Agents of SHIELD S05E04 Mini-Review: Destroyer of Worlds

Agents of SHIELD, Season 5, Episode 4: A Life Earned

It's actually been a fair amount of time since I last reviewed an episode of Agents of SHIELD, and I'm not sure why I never really caught up to the show when I did my huge DC comics show catchup bit. I guess the setting of the post-apocalyptic Kree Lighthouse just never really appealed to me as much as most of the previous seasons of Agents of SHIELD, where they dealt with Inhuman conspiracies and mysterious alien infiltrators and Ghost Riders and Frameworks? I dunno. Maybe it's because the whole 'fucked-up human society' world-building just feels honestly kind of bland. I'm not sure why. But we're going to try to do a catch-up with Agents of SHIELD throughout this month, starting with this episode. I'll try not to keep my reviews too wordy.

And this episode... it's more of a "get from point A to point B" bit. We learn a bit more about the overlord of the Lighthouse, Kasius. He's selling Inhumans, and that's the main export of the Lighthouse to the other humanoid-but-not-human aliens, and he does that via gladiatorial matches and controlling the types of babies that are made by the humans. Oh, and once he makes enough of a profit to leave the Lighthouse, he's going to blow it up. We get to see a bit of Daisy being brought up to inspection by Kasius and his cronies, with her reputation as Quake, Destroyer of Worlds being something that makes her special, while Kasius tries to figure out this whole time-travel thing... something that Daisy and Jemma manages to keep a lid and fool Kasius with the help of a mind-reading (and as it turns out, telepathic) Inhuman that Daisy makes friends with.

Meanwhile, Mack and Elena are forced to beat up some dude and extort money from him, and there's this huge discussion about 'losing yourself',  and then Mack ends up doing so when the dude he beats up (whose 'cargo' that Mack threatens is a baby) calls Mack unsuitable to be a dad, rubbing salt on Mack's wound of losing Framework!Hope. It's an okay B-plot, neatly building into Mack's character arc , but nothing too spectacular.

Coulson and May go off to investigate stuff, figure out that Douche McDick (or just Deke) is not trustworthy, and end up realizing that he sold Daisy out to Kasius for a profit. Deke ends up wanting to help because the message from the communicator from Earth's surface is the voice of his dead dad, but Coulson refuses to allow him to help out (smartly, since he's a dick) while the cliffhanger for this episode is May faces off against the steel-ball-manipulating Kree, Sinara, and isn't seen at the end when Sinara returns to Kasius, but we know she's fine.

Oh, and Fitz is apparently part of the alien ruling council or whatever, which is explained in the next episode.

Ultimately there's a decent amount of world-building here, and that's where the show excels. The characters that comprise the SHIELD main cast are competently written and acted, and have enough baggage from previous seasons that an otherwise 'filler' B-plot like Mack still makes you care. But on the other hand, most, if not all, of the new characters from the Lighthouse are laughably one-dimensional and there's really not much that makes me care for them. Deke is a backstabbing dick. Gryll is a small time gang boss. Kasius is manipulative and card-carrying. Sinara is silent and deadly. The Inhuman export/fighting ring stuff is neat, and while the episode is competent in introducing that, I do feel that the episode is really too slowly paced. Of course, it might be mean because it's just episode four (three if you count the first two-parter as a single episode) of a season, but the concept really doesn't feel super-fresh or exciting, honestly, and perhaps it's the reason why this fifth season is the final season of Agents of SHIELD. Better to end in a relatively high note with still ample story to eke out at least one last season with some quality.