I hate saying that fictional works are ‘timely’ in the way that the Internet loves to frame them for convenience, but I couldn’t help but feel a sharp pang in my heart when I rewatched Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. this past summer. Sure, that may have been nostalgia tugging at my heartstrings since I had watched the series when it first aired during some very formative middle and high school years, but it was “FZZT” – not only my favorite episode but also arguably the best episode from Season 1 – that made the tears start flowing.
Up until this episode, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. hadn’t yet found their own voice. The characters and plot were still heavily reliant on the timeline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the relationships developing between the main characters aboard “The Bus” seemed either too shallow or too slow-paced. But with “FZZT,” we started to glean histories that deepened the way we view these characters and how they value each other in turn.
The episode focuses heavily on growing pains and relationships alike – in the first half of the episode, we see how the discovery and investigation of an alien virus reveals and brings out the empathy of each character. When Agents Coulson, May, and Ward track down mysterious deaths by electric pulses to a firehouse and learn that one of the firemen is going to die soon as well, their reactions vary. While May and Ward are the types to remain stoic and silent, corralling the other firemen away so that they don’t get caught in the destruction, Coulson stayed with the man until the last possible moment. He shared the man’s worries and comforted him in the way that only someone who had died before could attest to, and tried to help him find peace in those last minutes of life. And as he walked out of the evacuated farmhouse, turning to stand in a line with the others, every head bowed and hands folded neatly in front of them while we heard a scream and saw the screen flash blue before silence, you could feel the palpable sense of grief without a word being spoken.
This already tangible grief for a minor character death was exactly why the stakes of the second half of the episode heightened so dramatically, when we found out that Jemma Simmons – resident research and medical expert – had also contracted the alien virus and was projected to die within a few hours as well. If she did, and emitted an electric pulse while the team was soaring above the Atlantic, the entire jet was going to crash as well, with everyone on board. While higher-ups ordered Coulson to “dump any infected cargo,” he refused, believing in Jemma’s capacity as a scientist to save herself.
I watched the entire episode with bated breath, feeling my heart break as I watched this ragtag team of amateur agents face their first real challenge on a mission, at the prospect of losing one of their own. The first time that I had watched this episode, I saw this as a pivotal event in the Marvel timeline that deepened the bonds between our protagonists, especially between Jemma Simmons and her best friend Leopold Fitz. Their relationship arc over the rest of the later seasons was achingly heartbreaking, but this was definitely the episode that had me rooting for Fitzsimmons later on (as they were affectionately called, within the show and by fans alike).
However, in the times that I’ve rewatched this episode since COVID changed the world in early 2020, I found another reason to love ‘FZZT’ beyond the on-screen chemistry. Watching this episode breaks my heart now, to see the crew so adamantly refuse to abandon one another, strangers and friends alike, and race to find a vaccine to save everyone afflicted by the alien virus spreading amongst them. Living in a country devastated by the government’s lax approach to taking precautions against the threat of COVID, the United States has faced tremendous loss, with over 750,000 COVID-related deaths as of November 2021. While the death rate had dropped slightly after vaccines initially became available, it has started climbing again for a variety of factors, including vaccine hesitancy and refusal.
Throughout this episode, we saw an unknown virus kill indiscriminately, a team of strangers fight to find a vaccine, and those same strangers grow closer as a result of one of their own brushing death – a mirror of our current reality, predicted eight years ago. If art imitates life, I like to think that ‘FZZT’ is one such example: a sign that empathy exists, and that people intrinsically care about one another.
Stephanie Tom is currently a student at Cornell University. A Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the 2019 Poets & Writers Amy Award, her poetry has appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Sine Theta Magazine, Hobart, Honey Literary, and The Margins, among other places. She is the author of the micro chapbook Travel Log at the End of the World (Ghost City Press, 2019) and the forthcoming chapbook My Heart is a Mausoleum but Only Out of Necessity (Glass Poetry Press, 2022). When she’s not writing she dabbles in dance and graphic design. You can read more of her work at tomstephanie.weebly.com.
