Agents of SHIELD, Season 3, Episode 18: The Singularity
A little more to go before my reviews are caught up! I do love how Hive's mind-control works. It's not a simple one-note conversion for Skye. She doesn't just get up and worship Hive all of a sudden, but rather Hive enhances all the resentment and feelings of wanting to belong to a family that Skye demonstrably displays throughout three seasons of Agents of SHIELD. Skye is still Skye, with all aspects of her personality still intact, but her feelings of making Inhumans more accepted and whatnot are enhanced and whatnot.
This episode's focus was both on Skye working as a Hive operative, as well as Fitz and Simmons finally getting an episode devoted to them. It's great having them play spies as they infiltrate this body-enhancement back market convention thing, and having them basically be quite forward with their relationship. Nothing overtly much to note other than it's cute and fun. Their confrontation with Skye and a Will-persona Hive is great, with Skye brutalizing Fitz without doing any real lasting damage, warning him to stay away, while Will-Hive sparing Simmons, and delivering some lines of dialogue that probably fucked with Simmons's head. Simmons isn't fooled, though, and stabs Hive in the gut. That probably won't kill a creature made up of a swarm, but hey, good on Simmons!
It's a tense confrontation even if I don't particularly think any of the main characters are going to die here, but the fact that Fitz and Simmons have shown their love for each other so strongly and bad things happen every time they do that in the past, well, you can't help but think that the showrunners will throw in yet another wrench to fuck them apart.
We also get a little subplot with Coulson, May and Lincoln going off to find the other Inhumans, namely 'Ginger Ninja' Alisha. May calls Coulson out for being so overprotective of Skye, while all but willing to put a bomb vest on Lincoln. I mean, Lincoln isn't quite as likable as Skye, that's for sure, with his tantrums and being uncontrollable, but Coulson is playing favourites and it's great for May and Lincoln both to call Coulson out on that. Alisha's already been taken over by Hive, though, and Hive is always one step ahead of SHIELD in this regard.
Before the big Fitz-Simmons thing, Team Hive is just going around picking up all the ersatz Inhumans around the globe. First Alisha, who will probably provide cannon fodder fighters like she did when she was working for Jiaying, and then James. James finally gets to be an Inhuman with explody powers similar to X-Men's Gambit (apparently he's the MCU version of Hellfire, who I have no idea who he is but cool), and he gets a decent fight scene against Mack in the climax of the episode as Mack tries his best to rescue Fitz and Simmons. James is funny, filling in a niche left behind by Hunter as the snarkiest asshat member of the cast, and his little search for a superhero codename is fun enough on its own.
After Fitz and Simmons' attempts to infiltrate and gain the trust of dr. Radcliffe in an excellently atmospheric twisted CyborgCon thing, he ends up being gang-pressed by Hive to help out as the brains of the team. Hive has brought an entire village with Gideon Malick's money, and apparently is going to pull off a Magneto and experiment on turning humans into Inhumans.
I thought there was a bit of a missed opportunity for Hive not to hunt down Elena and Joey, people who we actually care about unlike the cipher that is Alisha (as cool as she is) or the asshat James, but hey, guest stars and all that.
Oh, and despite his attempts at interacting with Skye, Hive never once in this episode brings up Grant Ward's persona despite bringing out Will to talk to Simmons. Interesting, that.
Meanwhile, with the death of our last named Hydra member, Gideon Malick, Hydra is just this vague, nebulous threat with no real leader in check, and while we only see it from Coulson's POV, Talbot shows his competence by sending in his ATCU forces and finally crushing Hydra and cutting off the head. It's a bit anti-climatic considering how big a presence Hydra has been, but it's a nonetheless appropriate end. With all the leaders of Hydra dead (or in Ward's case, converted into Hive) there really isn't any point to introducing yet another new head of Hydra and doing the same old thing as we did throughout several movies and two and a half seasons of Agents of SHIELD, so yeah, that just happened. It's appropriate, I guess, after all the heads cut off the body just kinda dies.
Overall, a great setup to hopefully a climactic ending to this surprisingly excellent third season. I hope we learn more about Skye and just how deep in mind-control she is. With Hydra out of the way (and the show seemingly ignoring the Watchdogs after that one episode) we're focused on a proper SHIELD vs Hive war, which is cool.
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