Agents of SHIELD S04E16 Review: The Return of Grant Ward! ...Again! ...Once More!

Agents of SHIELD Hydra, Season 4, Episode 16: What If

Hail.

In-between episodes 15 and 16, there was a pretty significant real-world hiatus. And despite my very, very late reviews to the last two or three episodes, I actually watched them more or less as they aired, so to return to this wildly different sub-arc of Agents of SHIELD is a huge breath of fresh air. I am definitely very much impressed with how Agents of SHIELD is handling its fourth season, splitting them up into distinct yet interconnected arcs, ensuring that each episode has that fresh quality that ensures a high tension in every episode because, shit, every episode is relatively close to its respective arc's climax. And here, the 'Agents of Hydra' world is a direct follow-up to the L.M.D. storyline, yet it takes its time to flesh things out to set up this strange new world.


This episode spends a bit more time to establish just how 'deep' some of the characters have taken into their personas, in particular May and Fitz, both of whom found themselves very much comfortable as the top agent and basically evil scientist overlord of Hydra in this dream world. And unlike other 'what if' episodes (for example, Flash's Earth-2/Flashpoint/10-years-in-the-future storylines) the episode establishes that, well, if you die in this fantasy land, you die for real. Also the general subversion of what you expect would happen in this kind of story -- mainly, that not everyone returns back to sanity immediately -- is very well done.

We get to see some really great stuff. Our main character throughout this all is Daisy, who's stuck and having to go with the flow as she hangs out with reverse-world Grant Ward (who, naturally, is the nicest and most supportive boyfriend in the world) as she finds herself working for an organization dedicated to rooting and wiping out Inhumans, including an informant, Vijay, who she's forced to interrogate. Kind of. Her discoveries of May as, well, basically herself, but working for Hydra instead of SHIELD; and Fitz as the Doctor, is all well done. Daisy and Simmons are the only ones to even remember what's happening, since they're inserted into this Framework world without Aida's tampering.

And it's cool to discover just what happens throughout this Framework world -- the Framework world apparently just eliminates the 'biggest regret' of the people that Aida plugged in, and extrapolates life from that. Through the extrapolation of the Bahrain incident, where May doesn't kill the Inhuman child and she instead causes a huge incident, killing a school and causing SHIELD to be replaced by Hydra, it all leads to a domino effect where Hydra rules the world and basically has full rein over what's printed in science textbooks, takes primary school kids away for questioning and makes everyone live in fear. There's that, and, as Simmons surmised by figuring out that she's killed by Hydra agents during the equivalent of the season one 'fall of SHIELD' arc, there's a significant cover-up by the Hydra powers to ensure that they stay in power.

It's amazing to see all these characters act as they do, but more surprisingly is the introduction of classic Marvel villain Madame Hydra (well, just 'the Madame' and 'Ophelia' most of the time)... who, in the Framework world, is Aida's avatar. And dating Fitz. That, coupled with the fact that Framework-Simmons is killed brutally until real-world-Simmons comes in to replace her, means that Aida has a bigger hand in designing the world beyond her 'extrapolate the Bahrain events' deal, if nothing else because she is really enamoured with Fitz, the one that actually cares for her. 

We don't really get to see a lot of everyone else, just Daisy, Simmons and Ward. And honestly, as polarizing as the character of Grant Ward ended up being throughout the three seasons he's been in, it's an amazing breath of fresh air to retool this character back into not just a nice, supportive boyfriend to Skye (who's more confused than anything that her girlfriend literally is acting like a different person) but the cool revelation that he's actually part of the resistance. "Are you part of the Resistance?" "No!" "Cool, because I am."

And I am definitely a fan of Simmon's stance that "oh my god, this is all just bits and bytes of data, none of this matters other than the real people trapped within". Yeah, these characters are probably going to be invested in the backstories and the new lives of this brave new world, but they're taking the skeptic's viewpoint in all this, which is definitely realistic and well-done. Yet for Coulson, May and Fitz (and Mack and Mace, neither of whom we've seen in this episode in any meaningful manner) this is the world for them since their memories have been supplanted.

The main arc of success done in this episode is Simmons and later Daisy managing to get Framework!Coulson to question the truth of this world. Simmons's frantic visit gets Coulson's mind jarred slightly by mentions of Tahiti (t'is a magical place), and Daisy's later calmer meeting causes some memories to be jarred back in Coulson's head. That's Coulson, though, and as Simmons points out, his mind has been fucked with before which is why it seems to be working... what about Fitz and May, who are villains now? What about Mack, who's happy with his daughter? What about the real world, or Madame Hydra's big plans?

This is all very exciting, for sure.

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Hydra in the Framework continuity is associated with the colour green, from the 'Agents of Hydra' logo to Ophelia's clothes. It's a reference to how the comic-book Hydra is, indeed, associated with the colour green, whereas the live-action counterpart of Hydra prefers more generic black evil spy organization colours.
• Madame Hydra, the guise that Framework!Aida takes, is, of course, based on an existing Marvel comics character. While she's only called 'the Madame' and 'Ophelia', it's unambiguous who she's supposed to be represent. Madame Hydra in the comics is Ophelia Sarkissian, and is one of Hydra's top operatives until she severed ties with them and adopted the codename Viper. It's her role and codename as Viper that was adopted into the 2013 the Wolverine movie, which swapped out her Hydra history for some gross viper mutant powers. 
• Ward's line, "There are things about me you wouldn't like if you knew", in which he's referring to his secret status as a SHIELD Resistance agent, is actually a clever callback and reversal to his iconic foreshadowing line in season one (episode 19, the Only Light in the Darkness) where he's actually referring to his status as a Hydra sleeper agent.
• Various references to Coulson's storyline in the first two seasons are made, among them Tahiti, his penchant for writing lots of things over and over thanks to madness (alien-blood-induced in season two, and here it's because of the Tahiti conditioning), as well as the hula dancer figurine that's a keepsake between him and Skye/Daisy. In addition, Coulson's conspiracy folder also has a photo of Audrey and his newspaper clippings contain various references to other Agents of SHIELD characters, among them doctor Winslow (Cal Zabo's new, post-mindwipe name), Felix Blake and Sunil Bakshi -- all previous antagonists.
• Daisy appearing on the rear seat of Coulson's car to talk with him is very similar to how Coulson does it to the Tahiti doctor who operated on him in season one.
• Coulson is teaching in the Alexander Pierce High School. Alexander Pierce, of course, is the Hydra overlord and primary antagonist of Captain America: the Winter Soldier.
• One of the articles on the Hydra magazine references Carl "Crusher" Creel, a.k.a. the Absorbing Man, winning a boxing match. 
• "What If" is a series of Marvel comic books (equitable to DC's Elseworlds imprint) where Marvel show alternate takes on the normal Marvel comics lore.
• The 'Cambridge Incident' seems to be partly based on the Stanford Incident in the comic book version of Civil War, where a large-scale murder of children caused by a villainous super-powered being causes mass fear and a governmental crackdown by the government.