Don’t Go To Tahiti – Agents of SHIELD Episode 11 Review

I wrote about the pilot episode of Agents of SHIELD forever ago but didn’t keep up with it because I was a little disappointed with how the show was going. During the past few episodes, it picked up a little bit, but Agents of SHIELD still isn’t the great Joss Whedon series that I expected it to be.

The whole premise of the story is Agent Coulson assembles a team of misfits to stop an organization called Centipede from turning innocent people with powers they don’t know how to use, into superhuman monsters. But wait, I thought Agent Coulson died in the Avengers movie. There were even blood spattered Captain America cards removed from his corpse. Did I cry for nothing?

Agent Coulson’s account for why he is alive is that he went to some physical rehab in Tahiti to recuperate. After all, it is a magical place. Why does he keep saying that? Every episode Agent Coulson talks about his “magical” time in Tahiti, and every week I keep thinking I should go there. After this week’s episode, I don’t want to go to Tahiti at all anymore.

Entitled “A Magical Place,” this week’s episode shows us exactly what it was that Coulson was doing in Tahiti, and that it actually wasn’t Tahiti at all. Basically, Nick Fury loves Agent Coulson so much that he couldn’t accept his death in The Avengers, but he pulled out all the stops to bring him back to life – including procedures so painful and inhumane that the half-alive Coulson repeatedly asks for them to end his life.

What I don’t understand is what’s so important about Agent Coulson that he must live. I’m assuming he is Nick Fury’s favorite person ever in the whole world that he would rather see Coulson endure severe pain than not have him in his life.

I’m just going to go ahead and grade this episode a C- for being anticlimactic. I’ve watched this show every week since the beginning just waiting for the big reveal of how Agent Coulson is alive. It turns out Tahiti is just code for really painful brain surgery. The only real good part about this episode is that Ron Glass from Firefly guest stars as the surgeon that brings Coulson back to life.

All this time I was hoping that Agent Coulson was really just a robot.