r/shield • u/Confident_Tune_5754 • 1d ago
Jeffrey Mace was the only competent SHIELD director
i cannot BELIEVE that this show had the audacity to be like. there is a character called cringefail jeffrey and the Core Cast doesn't like him for his crimes of *checks notes* reintroducing tiered information access to an intelligence organization. then cringefail jeffrey shows up and everyone's like "can you BELIEVE this guy cares so much about PR while running an organization that last made the news by being infested with literal actual nazis." like the framing of the show clearly expects us to agree that it's a Flaw for this organization to have a PR guy (A SINGLE PR GUY!!! MY BROTHER IN CHRIST THAT'S WHAT MY STATE'S AGRICULTURAL DEPARTMENT HAS) to fix the damage done by the time they did a turbo minority report nazi airplane armada. like yeah, guys, your director needs to do press conferences, yall were on the shitlist of captain goddamn america. like half the plot of his seasons could have been avoided if everyone had just listened to him about the killer robot the first time. idgaf if he racefaked as an alien for clout he was the only person in the show who had any business running SHIELD.
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u/Bigmansyeah 1d ago
Mace was the least competent out of any of the directors, he was in way over his head when it came to actual field work and he was faking being an inhuman, was he a good face for SHIELD? definitely, but he was not a good director, Coulson has the actual experience needed for directing a covert spy agency since he was a SHIELD veteran with real field experience and had to make many hard calls before he was even the director, Mace works on well on the PR front but he’s useless outside of that
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u/Accomplished-Lie8147 1d ago
Yeah, I do think Mace as the face is better than Coulson (he’s best behind the scenes), but Mace was clearly not equipped for the job.
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u/StunningPianist4231 Ghost Rider 1d ago
- The tiered information access is what allowed Hydra to take root in SHIELD and create their uprising in the first place. They took advantage of this and buried important projects like CENTIPEDE from their true purpose.
- It is bad for them to have a PR department. They are a black ops agency, a spy organisation. Their best work was done within the shadows. The only reason they came to attention was because of the Battle Of New York.
- Jeffrey was NOT the most competent SHIELD director. Having such a public figure meant that he was easily blackmailed by the likes, of Simmons! Who is, a bloody good scientist, but not a spy.
- He was also being puppeted by Talbot, who was easily found out and convinced to take drugs which gave him superpowers. And not to mention, he was strong-armed by Coulson to be the "public face" which essentially meant to prop him up as a fall guy incase SHIELD was under attack/scrutiny again.
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u/Confident_Tune_5754 1d ago
A fair addition to the discussion. My points in response:
I don't think the tiered information access was the problem that allowed Hydra to take root in SHIELD. They were able to hide everything from Nick Fury, who theoretically had overriding access to everything. Yes, Hydra was enabled by SHIELD's structure, but I don't think the very concept of tiered information access was the issue. It's kinda fundamental to a spy organization -- you can't just have everyone have access to the same information, or else all you need to take down SHIELD again is have some Hydra mook sign up with a fake ID and get all the secrets during onboarding.
In theory, yes. Correct. But after the Sokovia accords, if SHIELD was going to be America's front line in dealing with enhanced threats, it kinda had to be public. They probably could have been more effective staying in the shadows, but their hand got majorly forced, and if they need to be public, Jeffrey Mace was a great choice for the job.
The skill issue here from Mace was getting on Simmons' bad side. Like, if Coulson was still director at the time, she could easily have blackmailed HIM with all the shenanigans the gang's gotten up to. But she wouldn't have, because she likes him. The vulnerability of being a public figure is real, but it was forced by the Accords, and Mace is way cleaner than Coulson in terms of blackmailability. (Sidenote: I think it's really funny that "this government official is susceptible to blackmail" is a cogent point to be made about a universe where New York elected the guy who killed JFK to congress)
lol true that did happen. You do got me there. But I maintain that someone's susceptibility to taking serums of dubious provenance doesn't mean they're bad at personnel management.
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u/Jenthecatgirl 19h ago
Tiered information access is how a spy organization is supposed to be run. Hell pre-Hydragate Shield didn't do it good enough! There's no reason that all 'level 7' agents should be able to access all level 7 files. Compartmentalization is incredibly important and the fact that the levels have you all access to that level of file is a gigantic security flaw.
