Agents of SHIELD- So this happened. The first half of the season is largely lame, the fifth (Girl in the Flower Dress) and eighth (The Well) being the only ones I felt were actively good and with at least one (the second, 0-8-4) being actively bad. Second half is better overall despite amplifying the single most annoying bit of the early episodes, the wangsty trust issues. But at least those are justified at the time because, y'know, that's that part of the show that corresponds to the second Captain America movie. Also had entirely too much Victoria Hand.
It's a bit weird how long the show took to get interesting because it always had the components to be good; the cast is diverse, Coulson is Coulson, they can pick up bits and pieces of a larger Marvel Universe without having to dedicated acres of plot space to them and when they elect to do stuff like "well yeah, of course there's random people with superpowers out there, it's still a Marvel universe" or "wait, Asgardians are visually indistinguishable from humans, why WOULDN'T one happen to like the place and decided to stay?" and general they can elect to show impact from larger events (ie movies) or build the universe at large and both lead to interesting episodes. But when the show doesn't have something to pay attention to and instead dwells on the cast, it fares poorly because basically it's written like a soap opera (... or an X-men comic really). Amazingly, at the end the shakeup in the cast dynamic does away with all that nicely and look, these guys are friends and don't need to whine constantly because they are here to get shit done. Very nice.
Despite some in and out praise for everything after episode 17 (HEIL HYDRA and all that, gosh whyever would the big reveal in Cap completely upend a show about ground-level SHIELD agents I couldn't tell you) and the snark about soap operainess the real standout is episode 15. Gosh, a named supervillain that isn't shoehorned into the metaplot (metaplot is nice and all but you can have a villain who's an active villain during their entire episode without making them also a minion of your big bad in this kind of show) and a cool cameo that actually gives us a little insight into a side character from the flicks and leaves them a plot thread that could be used all kinds of ways if they elect to later? Very nice.
Speculation (I haven't been keeping up, so if the previews invalidate this then I guess I record my wrongness for posterity: Skye is an Inhuman. Bit of a longshot, but straight up alien doesn't mesh with her not immediately scanning as something else all those times she was medically examined and she's very obviously not Asgardian, so alien-but-you-can't-tell is out. Inhumans meanwhile could fit the known facts well; she's an 084 because Inhumans haven't made contact with modern humans yet and nobody knows what the fuck, but where she was found is relatively close to one of their comic outposts if memory serves. She scans as human because, having not been exposed to terrigen mist or whatever the MCU uses instead, she is completely human still. Inhumans can range all over the mutation spectrum, including overt physical ones, so her parents being 'monsters' could be a relatively literal description. Plan B is that she's instead from Titan, although that doesn't mesh as well with lacking overt superpowers so seems a lot less likely.
