A dull showdown with Lash highlights Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s style problem

Despite the considerable improvements Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. has made since its debut, the series has yet to pick up a sense of style. The writing, design, and direction are competent but uninspiring at best, bland and generic at worst, and it sometimes feels like the people behind the scenes are doing the bare minimum to bring these stories to life. The series has managed to compensate for its stylistic weakness by building up character relationships with an ensemble of exceptionally talented performers, but the show could be so much more if it wasn’t so committed to mediocrity in those other areas.
We got a glimpse of that better series in “4,722 Hours,” an episode that made strong creative choices to amplify Simmons’ emotional experience, but with “Chaos Theory,” the show firmly settles back into its middling status quo. The episode delivers some significant developments, but it does so without much imagination, wrapping up the Lash storyline quickly and efficiently. As it’s done with characters like Ward and Jiaying in the past, the show aggressively announces that former ally Andrew Garner is a threat now by underscoring all his scenes with tense, discordant music, and giving him lines with double meanings the other characters don’t pick up on, like his warning to Simmons that “secrets can eat you up from the inside.” Subtlety is written out of Andrew’s character in Lauren LeFranc’s script, which offers revelations about his Terrigenesis, but fails to adequately address his motivations as the murderous Inhuman Lash.
There are cryptic teases when Andrew talks about his moral responsibility to kill Inhumans as it relates to some ominous future event, but withholding key details diminishes the impact of his scenes with his ex-wife May, who he shoots with an I.C.E.R. and chains up after she confronts him. The plot of a woman watching the man she loves turn into a raging beast is well-trodden territory for a Whedon-produced TV series, and Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn’t try to make this familiar situation unique in any way. By refusing to delve into the specifics of what is driving Andrew’s behavior as Lash, Lefranc creates a broad conflict for Andrew and May that isn’t especially conducive to rich emotional storytelling, and despite the best efforts of Blair Underwood and Ming-Na Wen, the drama between the former spouses falls flat.
The Hawaiian vacation was six months before the drama, though, and the flashbacks to Andrew and May enjoying drinks in front of an island sunset are the most effective moments of the episode, largely because of their use of color to create a much different mood from the present-day plot. This show’s primary palette is gray, brown, and white, so whenever there’s any pop of color, it makes an impression. The warm sunset combined with smaller color details like the flowers and drinks on the table help make this tropical world feel more alive than the washed out locations S.H.I.E.L.D. visits this week, and it shows the value of embracing a wider spectrum of colors in the design to create more evocative visuals.