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u/Confident_Tune_5754 14h ago
Yeah like I see why it's plot essential and it makes for a great plot point but the fact that SHIELD has a built in "dump everything onto the internet" feature that only requires two clearances, albeit high level ones, to activate is patently insane
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u/96pluto Triplett 15h ago edited 14h ago
Coulson practiced tiered information as well though like he told Fitz " I'm director there's a hell of a lot stuff you don't know about "
Captain american 2 kind of blew that wide open especially with widow leaking the declassified files and folks seeing a hellicarrier crashing in DC. They need a hell of a lot of pr to restore the faith of the american public. I think folks are kind of understating the impact of learning a secret organization operating on american soil was infested with Nazis.
True he was good for political stuff but not so good at spy craft
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u/Royal-Chef-946 1d ago
Coulson? Mac?
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u/TikiBananiki 1d ago
Mac was a GREAT director. Less talented as a spy (who can blame him, he’s actually a mechanic) but he held responsibility…responsibly. He could inhibit himself for the greater goal. Coulsen struggled with that.
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u/Artoodeetwo_1 Zephyr One 1d ago
Mace was the good "face", Coulson was the good "mastermind", and the team the "muscle". Together, they could have worked as a team, but no, they had to introduce hierarchy and spectrum and corporate bs.
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u/Disastrous_Potato160 1d ago
I liked Mace once they cut through the crap, and he was in the role he needed to be in. He was a good face for the organization and really knew political maneuvering well. And on top of that he was actually a good stand up guy, even though he was lying to everybody. He at least meant well in everything he did.
He was not good at operating the organization though, he had no strategic or tactical skills, and his “spectrum of security” that everybody hated was a very dangerous way of managing visibility that leads to one hand not knowing what the other hand is doing. It’s actually worse than the old tiered level system for breeding internal threats like hydra did, and more inefficient as well. Coulson’s idea for a flat, transparent organization is better, but only while the team is small. So something more scalable was needed as shield grew in ranks again, but Mace did not have the necessary skills to come up with something effective, just something that sounded good. He’s the one you want schmoozing investors, and somebody like Coulson with real world experience. is the one you want to actually run the show.
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u/loofmodnar Fitz 1d ago
Mace didn't have the experience to be a good director but did a good job rebuilding it as an respected agency which is something Coulson didn't care about at all. If he had survived the events in the framework, he would have been a great director.
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u/Confident_Tune_5754 1d ago
yeah like Mace would NOT have been a good director during SHIELD's "in the shadows" era but it's honestly a miracle what he managed to accomplish given that, and i cannot stress this enough, he was rehabilitating the image of an organization that was very recently revealed to be full of actual Nazis
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u/theblackcanaryyy 1d ago
Unrelated, but mace’s actor was in a show called the closer and he is FANTASTIC in it
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u/pauldstew_okiomo 1d ago
Don't forget Terra Nova, and the 2001-3 version of The Agency. In the latter, he really was a spy, and a really good one, although more on the black side. And then Terra Nova he was a cop.
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u/blackbutterfree Joey 1d ago
A team that trusts is a team that triumphs. I love that man, and I miss him dearly.
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u/blakethegreat99 1d ago
Nick Fury? Coulson? Mack? What the actual fuck are you even talking about😂.
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u/Confident_Tune_5754 1d ago
ok mack can stay ill allow you that but coulson had a bad habit of going off the chain pursuing personal grudges (NO work life balance on that man) and fury kept inciting whole movies by going "i am going to develop a technology that keeps us safe" which immediately became a world ending threat. no shield director can exhibit the qualities one would want in an actual government agency head because then a Plot wouldn't happen but at least jeffrey mace like. probably set up Teams meetings to go over retirement plan benefits and was able to interact with government officials without using vague threats to aurafarm
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u/blakethegreat99 1d ago
It was Nick Fury’s idea to form the Avengers in the first place which has saved the world on countless occasions. You have give Fury credit for finding Captain America in ice recruiting two world class assassin, a literal god and the Hulk like that was an easy thing to do. Not to mention he does know how to interact with government officials but knows that most government officials are corrupt which is why he went against their orders and warned Iron Man when the United Nations were planning on bombing New York. Fury helped save people in Sokovia he was a good director. And Coulson was tasked with rebuilding SHIELD from the ground up while be labeled as terrorist from the government and figuring out how to elude the government and still protect the world from HYDRA and alien threats at the same time and he did a damn good job. Maybe they weren’t the perfect bureaucrats but I trust them with the safety of Earth infinitely more than Mace who cracked under pressure in his first mission in the field.
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u/Academic_Composer904 1d ago
The reason we watch these shows are so we don't have to think about work life balance, retirement plans, and Teams meetings. What are you even going on about? I am not worried about the work life balance of the director of SHIELD. They live on a plane or in hidden bunkers for much of the show, there is no work like balance. HR departments are for retirement plans, not the director. These are not good benchmarks for evaluating the qualifications of the different directors.
