Agents of SHIELD, Season 4, Episode 5: Lockup
Shit, I totally forgot about Agents of SHIELD! I'll try to be more succinct with this barrage of reviews. Anyway, episode 5 was a bit of a filler episode. We're still hunting down the ghosts, although now we have some brain stem injections that help to neutralize the madness they cause, and Ghost Rider, well, he's basically the ultimate ghostbuster. Ultimately this episode is truly a filler episode, designed more to show the new dynamics with Quake returning to the fold of Team Coulson and Ghost Rider having to play nice with them. Ghost Rider is still the strongest part of the show, I think, and I am very glad that they're finding a great balance between letting Ghost Rider's story stand on its own, while still not taking much away from our cast of snarky secret agents.
There's a larger focus placed into action in this episode, with the majority of the cast going into a prison to get Eli Morrow away before the ghosts arrive, and Ghost Rider sends at least two back to hell with his awesome fiery chains. I cannot understate just how awesome Ghost Rider's effects are, despite the relatively low budget of this TV show. Quake's got her own awesome scene too. Unable to use her powers without shattering her bones, we get to see some badass martial arts moment when she locks herself in the cafeteria to fight an entire army of unleashed prisoners. It does show a little bit of self-blaming Messiah complex thing going on with Quake, causing Coulson and May to backtrack to bail her out. We get some solid moments with May comparing Quake's own feelings of guilt as being similar to her before Coulson pulled her out of the cubicle, and we get the offhanded drop that May saw Coulson when she died briefly last episode. Huh.
Also cool is the fact that Coulson's robotic arm can create a holographic Captain America shield. What the shit, have we ever seen this already? This works so well on so many levels.
While the rest of the cast are dealing with the escaped prisoners and restoring the infected ones, Ghost Rider meets the final member of the gang that attacked him and his brother in the past. This dude is reformed, however. A bit of a douche, but he's doing his time in prison and isn't even participating in the riot. Robbie is absolutely pissed off, but he learns that someone actually paid for the hit -- except that this particular dude doesn't know anything about it, and everyone else who knows are dead because some dude in a flaming skull is hunting them down.
In one of the most badass Ghost Rider moments to date, we get a closeup of Robbie's head transforming into the Ghost Rider (always a cool scene), the terrified screams of the prisoner asking for God to help, then we see the rioting prisoners outside as the cell literally explodes with hellfire, and this demonic leather-clad man with a flaming skull walk out and every single prisoner runs back to the safety of their cells. Badass.
Of course, this show of badassery and vengeance -- despite Mack telling Robbie not to deviate from the mission -- leaves their target, Robbie's uncle Eli Morrow, being kidnapped by the one remaining ghost, Lucy, and they absconded away to do whatever they're going to do.
Meanwhile, Simmons has to deal with a polygraph test despite being a pretty shitty liar. She has to cover up not just the knowledge of Team Coulson running around independently, but also the existence of Aida. She barely manages being caught by the polygraph because Director Jeffrey Mace, ever so nice and reasonable (no sarcasm here) asks her to help out as the voice in his ear while he talks to the jackass anti-Inhuman Senator Nadeer, providing facts and the like. There are some nice nods to his own acts of heroism, and when finally confronted with a couple of hard questions, Mace shuts Simmons out and tells the public that, well, he's qualified because he's an Inhuman himself.
His ratings quickly skyrocketed, in no small part due to the simple charisma that Jeffrey Mace himself inherently has -- what a great casting choice -- but Simmons manages to wiggle out of having to return to the polygraph test by telling Mace that she knows that Mace is lying about his heroics in Vienna. Simmons doesn't exactly know what, but she knows Mace is lying, and this little bit of anti-trust between Simmons and Mace has them be put on stalemate. It's fun to see Simmons's frustrations and later her cheery 'fuck yea I've won' face as she exits Mace's office.
Mace's honestly just a decent guy, just one that happens to be obstructive to our heroes, and honestly I don't really think he would have too much conflict with letting Coulson do what he's doing if they had only consulted him -- or at least kept him in loop. It's a bit hypocritical for Coulson after three seasons of getting angry at the likes of Skye or Lance or Ward breaking on their own, but the conflict is still there... and thus Mace gets blindsided during a private meeting with Senator Nadeer when shown images of SHIELD agents participating with Quake in the prison, and especially Ghost Rider executing some random model prisoner. It's something that Mace has no idea how to prepare, and the fact that Ghost Rider himself is a loose canon with his own code of honour (the angelic-demonic spirit within Ghost Rider knows who's guilty and who's not, but that doesn't really count in a court of law, does it?) that Jeffrey Mace doesn't even know about... yeah, it's not a good day for the director.
This does build up the previously seemingly squeaky-clean Mace as slightly more sinister, but I really like Mace and I honestly hope he can actually be respected by Team Coulson as one of the good guys, because at this point he's honestly just trying to do his job.
All these are actually very solid storylines -- Jeffrey Mace, the little B-plot of Aida, Ghost Rider and all his origins, this mysterious tome of evil... but there's one huge problem, really, that the Darkhold ghosts just kind of look terrible and act terribly. I don't begrudge cheap makeup, but the fact that we're five episodes down the line and we don't know anything about the ghosts other than their powers and how they got here (science experiment with demonic magic go kaboom) makes them extremely boring antagonists in SHIELD's list of antagonists, and they don't really seem threatening enough to really carry the season or half-season as Ghost Rider just literally one-shotted all but one in less than two minutes.
Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:
- The references to Director Mace being the hero of Vienna refers to the events of Captain America: Civil War, where the U.N. summit in Vienna was bombed by a mind-controlled Bucky. Mace is also mentioned as a 'patriot' thanks to these events. His comic-book persona is, of course, called the Patriot.
- Simmons getting out of lies by speaking technical truths calls back to how Ward broke the similar polygraph test back in season one.
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