Agents of SHIELD, Season 5, Episode 9: Best Laid Plans
Last episode was a messy one that just juggles around the characters, and I'd argue that this episode is more of the same as well, albeit slightly better structured due to not having the oddly-paced "apocalyptic past/future" scenes. We're clearly building up to a proper climax for the Lighthouse Future arc, and honestly? Despite the definite potential that the arc has given us, I'm definitely ready for Agents of SHIELD to ditch this reverse-Days-of-Future's-Past setting. This episode's pacing honestly feels all out of whack. So many mini-storylines are happening all over the multiple levels of the Lighthouse and the ground-level broken Earth, but none of them feel like they're properly developed.
And my biggest issue is the whole 'time loop' deal, which never really felt like it was explained or developed adequately. Yes, I'm familiar enough with the sci-fi trope, but it seemed like our cast barely acknowledges the whole time-travel bit and then suddenly one of their biggest priorities is whether they will cause a stable time loop by travelling back into the past and causing Quake to break the planet in the near-future-of-the-present-time-that-they-are-returning-to. And as much as the actors try their best, the whole scenes in the Lighthouse don't really work. Tess isn't a character that I remember much of, so her Kree-blood-induced return isn't as big an event as the show makes it out to be. Kasius having a 'seer' of his own feels so out of the left field and considering previous episodes, I'm genuinely confused why he's constantly been on the back foot.
The cast on the ground level basically spend the entire episode trying to get the downed Zephyr One to fly, while Sinara infiltrates their ship. Oh, and gravity storms cause the ship to get tossed around, while May and Fitz-Simmons try their best to utilize the gravity storm to basically lift them off the ground. Sinara and Quake get a bit of a half-assed attempt at a zero-gravity fight (and honestly it ends pretty quickly -- the majority of their fight is a pretty generic brawl), and Sinara gets stabbed in the chest with a metal pipe. Considering how much build-up Sinara has gotten among the new characters, the death is certainly shocking... but at the same time, I'm genuinely disappointed that it happened with so little resolution to Sinara as a character... although at the same time, I'm also happy that it means that we're starting to really wrap up the Lighthouse sub-plots.
There are a lot of scerentime spent on Deke that basically has him struggle with how he failed to believe in his dad enough, and some arguments regarding killing Voss, but, again, the character hasn't been particularly interesting, no matter how hard the show tries to obviously pair him up with Daisy. May gets a comparatively lesser screentime in her own personal conflict on whether she could ever be a mom after last episode revealing her alternate-timeline self being Robin's surrogate mom. May's scenes are a lot better, especially in her interactions with Coulson and Daisy.
The B-plot with Mack, Elena and Flint trying to fuck up Kasius's plans are extremely rapid-paced, and is plagued with Mack being extremely inconsistently written, admonishing both Elena and Flint for wanting to be so 'brutal' in taking the fight to Kasius, but for no particular reason allows Flint to join the battle and then causes the big explosions himself. The fact that the show's very unclear timeframe means that the human resistance somehow is able to move multiple high-yield explosives between levels in the same time that it takes Kasius to arrive also makes this side-plot very poorly paced. Throw in the aforementioned unnecessary "Tess is back to life" complication (she's another one whose motivations go through rapid 180's) and this sub-plot honestly just feels like a way to buy time and to handwave that the Lighthouse humans are completely safe when we inevitably get to the finale in the next couple of episodes.
The episode does have its highlights, mostly in Simmons, Enoch and Daisy getting some hilarious one-liners, and the scene of the Zephyr taking off being pretty cool, but ultimately it feels like a pretty messy combination of scenes as we rush to introduce a bunch of scenes and wrap up a bunch of storylines.
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