The key to telling a good spy story is making sure that your reader doesn't get lost in all the twists and turns. With all the agents and double agents and triple agents, you've got to give your readers some sort of road map so that they don't wind up wondering who's doing what when and why. Latour unfortunately doesn't do that here, making it difficult to follow what seems to be a decent story.
If I'm piecing the pieces together correctly, Bucky killed Agent 16, Robard's lover, in 1983 while she was guarding, I believe, a doctor named Tarasova and and his daughter, Tesla. After killing Agent 16 and Tarasova, Bucky seemingly handed over Tesla to the KGB, who sent her to the Red Room, where Black Widows was trained. Tesla is now apparently on a mission for revenge, but, unfortunately, we don't know against whom.
The missing ingredient here is that Latour doesn't make it apparent why Bucky was after Tesla in the first place. In fact, he refers to the incident as the Tarasova Extraction, making it unclear if he was after the doctor or Tesla. I'm assuming that it was the latter, since it makes no sense that he would assassinate someone that he was supposed to extract. But, why was she important to the Soviets? Why was the doctor (and/or she) so important to S.H.I.E.L.D. that Agent 16 was guarding them? Latour doesn't answer those questions here and it makes it somewhat difficult to follow the story as a result.
But, it also distracts from the larger issue, namely why Latour went crazy when he did. Why did he blow 30 years of cover? Latour keeps seeming to imply that he's done so because he's mourning Agent 16, but I don't understand why he suddenly decided to mourn her 30 years after she died. Moreover, how long could he have known her if he met her undercover? If he's been undercover for 30 years and she's been dead for 30 years, it seems like they would've just been ships in the night. Moreover, if he didn't meet her undercover and went undercover after she died, why would S.H.I.E.L.D. risk sending someone with that emotional baggage undercover? I could be wrong, but I don't think that this issue or the last one really shed light on those issues, making it all the more confusing.
The best part of this issue was actually Nick's conversation with Maria on the docks, establishing that he's essentially serving as Bucky's private handler. It's a good use for Nick and I think that it has a lot of potential. We'll see how it goes.
Overall, I'm hoping that the weaknesses of this issue are just growing pains. Latour's getting somewhere here and hopefully he finds his way to it in a way that strengthens future arcs. But, for the time being, we probably need some clarity fairly soon before this arc starts feeling like a bad episode of "Alias."
No comments:
Post a Comment