Agents of SHIELD S2E20: Plot Twist

Agents of SHIELD, Season 2, Episode 20: Scars

Let’s get to cracking the last of the superhero TV season finales that I have outstanding! Out of all the four shows I review, the Flash was awesome as I expected it would, Gotham was a flop as I expected it would, and Arrow was…. simply messy. But while I expected Agents of SHIELD to be somewhere in between Arrow and Gotham in terms of quality, since the introduction of the Inhumans (who are finally referred to by name in this episode), it has continued to regain a second wind that more than makes up for the crappy first half of the second season. The last few episodes to close out season two of Agents of SHIELD has been a string of absolutely well-written and solid stories, and the writers clearly made use of their mid-season break to sort things out. And this one was no exception.

This episode, of course, takes place after Age of Ultron, and surprise, surprise, Coulson was the one who provided Nick Fury with the Helicarrier, which was the mysterious Theta Protocol. It’s heroic, definitely, but there really is no real reason for Coulson to keep it a secret from May beyond helping to string along the ‘Coulson keeps secrets’ plot. It’s another weak part in this episode, but honestly it’s a rather minor complaint.  Though I do like the nice and absolutely appropriate stealth tie-in to the wider Marvel Universe when Gonzales compares Coulson to Tony Stark, in which a single man does secret projects that are not shared to the rest of the team. It’s an absolutely fitting comparison for Gonzales to make in light of recent events, and the timing for the conversation – right after Age of Ultron – is impeccable. I almost wonder if they planned out Coulson’s weird little secret-keeping agenda just to make this comparison.

Coulson himself doesn’t really have that much justification for keeping such a big secret from May and the others, which leads to May and Coulson going into a bit of a conflict when it comes to choosing who should represent SHIELD to talk to the Inhumans. I do like the little cold war thing going on as the three main powers in SHIELD – Coulson, Gonzales and May – are trying to be passive-aggressive yet still work towards the greater SHIELD goal. The little SHIELD Civil War thing is rather quietly folded up as they just basically work together against this greater threat. Also presumably Coulson and Fury’s big display just kind of shut everyone else up because, dude, they’ve got Thor and Hulk on their side.

May gets a nice little angry moment when she rants to Coulson about what really happened in Bahrain – her killing the little girl instead of her being just a casualty.

Skye is the main lynchpin to finally bring together both SHIELD and the Inhumans, with her presence (and SHIELD “acquiring” Lincoln) being a way to get both sides in a room, on a meeting table. And considering Gonzales’s season-long xenophobia towards powered people, and his insistence to go into the meeting with the leader of the Inhumans, as well as Raina’s constant prophetic dreams about SHIELD attacking Lai Xi, it seems like the obvious option that Gonzales is going to cause the war between SHIELD and the Inhumans, either by attacking the Inhuman leader or simply by being an ass.

So of course the show chooses to surprise us by showing a far more human side to Gonzales, and I think the show’s handling of Gonzales, pig-headedness aside, has been pretty excellent in developing into a pretty three-dimensional character. Yes, he doesn’t trust powered people and thinks of them more as assets than people, but he still recognizes that, yes, they are people. He just wants to index them and keep tabs on them to control them so they don’t hurt everyone else. And the fact that the mysterious item Weaver hands to Gonzales turns out to be a precious personal trinket that Gonzales is handing off to Jiaying as a gesture of peace.

Granted it is relatively stupid for him to bring the gun to the meeting, but you can’t blame him for being paranoid. It’s also odd that they didn’t send Bobbi or Weaver or whoever else to go to the meeting because everyone knows that Gonzales is a power-hating bigot, which is just as subjective as Coulson’s fatherly feelings… though Gonzales does make good on trying to be a peaceful negotiator. But still, the argument could’ve been worded better.

In retrospect Jiaying has been doing some rather questionable things throughout all her appearances when she’s not interacting with her daughter, but still, we chalk it up to ‘oh those wacky Inhumans and their rigid societies’ instead of ‘Jiaying secretly wants war because…’ which, I suppose, will be explained in the actual finale. It’s a sudden plot twist that was handled really well as Jiaying suddenly goes absolutely apeshit when an outsider compares being crippled to Whitehall’s vivisection (though honestly Gonzales wasn’t being an ass about it) and cracks open one of the Terrigen mist things which apparently kills Gonzales off, then uses Gonzales’ gun to shoot her shoulder and paint herself as the victim. So Raina’s fears actually came to life – not because Gonzales is evil or Gonzales panicked, but because Jiaying was pulling everyone’s strings. And it really looks like Jiaying just went angry because Gonzales tried to Index the Inhumans all Nazi-like, so up until she goes on her little rant she doesn’t really seem evil, just angry.

