Agents of SHIELD, Season 7, Episode 7: The Totally Excellent Adventures of Mack and the D
So that went bizarre real quick. I get that the previous couple of episodes have been kind of... just solid spy/superhero/sci-fi stuff but not a whole ton that really jumps out at you. So we get some really Legends of Tomorrow style zaniness in this episode as Mack and Deke are stuck in 1982 and had to wait for twenty months for the rest of the crew to return. And apparently, they've been up to some hijinks here. Again, not really something I would expect from the final season, the final hurrah of a show... but it's still kind of entertaining. Especially the second half. Not to knock the first half, with Mack being depressed, growing a beard, making model kits of cars and shutting Deke out of his life; or the conversation about Mack telling Deke what a fraud he is for basically taking songs from the future and using it to fuel his career... but the rest of the episode is actually dang hilarious.
So, to surmise... Sibyl and Coulson both survived because they are, well, computer programs and this is a superhero show. Of course they do. But Coulson's return and being hooked up to a VCR is presented to us (and Mack) as such a low-key event; while Sibyl's return feels like something out of a hilarious old-school B-monster-movie with a hilariously silly human that she manipulated into building a hilariously retro-looking robot that looks like a one-off enemy from one of the older seasons Star Trek or Doctor Who or something. It's great. And, of course, as Sibyl and her army of retro robots attack Deke's neo-SHIELD organization, we get some hilariously over-the-top grisly black comedy as the one member Deke scouts out just to be a drummer (and his girlfriend) gets hilariously killed with way too much blood as the Chromicom hunter goes "I am lost". Again, very zany, very loony, and approximately fifteen times more entertaining in the span of ten minutes than the Chromicoms have ever been in one and a half seasons. The fact that we actually get a hilarious scene near the end of the surviving Sibyl robot slowly making its way down stairs via side-ramps is pretty fun, too.
The rest of the episode, though... the camp does distract me from it some, but it's basically a way to get Mack to mourn his loss and go through an episode focused on him without it being too much of a downer, I suppose. Mack has kind of been one of the more static characters among the long-runners, so it's nice to have this. The zaniness of Deke's weird neo-SHIELD (presumably for time-travel reasons, they can't contact the real SHIELD) band is kinda neat, but ultimately Foreign Spy Chick; Other Chick; Comedy Duo and Guy That Dies First are just kind of there. Again, I can understand why because they're mostly here just as a gag for to fill in the 'ha ha wacky team of agents and characters' of the episode's lampoon, but none of them really rise beyond being one-note tropes.
Deke himself is an interesting character. I've expressed a massive amount of frustration about him -- he starts off as a pretty irritating character who somehow finds himself on the side of the protagonists, and the only reason that I don't rant about 24/7 because his actor is charming (and in later seasons he's relegated to background duty). Sort of like a less offensive Danny Bland. And it's kind of interesting that the show is trying to do something with him and, as Deke himself points out, he's trying to grow somewhat, actually trying to put the mission and SHIELD and his friendship with Mack first instead of just making a self-serving business with knowledge of the future. That's neat.
Ultimately, the episode ends with Sibyl-in-a-VCR and a somehow-alive Nathaniel Malick getting the time-predicting-plot-device-cube. Okay, so I was wrong. We're not done with the Chromicoms just yet, but at least by virtue of having an army of B-movie robot mooks, they are visually more interesting if nothing else. I'm genuinely still not sure where the season is going, which is kind of a shame since I really would've liked to say that the show ended in a grand hurrah. It sure is more entertaining than the previous season, but I kinda wished that we got something more.
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