You may have already heard the unfortunate news that Bill Paxton has sadly died at the fairly young age of 61. He’s starred in many very famous films like Titanic, Terminator, Aliens and many more. He also played a very important character in the first season of Agents of SHIELD. And I, personally, think that his character is rather underrated. Please bare in mind that this post will feature major spoilers for season one of the show, which aired on TV like half a decade ago.
First of all, I absolutely realise how long it’s been since most of you probably watched the first season. So, I’m just going to give you guys a quick reminder of what went down. Most of the episodes were just Coulson, Sky (not Daisy), Fitz-Simmons, May and Ward going on top-secret SHIELD missions. I thought this was amazing at the time, but once you go back to watch those episodes again, you see how different they are from what the series has become. Back then it was almost a light-hearted comedy.
Anyway, eventually, it turned out that Ward was actually a mole who was a HYDRA agent all along! And then we have this great Vader-Sidious situation with Ward and Garrett (played by Bill Paxton). I just really love this dynamic of how we find out that Ward is actually evil and we can see everybody being so terrified of him, but then we find out that there is somebody even more powerful pulling the strings!
Also, at the same time, the agents were trying to find out more about Deathlock. And, similarly to the Winter Soldier reveal in Civil War, it turns out that there were actually multiple Deathlocks! And guess who’s one of them? That’s right! Y’boy, John Garrett!
Now, why do I think that this is such an underrated character? Well, people are always complaining about how the MCU has crappy villains. I mean, making a good antagonist is definitely one of the hardest parts of writing a story. The few examples of good villains that people usually point to in the MCU are Red Skull, Loki and Baron Zemo. And I’m so damn disappointed whenever they leave out John Garrett. I mean, sure, he might not be that fabulous when compared to the likes of Loki, but I still think that he is a great villain, which more people should appreciate.
I’m not sure if it’s just me or if anybody else shares this opinion about Garrett with me. I guess I’ll never quite find out since I don’t have enough traffic here on my blog for people to actually tell me what they think in the comments. Oh, well!
Anyhow, it is possible that one of the reasons this character resonates with me so much is that I just remember watching that awesome season finale with every single character having their moments. We had Fitz and Simmons dropped into the ocean. We had Coulson in combat for once. Heck, we even had Nick Fury come over to kick some ass!
I also think that Garrett was just such an awesome character because he’s a very good adaptation of the John Garrett character from the comics. Granted, I haven’t actually read any comics with Garrett in them. However, from what I can learn about him from the wiki page, I think that the writers, the special fx crew and Bill Paxton all did a very good job!
I really enjoy doing these posts on underrated characters. I did one quite long ago about Qui-Gon Jin. Let me know if you’d like to see more of these. Anyway, share this post on your social media if you feel like you want other people to know about it. Talking about social media, don’t forget to like me on Facebook, follow me on Instagram and subscribe to me on YouTube. But that’s it from me for now. See thee soon!
