Agents of SHIELD S02E11 Review: It's Back

Agents of SHIELD, Season 2, Episode 11: Aftershocks

And it’s back! It’s been more than two months since the heavy mid-season finale, and Agents of SHIELD took a two-month break as they aired the first season of Agent Carter instead. But it’s freaking back now. And Agents of SHIELD’s season two, as annoyingly messily-paced as the episodes preceding the mid-season finale are, ended up with a really powerful mid-season finale. And this episode doesn’t really deliver much in terms of revelations, but as its title tells us, it deals with the aftermath of the mid-season finale, with Whitehall and Triplett dead, and both Skye and Raina transformed into Inhumans. This episode is certainly a solid one, and while it still suffers from the ‘too many characters and not much to do with every one’, this episode has been pretty good at giving everyone decent screentime. Granted May still gets way too little screentime despite being one of season one’s main characters, but that’s a rant for another time.

I still maintain that there isn’t really any point to killing Triplett off and I’m still rather bummed that we didn’t end up doing anything really interesting with him beyond killing him off as SHOCK VALUE to shake up Skye and Simmons.

This episode’s plot is divided nicely into two big threads and two smaller ones. The two big threads are SHIELD dealing with the aftermath of Skye’s exposure to the Terrigen mist and Triplett’s death, and Coulson waging a counter-strike revenge war against the crippled Hydra. The two smaller ones are some intrigue regarding Mack and Bobbi, and, sadly, the Inhuman stuff which I was the most excited about. Granted all the other character and Hydra stuff are really cool but after two months I wanted something concrete on the Inhumans.

We do get a fair amount of hints here and there, though, and we have a name for the creepy eyeless dude from last episode’s stinger. We see him as a child after having gone through the Terrigen mist just… teleporting around in a room all Nightcrawler-style while not having eyes. And then Skye’s mother, Jiawei, shows up and kind of takes him in to help him understand his powers. This whole Inhumans thing has apparently been going on for a while considering Skye’s mother’s immortality. She’s basically taking on a Professor X role to these, well, X-Men after they go through the drastic transformations from the Terrigen mist. And there seems to be an actual society built around the whole Inhumans thing which is cool.

Also Fitz totally went all ‘that’s inhuman’ when describing Skye’s heartbeat, which is a nice little nod.

And in the present day, it seems that Gordon has taken over that role from Skye’s mother, even paraphrasing a line she said to him. Again, getting a lot of X-Men vibes from this and that’s fine because I really like the X-Men setting. And this seems to be a rather more fucked-up version of it. We see bits of what Gordon can do in the present day, too, seemingly able to create this big forcefield thing in addition to teleporting Raina to safety and recruiting her to whatever big organization they’re connected to.

Raina herself has not taken her transformation into a thorny monster well, even though I kind of expected her to be over the moon with finally achieving her lifelong goal. She kills a couple of scientists rather brutally with her claws and she’s apparently immune to bullets, and she tracks down Cal. She’s absolutely fucking pissed at her transformation because she expected to be turned into an angel instead of this thorny Mystique, and not being all right in the head she naturally blames Skye, saying about how Skye took the gift meant for her. And she’s definitely suffering, describing how the thorns hurt and how it hurts to breathe and all that. It’s no wonder she later took Cal’s advice to kill herself pretty badly. It’s an interesting take on Raina’s, for sure.

Cal is over the moon over discovering that Skye has gone through the transformation and does this funny little happy dance, and then Judo-slams Raina down to the ground when she manhandles him, and basically tells her that there’s no reverse or cure to her condition and kind of mocks the irony that after her flower-dress obsession she now has a lot of thorns and leaves her out to dry. Cal is basically expecting Skye to come back to him to help her to get through her transformation, and wants to distract SHIELD by going through SHIELD's old index and recruiting a team of metahumans to fuck it up. Though I think we can safely say that we probably won’t be seeing Cal for a while. It’s a pretty cool development for both Raina and Cal’s plot points, and while I really wanted to learn more about the Inhumans, I guess this will do for now.

People have been talking about who Raina is ‘supposed’ to be with Skye being revealed as the MCU version of Daisy Johnson/Quake, and some people have been discussing who Raina is supposed to be. Raina from the comics (who isn’t an Inhuman), Ultimates Gorgon (who is) or whatever… I am honestly a bit annoyed about the whole ‘this person who seems like an original character is actually this other character from the comics who also goes by a different name’ thing that Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter like to do. Jeez, once or twice is awesome, but all the time?

