Agents of SHIELD Episode 23 (Season 2 season premiere)

By Mark Rodriguez

A second season of SHIELD begins and this time I'll be giving more of a brief synopsis of the episode and then my opinions, instead of the entire play-by-play like before.

The episode starts a few days after the first Captain America movie, as the remaining members of HYDRA want to store all the stolen highly technological goods they had shortly after the Red Skull died. Agent Carter and the Howling Commandos bust in and seize the goods, wanting to have them locked up for the safety of the world.

In present day, Coulson is now the new director of SHIELD and he now has a new set of hired mercenaries working alongside Sky, May and Triplet (one of them played by Lucy Lawless) and find out that HYDRA is after that same piece of technology. They soon find out from Grant (under lockdown for potential HYDRA intel) that they have Carl Creel, The Absorbing Man working for them, a guy that can gain the skin structure or whatever material he absorbs.

 He goes after a General that's in charge of the hunt against both SHIELD and HYDRA, and Carl is captured and sent to the same base where all the technology is being held. Coulson's team sneak into the base and confront Carl and the soldiers in the base. One of the mercenaries finds the item and grabs it, and the block of strange metal grafts itself to her hand. The mercenaries decided to run and take her to the hospital. The SHIELD agents manage to get a plane with cloaking technology to better continue their missions.

Absorbing Man goes after the mercenaries and turns into stone to overturn their car. He steals the block and escapes. He turns it in to his leader, which looks pretty much like the same guy we saw at the beginning of the episode (during Captain America's WWII era) not looking much older in present day.

Meanwhile the episode ends on a sad note. Throughout the episode we saw that Fitz was trying to work on cloaking technology while suffering some sort of Post-Dramatic Stress Disorder after the events of last season, with Simmons calming him down. It gets worse as Coulson reveals that Fitz suffered brain damage from the underwater escape that saved Simmon's life from the last season, and that Simmons had left the team. The whole time we saw Simmons comforting him, was a delusion, further showing the extent of the brain damage.

My Opinions

Wow. This episode hits the ground running with a great flashback scene happening several days after the first Captain America movie, and it was nice to see Agent Carter (in her prime) and the Howling Commandos for a few moments. Coulson gets busy as the new director of SHIELD and is now even more serious than before. I wonder if he'll be hitting the field though since now he can just stand back and give orders like Fury used to. Sky is more battle ready now, a fighter as well as a hacker. The brief scene with Grant shows she still hates his guts, but she might still care. Grant is hard to read, he might still care for her, or he might be using her as a ticket to escape. May is still watching over Coulson to make sure he can handle his new responsibilities. Triplett is still a wisecracking fighter.

The mercenaries were cool and it was nice to have Xena guest star. Yeah, I would have liked these new guys to stick around, especially Lucy's character, but she was dying due to that metal block thing trying to fuse itself to her hand, and then she had her buddy cut off her hand to survive it.... But then Absorbing Man showed up and she died in the car crash. The other guy just laid low and played possum until Carl walked away, so who know if he'll come back. I just wish Xena stayed as a regular.

Then we have Carl 'The Crusher' Creel, the Absorbing Man, now working for HYDRA. Apparently his execution was covered up by Garrett and Grant knew about it. He's basically like the comics, but with someone with his powers.... where are Hulk or Thor when you really need him? Luckily the agents didn't have to face him too much, he kinda ran off after seeing the item he was trying to steal try to fuse with Xena's hand, and came back to swipe it after the heat died down.

But yeah, we got to see him absorb wood, steel and even diamond in this episode. He even had the chance to use the famous ball and chain from the comics. One thing that came to mind when I saw him was that the first Hulk movie was had in 2003 had the Absorbing Man be the villain, or rather they gave Bruce's father the same kinds of powers....

As you know, the not-sequel The Incredible Hulk would later make like this movie never happened.... and even added a Tony Stark cameo in the after credits to further tie it into the new cinematic universe they were starting up at the time. Since this series is tied to that movie universe, we now officially have Carl Creel as the true Absorbing Man of the series, and we can further believe that the Hulk 2003 movie never happened with this new continuity.

As for Fitz.... damn.... that's just so sad... Throughout the episode he seemed so shaken up and kept losing his train of thought whenever he wanted to finish a sentence (in which Simmons would correct him) and he'd only feel calm and relaxed whenever he 'stared into her eyes'. To know that she was gone the whole time and this was all a hallucination caused by brain damage.... dude... That's hitting the feels kinda hard in the first episode, isn't it??? And to make it more tragic, this was caused by his sacrificial efforts to rescue Simmons from downing in the sinking death trap that Grant put them in. I do wonder, will Simmons come back in real life? Will the show continue to twist the knife by having more scenes of Fitz 'talking to Simmons'? I guess we'll find out next week.

Sadly, Fitz' bold rescue plan from the end of season 1 had horrible consequences.....

