Dana Leigh Brand

I was trying to figure out what on earth I could talk about for the last five episodes of Daredevil since I covered so much of my love affair with this show already. These five episodes rightly conclude the various arcs of the season so everything that tickled me to this point is still here.

This middle section of Daredevil‘s second season is best subtitled as “Matt Fails at Life.” Pretty much every aspect of his non-vigilante persona crashes and burns. It’s glorious.

I got into trouble with just about everyone last year for daring to find Daredevil lacking. So far this season? I adore it. It’s fabulous!

Agents of SHIELD offers politics, spies, and allies in “The Inside Man,” providing plenty of intrigue without being completely emotionally exhausting. “The Inside Man” offers a pause for character development before plunging head first into peril.

I’m delighted to say that Agents of SHIELD has hit the reset button with “Bouncing Back.” How aptly named! We’ve gone back to the start, but with many lessons learned.

Agent Carter‘s “Hollywood Ending” is exactly that, in the most 1940’s sense of the term. That is: every plot is resolved, each character completes a satisfying arc, and also there are kisses. Nice kisses. Kisses I’m not complaining about, for once!

This has gotten kind of squirrelly. Does anyone else feel like Agent Carter is scraping its wing tips trying to land? Overall, the thing is solid, but I’m a bit like “???” with some of the persnickety details here. Let’s get those out of the way first.

Now I definitely feel like I was emotionally manipulated for financial gain and I no longer care, because all that’s happened is that they justified my wariness and confirmed my suspicions. This entire endeavor at “revisiting” The X-Files was simply a desperate attempt at relevance by Fox.

Agent Carter makes me happy. All hail Whitney Frost! Huzzah for romances where ladies still have agency. Yay MCU interconnectivity! And give me all the sci-fi science you can possibly muster because I will inhale it like a kid who’s gotten hold of the cookie jar.

I am seriously done with this The X-Files revival. After “Babylon” I am just not having it anymore. This episode was so insubstantial that I barely have anything to say. The clone agents were terrible and pointless. Mulder’s grand revelations about “faith” represented by his belief that he was given shrooms are asinine.

Sometimes, an episode of television is just pure fun and beyond that nothing else particularly matters. Agent Carter hits just enough notes in “The Atomic Job” to make it a joyful sidequest. This episode was one big detour down action/adventure lane, and yet it was so phenomenal at it that we’re tickled.

Oh, yay, more garbage from The X-Files reboot. Not only did we get a recycled monster of the week, it was hand-waved away in favor of even more baby drama from Dana Scully! I thought we got rid of this crap a long, long time ago. Wishful thinking, I guess.

Agent Carter goes for backstory in “Smoke & Mirrors” to give context to all that espionage. It’s a solid episode with the usual balance between action and intrigue with the added bonus of a little patriarchy smashing.

Well, so far two-thirds of The X-Files reboot is phenomenal. Two out of three episodes have been self-aware without being self-conscious. “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster” is the perfect blend of in-jokes, existentialism, and monsters.

Agent Carter is back for real now! Hurray! I’m throwing streamers and serving cake! “Better Angels” saw the return of not only the series’ stylistics, but a proper mystery plot, and some complex characterization as well.

Let’s get one thing straight, The X-Files —if you promise me a monster-of-the-week I better frickin’ get a monster-of-the-week. “Founder’s Mutation” was mytharc masquerading under one-off mystery.

This X-Files revival was concocted explicitly for ratings which still has me on guard. The second thing that has me on guard? To be overdramatic about it: The X-Files is a foundational piece of my soul.

I didn’t believe that season one of Agent Carter could live up to my impossible expectations, yet it blew them out of the water. It turns out that the only thing Agent Carter has to live up to now is its own first season.

Agents Of SHIELD treats its winter finale like a season finale. Blessings upon its head. If we have to wait three months for new episodes, a cohesive action-packed episode with a definitive ending is much better than sitting on a cliff-hanger for that long.

Do you ever think too much about a TV show because you love it a lot, so you end up making up little scenes in your head of what could happen? That’s called fan-fiction, and mine was oddly aligning well with last night’s Agents Of SHIELD.

It’s easy to take Marvel offerings for granted. Market saturation and the illusion of action-thriller sameness make them easy to dismiss as commercial garbage. That would be a mistake, especially in the case of Jessica Jones.

Agents of SHIELD offers up “Many Heads, One Tale” like the magnum opus of a master weaver, taking the literally six or seven season plots and tying them all together so neatly it almost feels deterministic. This season is a hot mess, so I love that everything has finally come together, even if it does feel like a foregone conclusion.

“Chaos Theory” is actually perfect. Color me astonished. This episode, as seventh episodes of seasons tend to do, tied everything together with a great big bow and then knocked it out of the park.

Agents Of SHIELD returns to form with an action-packed hour including Lance Hunter in his finest form, a new “ship” in Bobbi and May, and a (mostly) unexpected final twist as the show reveals the man behind new Inhuman, Lash.

Agents of SHIELD, you were doing so well it was inevitable that you’d stumble and fall when I needed you most. That’s the way it goes. Outside reports claim this episode is a fascinating story of survival and shit. I can’t see the forest for the trees.

Well, that escalated quickly! Agents of SHIELD just took a plot that I was sure they were going to drag out through December and slammed it into high gear. In episode four. I was definitely not expecting that.

Agents of SHIELD is still going strong, hurray! “A Wanted (Inhu)man” runs on about three different tracks which don’t connect yet but promise to do so in the future.

This is the show at its best. This is what the series has been doing so damn well since Winter Soldier. Every time I start to trust that they can keep it up, I remember the beginning and weep, or they stumble and come up flat. But this week, man oh man. This week who cares where we started.

A flashy but hollow Season 3 premiere feels a bit like Agents of SHIELD is hitting a reset button. So color me disappointed.

Let Dana Leigh Brand convince you to watch Agents of SHIELD aka the best sci-fi series on TV.