Meanwhile Skye is still in quarantine and SHIELD has no fucking clue what to do with her, though they’re all acting like a supportive family and whatnot. Even if they argue a lot. Fitz and Simmons are just separately confused about what’s going on with Skye and if she has changed, and while it’s a bit annoying to see them (and not even all of them) catch up with stuff the audience already knew for a while now, they actually made it a pretty awesome process.

We get Skye interact with Bobbi and May, taking ‘big sister’ and ‘mom’ counterparts of their dysfunctional family, which is cool, and we see a bit that Skye’s powers are tied to her emotional state and while it does enable her to make that gigantic earthquake from the mid-season finale, it also allows her to create vibrations on stuff all around her. And it’s nice to see how she and Raina, like Gordon in the flashback, have little to no control over their powers and are just fucking terrified. Especially when she’s still dealing with flashbacks of watching Triplett turn into stone and shatter into pieces.

We also see Simmons and Fitz in particular get a fair amount of characterization which are unrelated to each other which is a nice thing to do. Simmons tries to deal with everything in a clinical way, just watching in grief as they cart away the broken-apart remnants of Triplett’s body before having her team massacred by the transformed Raina and failing to kill her even with three shots from a gun. Between both those incidents Simmons have kind of developed a rather… extreme view on super-powered people and kind of took a stance for exterminating all of them like a plague. And while it is interesting to see her get some development, I thought it’s a bit too sudden and rather odd. It certainly will put her at odds with Skye once things are revealed to her, and in retrospect it kind of made sense that Simmons, with all she’s been through, and her penchant for compartmentalizing things and having an overdramatic reactions to things she considers her fault (like jumping out of a fucking plane or going undercover into Hydra), would develop this bit of superpower hatred. She does have the justification of seeing so many metahumans go bad -- Blizzard/Donnie's death in season two probably hit her really hard too, come to think of it. I don’t particularly like it, but she’s lost Triplett and old-Fitz to this metahuman war, gone through a fair bit while being a double agent, and, well, I am sort of interested to see where they go with this especially when she has to choose regarding Skye.

Fitz, on the other hand, goes through the episode with the madness mantra of ‘there’s something wrong with the data in my head’, while tinkering with Skye’s bio-watch thing. He’s definitely improved his language and speaking skills rather significantly over this season, and he’s grown more comfortable with talking to Mack and trying to get him to open up. More on that later, but I do like how this episode is a climax over Fitz’s characterization throughout this season. He’s embraced his new brain-damaged self which is not the same with how he was before – and definitely different – but he knows he’s still the same person deep down. He’s embraced that there’s no going back to his old self before the whole drowning thing, and there won’t be that a cure for Skye either. I do like that scene where he tells Mack that he understands how it’s like to be trapped in his own body without much control over what’s happening.

And after going through the data on Skye’s vitals and blood and thinking that his brain is fucked up, he finally comes to the conclusion that, yes, Skye is changed drastically on a fundamental level, and blabs all of this to Skye and kind of causes her to flip a bit. Fitz gains enough control to cover up for Skye when Simmons confronts her, and it’s a rather big emotional moment how Fitz sympathesizes with Skye’s condition (it’s not wrong, just different) and how he truly understands her. Fitz’s reasons for hiding the truth also makes sense, what with Simmons being all caught up over Triplett’s death and the conflict between Mack and Coulson. It’s nice to see Fitz finally do something beyond just moping around and trying to handle his new state of mind.

There’s also a bit of a running theme of who is guilty for Trip’s death. We’ve got Simmons blaming her curiousity, we’ve got Skye blaming Trip going in to save him, we’ve got Coulson blaming the fact that he’s a leader and there’s Mack blaming Coulson for being so obsessed with alien bullshit in the first place. Mack has a rather valid point about how Coulson is basically turning into a ‘give orders’ leader and not the ‘daddy of the team’ he used to be, and he just came back from being brainwashed, but I dunno.

The main plot on the Coulson side involves him going off to crush Hydra while it scrambles for a new head on the wake of Bakshi’s death. And indeed we see several members of Hydra (including Dr. List, the dude that works for Baron Von Strucker in the post-credits scene for Captain America 2) gathering in a meeting talking about who takes over Whitehall’s operations, and they decide to give it to whoever crushes SHIELD. And I do like how it seems to build up to having these five people – Dr. List, Mr. Bloom, the Sheikh, the Banker and the Baroness – be the big organization for Coulson to take down over the course of the rest of the series, and maybe even be some comic-book characters I don’t know about, but even though they felt important, Coulson manages to take them out with a pretty awesome gambit.

