asleepinawell:

Relevance was such an all-around great episode with so many good scenes, but this one really stuck with me. I knew very little about the show or Shaw as a character when I started watching so I had no idea what to expect. Shaw, despite what she says, is a badass in this episode, and I fully expected her to be shown here as the cold-blooded killer who guns down everyone in the room, makes a quip about it, and then has a beer. Because that’s the type of narrative I’m used to seeing in media. Which…almost happened. But then she let Louis go. She stopped, thought about it, decided Louis wasn’t someone she needed to kill, and let him walk out (and then had her beer). And, for me, that helped frame Shaw as a character. Absolutely someone who could kill without remorse when needed, but not someone who would kill a relatively harmless, unarmed man with his hands in the air. Not because she’d feel bad about it, but because that wasn’t how she chose to do things.