Agents of SHIELD S04E17 Review: Brave New World

Agents of SHIELD, Season 4, Episode 17: Identity & Change

We continue to go through the strange new world of the Framework, and it's just amazing. Honestly, I'm not sure how to truly express how happy I am with the Agents of SHIELD plotline. It's a story where they're literally free to do what they want, with real stakes because if you die here, you die for real. True, it's very anime-ish in a way, but at the same time it's such a fun and well-executed subplot, in no small part due to the greatness of Madame Hydra and Fitz's the Doctor as villains. I mean, yeah, I guess May counts as one of the big three villains but she doesn't honestly feel that much different from regular May or LMD May, just on a different side.

The episode basically has our heroes -- Simmons, Daisy and a newly-inducted conspiracy nut Coulson (who is hilarious by the way) -- join up with the resistance, where Jeffrey Mace has fully embraced his role as the Patriot, a far, far truer translation of the comic book character (as far as I can tell anyway -- he's supposed to be a Captain America copy, no?) and working with NiceWard.

One thing leads to another, and there are several great scenes and stakes being raised, but none really struck a chord as much as Aida (or, well, Madame Hydra) and her talk with the very real Daniel Radcliffe and Agnes -- who, I must be honest, I totally forgot even existed. But both sides race to find Radcliffe in his island paradise-prison, where Aida lets her live the rest of his days. And here Aida's full plan, or at least the parts the audience is privy to, is shown in more or less its full state. She's basically seduced Fitz with a version of the truth -- she came from the 'other world', and Team Daisy are doppelgangers coming from the 'other world'. Armed with this information, and the motivation that Aida claimed to be tortured and enslaved by the people of the 'other world', this gives Fitz absolutely no love for the real-world people and will not be as easily swayed as Coulson.

Aida's confrontation with Radcliffe, and Fitz's subsequent murder of Agnes, are both also amazingly well done. Radcliffe's a little nutty but still sane, but Aida's venom when she talks about how much she loathed being, well, basically property -- even as nice as Radcliffe treats her compared to other robotic uprisings -- and makes it absolutely clear who's boss now. It's a pretty powerful scene that truly encapsulates her motivations -- to be human without actually being human -- while showing emotion instead of dumping information.

Evil Fitz's just scary, yeah? So far everything that Evil May and Evil Fitz have been doing are on, as Simmons puts it, bits-and-bytes. No real harm is done when Evil May orders the execution of like a dozen virtual Inhumans, or when Fitz orders the torture of virtual Nadeer, because while they may have a bit of a crisis of conscience when they get out, this is Fitz literally executing a harmless woman in cold blood. It's perhaps a moment that was overtly hammed up by the slo-mo reaction shot of Simmons, which, as appropriate as it is, felt hilarious nonetheless. And the descent of Fitz into evil is shown very well, and now that he's torturing Radcliffe and Daisy instead of random virtual people we don't care about, it's actually some real stakes at the table because, again, you die for real if you die here.

Also, Coulson establishes that, yeah, he's kind of a one-time deal and even then he's still more eccentric than anything, not the badass spy boss we are familiar with but more of someone who's like, sweet, I have access to all this super-awesome gun slinging skills! And that scene where Mack, who really is nothing more than a scared father who just wants nothing to do with the fascist gestapo and wants to go home with his daughter, suckering Daisy in with his 'you're Daisy Johnson' story is amazingly done. I did feel like some of the Mack/Hope bonding stuff felt like pure padding, but dang if it isn't some d'aww sweet fluff. Which means virtual Hope's probably going to die, or we're going to get one helluva tearjerker when Mack has to say goodbye to his virtual daughter. 

So yeah, this episode ends with everything going awry. Daisy and Radcliffe are under the tender mercies of evil Fitz, Agnes is dead, Team Simmons have lost the Patriot and GoodWard's respect, and Mack's just clueless and very afraid. We also have cryptic foreshadowings of a 'Project Looking Glass', so there's definitely something bigger in play beyond 'escape the virtual world!'

As much as I love the Arrow episode with a virtual world? This just eclipses it so much. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Coulson's fanboying of the Patriot's suit is, of course, a reference to him doing the same to Captain America in the Avengers, which, of course, is a reference to Jeffrey Mace himself being one of the later successors of Steve Rogers as Captain America in the comics. Oh, and the Patriot is Mace's official superhero codename here instead of a PR nickname as in the real world. 
• Another callback to a Captain America movie is Daisy's escape through the elevator, though here her escape is thwarted after the elevator sequence.
• Radcliffe briefly mistakes Ward as Hive, which was the persona that Radcliffe worked with (and is understandably terrified shitless of) in the last season. 
• Hope's favourite movie, 'Chopping Mall', is one of the so-good-it's-bad robot movies that Mack and Elena rattled through earlier this season when Aida first went rogue.