Agents of SHIELD S05E15 Review: Hydra Hogwarts

Agents of SHIELD, Season 5, Episode 15: Rise and Shine

Part of how much this episode is going to appeal to you is how ridiculous you find the idea of a special school to train Hydra agents, with classes and guest lecturers and mess halls and petty teenager politics. It's basically Hogwarts, but instead of happy British wizards, you get future quasi-Nazi supervillains. It's insanely weird, but it does make for the basis of a pretty fun episode. 

A good chunk of this episode is told via flashbacks, with us following Hale's journey through the ranks of Hydra for around 20+ years, and it's... interesting. The mythology of Hydra in Agents of SHIELD skirt the line between being insanely jumbled up and actually making sense if you think about it, and this episode actually helps to sort of fix it. We get to see young Hale at a young age, attending the (admittedly gloriously silly) Hydra high school alongside other characters like Jasper Sitwell and Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, and basically fighting tooth and nail to prove her worth -- she is clearly one of the brightest students in the class taught by Daniel Whitehall, but she ends up getting into a fight with the jealous Von Strucker (sort of the Hydra equivalent of a snotty rich-kid-born-with-a-silver-spoon). And despite showing coldness and professionalism in the Hydra ritual of dog-killing (NO) compared to all the crying boys, poor Hale gets placed by her favoured mentor, Whitehall, in a program that pays more attention to her ability to quite literally be a baby-producing factory as Whitehall thinks that Hale has the right gender and genetics to produce his "Destroyer of Worlds" project. 

We then follow Hale around the time of the third season of Agents of SHIELD, where she is part of the whole "Fall of Hydra" bit that happened after SHIELD captured Gideon Malick. Hale's commanding officer in the Air Force ends up committing suicide rather than be captured by Talbot's men, and while Hale herself is beneath suspicion, she ends up returning to the Hydra high school to see her daughter Ruby argue with one of the remaining teachers. That same teacher had earlier pissed on Ruby for being unorthodox, and is now condemning Ruby for refusing to kill her dog. Ruby notes that it's this silly blind compliance that has led Hydra to the brink of extinction, and refuses to comply with what is basically a barbaric ritual. Having 'complied' herself earlier in her life, Hale decides to kill the Hydra teacher and ends up forging a new path. The thing left behind by Fischer is a device to contact a group of alien council called the Confederacy (the same alien group that Kasius is a member of earlier in the season), and Hale is intent on freeing Earth from being a mere 'subject world' to the Confederacy, and Hale's main goal isn't some petty takeover of the world, and with her daughter and her being the final two heads of Hydra that's left, she's going to fight the aliens even if it means teaming up with SHIELD. 

Which leads us to the second series of flashbacks, which revolves around what happened to Glenn Talbot after the events of the fourth season. He recovered and he doesn't blame Coulson or Daisy for the injuries inflicted upon him, and while he might sometimes be a bumbling, emotional man, Talbot's heart is in the right place. It does hurt to see him lose his temper with his son, leading to him eventually being spirited away by Hale to the same Hydra school facility, where Talbot gets utterly unnerved by the same display on the breakfast room that Ruby does to Werner von Strucker in a previous episode (and again to Coulson later here). Poor Talbot understandably refuses to do anything to help out what he sees as Hydra and another insane world domination plan, and is holding out hope that Coulson and SHIELD will free him eventually... but the poor man and his uncooperativeness ends up causing him to be trapped in the Hydra base until today. 

And that brings us to the present day, where Coulson is subjected to the same "unnerving introduction" that Talbot and Werner were subjected to, and ends up easily calling out the bluff and shrugs it off until Hale decides to talk face-to-face. And Hale's proposition is sound -- flags and old allegiances don't really matter if humanity is faced with the threat of total annihilation, and if there is anything that SHIELD and Hydra can agree on, none of them want to see Earth invaded by the Confederacy. 

Of course, it doesn't help when Coulson discovers what Hale's plan is -- to turn Daisy Johnson (who Hale thinks is of a better mindset than Ruby) into the Destroyer of Worlds with Whitehall's machine -- and Coulson realizes that this is how Quake managed to obtain enough power to destroy the Earth. But Coulson's talk about having been to the future and seeing how the Destroyer of Worlds ended up gets taken as mockery and sarcasm by Hale, who ends up seeing Coulson as another in a string of high-and-mighty men who wants to play hero and is stifled with personal bravado that they can't cooperate. There's definitely a huge hint of irony as Hale herself is the one refusing to keep an open mind and cooperate... although Coulson's constant snark throughout the episode doesn't exactly help his case that he's being dead serious in their final conversation. 

And again, Ruby ends up talking to Coulson again, with her own (none-too-stable) goals being made clear as she's intent on embracing her destiny as the Destroyer of Worlds, while showing off the broken Talbot (who's gone completely crazy, the poor man) to Coulson. Poor, poor, Talbot. 

And as negotiations break down between Coulson and Hale, we get some smaller scenes from the rest of the team back at the SHIELD Lighthouse. Elena gets her new robot hands, which is neat, while Daisy, acting as interim leader, is obsessed with hunting down Coulson. Meanwhile, Fitz is placed in a cell and is in a huge ball of self-loathing. Daisy is understandably traumatized by what Fitz did to him, whereas Fitz is unrepentantly refusing to apologize, noting that what he did was necessary (and arguably, it is, but he could've definitely been a lot nicer in getting what he needed from Daisy). Simmons ends up breaking through Fitz's new walls by revealing the new revelations about Deke and how they're invincible until at least the Earth gets cracked, adding to the whole time loop thing. Fitz's reaction to finding out that Deke is their descendant is hilariously appropriate, too, because instead of starry-eyed joke, his reaction is a disgusted "our daughter grows up and marries someone like him?"

Overall, a pretty great episode that explores the long history that the show and MCU as a whole has built, nicely interweaving a new character within all that history in service of a larger arc, while simultaneously giving some really great showings for Hale, Talbot and Coulson. Also a lot of fun moments in this episode too, from Fitz's reaction regarding the Deke revelation, Coulson's unflappable snark throughout the Hydra base and especially Daisy rolling her eyes at the "Hale Hydra" wordplay. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Returning guest stars in this episode includes Werner Reinhart (a.k.a. Daniel Whitehall), one of the primary antagonists of season two of Agents of SHIELD; Wolfgang von Strucker, a Hydra antagonist in Avengers: Age of Ultron; and Jasper Sitwell, a character who appeared in Thor, Captain America: Winter Soldier and the first season of Agents of SHIELD. 
• Von Strucker brings up the Tesseract and how Red Skull had it in the events of Captain America: The First Avenger. Notably, prior to his death, Von Strucker would experiment with a different Infinity Stone to create the Maximoff twins. 
• Whitehall brings up "whether or not to comply", a reference to his hypnotism/torture mantra of "compliance will be rewarded".
• Hale refers to Coulson as one of "Earth's mightiest heroes", a tagline often used by the Avengers, and it's a running theme throughout the first season and the Avengers movie that Coulson is an Avenger in all but name. 
• The collapse of Hydra after the capture of Gideon Malick by the combined forces of Talbot and Coulson happened around halfway through the third season. 
• The whole "kill a dog you have bonded with" as a rite of passage for Hydra agent is a callback to how John Garrett forced Grant Ward to kill Buddy the dog in season one as a rite of embracing his destiny as a ruthless Hydra agent.