Spontaneous Musings

I'd recommend reading summary/recaps up to episode 15, and then watching episode 16 of S1 ("The End of the Beginning") onwards. That's when the show improved by leaps and bounds, overnight, the real reason being that they had always been waiting for Captain America 2 to come out so they could unveil the HYDRA twist, which played a major role in hampering the show in the first half of the season. Because they had to basically kill time until they were allowed to unleash that twist, since they weren't allowed to spoil the HYDRA thing before the films revealed it. And what happened immediately afterwards was the show turned into a tight, taut, suspenseful, clever thrill ride. Episode 17 actually occurs concurrently with The Winter Soldier, from Coulson's team's P.O.V., and the way it played off the events of the film, and then launched the series into the arc that made up the last 5 episodes of the series was just phenomenal. Incidentally, once you know some of the later season twists, it makes rewatching earlier episodes of S1 much more interesting. There were actually a lot of interesting embedded clues hiding throughout the episodes, as well as dramatic irony and foreshadowing.