Agents of SHIELD S04E11 Review: Who's An Android

Agents of SHIELD, Season 4, Episode 11: Wake Up

Another pretty strong entry in Agents of SHIELD, with the LMD plot being absolutely well-played out. While Quake, Jeffrey, Talbot, Coulson and Yo-Yo has to deal with trying to be proactive against Senator Nadeer and ending up failing pretty badly due to Nadeer pre-empting them, May is trapped within a mental prison that she's still badass enough to match. In all this, Radcliffe sets up the fact that there's a second L.M.D. other than Fake May in play, which gets the audience thinking. The obvious red herrings are Mack and Fitz, of course. Mack bugs out of the mission because of a suspicious text, and Fitz's obsession with investigating the L.M.D. mystery seems to set up Fitz as the second L.M.D., if only to have him go and break down when he, like Fake May, realizes that he's an L.M.D.

Of course, it turns out that the Radcliffe which Fitz and the other agents arrested is the actual L.M.D., but I honestly didn't see this coming at all until the final scene, where Fitz shot Fake Radcliffe in the head. That was a well-done twist, and Fake May seems to be firmly incapable (or doesn't want to) betray her creator just yet. Fake May's story in this episode is as engaging as the real one. While the real May finds herself in a brutal breakout attempt, fighting against Aida... only for it to be revealed to her (and us, the audience) that it's merely a simulation to keep her contained, Fake May is going through a crisis of conscience, tearfully confronting her creator (well, the L.M.D. version of Radcliffe, anyway) but being physically incapable to pull the trigger or even betray him.

We also get the revelation that Radcliffe, via his three L.M.D's: Fake May, Fake Radcliffe and Aida, is the leak that SHIELD has, and has ran off to find protection from Nadeer. And apparently there's yet another mysterious 'Superior' in play?

There's a lot of great character beats here, like Coulson's mistake, Talbot's not unreasonable claims that Coulson keeps taking risks without listening to other people, Quake's attempts to defend herself by telling the truth and only the truth, and most importantly Mack and Elena's talk about 'Hope'. Hope is Mack's daughter that died four months after she was born, which... which felt a bit irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but it does deliver a pretty powerful scene between Mack and Elena, so there's that. I'm curious why Mack held Hope's picture during the Ghost Rider arc, so maybe there's something about Hope's death that will be relevant somewhere down the line? I dunno.

Overall, a pretty solid episode, even if a good chunk of the episode is just having us guess at who the L.M.D. is, it's still a pretty solid 40 minutes.