Agents of SHIELD S05E17 Review: Fighting Fate

Agents of SHIELD, Season 5, Episode 17: The Honeymoon

This is another things-happen episode, although it feels a lot more impactful than the previous episode. Fitz, Simmons and Elena go off on their "we can't die" mission to secure the Gravitonium, while Ruby Hale goes on her own personal play to take over Hydra from her mother.

And that conflict is perhaps the one that the episode focuses the most on. As Fitz, Simmons and Elena go on a badass mission to take the Particle Infusion Chamber and deny Hydra from using it, they arrive at the same time as Anton Ivanov and his army of droids. There's some really convenient plot developments here. While Fitz-Simmons are pinned down by the droids, Yo-Yo fights Ivanov, and eventually wins by pushing him out of the window and killing him (apparently it's his real body? Somehow? Even though the previous episode established that Ivanov's brain is held by Hale?) and Ivanov's death somehow deactivates all the robots.

Ruby, meanwhile, uses some emotional manipulation by putting up a show of a desperate, confused teenager crying and asking her mom why she denied her the same opportunities that Hale herself was denied, and Ruby comparing Hale to Whitehall ends up causing Hale to hug her daughter. Ruby isn't the most well-defined character, but the scenes in this episode are actually moving enough, even with the context that Ruby was putting up a huge show to get the drop on Hale and lock her up. For all her bravado, she apparently loves mommy enough not to chakram her in the neck, which is genuinely surprising.

Ruby, Werner von Strucker and an army end up showing up and forcing Fitz-Simmons to activate the device to transform Ruby into the Destroyer of Worlds. Meanwhile, Elena's overconfidence ends up being her downfall as using her mechanical arm with super-speed ends up sending a lot of feedback that really affects her abilities to save her friends. It's a neat little cliffhanger as Fitz and Simmons realize that they might not be quite as invincible as they thought they are, especially with little miss psycho chakram lady there threatening to kill them if they don't help her.

Meanwhile, May and Quake retrieve Coulson and Talbot from the random mountains thanks to Robin's drawings in the previous episode, and discover Mack in a jail cell in the Lighthouse. May and Quake call out Coulson's recklessness and willingness to put himself in danger because he's a bit of a fatalist at this point, and May blurts out the reason why -- she loves Coulson, and that declaration manages to shut Coulson the fuck up. She also calls Coulson out for being way too confident that everything is falling into place, like Quake being the new leader of SHIELD... because Daisy's still way too committed into saving Coulson and not do the mission statement of doing the whole earth-saving thing. Oh, and Deke gets shot and he gets thrown into a C-plot where Mack and Piper have to play doctor to save his life, and it's... it's honestly a bit unnecessary, and that's not just because I don't like Deke. It genuinely is unnecessary and doesn't add much to the story beyond going "oh no, Simmons and Fitz have abandoned their posts" and having some obvious Deke-Daisy shipping moments that honestly is just getting obnoxious at this point.

Meanwhile, poor poor crazy Talbot goes through so much shit, and seems to be about to be thrust into even more shit. His confusion and delirium is delivered very well by Adrian Pasdar, and while it seems that the show is giving Talbot a reasonably happy ending with him being rescued by SHIELD, and Daisy allowing the broken man to call his family. And as Talbot insists on doing whatever he can in order to bring down his tormentors, when he calls his wife, Hydra's already gotten to her and he ends up being brainwashed by the same Whitehall method.

Overall, it's actually a pretty exciting episode. It's filled with action scenes for the most part, yes, which really helps. The episode's storyline is pretty solid as a standalone episode while also building up a bunch of stuff. There's some really solid writing for Fitz, Simmons, Daisy and Ruby, and a lot of neat exploration about the whole time loop/invulnerability deal without going into a long, tired speech. Overall, a pretty strong episode, all things considered.