Agents of SHIELD Season 1 -- By Memory

I wanted to catch a friend up on the events of "Agents of SHIELD", season 1, so I thought I'd make it available to all. Special thanks to Conor Bendle and Mik Bennett who checked that I provided appropriate information for season 2.

After the events of the third biggest movie ever made, Agents of Shield follows a not-very-crack team of not-very-superheroes. Almost every episode, the Agents have to investigate an object or villain, most so obscure that even comic fans have to look at Wikipedia to remember them.

Surprise! Agent Coulson is alive. Except not really. That is to say, he's not alive in the movies, but he's alive on TV. And from the word go, we're not sure if he's even that. How did he survive being stabbed in the heart? Is he a robot? A hologram? Some sort of clone duplicate? The answer won't be as exciting as you think.

So Agent Coulson isn't allowed to see his old friends the Avengers, because in the movies they all think he's dead and it would be too expensive to have them on the show. But he still wants to help defend the world from evil, so he builds a new team:

Melinda May – an emotionally closed martial arts master who definitely won't open up and become more friendly over the series. Fitz and Simmons – two young scientists who went through SHIELD's version of Hogwarts with top marks and are so close that most of the time people just refer to them as Fitzsimmons. Grant Ward – a super competent, decorated agent whose personality is even less interesting than his name. And as a late addition, the magical hacker who never knew her parents, Skye.

The first season has three major arcs: the first comprises mostly stand-alone episodes where the team meet a collection of colourful villains and encounter strange devices, all related in some way to the Avengers or other parts of the Marvel movie world. The second arc focuses on connecting the stand-alone events of the first few episodes together to reveal that a rogue group known as "Centipede" is trying to create their own brand of scary super-soldiers – the most prominent of these is Deathlok, who is doing what Centipede orders him to save his family. During this arc, Skye discovers that SHIELD potentially knows who her parents were and Coulson finds that he was resurrected through the use of big, bad, alien technology. When Skye pushes Coulson to help her find the classified documents about her family, Coulson – understandably, following his own revelations – tells her she might not want to know and refuses to help.

In the final arc, the Agents of Shield are caught off guard trying to return to the Hub (a major Shield base) by the reveal that the evil organisation Hydra has been within Shield all this time. The events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier occur at the same time. During the final arc, the agents ally themselves with the remaining loyal Shield agents only to see them killed off by Hydra and Centipede (who are also part of Hydra and led by Garrett, played by Lieutenant Hudson from Aliens). Ward himself turns against the team and joins Centipede, after having been a deep-cover villain all this time. This, incidentally, makes him a much more dynamic and layered character and is retroactively for the best.

Our agents make it "Game Over, Man!" for Garrett and Centipede, with a little help from Nick Fury, whose actor Samuel L. Jackson was a better sport than the other superhero movie leads and just wanted to be a part of the show. At the end, half of the original cast is in a bad place: Ward, with his mentor Barrett dead, is captured and will probably be both conflicted and crazy/evil next season. Fitz suffers a near-death experience and "might never be the same again", causing a lot of heart ache for Simmons. And finally, Coulson, though he has a revitalising new mission from Fury to basically restart SHIELD with nothing but his little team, is getting worse following the reveal of how he survived. The alien technology used to bring him back from the dead caused Coulson to start drawing strange patterns that look like circuit diagrams, maths equations, or some kind of map. To be continued!