Agents of SHIELD S04E09 Review: Robot Apocalypse

Agents of SHIELD, Season 4, Episode 9: Broken Promises

We start off with a new arc of Agents of SHIELD. With Ghost Rider gone out of the show for a while, we're back to some familiar territory. We've got internal SHIELD conflict, we've got Inhumans, and we build up what initially seems to be the big conclusion of the Aida/Life-Model Decoy storyline. Of course, a single episode dealing with the robot apocalypse (with Mack and Yo-Yo gloriously cracking jokes and referencing a huge ton of 'robot goes crazy and kills humans' movies, too) isn't quite worth the huge amount of buildup that Aida got, so the revelations at the end are more than welcome.

Actually, the show itself being so self-aware with how robot apocalypse is such a tried-and-true sci-fi trope might play to how they're trying its best to not make it a repeat of, say, Age of Ultron. Really, the biggest part in Aida's favour is that she is portrayed as being a lost soul who suddenly gained sentience from the Darkhold, and is just a confused person trying to survive while everyone else treats her like a computer that should be rebooted. If she hadn't crossed the moral event horizon last episode by killing one of the minor background SHIELD agents and replaced May with a Life-Model Decoy, I would actually be rooting for Aida.

There are some excellent Westworld vibes to with LMD-May, who actually doesn't seem to know that she's a LMD until Aida accesses her... or maybe I still have Westworld in my head and LMD-May is just a very, very good actor. Whatever the case, Aida very nearly gets the Darkhold out of the base, but thanks to a combination of other factors, like Fitz lampshading how many times the SHIELD base has been hacked and how he's prepared an offline power source he controls remotely, and Mack and Elena being genre savvy and just randomly slicing Aida's head off... yeah. There's a lot of great moments for Aida and especially Fitz in all of this...

Which makes the revelation that Radcliffe being the true mastermind behind it all very sensible. Radcliffe isn't fully evil, of course -- he has seen the potential within the Darkhold (and Aida) but SHIELD wants to get in the way of that, and partly due to his own science-before-everything mentality (he started off life as a villain, after all) and partly because he did touch/read the Darkhold a little, he's obsessed with getting the Darkhold and the fact that the time window for getting the dark tome of eldritch knowledge is short, he had Aida go crazy. It is a bit questionable as to why he sent in the Aida equipped with Darkhold knowledge to go crazy and get decapitated instead of the Aida 2.0 he has in his house, but eh, small complaints. Also, the death of that one agent is just Aida accidentally misinterpreting Radcliffe's orders, and the scientist, while morally ambiguous, truly meant no harm to SHIELD (note that even the activated Quinjet just shot at walls and boxes instead of actively gunning for the agents). This easily makes Radcliffe one of, if not the, most interesting villain in Agents of SHIELD as far as motivations go.  

Of course, the robot apocalypse alone isn't quite enough to carry an episode on its own, and while the Watchdogs plot is easily the weaker of the two, seeing Simmons, Quake and Mace work together is very well-done, especially the bonding moment where Mace basically makes friends with Quake and is willing to let bygones be bygones. Man, this quick cooperation between different good guys is refreshing! 

It's a bit tried-and-true with mutants over in X-Men, of course, but Senator Nadeer bonds with her brother Vijay, the dude that emerged from the terrigenesis cocoon in Simmons' B-plot a couple of episodes ago, but Nadeer is working with the Watchdogs... and the two of them apparently are such xenophobes that they promised each other to kill the other if they became an alien. Of course now that he's a freaking Inhuman with super-speed, Vijay is unwilling to let a bullet go through his head because, shit, he's the same dude. Just with powers. But the Watchdogs do eventually turn on him, and while Mace, Quake and Simmons do their best to take down the Watchdogs, Vijay goes along with his sister into a helicopter, only for Senator Nadeer to be enough of a cold-hearted bitch to change her mind and execute Vijay herself. 

It's a bit weaker mostly because neither Nadeer nor Vijay have been big enough players to tug at our emotional strings the way Aida did, but it's still a solid B-plot running through that helps to make the robot apocalypse not dominate the entire episode and be excessive. Good show.

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner: 

• The Nadeers' mother died in the Chitauri attack in the Avengers, putting them on the list of many people whose life are changed by the Chitauri invasion in Marvel's TV shows.