Abidjan Operation

Avengers_BartonCompromised

After Hawkeye is enthralled by Loki, agent Coulson has to call agent Romanoff in from the field, mid-mission. While he awaits her to extract herself from a situation, he idly glances at case file 242-56 which consists of a large video of Barton and Romanoff mid-combat, and overview profiles of the two agents. A legend in the upper right identifies this as STRIKE TEAM: DELTA, and a label at the top reads ABIDJAN OPERATION. There is some animated fuigetry on the periphery of the video, and some other fuigetry in windows that are occluded by the case file. bartoncompromised

Some things to note.

  • The four windows seem to be connected by content and by case file designation. But each has separate window controls in the upper right hand corner. (Not an aberration, we saw the same thing in Carrier Control.) If it’s a single case file, the layout ought to be handled automatically to save Coulson (or agent Stephen Morton, who appears per the text in the upper left to be the one actually logged in), from all that file management. It would even avoid the “error” of Barton’s profile being obscured by Romanoff’s, as in the image.
  • There are bar codes displayed on the agent profiles. Why would a computer operator need barcodes on a computer screen?
  • There is a miniature 3D rendering of a screw to the right of each of their portraits.
  • There are also three hexagrams from the I Ching on Romanoff’s profile. Each one of these is Ch’ien The Creative, which makes sense, she’s total Yang. Barton’s hexagrams are obscured by an overlap of her profile, but I really think it would be a lovely compliment if his were K’un The Receptive, or Yin. Also, OK, kind of weird that SHIELD would use the I Ching as part of official policy, but hey, crazier things have happened.
  • There is a snippet of text from a document about the fundamentals of lossy image compression in the background. It kind of makes sense given that there is clearly some face recognition going on in the video.
  • It must be hi-tech, as the container rule lines jog about semi-randomly. Nurnies to be sure.
  • The video controls along the bottom of the actual video are repeated in miniature along the bottom of the profile pictures, even though these profile images do not move. (Though if they were more like looping photographs in Harry Potter, that would have been cooler.)
  • Abidjan, you might know, is a large city on the Ivory Coast but the coordinates on the screen put this scene in the middle of the Gulf of Guinea. Which, though it’s 894 km east of Abidjan, is actually closer that I would have guessed it to be.

6 thoughts on “Abidjan Operation

  1. Questions raised by this artifact: where’d the footage come from? Was some other SHIELD agent under orders to visually record as much as possible in the field? Was it seized from whomever Barton and Romanova were sent to deal with?

    • And why does it look like a ruined building, when the data says it’s in the middle of the ocean? Maybe it’s the chance for some fan fiction/backworlding that might explain this.

      • Fan fiction gets around to everything eventually, doesn’t it?

        Speaking of self-contradicting GUI data on story locations…there’s a Batmobile control screen in Batman Begins you might want to look at. By every indication of the film otherwise, you’d swear Gotham was on the Atlantic Coast. The offending control screen has Gotham somewhere in Kansas, if memory serves. I’ll try to track the image down for you.

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