It has finally arrived. This week was a huge week for returning shows as Thursdays officially became TGIT on ABC, and more and more of our favorites returned to the screen.
It is quite the feat to have to choose from amongst the many absolutely wonderful players on TV this week, but the honorees for this week’s Hypable Honors are definitely worthy. We’re sure they’d even hold up next week when even more of our old favorites return to the schedule, but thankfully, we don’t have to cross that bridge just yet.
A lot has happened on both Scandal and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to lead up to the magnificent performances that we have chosen to highlight this week, and neither of their paths has been easy. Hopefully you will agree with this week’s choices for Hypable Honors, because we just couldn’t stop thinking about them.
Hypable Honors
Show: ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’
Actor: Iain DeCaestecker
Fans of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. spent a long hiatus worrying over the fate of the team’s brilliant engineer, Leo Fitz, who wrapped up season 1 in uncertain circumstances. If you heard the percussive wave of hearts shattering across time zones, you can probably guess that our worst fears were realized when the show returned on Tuesday night.
Fitz wasn’t dead, nor was he in a coma. Instead, the snarky Scott had suffered severe damage to the temporal lobe of his brain, leaving him clumsy, stammering, and achingly frustrated.
Iain DeCaestecker’s portrayal of Fitz’s difficulties was, frankly, devastating to watch. With his head bent in concentration and a desperate focus in his eyes, Fitz struggled with the most basic of scientific tasks. The hard shell of his frustration was perfectly in-character, and it was all the more emotional to see it crack in a moment of mournful honesty with Simmons.
Learning, then, that the biochemist had left the team weeks ago only magnified that tragedy of the situation – and made DeCaestecker’s performance all the more heartbreaking. Watching him putter about hopelessly in the lab, murmuring to his absent best friend, hoping for a recovery that now seemed more out of reach than ever… well, it just about broke us.
DeCaestecker turned in some damned fine acting in the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. But judging by his exceptional work in the premiere, season 2 will hit a whole new level for character and actor alike – and both will keep us reaching for the tissues.
Show: ‘Scandal’
Actor: Bellamy Young
There’s very little wrong that Bellamy Young can do as Mellie Grant, even when she’s screaming her head off in anger or blackmailing her own husband, and the season 4 premiere last night offered even more proof to that fact.
After last season’s devastating death, it only makes sense that Mellie would have a bit of a break, not a psychotic one, but just a lack of caring about decorum and what is ‘proper’. Watching her stuff her face with cereal while talking about wearing panties ‘straight out of the dryer’ on the couch in the Oval Office? Absolutely priceless.
While watching her stomp around the White House in a robe and sweatpants elicited more than a few giggles from this fan, it gets so much sadder when you see her lay down on her son’s grave and connect with him. This change in Mellie, while funny on the surface, hints at unrecognizable levels of grief underneath. She is holding herself together, but just barely.
Bellamy Young has always brought the house down as Mellie Grant, especially when we discovered the horrors in her past last season, but her performance met a new high in the season 4 premiere. She shocked us, she entertained us, and she made us clutch our tissues for her, and there’s not much more you can ask from any actress. Thank you Bellamy Young for giving Mellie Grant such a palpable vigor for life. She will always be one of our favorite parts of Scandal.
