psocoptera

I may have lost the ability to think about this show in Watsonian terms. Coulson reveals the cloaked Bus to Colonel Adrian Pasdar's Mustache or whoever that guy is at the end of 2x02 and I'm just like, okay, I guess the writers wanted it established in this episode that they can do that now, because what possible in-story reason could Coulson have to tip his hand like that? How many mysterious disappearances could he have pulled off before Col. Mustache caught on? Why is Hunter part of the team instead of Lucy Lawless? His character is all about her, why not just make it her? Presumably with Ward all beard-ified and Fitz TBI'd, the showrunners wanted someone else in the crucial "white guy" role, plus Lawless probably charges more per episode.

Speaking of white guys, was anyone else surprised that Skye's dad apparently is one? (Kyle MacLachlan, in fact.) This has raised for me the question of how we're supposed to read Skye's race. Chloe Bennet, the actress, was born Chloe Wang and is half Chinese. This is maybe a borderline-offensive observation but it seems to me, looking at pictures of Chloe Bennet on the internet, that sometimes she looks "more Asian" to me in appearances as herself (try searching for "chloe bennet comic con") than she does when she's portraying Skye. (Obviously Bennet is the same amount Asian at all times and so no matter how she looks, that look is a half-Asian look, but, I don't know, what is the right way to phrase this. Her Chinese ancestry is sometimes more apparent to this white American observer?) It makes me wonder if her show makeup is intentionally being designed to downplay her Asian features and if, perhaps, we're meant to read Skye as white rather than hapa. (I guess if she's an alien, you could argue the character isn't meant to have a race at all, but I sort of feel like that's bullshit, of course the audience will think of her as having a race, and the show is set in our world, so people in-show will categorize her racially too. (I don't actually know or recall if we had any idea if, say, in the 24th century people on the Enterprise thought of Guinan as black - I could believe they didn't.)) Anyways, white dad. If we get a white mom, that would seal it - but what are the odds we get a mom, everyone knows dads are the important ones for Issues. (Actually I guess we did see May's mom! Go AoS!)