IDW TMNT New Animated Adventures #13

By Mark Rodriguez

There's only so much one-off adventures that don't really lead anywhere that Paige can take and after 12 issues (most of them being about Mikey doing something stupid and hilarity ensues), she's all turtled out. I'll be taking over on the comic series based on the new cartoon. I do have to admit though, it must be very difficult to write a comic based on an existing cartoon and not be able to do anything that will contradict anything already seen on the show.

Though the series started out with one story, lately they started off with a longer 'major story' and two short stories. So let's go by story.

April's Way

The story starts with April tossed on her butt by Leonardo during a training session. She complains that Leo used a new move she never seen before so she wasn't able to block it. Leo mentions they learned it the other day while she was at school. She thinks it's unfair the others train without her while she's at school, and she says even Mikey has perfected meditating. Well, actually he was on his tPhone, listening to music. April heads off to a field trip to the zoo and tells them not to learn anything too awesome in her absence.

On the field trip, April learns about elephants, or as much as she can as she scribbles drawings of the turtles and herself in her notepad. The guide explains that Ellie is safe at the zoo and if she ever gets angry, music calms her down  She watches some monkeys and finds out that she lost her group and the zoo will be closing soon. As she heads out, she finds out that the Kraang are planning to mutate the people and the animals in the zoo and call for the elephant.

April tells the Turtles about the Kraang and their plans, and they tell her to hide and wait for them to arrive. April feels Ellie the elephant doesn't have that much time and heads off to stop them on her own. The Kraang are already dragging the elephant out of her cage and April figures if she can't out-fight them, she can out-think them.

The Turtles head down the sewers and run into a bunch of Kraang. Mikey rushes in and the others follow and they quickly take them down. However, their fight brings the attention of more Kraang and they're captured.

April plans to take the Kraang out one by one with stealth, but then see that the Turtles were captured. She then sees that the elephant is tried to a Mutagen miachine and looks angry based on what she just learned about Ellie, so she tosses her pencil at the release button to let it go. Once free, Ellie goes on a rampage and stomps the Kraang down. Leo says once it's done with the Kraang, the elephant will come after them. April runs in and grabs Mikey's tPhone and plays music to calm the elephant down. It soon goes to sleep.

The turtles are impressed with the ninjitsu April just used, even though she's confused. They say she used stealth, and smarts. Raph invites her to train, but April says as a ninja she should also learn about the world around her, and invited the turtles to continue the field trip with her.

Lesson Learned

Raph pulls a shoulder muscle during some heavy lifting training and Splinter says he should heal up before risking further injury. Soon enough the Turtles have to head on patrol without Raph. He gets upset and decides to walk off on his own. Sulking by himself, he is suddenly attacked by Mousers. As he fights them off, the ceiling collapses onto him, further injuring his shoulder.

Raph re-wraps his wound, but can't use the tPhone to call for help since it was busted. He sees a Mouser head, still chomping away at nothing and sees that they're built to last. He uses the Mouser head a boxing glove and soon punches his way out of the rubble. The Turtles arrive in time to see him escape. Splinter arrives to commend him on his resourcefulness to make up for his injury... but he still disobeyed him so he is now double-grounded. Raph says he's fine and his shoulder doesn't even hurt anymore. Splinter touches Raph's other shoulder, and he passes out from the pain.

oh and I got attacked by Mouser.... you think maybe we should go see what Baxter Stockman is up to? No? OK.

LEGO TMNT Part 3

The Turtles prepare to face the Shredder on a rooftop. Shredder does arrive and is confused why his past with Yoshi is coming back to haunt him now. Shredder call for the Foot and soon the Turtles take them down. Shredder says they were just students and he is a master and challenges them to fight him one by one or all at once. Raph goes first and quickly kicked back. Don and Mike go next and are defeated. Leo also tries but is beaten.

Leo says he's too dangerous to fight one on one, so they try to hit him from a distance. They toss their throwing stars and blades at the Shredder, and Raph tosses his sai. Leo jumps in to kick him back and slices off his helmet. Shredder pulls out a thermite grenade, ready to take everybody out but Don hits him with his staff and he falls off the building as the grenade explodes with him.

The Turtles have succeeded in their mission, and like Leo says, the Shredder has been shredded. The Turtles are worn out and decide to head home. They're ninjas, so they strike hard, and fade away into the night.


My Opinions

Well on the first story, it was a short and simple tale that shows April can handle herself just fine. On its own it was pretty entertaining. It's also good to see April do more stuff on her own that doesn't have Donnie involved. I know lots of people on the show complain that April feels more like Donnie's friend and potential love interest than a friend of all four of them. The only time I can recall off the top of my head where she had screen time with one of the Turtles that wasn't Donnie, was when Leo came to her for advice on his feelings towards Karai. Here we see him train with Leo and also handle a Kraang situation mostly by herself.

