How Grant Ward from Agents of Shield managed to fool me
I pride myself (possibly wrongly) that not much in fiction fools me anymore. My father and I will have competitions about who can guess who the murderer is first, I can spot a ship within the first meeting, and I can predict who is going to die. How? Well, because some writers use too many tropes and cliches and obvious build-ups. Most fiction that uses these obvious tools are procedural TV shows, or written-to-market romance books, or any other type of “we barely stand out from the masses” fiction. Superhero movies and shows tend to fall into that category, and this is why I was so surprised when they managed to fool me.
OBS the rest of this text contains spoilers for Marvel’s Agents of Shield season 1. Continue reading at your own discretion.
My initial reaction
When it was first revealed that Grant Ward was secretly a Hydra agent working from within Shield my first reaction was legitimately: “ha, that is so obviously fake!” I did not believe for one second that he was actually Hydra. The first clue we had to this was Ward shooting agent Hand, and I was like “Ohh, when did they have time to plan that? Does he have real bullets in some other pocket too? Do they really expect that to fool Garrett?” Well, as you will know, it turned out he actually did shoot her, it wasn’t all faked to get Garrett to talk.
When the Shield team was gathered in the motel and talking about Ward I actually paused the DVD to tell them why they were wrong. I told my TV “Look, obviously he isn’t a double agent. If he is anything he’s a triple agent.” I had a whole list of behaviors I had observed in him, behaviors that made it clear to me he couldn’t possibly be betraying his friends. I told my TV “no one could play that stupid that well!” Now, I know Grant Ward speaks 117 different languages and can hit a fly 10,000 yeards out. I know he isn’t unintelligent, and that wasn’t the kind of stupid I was referring to, I meant emotionally stupid.
What he said he did to convince his team
There’s a scene in episode 18 where he explains all his behavior. He explains how he fooled every single one of his teammates, how he chose behavior targeted at each individual.
I jumped out of a plane. Deep cover tacics 101: perform selfless acts of bravery here and now. So I jumped to save the scientist; I had a parachute.
Agent May was the primary threath, so I let things get intimate.
Sky was the unknown variable. Being her SO put me in a position to be a soundingboard, get an idea what she was thinking.
I gave Coulson a person he thought he could help, the plane was full of them.
Agents of Shield season 1, episode 18
Ward had a plan for how to fool every one of them, a targeted approach for each that when combined gave the overall appearance of someone who was one of them. And it worked. But those weren’t the reasons he fooled me.
What he did to convince me
What convinced me that he wasn’t a double agent was the “flaws” he exhibited. In my mind, anyone playing pretend like that, trying to fool people, wouldn’t make such huge mistakes, such human mistakes. What mistakes? Well, there were three of them.
1. He slept with May
Yes, this is one of his reasons too, but from my side, it looked like a character flaw. We could already see that he and Sky had a spark going, so when he decided to sleep with May it seemed to me as a “safe” outlet for negative emotions. Like Shakespeare’s Richard of Glouster said, when he couldn’t have a kingdom:
What other pleasure can the world afford?
I’ll make my heaven in a lady’s lap.
Richard of Glouster, Henry VI part 3, act 3 scene 2
Instead of Ward sleeping with May to convince May he wasn’t a double agent, I saw it as Ward having a bad day, wanting a relief, and sleeping with May over Sky because he didn’t want to risk a potential relationship with Sky. In other words, a dick move. And a stupid one, since Phil and May also had a spark going, and sleeping with the woman your team leader fancies is not a good way to gain his trust. How could he possibly have predicted with such certainty that Coulson would react the way he did, especially since Coulson is said to have changed a lot since Tahiti? Or was he just gambling that no matter what Coulson would feel about Ward’s relationship with May, he wouldn’t let it impact the team, that he would be professional? Yes, Coulson is a professional, but he is also one of the most emotionally driven agents on the show.
2. He fell in love with Sky
He continues to claim through the show that he really is in love with her, so for this point, I’ll take his word for it. If nothing else I do believe that he believes it. This isn’t just a matter of stupidity, of allowing emotions to interfere with a mission, since that would count against him being a good agent regardless of his side. This made me not believe that he was Hydra because I simply didn’t believe a person could have the mental capacity to keep up a facade like that, a life or death facade, and still have the emotional presence to fall in love. I believed that if he was both a spy and in love, he wouldn’t have the awareness to know it was love he was feeling.
3. 100 people with 1% of the solution
It seems to be a common thing that people are more likely to like you when you are not trying to get them to like you. This means that while Ward’s initial attitude of “I don’t want to be here” was a great way of gaining their trust, by making them work for his, his switch in suddenly showing them that he’s been listening to them all along, has been paying attention, made me think that he couldn’t have been faking it. It was too fast to have been planned, too seamless, too prideless. I mean, he goes from:
“She doesn’t think like us.”
to:
“It was everyone’s idea, sir.”
in one episode. It is so smooth. No lie is ever that smooth. Lies are supposed to sound true, and truth is rarely smooth, so good lies aren’t smooth either.
On top of that, it shows genuine good character. It shows a desire to change, to at least try to be one of the team. It shows him going off script, both Hydra and specialist script.
Conclusion
Grant Ward was flawed. Too flawed to be fake. He made bad choices, he battled his heart and his duty and couldn’t balance it, and yet he was good too, he grew. He was a well-developed character, he was round and layered. He was the kind of character writer’s desperately want to write, the kind of character we spend years learning to write – years and many failed attempts. And Ward did it? With no previous drafts filling up the trash can? With no possible edits or rewrites? With no backspace button?
In short, what made me think Ward couldn’t possibly be a double agent was the fact that he was like a writer and an actor in one, and he was bloody brilliant at both. Also, Ward’s surprising betrayal was one of the main reasons I fell in love with Shield – it had been too long since someone had managed to surprise me like that.
