The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s 8 Best TV Episodes

After rewriting the landscape of cinema with their trend-setting shared universe of movies, Marvel managed to repeat that same success on the small screen by creating several shows that share a separate, if tangentially related, continuity. More importantly, they're all darn good TV. On ABC, there's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (which is off to a great start this year) and, until its untimely cancellation, Agent Carter. Over on Netflix, there's the ever-growing Defenders subset – consisting of the likes of gritty superhero shows like Daredevil and Jessica Jones, which are leading up to a multi-hero team-up show. As different as each series is, every one of them has produced many terrific episodes of television. Some of which arguably surpass the movies as top-notch pieces of superhero storytelling. Here, then, are the 8 best TV episodes of the MCU, not counting the incoming Luke Cage. If we've missed any of your favourites, be sure to let us know in the comments section down below. 8) Turn, Turn, Turn – Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. Infamously, the majority of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s first season failed to strike a chord with many fans who felt that the show was not capitalizing on its potential. But that all changed with the season’s seventeenth episode, which exploded both the show’s internal storyline and its role in the wider universe. Tying into the newly-opened Captain America: The Winter Soldier, "Turn, Turn, Turn" reveals that Phil Coulson’s team has also been infiltrated by nasty HYDRA agents all along. Starting from here, AoS became the place to go to see the fallout of the movies – it's since dealt with the aftermath of the likes of Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: Civil War. What’s more, it also brought rogue agent Grant Ward into his own, marking his transition into the villain who would stick around for three whole seasons. In short, it's a landmark episode for the show and the first legitimately great TV episode of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 7) Daredevil - Daredevil One of the many great things about the first season of Daredevil was that it used the fact that it was made for Netflix to its advantage. Instead of having episodic plots, it was one big, protracted superhero origin story. As such, the season finale had all the stakes of the third act of a comic book movie. And thankfully, less city-wide destruction and weird portals in the sky. Firstly, it shows Matt Murdock finally get out of his black outfit and properly become Daredevil, as he dons the classic red suit (even if it did need re-designing for season two). More importantly, it gives us the big showdown between Matt and Fisk – in both a dramatic and physical sense. After a season of ambiguous morals from both, it packs a real punch to see each character assuming the identity of how the world sees them: hero and villain. 6) AKA WWJD? – Jessica Jones Jessica Jones had a tough job creating just as fascinating a hero/villain rivalry as Daredevil and Fisk, but it managed it in Krysten Ritter’s troubled private eye and her mind-controlling stalker Kilgrave. One of the very best episodes that showcased this was episode eight, as the pair are forced to live together. For the first time in the show, we get a fuller picture of Kilgrave beyond just being the spectre of Jessica’s nightmares and a scarily-powerful monster. Through the look at his childhood and his apparent love for Jessica, it's clear that he's not really evil. He's just a child who never learnt you can’t always have it your way (because he actually can). Nonetheless, the episode doesn't completely neuter Kilgrave. His warped declaration of affection – moving into her childhood home – is a clever metaphor for how he has corrupted every aspect of her life with his emotional and physical abuse. 5) 4,722 Hours – Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s exciting tie-ins to the wider MCU are all well and good, but a show has got to prove it can be great on its own two feet as well. That’s exactly what AoS did in this third episode, which showed it wasn’t afraid to experiment. Detailing the traumatic six months that Jemma Simmons was stuck on a bleak alien world, it is absolutely the most emotional installment of the show so far – with a touching one-off romance and a creepy monster to boot. Elizabeth Henstridge shows her impressive acting range here and highlights how far Simmons has come since the series’ beginning. With the feel of a classic sci-fi movie, it’s a well-told tale of survival against all the odds (with some coincidental comparisons to The Martian, which was released around the same time) and proof that AoS can do great standalone drama when it wants to. 4) SNAFU – Agent Carter Sometimes a particularly good penultimate episode can best the finale, and this is certainly true of Agent Carter’s first run. Though the closer to the short eight episode season was highly enjoyable, the preceding installment was even better. In many ways, this is the episode where the season’s many plot threads come to a head. Peggy is on the run from her colleagues at the SSR, Leviathan’s evil plan is revealed and there's a shocking death of a regular character for good measure. It’s got everything you could want from the show. Try as it might, season two didn’t manage to top this one. It’s not a standalone great like "4,722 Hours" but it makes great use of the brief season, providing a tight build-up to the finale in a way that few 22 episode seasons can accomplish. 3) Penny and Dime - Daredevil Despite starring in three movies beforehand, Daredevil’s version of the Punisher is hands down the best we've ever seen. The treatment of the character is pretty much spot on throughout the season (except for muddling up his backstory later on), but "Penny and Dime" is the epitome of it. That scene by his family’s grave, where Frank recounts the tragic details of their death and the importance of his daughter’s storybook, is the standout and the most powerful sequence of the show to date. It could have come across as a little much if not played the right way, but Jon Bernthal is astounding in the scene and makes you believe in the heartbroken figure beneath the Punisher’s murderous façade. Let's hope we can get a series of this quality when The Punisher spinoff arrives. 2) AKA Sin Bin – Jessica Jones In everything from The Avengers to The Dark Knight, we've seen supervillains locked up by the heroes - only to be more trouble inside the cell than out. It's become something of a hoary old trope, then, but that doesn't mean that it still can't be effective when deployed correctly. Which it is in Jessica Jones' ninth - and finest - episode. With Kilgrave locked in a hermetically-sealed room where he can’t use his powers, Jessica thinks all she needs to do is get to him to confess to his crimes and her troubles will be over. But Kilgrave still has a hold on her, in how much she hates him, which makes for a thrilling and fascinating hour as we see the control of the situation shift to Kilgrave. It's a tense, thrilling episode that sports two terrific performances from both Krysten Ritter and David Tennant. 1) Shadow in the Glass - Daredevil As this list has demonstrated, the villains of Marvel television are just as good as its heroes - which means that any episode revolving around them is a shoe-in for the best of the bunch. Naturally, then, the Daredevil episode that gave us a look at Wilson Fisk’s backstory is the show’s greatest episode to date and quite possibly the best MCU TV episode as well. Through the flashbacks to Fisk’s traumatic childhood, where we learn that he murdered his own abusive father, we see that – like many superheroes and their nemeses – Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk are two sides of the same coin. Both experienced the horrors of Hell’s Kitchen as children. Just like Matt’s father’s murder explains his reasons for being a vigilante, this explains Fisk’s later career choice. It’s a fantastic character-driven episode that highlights just why Fisk is one of the – if not the actual – best villain of the MCU we’ve yet seen.