Agents of SHIELD, Season 5, Episode 3: A Life Spent
This episode is pretty competently done, and is a thrilling ride from start to finish... the real problem is that "A Life Spent" felt more like a collection of additional scenes that could've been established in the premiere two-parter. It's entertaining, but it also feels more than a little repetitive. With our cast learning what a shithole the Kree-run dystopia that the Lighthouse is for the umpteenth time, it kind of loses its bite and there were definitely moments when I watched this episode that I felt like it really could've tightened up its storytelling.
To recap quickly: Quake goes through her own espionage mission to save Simmons, but gets betrayed and blindsided by the obviously-evil-jackass Deke. (Who, judging by his 'playing the long game' line, might imply that he's betraying Daisy for... some less-malevolent motive? Eh.) All the action scenes are cool and Chloe Bennett is a very charming lead actress, but the scenes kind of feel like just moments of getting from point A to point B. Simmons, meanwhile, sees her stuck in an aristocratic meeting between Kree overlords -- Simmons' own 'sponsor' Kasius and Lady... something-or-other. Simmons is tasked to help an Inhuman girl, Abby, realize her density-manipulating powers... and the scene is treated with all the neat sense of wonder and self-discovery that superhero tales tend to have, but then Abby is sent to fight in an Inhuman cage match and it's... repulsive. Having a big burly animal of a man wail on a cute little girl is a cheap, easy emotional trick to make us hate said man (or in this case, the Kree overlords who treat this as a glorified cock-fight) and it ends with Simmons' horror that she helped Kasius move a product, dooming Abby to potentially spend the rest of her life fighting in the ring.
(That phase-through-heart-rip is metal as all hell, though).
Meanwhile, Team Coulson are just stuck in a trawler ship and tries to look up all the conspiracy and stuff, and find that someone is transmitting from Earth, and they kind of want to get there. On the way, Mack refuses to kill Zev, which ends up nearly causing the entire group to get killed until Elena yo-yo's a gun into Zev's person (it's implied, anyway) which ends up causing Grill, the boss of the trawling business, to give Zev up to the Kree and apparently exile him to the barren, Roach-infested Earth.
It definitely feels like a in-between chapter more than anything, and it's of course a very competently acted and shot episode. But I just feel that it swerves way too much to the zone of darkness-induced audience apathy, as well as the general feeling of repetition as we get multiple characters being oh-so-mortified that humanity and society have degenerated so much and have became eeeeevil. Overall, it's a competent episode -- I can't find much to criticize about this episode, but I can't find anything to praise either.
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