This week, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD threw us quite a curve ball here in Whimsieville. Usually, after the show, the Whimsies stay up half the night discussing the episode, and I have the opportunity to let you all in on some of the things they talk about. But last night’s episode did not lead to happy banter or cheerful chatter. Instead, it led to tears, and we were all up half the night, dealing with a lot of personal issues.
This episode, the 7th of the show, is titled “The Well,” but we did not anticipate the meaning, or how it would affect everyone, especially Trixie. Originally, I thought Trixie would be especially pleased with this story, since so much of it centers around Asgardian legends, and the action even picks up directly after the events of the latest Thor movie. Trixie, of course, is our local Thor expert and groupie, so this should have been a lot of fun for her.
Instead, “The Well” centers on an Asgardian staff that has the power to instill massive amounts of rage in anyone who touches it. When Agent Ward touches a piece of the staff, childhood memories surface—memories he has tried very hard to suppress, and for good reason. We’ve heard before that Agent Ward spent his childhood dealing with an older brother who was a bully. How much of a bully, and how evil a character, we could only guess. But now, through flashbacks, we see a child stuck in a well and Ward wants to help, but his older brother will not allow it. My best guess is that this child in the well is the youngest of the three brothers. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the oldest brother threw him in there.
What ends up happening to this child, I don’t know. However, I can make a pretty good guess what happens to Ward after these scenes. You see, Ward’s older brother FORBIDS him to assist in any way, and yet, Ward begins to lower a rope to the helpless child in the well. When the older brother finds out his orders were disobeyed, I’m sure Ward is going to be subjected to even further bullying and violence at the hands of this evil brother.
Some of this is conjecture on my part, because the details of the scene are not spelled out for us. The whole point of showing us this event, though, is to give a glimpse inside the hard-edged, usually emotionless Agent Ward—to give us a hint about what “makes him tick.” The little we’ve known about him to this point assures us there must be some kind of dramatic backstory behind why he is the way he is. These scenes begin to open the curtain oh his inner workings.
However, these scenes also did something else, opened another curtain. When Ward falls prey to the power of the Asgardian staff and his deepest, darkest memories are dredged up for his own personal pit of Hell, something very similar happened to Trixie as well.
If you’ve read Trixie’s story, then you know that she also was once the victim of a bully, and that the details of this bullying were very similar to what happened in our show last night. Till now, the rest of us had only heard the barest details of Trixie’s trauma, as she is basically a cheerful sort, and does not care to dwell on the negative. She has only mentioned that someone once tried to drown her, but she survived. What a terrible experience! But we have not pressed her for details.
Last night, however, as we watched the show, Trixie first began to whimper, and then to weep, and finally to wail. The scenes before her were so eerily similar to what had happened to her so many years ago, and the emotions of that painful and frightful ordeal came to the surface and overwhelmed her. We all gathered around her, wondering what was wrong, but actually, it was fairly easy to guess. She could not speak at first, so I simply took her in my arms and comforted her.
When the show was over, and Trixie finally stopped crying, she at last told us her tale. I will not go into the morbid details here, but suffice it to say that her “well” was a backyard swimming pool, and the evil brother was not actually HER brother, but the brother of her Person, a girl whom we now learned was named Abigail. Trixie has never been sure if the brother threw her in the pool and tried to drown her simply because he was evil, or if he was mad at his sister Abigail and thought that destroying her Whimsie would make her feel bad. Either way, she spent way too much time in the water, and though she was not “destroyed,” she was damaged. After this, it took her years and years to dry out, and feel like a fully functional Whimsie again.
But wait. There’s more. Being drowned by a bad brother was not the worst of it for Trixie. When at last she was retrieved from the bottom of the swimming pool, where she had sunk like a stone, Abigail took one look at her swollen, misshapen body, and instead of nursing her, mothering her, doing anything and everything she could to make it better, Abigail simply threw Trixie on the ground and exclaimed, “UGH! I don’t want you anymore! You’re ruined! You’re UGLY!”
Oh, poor Trixie! Abused and abandoned. How did she ever survive such trauma? After all this, Abigail never played with her again, and Trixie claims that she has no recollection of how she went from a water-drenched Whimsie laying on the lawn beside the backyard swimming pool to a useless item thrown on the top of The Hoard. She has blocked out the memory of all those many years.
I am only glad that she did indeed end up in the same Hoard as Tessie and Tillie, who befriended her, and helped her, and did all they could to make it better. Such good friends! I hugged them both and thanked them profusely for being there to help Trixie as much as they could.
But they too were crying. Not only for Trixie and the sorrow in her story, but also for themselves. Trixie’s tale reminded Tessie of her abduction by wolves, and Tillie was thinking of Jennifer, her Person, who had not exactly abandoned her as Trixie’s Person had, but who lost interest, and neglected her, assigning her a spot on a top shelf, but after that, never again took her Whimsie in her arms to hang out and watch movies and read books with her on the soft pillows of the bed.
So everybody was crying, in a terrible funk, and we all stayed up late into the night talking it out. At last, I tucked the three Whimsies into bed, drying their tears. I assured them that though in this world bad things may happen to good people (and good Whimsies), we are all oh so fortunate to have found each other. We agreed to stick by each other, and do our best to never allow anything terrible to happen to any of us again, as much as it is in our power. With these assurances, and a few more sniffles, my poor, sad little Whimsies at last drifted off to sleep.
And I thought Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD was just going to be a fluffy show about comic book heroes and villains. In the end, I know it was good to get all this out in the open. I know Trixie will feel better after talking about it. I just hope next week’s episode of SHIELD will be more….fun.
