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Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
2013 · TV series · 7 seasons
Created by Joss Whedon, Jed Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen
DramaScience FictionFantasyActionAdventure
Agent Phil Coulson of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division) puts together a team of agents to investigate the new, the strange and the unknown around the globe, protecting the ordinary from the extraordinary.
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5 comments on Hacker News
Fun fact: That's actually the real world location of Kree City [1] from the Marvel franchise. However, they had to film in Puerto Rico and show the city entirely via CGI for the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. due to the Cuban embargo and Skye flooding the city before the spec ops camera crew could get there.
[1] https://marvelcinematicuniverse.fandom.com/wiki/Kree_City
The TV shows around the MCU have always been better. They still have lots of explosions. I'm in the middle of an Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. rewatch right now. The movies provide a lot of worldbuilding they would have to do in each show otherwise. They usually pepper that context in so you're not completely lost, but you would miss stuff without watching the movies.
Also, Endgame.
Given HUD still hasn't released the relief funds for Maria in 2017, I'm not holding my breath on any other help coming here.
There was an episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. set in San Juan, though. So now there's something else mainlanders have heard of.
Strange. The examples you say "made you grumpy" are exactly the three movies I think are the beacon of hope for sci-fi, and the trio of hardest sci-fi of the last, I don't know, five decades?
Gravity is the least hard of those tree, but still is orders of magnitude more accurate than anything I know that came after "2001: A Space Odyssey". There are some issues with orbits and distances and maybe with the tangled-in-parachutes scene (though I believe it was correct, critics miss the frame of reference of the camera).
Interstellar has only few implausible things - the biggest offenders were the "power of love transcending dimensions" line by one of the characters, and the... final act. But physics was done more right than probably ever before, Space Odyssey included. (INB4 yes, that planet near black hole was realistic, it's actually a pretty neat edge case of rotating black hole physics.) I actually found myself Googling what I thought was pseudoscience, only to discover it's actually true (and to learn some more about relativity too).
And the Martian... come on. There's basically two things the book gets wrong, and both are minor. Dust storm being too strong, and the author handwaving radiation shielding into existence without explaining how it works. The rest is pretty much totally legit. (Ok, the movie didn't show that gravity on Mars is weaker, but that was literally because the director said that doing it is too much of a mess, and the audience won't care anyway.)
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> Fine, but if you concede that, don't try and paint a thin veneer of half-assed realism over the whole thing. I will forgive just about anything in a more fantasy-directed sci fi, but if you start trying to be "hard", I'll hold a different standard.
Totally agree. Though if the Holy Trio above made you grumpy, I wish to know what do you consider hard. It seems we have pretty different standards.
> Second, the correctness seems to often play second fiddle to whatever set pieces or plot is desired. I understand this may be a pragmatic necessity, but it's very obvious when the two start to generate friction against each other (scientific realism and plot) and I long for this to be balanced elegantly, with the science as a more integral component
Also agree. The movies and series in this article are basically a joke in this area (even though I love Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). They're more like Star Trek in this regard, though I still think Star Trek's technobabble made more sense.
And about science being a more integral component - again, check Interstellar. There's a pretty neat story that starts with Nolan approaching Kip Thorne, telling him that he needs a planet with very strong time dilation for the plot. Thorne initially thinks it's impossible, but then he sits down, does the math, and figures out a crazy scenario in which that planet is very much plausible...
http://www.space.com/28075-science-of-interstellar-book-review.html
This, but from the villian's perspective, is the key plot premise of the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D tv show, actually.