So here we are, ladies and gents! The Season 2 Finale for Agents of SHIELD, or S.O.S parts 1&2. I was honestly wondering if they could keep me entertained for the full runtime but god damn if the creative team didn’t craft an intense and engaging 80 minute feature.

Jiaying’s plan is to cause war between the Inhumans and SHIELD and she succeeds, using the staged attack as a catalyst to take the SHIELD carrier and lure every other SHIELD agent there to kill or convert them to Inhumans. It really says something for this show that the roles between Jiaying and Cal have been swapped. Both in terms of their standing as good guy/bad guy in the show but also in terms of the typical gender roles that this story would represent. Jiaying has been broken for a long time, the scars on her face a superficial crack in the porcelin to show that she’s more damaged than she appears. Her actions are also well in line with the new Marvel mandate of Inhumans being the new Mutants, with Jiaying playing the Magneto perfectly. Plus she’s basically got the powers of Morbius The Living Vampire so that makes her SUPER evil!

Speaking of Cal, we finally get his Hyde transformation and while it’s subdued (he’s nowhere near the Hulk-ing monstrosity I’m used to seeing) he’s definitely a more twisted, hunched monster form than his regular self. Kyle MacLachlan brings his bestest A-Game in this two-parter and firmly cements himself as both a cool character and a fantastic actor in my mind. I’d already liked his performance for most of the season but he just delivers an immensely fun performance here, even when trying to be a monster.

HAHAHAHAAAAAA! Fuck you, Grant Ward! Fuck you and any redemption/happiness the Tumblr fan girls think you’re worth. The grooming sumbitch finally gets his comeuppance, both in the form of an ass beating from Bobbi and killing his new girlfriend because she looked like May. Whoopsie! Still Brett Dalton continues to be super charismatic, despite being a total psychopath. We’ll see what the future holds for him as a new head of HYDRA.

Skye faces off against her mother (after having a VERY impressive fight with Alisha, a super hot redheaded Inhuman who can clone herself) and Cal comes in to save them both, in a way. To save Skye from having to kill (or be killed by) her mother and to save the woman he loves from her own path to vengeance. Coulson, Mack and Fitz stop Gordon from releasing Terrigen mist all over the ship, only for Coulson to lose a hand in the process. Who’d have thought SHIELD would mutilate it’s lead better than The Walking Dead could. Some serious balls shown here!

In the aftermath, lots of things happen including but not limited to; Cal going through the Tahiti procedure and given a new life as a vet, Bobbi considering quitting the team, May actually leaving and Skye being given the opportunity to build her own team of metas under the codename “Caterpillars”. Fun fact: Caterpillars is the codename for the Secret Warriors, a team that Nick Fury created in secret which included Daisy Johnson/Skye. Should be interesting to see what Coulson’s efforts and her leadership will build.

In the stinger, we even get a little FitzSimmons resolution and even the promise of a blossoming relationship, something that fans have been wanting since the beginn–

WELL THAT WAS PANTS-SHITTINGLY TERRIFYING

Season 2 comes to a close in a genuine shocking manner and establishes a lot of threads that Season 3 can run with. It’s been a pretty damn good season and it’s been a pleasure to watch and thank you all for coming back, week-to-week, to see me ramble on about this show. I hope to see you again soon for more S.H.I.E.L.D. Exposed!

I picked this up in a special deal that my local shop was promoting whereby, for about $35, you buy the 8 basic variant covers and they include a ninth metalized (is that a word) version of the Charlie Adlard cover H. A fine deal. I’m not going to be able to get the Comic Con B&W cover and there’s no way in hell I’m getting the Charlie Adlard B&W 1:200 cover (currently going for anywhere from $400 -$2000, depending on the ignorance of the buyer) and I appreciated the store trying to give the regulars a little discount. All of the covers are beautiful. My favorite is probably Silvestri or Ottley’s. Silvestri got the mood right and the picture fits the epic nature of the 100th issue fairly well. Ottley just drew the hell out of Michonne and I love the expression on her face.

The story itself was absolutely brutal. I felt drained after reading it. A lot of it was expected due to the huge amount of build-up, but the second half of the book is absolutely bleak and doesn’t give you a glimmer of hope. The tension created from the “selection” scene is heartbreaking and more than a little sickening and after knowing these characters, some of them for the past 9 or 10 years that the comic book has been in production, I was hurting right along with Rick.

Half of me hates this book, because it creates such an emotional attachment to these characters and strips it away without pause and with brutal efficiency, but I also love it because Kirkman has created a fictional world where you’re not comfortable. Where you can’t settle in to knowing which characters will live or die or guessing your way at how the Scooby Gang will make it out of this snafu.

Read the issue, then go have a lie-down. You’re gonna need it.

