Anyway, after working literally all day on homework projects, I still have two more to write and print off before 8:30...
     26 days until season three of Agents....it'll be the Best. Day. Ever!

     Also, it's now technically meteorological fall, as of Monday. Football starts today for colleges, and the high school season starts tomorrow night. But it's Oklahoma; "fall" is a contraction of "football"; they're basically the same thing.