Agents of SHIELD, Season 4, Episode 12: Hot Potato Soup
Definitely a pretty episode, mostly due to the focus and arc welding it does. Sure, the LMD plotline might be nowhere as interesting as the Ghost Rider episodes, but it's still engaging enough to watch anyway. I totally forgot the Koenigs existed, and to see them reappear -- and introduce two more Koenigs, as well as reveal that they're just quirky, identical quadruplets and not robots like the fandom has been speculating since season one... yeah.
There's a bit of weaker points in this episode, as much as I enjoy the Koenigs, and a lot of it is due to the fact that I'm just not super-invested in Fake May. Sure, the situation she finds herself in, a robot who feels, yet knows she's not the real thing, but so desperately wants what the real May buries deep within herself -- attraction to Coulson -- is kinda sorta interesting... yet at the same time it does really feel like a weak attempt to pander to the shippers. It's one thing for Fake May to flirt with Coulson in the base, it's another for them to randomly kiss in the middle of a life-and-death mission.
And, of course, Fitz and Simmons contacting Quake about the true nature of Fake May's LMD-ness, as well as Fake May blowing her own cover by grabbing the Darkhold, came pretty quickly, and the fact that Fake May ends up just getting left crippled as she was after Quake blasted her, only later to be abandoned by Radcliffe and kept deactivated just for potential drama in the future (SHIELD visibly melts the Radcliffe LMD as well as the first Aida's head) is a bit eyeball-rolling.
Likewise, the huge revelation that, uh, the enigmatic Superior (I think it's him, anyway?), Anton Ivanov and his weird submarine and torture fetish, hates the Inhumans because they didn't... get their power by effort? And wants to genocide them all? Also, he wants the Darkhold to get the power to kill Coulson, who he thinks is, like, an Absol-esque portent of alien disasters and whatever? It's honestly very weak and even Radcliffe seems to realize the utter hilarity of someone who thinks Coulson of all people is responsible for all the apocalyptic alien invasions on Earth.
While Radcliffe and Aida continue to give strong performances in this episode, and I absolutely like Radcliffe's insistence of not permanently hurting or killing any of the SHIELD agents -- he still has some attachment to them -- neither Nadeer nor Ivanov are appealing enough to really believe that Radcliffe is in any danger from any of them. And if Aida going all Terminator on Ivanov's people is any indication, I'd honestly rather have Radcliffe do his own independent thing instead of getting bogged down with all this.
Fitz and the LMD Radcliffe is easily the standout parts of this scene, with Mack and Simmons playing along very well. They discover that LMD Radcliffe has an actual synthetic brain, of course, and we get some unexpected emotional focus as LMD Radcliffe reveals that the real Radcliffe knows Fitz's father, and as Simmons helpfully tells us, Fitz's father is an asshole that has caused the dude to live with a huge, huge self-esteem issue, and Fitz is blaming himself for being so trusting of so many people that ended up hurting him -- his father, Grant Ward, Radcliffe -- and it's a cool display of raw emotion and the bond between Fitz-Simmons that works very well.
So yeah, the performances of Fitz's emotional turmoil, Radcliffe being a pretty awesome anti-villain and the hilarity around the Koenig quartet are all very strong beats, which sadly undercuts the Fake May story, and to a greater extend makes the revelation of Ivanov as the apparent Big Bad of this leg of the season very weak. Still, can't complain -- the episode itself was pretty enjoyable, and Patton Oswald is absolutely hilarious.
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