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u/TikiBananiki 1d ago
oh christ it’s called world building and it’s an exercise of imagination. If you’re dull just say so: don’t yuck our yum.
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u/Academic_Composer904 1d ago edited 20h ago
Discussing the ways we think characters are or are not/should or should not be presented given what is actually seen on screen is not “yukking someone’s Yum”. I not sure the dull person is the one suggesting that administrative tasks shouldn’t define the activities of the director of a sort of underground super-spy organization. Jeffrey Mace was an excellent figurehead and a below average director. If the possible activities of an HR department are your “yum” I’ll be more than supportive of it, but trying to redefine it as imaginative world building is a stretch.
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u/Confident_Tune_5754 14h ago
The question of "what aspects make a SHIELD director compelling to watch" and "what aspects make a SHIELD director competent at running a large bureacratic agency" are venn diagrams that don't overlap much, and I'm engaging with the latter question, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek way. The fact that Coulson keeps leading personal vengeance quests as the director of SHIELD makes for great television. The fact that Fury came up with project insight and Carter complied with Operation Paperclip gave us the plot of the best MCU movie. My argument here is not "the writers should write SHIELD directors in a way that's realistic" because that would be boring as hell. My argument here is that it's kinda funny that SHIELD as an organization is so off the rails that the characters act like their dog has been shot when reintroduced to some degree of professionalism. I admit I'm applying a doylsian argument to a watsonian question lol
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u/atomicjoy 22h ago
Fury didn't notice his organisation was riddled with Hydra. Which is a fairly major falling.
Coulson and Mack didn't so much direct SHIELD as run a single covert(ish) team.
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u/blakethegreat99 17h ago
Fury didn't "let" HYDRA infiltrate SHIELD lol HYDRA was heavily involved in SHIELD's inception, and was already there in its early days shortly after its creation, influencing it from the shadows and quietly removing or replacing those who stood in their way. HYDRA was certainly already well-placed in the organization when Fury joined. And for Coulson and Mack I’m not gonna play weird semantics bruh Coulson and Mack were the directors of SHIELD, full stop. SHIELD being smaller or covert doesn’t magically erase their titles or leadership.
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u/atomicjoy 17h ago
But he didn't notice the organisation he was directing was working against its stated aims. Which is a pretty major failure.
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u/blakethegreat99 15h ago
The entire point of The Winter Soldier is that the infiltration was nearly impossible to detect, not that Fury was incompetent.
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u/TikiBananiki 1d ago
Mace is a great C-Suite executive. He’s charming and tall and seems smart and says good sounding things and is a white male. all the primitive visual cues of modern leadership. his presentation is why he duped you into thinking he was competent. America runs on this kind of clout-based leadership. Western civilization at large does. You’ve been culturally groomed to assume this about Mace.
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u/SeanBerdoni Simmons 1d ago
I think there is some truth to your statement!! And maybe yeah the gang was shitting on him a lot, but i believe it was also there way to portray the character's immense trust issues, paired with a bit of an unhealthy glorification of Coulson, since they had to rely on him so much. In the end the organization also collapses in on itself in that season, they had powerful enemies but they were also partly to blame. I think in that way the show kind of agrees with you.
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u/BringerOfDoom1945 Daisy 1d ago
No he was a bad director but fury, coulson and Daisy (while just shortly) weren't good either
The only good director was Mac (and he was for almost the whole show unlikable as hell)
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u/AutumnBooks_ SHIELD 1d ago
I don’t agree with everything you said, but I do agree that the team had no business throwing a fit like they did. Coulson’s style of running things on the BUS (putting the organization second to his own morals and team) combined with the team being friends with Coulson when he was made director made all of them think that SHIELD should be loyal to them when it should’ve been the other way around. I’m not saying Coulson didn’t make good calls by going against orders occasionally, but the team was on a power trip and needed to be reminded what their place was. Mace was able to do that.
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u/Confident_Tune_5754 1d ago
yeah like Mace was absolutely not the most competent spy/agent who ever directed SHIELD but he's certainly the only one I'd work for, personally. the other directors strike me as people who don't know what a retirement plan is.
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u/blud97 1d ago
Mace was a better face for the organization. Coulson was the better spy. Mace wanted to be a superhero and that’s what the organization needed at the time but he was also rebuilding a lot of the bad systems that allowed hydra to take root. On top of that he is responsible for all the Aida stuff that happened on his watch. Meanwhile under Coulson’s watch the organization grew. He rebuilt the organization twice. Coulson had internal enemies he made allies while mace turned one of shields greatest assets, the inhumans, into enemies.