Agents of SHIELD S06E01 Review: Ley Lines

Agents of SHIELD, Season 6, Episode 1: Missing Pieces

Well, that's certainly and interesting opening for Agents of SHIELD. The show honestly gets a lot of rap for some of its low points, but honestly, between aliens, a proper Inhumans adaptation, dystopian futures, LMD's and a lot of other gloriously wacky subplots; including the adaptation of some Marvel comic-book classics like Quake, Ghost Rider, Mockingbird, Deathlok and Madame Viper, Agents of SHIELD has sometimes been sort of shrugged off as "eh, that weird long-running TV show starring a bunch of OC's". Which is honestly not a fair rap, since I would without hesitation that I get a lot more out of Agents of SHIELD than I do something like Iron Fist, Inhumans, Cloak and Dagger or Jessica Jones. And I genuinely thought that we have gotten the conclusive conclusion to the show with season five, but apparently we're getting a shorter sixth season, which is something that genuinely caught me off guard!

And this episode definitely tries its best to showcase how the status quo has changed between the relatively long hiatus between seasons. And I think this is what made Agents of SHIELD such a pleasantly long-running series. It's not afraid to give our heroes new adventures, but it's also not afraid to retool each season, which is what makes Agents of SHIELD so much more easy to watch long-term compared to other long-running TV shows like Arrow. This season makes use of the real-life time skip the show itself got to split up its cast members and toss them to different parts of the universe to deal with different problems.

Perhaps the less-interesting part of the episode is the space part, where Daisy, Daisy's new hairdo, Simmons, as well as the delightful return of background filler characters Agent Davis and Agent Piper are on a spaceship trying to uncover where Fitz's ship has disappeared off to, because apparently in this 'repaired' time stream, some bizarre incident sliced up Fitz's spaecship in half before our heroes are able to uncover him, and our heroes have to go around, intimidating aliens with the thought of dealing with the scary Quake, in search for Fitz's ship. We do get a lot of fun CGI space scenes (with less episodes, that means more of the budget can be used to make space scenes), but ultimately the clincher of the space scenes is the discovery that Fitz's cryo-pod is empty. He's not dead, but god knows where he's disappeared off to. There's a definite sense of weariness and despair among the crew, especially with the constant implication that apparently their crew was larger than the four-man crew it's been reduced to.

While in combat with a giant Not-Star-Destroyer owned by the Confederacy, an argument between Simmons (who wants to push the mission deeper into space for a wild goose chase to find Fitz) and the rest of the crew (who wants to return to Earth, refuel and re-strategize) ends up with Simmons essentially changing the navigation in the chaos to direct them to wherever the heck she thinks Fitz is based on a far reach of "hey, there are coordinates in this CR Pod".

On Earth, Director Mack of SHIELD is... he's still running SHIELD, with the rest of the cast and a bunch of new recurring characters. May's around with them because Coulson apparently passed away off-screen, and also he broke up with Elena. I'm... I really don't care? I also don't care that the show spends way too much time going "hey, Elena, you should move on" and "oops, Elena is already shacking up with another man", all of which end up taking a bit too much screentime than I care for.

The threat our Earth-bound team is dealing with is a bunch of strange anomalies of people manifesting out of concrete. Dimension travelers from parallel earths? Time travelers from an alternate timeline? Aliens, demons, or something else entirely? Whatever the case, as SHIELD investigates these strange phenomena, one of the new background agents pieces together the 'long shot' (it's totally the explanation) that all of these appearances happen alongside ley-lines. One of these weird dimensional hoppers get quite literally fused with the concrete slab he's portaling through, and subsequent investigation ends up with him carrying a device that shows then when and where of the dimension hoppers' next attack. Oh, and he ends up being alive long enough to give a cryptic proclamation of "it's coming", refering to a 'Pachakutiq'.

Out of the new recruits, one gets special attention, because the episode takes the time to properly show Mack recruiting the disillusioned scientist Dr. Marcus Benson, who just looks so gosh-danged tired of the world. He's going to essentially play the role of the science squad while Fitz is MIA and Simmons is looking for Fitz. Their little attempt to prevent a disaster ends up with the dimension-hopping team blowing up a museum with some bizarre energy beam, which brings with it a giant truck being driven by the dimension hoppers' leader, "Sarge". Or, well, a grizzled Phil Coulson who has no idea what SHIELD is, and coldly guns down one of the new recruits, the happy young man Agent Fox. Coulson may be dead, but apparently you can't write out Clark Gregg that easily! It's neat, because I really don't care for the other dimension hoppers (beard man, badass chick, other man). I'm sure they'll grown on me eventually.

Overall, the story being told might not be the most original thing ever (is anything in superhero television, really?) but the genuinely fun tone and the balance between serious epic action and comedic banter is such a neat balance that I honestly am genuinely excited to see what we're getting from this show. Besides, Agents of SHIELD have been doing wonders at fixing my biggest gripe with its earlier seasons -- which is shorter story arcs. The previous seasons have cut their seasons up to mini-seasons, but this one seems to just forego that entirely and reduce its episode count to slightly more than a dozen, hopefully allowing for tighter storytelling and writing.

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Dr. Benson is noted to work at Culver University, which was last seen in Incredible Hulk where both Bruce Banner and Betty Ross worked. 
• The time frame given for season six is "one year after the fifth season", which means it's one year after Infinity War since the Ebony Maw attack happened concurrently with the final episodes of the fifth season. It's sort of jarring that no one mentions the Snap, although I'm not sure if it's just the production being indifferent about tying in with the movies, or if it's an actual plot point... like the Agents of SHIELD timeline has finally diverged away from the MCU after the timey-wimey plot of the previous seaso.