That's another thing we don't see on the show. April trains with Splinter, but we never actually see her train with the Turtles themselves. In this comic (and the other one where April accidentaly socked Raph and he made up this elaborate story to cover up the fact that she, of all people, gave him a black eye) we see that she does actually spar with them. If anything, this comic does kinda fill in the blanks from time to time and show things that we can only assume happen on the show off camera.

And yes, I get the moral of the story is April is better at outsmarting things than out-fighting things... though to be fair, on the show she has proven examples of doing both. Oh and I also noticed the zookeeper said Ellie loves Punk Music...

And yet April used Rock Music to calm her down. I guess music is music.

The second one was kinda interesting. Raph hurts himself, so he should take it easy. He doesn't and things get worse for him. Yeah, Raph did disobey orders, but a walk wasn't gonna kill him. Those Mousers literally came out of nowhere. No really, did Baxter just let some loose hoping to get lucky? It was very weird, but I guess the story just needed a quick villain tossed in there. It was a weird story... and easily could have been a sub-plot to the April one, or any other one. Also the art to this second one seems to be a lot more lively and brightly colored. It's the main artist tries to capture the 3D models of the show in animated form, complete with some of the stiffness.... while this guy goes all out and make them into fully animated characters.

As for the Mirage comic, it's cute. One other thing I noticed besides the censored mentions of death and leaving out things like Leo impaling Shredder and making him commit seppuku.... is that they also had to toss in Mikey acting silly here. It's hard to say Mikey is all that serious in Mirage anymore, since more recent Tales of the TMNT Volume 2 issues added him acting goofy and using slang that he didn't before... but in the first issue of the original comics, all of the Turtles were basically serious and violent. The only slight hint of characterization went to Raph for liking to go outside on his own, and Leo since he was calling the shots during the battle. Don and especially Mike didn't get their character traits til later issues.So yeah, it was kinda weird, and funny to see Mirage Lego Mikey still crack a smile and goof off. Not much to say except... it's the first issue of the Mirage comics but Lego style.

As for the comic itself, it was a decent read, though it was probably more fun reading the Lego re-telling of the Mirage comics. I did enjoy April doing other things than just being Donnie's crush. Plus drawings opposed to CGI makes it easier to show her school and her doing actual school-related things without the expense of designing a classroom full of new throwaway characters.

I also notice the titles for these tales are just randomly slapped onto the first panel without any big presentation. But then again, the main IDW title doesn't seem to have titles for their issues at all.

Well, let's see what happens in other issues. I do agree with Paige, it needs a multi-parter or something to keep us coming back for more. I think the only redeeming value here is waiting to see when so-and-so is gonna be in the comic. I am wondering when we'll see Casey and Slash.

Mark's Book Report- The Sea of Monsters (Percy and the Olympians Book Two)

By Mark Rodriguez

I gave myself a little break from Percy to let the story sink in. I also found the movie and checked it out... bottom line... I liked the book a lot better. But yeah, I wanted everything from the first book out of my system before going into the second one. Here's my Out on DVD review episode about the first movie....

And now that I have that out of the way, I returned to the book store to continue on with the second book. Sadly the same girl wasn't there from the first time, cause she really seemed to love the series and was curious about what I would think. I actually met someone where Paige works that absolutely LOVES the series and is eager for the next book of the spin-off series later this year. So now that I got 'The Sea of Monsters'.... here is my review.

The Story

After the first book, Percy, Annabeth and Grover went their ways. Percy went to live with his mom and went back to normal school where there hasn't been an incident for almost a year. Grover went off to search for Pan. Annabeth also returned to her family. All seems well.... until the final days of the school year.

Percy is attacked by giant cannibals in a deadly game of dodgeball. Luckily Annabeth has arrived to seek him out and helps out. Also his new friend Tyson turns out to be a cyclops and is a great help in the fight. After defeating the giants, Annabeth insists that Percy return to Camp Half-Blood since it's really gone to hell since he left.

When they return they find it under attack by giant metal bulls. The main problem is, the camp is supposed to have a forcefield that protects it from outsiders and monsters, but now the bulls are running causing damage like it was nothing. They find out that Thalia, the tree named after the daughter of Zeus is dying from a deadly poison, and when it goes, the camp will be vulnerable to monster attacks forever. Chiron was blamed for this and got expelled from the camp grounds. The only thing that can cure the tree is the legendary golden fleece. The only problem is that instead of Percy going on this quest... the duty of obtaining the golden fleece was given to Clarrisse, the camp bully, and also daughter of Ares that already hated Percy since day one.