He basically stages a prisoner transfer of Sunil Bakshi, who has been promoted to being moved into Ward’s old cell and survived his suicide attempt, and transfers him to Talbot. Or at least pretends to, because they pretended to be attacked and both May and Coulson “die”. I didn’t believe it for a second, especially with Coulson’s last words being the ridiculous ‘you’ll never take us aliiiiveeee’. May, naturally, lampshades what a terrible line that was.

Hunter pretends to be an assassin hired by one of the Hydra heads, and then lets Bakshi ‘recruit’ him. Hunter brings Bakshi to Mr. Bloom, and after a bit of talking with Doctor List through Hydra Skype or something decides it’s one of the other three candidates and orders pre-planned hits on them. And I do like how the final stretch of this arc plays out similarly to the Godfather with each one of the enemies being taken out. Hunter and Bobbi kills Bloom’s people with the machineguns strapped onto the trucks and then headshots Bloom, and Bloom’s people kill the other three nameless Hydra heads, rather ironically, with Whitehall’s old experimental weapons... a nice touch! I can’t say I remember the poison gas, but we see the stone-ification from the Obelisk used on the Baroness and Scarlotti’s disintegration grenades used on the Banker. Granted there’s no way Coulson will know that all the Hydra heads will get taken out (and they don’t, Von Strucker and List are still alive) but Coulson did deal a gigantic blow to Hydra by just throwing them a bone and expecting them to take each other up.

All this playing with dramatic music, and May talking about how Coulson respected Trip as the embodiment for all the good qualities SHIELD should be, and how Hydra lacks all of those qualities and that’s why they will fall.

It’s an awesome scene! I am unconvinced that Hydra has completely been crushed that easily (or that Whitehall has actually died permanently, really), but Coulson certainly did a huge blow against them. And Bakshi is still alive, handed over to the government and we know their track record with imprisoning Hydra agents have been pretty shitty. Ditto Ward and Agent 33.

Also Coulson has to deliver Trip’s stuff to his mother and good god that was a fucking sad scene even without words. People dying in fictional works never really got me, but these scenes of telling their families, fuck. In a more dramatic flair, a picture of the Howling Commandos is seen while Coulson comforts Trip's mother, and with May talking about how Trip symbolizes how SHIELD should be, I think it's supposed to represent that the old guard is really dead and buried now and all that's left is Coulson's new SHIELD.

Speaking of Trip’s death, we also get a bit in the beginning where everyone takes it out on something. May punching a bag, Simmons throwing herself into work, Hunter drinking beer and all that. And at the end they’re just reminiscing about Trip stories and, well, the sheer impact of Trip’s death hits home and why the fuck did he have to die beyond shock value really I’m so sad now.

But that last scene goes for a dark turn, as it appears that Bobbi and Mack have their own agenda. Mack gave Coulson this little model of Lola and it’s actually a scanner which locates Fury’s Toolbox, and both Bobbi and Mack seem to have something in store for them. I do sincerely hope this isn’t about Hydra again because we did that last season with Ward and it’d be just retreading stuff, but I’m confused on who would want that. Leviathan? Hopefully not because that was a bit dumb. Maria Hill? Some other thing? This little twist is really one of the few times that Bobbi and Mack felt needed beyond just taking some action screentime away from May and Ward (who, incidentally, doesn’t show up at all this episode).

These ‘new blood’ have some scenes which isn’t that distracting like how they were for most of the season. Hunter was rather cool with his acting and shooting Bloom in the head, and I do like how he pitches in like a jackass during the big argument between Mack and Coulson about how Mack has a point and whatnot. And there’s this ongoing thing about Mack wanting to know Bobbi’s secret and she reveals that it’s a therapy club thing? I thought it was a redundant waste of screentime which could’ve gone to revealing more Inhuman stuff, but no, it’s just Bobbi being secretive and bringing their relationship closer to destruction if/when Hunter finds out about her keeping secrets. It’s a nice parallel to the Fitz/Simmons situation too with one of them keeping and lying about a secret from the other.

Mack has taken a bit of a dip into the jerkass pool but thankfully it’s with good reason. All the big talking about how he’s questioning Coulson’s leadership finally comes to head in that argument, and he isn’t exactly being kind towards Fitz either. He at least has the excuse of being rage-controlled and kind of apologizes to Coulson later on. Of course, with the final scene, it might have some other more sinister meaning.

Overall a pretty solid episode. I don’t really have much expectations for Agents of SHIELD as a season, though, because the last time I had it kind of disappointed me. It’s definitely a chance to pick itself off the ground after a messy, extremely crowded first half of this season, though.