When ABC first announced that they would be making a TV show
about the agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., I don’t think anyone was more excited than I
was. I had seen all of the movies introducing the characters and thought most
of them were great fun, particularly The Avengers.
And up in my attic you’ll find, next to the cardboard boxes
of old files and baby clothes, somewhere over a dozen boxes filled with comics.
Mostly Marvel, mostly X-Men and Avengers related, spanning the seventies
through the nineties. I was really wanting a good show.
What I got was Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Maybe it’s just that I’m behind the times, but I was
expecting a show about heroes. Not necessarily “super” heroes, though as I
said, I grew up with the comics, so a little Hawkeye or Black Widow sure would
have been welcome. No, I was expecting heroes in the good old-fashioned sense
of people going out and doing the tough jobs, standing up for highest
principles, and doing it all for the right reasons.
It didn’t take the writers long to beat that out of me.
When the show started out, it seemed that a lot of those
elements were there. There was the team, going into danger, fighting to keep
the people of America safe, being “the good guys.” But slowly, I came to
realize that wasn’t really what the show was about at all. That was the
appearance, the shell. It was like one of the Halloween costumes you can buy
these days where you put on a set of green tights and it has foam inserts at
places that make it appear as though you had huge muscles, or red plastic
gauntlets with a light at the end that look like armor. It’s not a bad costume,
but underneath there isn’t anything.
I became disillusioned with the big trends first. Here was a
multi-billion dollar intelligence organization that, among other things, went
out and located pieces of alien or unexplained technology. And what did it do
with that technology? Did it study, investigate, learn, risk? Maybe sometimes.
But what we got to see was it being shot into the sun, or locked away from
prying eyes, possibly in the same warehouse as the Ark of the Covenant.
There were things out there, someone had determined, that
were too dangerous to handle. For anyone. So these shadowy forces made the
decision for everyone: Lock down the studies. Block the research. Silence the
questions. Knowledge was secondary, or tertiary, or unessential. What really mattered
was keeping the people safe. By any means necessary.
This lack of trust that the government in the S.H.I.E.L.D.
Universe doesn’t just relate to technology, of course. It permeates every
aspect of the show. The leaders don’t trust the agents, which is understandable
considering that they often aren’t trustworthy. When you pull in a young woman
who spent her early adult life hacking into your classified systems, you really
shouldn’t be surprised when she goes off the reservation and starts spying on
you, or simply picks up and leaves.
The agents don’t trust the leaders, which is also
understandable because they aren’t trustworthy. These are the men and women who
are shutting them down, denying cover, support, necessary information. These
are also the people who are deciding, in the background, how much of their own
background they should know.
That might be understandable in matters where a
security or national interest is at stake, but there’s never the case. The
deciding factor always seems to come down to how the agent will “feel” about
the news? How much can they emotionally take? And so, through these
supervisors, the government becomes the judge of how much we can know or
understand, even about ourselves.
Throw all of this together, and well... Let’s just say that
I wasn’t too disappointed when Hydra crashed the organization. They are pure
comic-book evil, but at least they have some ambition beyond hiding away all of
the toys to keep the children from bumping their knees. They have goals, focus,
and dedication.
In the real world, the one outside of the Marvel Television
universe, S.H.I.E.L.D., or what’s left of it, wouldn’t last long. Which takes
us to the new movie, Interstellar.
I had read some mixed reviews about the film, and had
started to become discouraged. But along with being a comic buff from way back,
I am also a Sci-Fi movie buff, so I took a chance.
There are definitely some things that could be improved on
about the film. As I told my wife walking out of the theater, they could have
dropped at least twenty minutes off the thing and never missed it. The
techno-speak gets a little heavy from time to time, and I believe I handle
techno-speak a little better than most. There are a few rabbit trails that the
writers go down that don’t seem to add much. But underneath the clutter of
time, and jargon, and perhaps a little too much “art,” there’s gold up there on
the screen.
At the heart of it all lies the penultimate question for
mankind: Will you strive to live, or merely survive?
In an artificially desperate world, the future is bleak
because of an evolving crop blight. One by one, it adapts to and destroys man’s
major food sources, until only corn remains. Presumably, not just food crops
but most other green plants are going, because the towns are prone to ever
worsening dust storms as less remains to hold the soil.
The government’s response to all of this, at least publicly,
is to adapt to the changes. Farm the corn. Make more people farm the corn. Make
people who hate farming farm the corn because that’s the only way mankind can
survive, and nothing is more important than that. Until it is.
Known to a few is that the corn won’t resist the blight much
longer, and that means the end of everyone. Or it would, if a strange agency
had not found a way to help us out. A mysterious “They” place a wormhole in our
solar system, allowing a desperate search for a new world colonize outside of
our galaxy, and potentially a way to save many of those still alive on Earth.
To survive, or to thrive? To live, or to exist? Those
questions lie at the center of the movie. A good deal of tension is developed
between the two philosophies. Much of that tension is lost unfortunately by
drawing out the scenes too long, but the questions remain. As with most
questions people ask about life and philosophy, the answers lie not in the
future. They have already been solved, many times, in the past.
Man is Spirit, as well as flesh. That is a gift of his
Creator. He, our Lord, has given us a part of His Divinity. Because of that, we
cannot just “survive.” If we resolve to take that path, then we deny that part
of ourselves that creates, that discovers, that seeks. The part that comforts
and cares, as well. We deny our given Divinity, and in doing so become no more
special than the ape, which shares so much of our DNA, or the weed, which lives
and grows and spreads and is, by definition, unwelcome.
The penultimate question: To live, or merely survive?
The future of mankind rests on that question and how each of
us answer as we go to work and school, as we parent our children, and
eventually allow our children to parent us. It lies in the science that we
accept, and the non-science that we reject, and the methods that separate the
two. And it rests in the truth. Not the truth that we determine for ourselves,
but the truth that transcends ourselves. That is where the future lies.
And the ultimate question? What about that, you may wonder?
That’s one that we all must answer first, or the matter of living or survival
means nothing. And the question is: Who gave you the will to ask?
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