Besides that, Percy finds out in dreams, that Grover never made it in finding Pan. Instead he was tricked by a giant cyclops that happens to have the fleece and uses it to lure Satyrs to their deaths. Grover is buying time, taking advantage of the fact that the cyclops is almost blind, but how long can he hold out? Percy, Annabeth and Tyson sneak off to take this quest, even if they risk clashing against Clarrisse. The fleece is located beyond the Sea of Monsters. Will they be able to find it in time, rescue Grover and Camp Half-Blood before the tree dies out? And what will they do when they run into Luke?

My Opinions

Wow, this series only gets better and better. Now that Percy knows that he's the god of Poseidon and all that, this book jumps right into the Greek Mythology. Lots of details and things introduced in the first book return here, like the story of Thalia the tree and Clarrisse having a bigger role. There's so many things to talk about, it's hard to know where to begin.

Grover is missing from most of the book, being held captive by the giant cyclops Polyphemus that loves to eat satyrs. It's kinda funny thinking of Grover in a wedding dress, pretending to be his bride so he can stay alive. I am glad that when he eventually does get rescued, there is still enough page-time left for him to hang with Percy and Annabeth like old times.

Tyson is basically Percy's new best friend in the story. He talks like he's not all that bright, but he has a heart of gold, and as a castaway son of  Poseidon, he's basically Percy's brother. Also as a cyclops he's super strong, fire doesn't hurt him and he's very good at building and fixing things. Everyone is against cyclopes in general since they can't be trusted, so Percy has to assure everyone that Tyson is cool. Percy though feels embarrassed to be associated with him at times, but he eventually does win his favor. I liked seeing both of them interact throughout the book as Percy is constantly trying to keep Tyson out of causing trouble... and Tyson is usually saving Percy's life. Tyson was unwanted and abandoned before he met Percy so he cares a lot for his brother now that he has one.

Clarrisse got a bigger role for this story and she's her usual bully self. Despite everything, she still fights for the sake of defending the camp, so it's good to see she's not all that bad. Though I'm sure she likes fighting the bad guys for the sake of fighting. She gets her own pirate ship complete with skeleton pirates and actually helps Percy on getting past the Sea of Monsters.  Even I feel sorry for her when Ares was chewing her out since he wanted her to succeed on this quest and get some fame away from Percy. She really is trying hard to please her father and wants him to be proud of her, so there is some goodness in there...somewhere.

Annabeth is pretty much the same. One of the most interesting chapters was when they were sailing close to the sirens and she wanted to hear their songs while Percy tied her up. The book did an amazing job describing how desperately she wanted to break free once she fell under the song's spell. When Percy touched her, he saw what she saw, which was the perfect image of the perfect family she wished she had, with Luke still as a good guy since she had a crush on him before he turned evil.

And yes, spoiler from the last book, Luke was the Lightning Thief and he did it to help revive the god Kronos that wants to destroy everything to get revenge on Zeus, Poseidon and Hades. He returns in this story a few times... and it always seems like it's gonna hit the fan when he does... I mean, damn, this book does a great job of keeping me in suspense! We also see his father Hermes, who gives Percy some items to help in his quest, and he hopes to one day regain Luke as a good guy again.

As for Percy himself, he's still the brave and heroic character from the first book. This time he's really going out there to save the camp and stop Luke's plans without any ulterior motives like in the first book. He's more of a nice guy and especially shows it near the end with Clarrisse. He has trouble dealing with Tyson, being embarrassed of him at first, and also not liking the fact that Poseidon just dumped a brother on him without warning. And he still feels some of the resentment of being abandoned by his father. He does eventually value Tyson's friendship and sees that Poseidon is watching over them, in his own way.

One theme this book kept from the first one, is the gods or goddesses disguising themselves as normal humans in some kind of store or shop to lure them into the trap. The first book had several, including the Las Vegas Casino trap where time literally stood still for everyone inside it. This book had Circe running some kind of spa and offers to give Percy and Annabeth make overs. While she made Annabeth look stunning, her idea of a make-over for Percy, or any men in general, was to turn him into a guinea pig. Another theme this book follows is all the snazzy titles for each chapter with crazy things like 'We meet the sheep of Doom' or 'Clarrisse blows up everything'. And we still get the 'Percy is the narrator' sense of humor.

The book is also full of action and they face all sorts of monster and creatures from sirens to giant metal bulls, to pirahna-ish sheep. And yes, Polyphemus the giant cyclops is probably the main monster they face in this story. I'm glad I got to see how Tyson and Polyphemus got to interact and actually fight it out. The characters are lovable and you care about what happens to them. Like I said, even the jerk characters like Clarrisse have things make you feel sorry for them so you can't hate them outright.

It's a good book, again I enjoyed it cover to cover. I'm really enjoying this series and I know there's a movie out about this one too. I'll be renting and reviewing it soon. But man... THAT ENDING. It made me super eager to pick up book three and find out what happens next! It's a hell of a plot twist and it's based on something that was mentioned in the first book! I'm really anxious to see how Percy and company will deal with this!