A picture of my haul (forgive the quality of a phone camera):

Left-to-right (Cover designation noted next to artist):
Top Row: Bryan Hitch F, Sean Phillips E, Ryan Ottley G, Marc Silvestri B,
Bottom Row: Frank Quietly C, Todd McFarlane D, Charlie Adlard H, Charlie Adlard (Chromium) L

Not pictured is Charlie Adlard’s Cover A because it is currently on loan to my brother-in-law for reading.

JJ and his amazing friend Jason weigh in on this sensitive week. The pair attempt to tread carefully over the minefield of politics and race to beg people to calm down and use their heads. Believe it or not, JJ manages to get through the whole censorship conversation without saying “I’ll be yo’ Huckleberry” (at least til now…) The duo then get sidetracked by attempting to answer a single question via e-mail. Still not sure if it was answered, but hey, it’s the thought that counts right?

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Welcome to Hands Down, DOOM’s own look into the world of the folks that frequent this sordid world of geekery. This week; did everyone enjoy their Halloween weekend? Some of us got a little carried away.

The failure of most zombie stories seems to lie in the medium: brevity required by the movies, imagination required by novels to convey the horrific images that the author has in mind, and, in general, a lack of new ideas or a poor execution of the zombie story. In recent years, zombies as a monster have become increasingly popular, but in order to increase the terror, writers often give them extra abilities which, in my opinion, are a sometimes lazy divergence from George Romero’s modern conception of the zombie.

Don’t get me wrong, I can appreciate the rage-fueled madmen from 28 Days Later, the super powered killing machines in the Left 4 Dead games, or any of the other zombie stories where dying doesn’t seem to be much of a hindrance to the physical acumen of the dead (i.e. Zombieland, Dawn of the Dead (2004), Slither). [REC•] was a terrifying movie, but one that I never felt could truly be called a zombie flick. I’ve always been of the opinion that once you’re dead, you shouldn’t be able to run faster than or even as fast as someone who is very pointedly not dead. Zombies should not be a human that is simply physically deformed in some awful way; they should be, as Miracle Max would say “mostly dead.”

In The Walking Dead, a comic started in late 2003, Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard have overcome the greatest obstacles of creating a great zombie story. Through the medium of comics, Adlard (initially Tony Moore) can display the raw visuals of horror, isolation and desperation while Kirkman masterfully scripts a story about the limitations of an individual, how much someone can sacrifice, and what it means to be human. The story is sometimes sensational (understandably…it is about zombies) but it is also frighteningly believable. Also, because of the episodic format and the relative ease with which comics are made, they are not bound to a story of any certain length, just as long as they can continue creating. To quote Kirkman himself,

“But one of the things that always bugged me about those movies is that they always end. You get to know the characters, you’re kind of invested in them, and then they run out of time, and there’s some kind of moment that happens, whether it’s a biker gang showing up or some other bad thing happening that kind of wraps the story up. And I got to thinking, “What if the story doesn’t wrap up abruptly? What if we get to follow these people, and see them try and live long-term in this zombie world?”

It does not stretch the imagination quite as much as I’d like to believe that humans are capable of some of the evils and desperate efforts taken in the comic to survive in a world where your neighbor can easily be your next enemy. Kirkman has crafted the story not as a story of monsters, but one of humans pushed to the edge of belief and how those humans push back.

The story revolves around a small group of survivors of the initial zombie outbreak. The main character, Rick Grimes, was a cop who was shot and put into a minor coma before everything went to hell. He wakes up from his coma to find himself alone and confused and begins his quest to find out the why and how to survive. (NOTE: This is a point of contention for Robert Kirkman as he addressed in the Q&A in the back of issue number #4 and in an interview with GQ as the idea for him waking up from the coma was written for the comic before 28 Day Later came out in theatres.) He eventually meets with a motley group of people outside of Atlanta and they begin their trek to find some form of stable life. The zombies in The Walking Dead are nothing short of a force of nature, indiscriminate in their destructive path. They act just as a virus: unpredictable, virulent, and damn hard to kill.

I loved reading pretty much everything of Robert Kirkman’s that I’ve come across. Invincible is one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve found in the last few years and books like Haunt and The Astounding Wolf-Man, while not his best work, are solid titles. I have much less exposure to Charlie Adlard’s work because I’m generally not a fan of the less detailed, more exaggerated style of art that he used over at 2000 A.D. but I’ve recently picked up some issues of Savage and was surprisingly pleased. The man knows how to draw some brutal action. The tv series seems to be fairly close to the books from what I can tell. There are going to be some moments that they just can’t do on television, understandably enough, but for the most part AMC is very forgiving when it comes to violence in their shows and there won’t be much cut. The hard adjustment is going to be watching all of these characters interact in color.

Make no mistake about this series, though, when you start reading it. No character is safe and you’re going to need quite a lot of comforting after some of the more gruesome points. You have been warned.

The Walking Dead premieres on AMC on Halloween at 10/9C You can read the rest of the exorbitantly long GQ Walking Dead Article here.

– Mike