So, yeah, Jiaying for final big bad, while Gonzales's last act is one of relative peacefulness. Nice twist. 

And it puts Jiaying’s actions throughout the episode in a far more sinister light. Jiaying’s second-in-command Gordon, who is always shown as somewhat stern if not outright evil, seems to be just following orders when he infiltrated the Iliad. Raina being ignored seemed to be just the story slapping her with a healthy dose of the boy who cried wolf, but it turns out that she was telling the truth and Jiaying was manipulating events to her designs. Can’t blame them for distrusting Raina, though. Good job, Gordon, for sticking to your loyalties.

And the tender moment between Jiaying and Cal as they warm up to each other and decide to hand Cal over for the good of their daughter? By the end of this episode I’m not quite sure how much of it is just the two of them working together as this Evil Couple™ or Jiaying just manipulating Cal emotionally to make him into a pawn. Regardless of the case, Cal’s inside a SHIELD Quinjet, having ingested his chemicals so we’ll be seeing Mr. Hyde soon instead of just season-long teases of his actual power.

There’s also some nice little well-done continuity excuses regarding the big question to why the Kree never bothered to look for the Inhumans before. Skye and Raina’s Terrigenesis uses a Diviner and a Kree Temple, which Lincoln notes as the ‘old-fashioned’ way, whereas Jiaying explains here that Lai Xi uses Terrigenesis crystals from a melted-down Diviner instead of the normal Diviner-in-a-Kree-Temple way, which was why the Kree didn’t bother to investigate before. And having been made from melted Diviner metal, the mist is absolutely lethal to normal humans.

Skye’s found herself trapped in between the Inhumans and her real, biological parents who definitely love her, as well as SHIELD, who are far more rough but also contains her adoptive family. And it comes to a head when the two butt heads, and she defends the Inhumans against May by bringing up the Bahrain incident which is honestly a bit of a low brow, especially since it’s the fact that the Inhumans lost control of one of their own that the Bahrain incident happened.

I don’t think that other than that Skye really got that much to do this time around, and neither did Fitz, Simmons or Hunter – Hunter did a fun little doodle of Raina while in a meeting, though, which was funny. The Koenigs return, apparently having been preparing Theta Protocol which accounts for their absence. Deathlok seems to have been written out of the finale thanks to his injuries, while Lincoln is just brooding and being all ‘we Inhumans need secrecy!’ The main point for the second-stringers this time around is Agent 33 making use of her May-face (which someone really should’ve remembered to remove between this episode and the last) to trick Bobbi and kidnap her… for some unspecified machinations that she has cooked up with Ward involving the proper way to exact revenge. Which really felt a bit shoehorned in, though its eventual payoff in the finale actually works rather well.

Also, Mack quits because, uh, he really hates aliens all that much and is a bit of a whiny bitch, but I’m sure he’ll show up in the finale when our heroes need him in a gallant manner.

There’s also a pretty cool racism theme throughout the episode, not just from SHIELD, but from the Inhumans as well. Team Gonzales, of course, are giant racists as established before and Mack quits simply because he hates aliens. And May goes on the warpath when he realizes the Inhumans are related to Bahrain. But the Inhumans are racists too, with Gordon verbally abusing Cal over the fact that his powers aren’t real, while the thing that made Jiaying snap seems to be the fact that a human deigned to take pity on her.

There’s also the whole mysterious thing on the Iliad, which has been foreshadowed but never shown until now, which is this weird monolith that keeps turning into liquid and back again – and is apparently a Kree weapon of mass destruction that can wipe out the Inhumans. Or something. So that means it will definitely not be set off since we have an Inhumans movie coming up, but will be a big plot device in the upcoming war.

Overall, a pretty awesome penultimate episode that shakes things up by switching Jiaying and Gonzales’s primary antagonist and reasonable authority figure roles in an absolutely organic and believable way that still comes off as a twist. It sets up a SHIELD-vs-Inhumans war, pitting two ‘good’ organizations with valid goals, with Skye trapped in the thick of it all, and builds up the two other outstanding villains – Cal and Ward – who all have their own agendas. Definitely well-done, this.