Agents of SHIELD, Season 6, Episode 4: Code Yellow; Episode 5: The Other Thing
When I first watched the first scenes of this episode, I went "aw, man, it's fucking Deke". I'm not the biggest fan of Deke Shaw throughout season 5, and while the actor is charismatic enough, I do feel like his character filled a necessary but ultimately pretty bland niche in the future Lighthouse storyline, and I do appreciate that the showrunners realize how horrible the Deke/Daisy attempted romance is and lampoons it in Deke's honestly pretty creepy attempt to turn his experiences in the Lighthouse into a VR game with ridiculous dialogue and a setup where Deke is acting out his fantasies with a "oh my hero I love you" version of Daisy.
The thing is, an episode focusing mostly on the supposed hilarity of Deke Shaw, a man who finds himself stranded in our world after coming from an alternate, dystopian future, is... it's honestly pretty freaking bland. There are a lot of attempts to inject a satire of a hipster millennial startup company vibe to his scenes, but honestly, none of it are particularly land. Other than that post-credits scene just being his pretty fun girlfriend Sequoia (played by executive producer Maurissa Tancharoen as a very hilariously accurate portrayal of #WorkLyfe) posting shit on the Instagrams. That's actually kinda hilarious.
Deke ends up finding himself in the crosshairs of "Sarge", who is looking for... people who are not from this world or something, I dunno. The Sarge Squad is still pretty enigmatic, but I really did love the conversation between Sarge and Deke. Sarge's strategy at talking to others and finding information is basically just going along with everything and going "yeah, sure, that's what is happening", which is hilarious and is delivered with Clark Gregg's amazing poker face, while Deke assumes that Coulson has been given a SHIELD mind-wipe. That's a pretty fun scene.
But other than that, we just have a relatively typical fight as SHIELD arrives to rescue Deke and his employees from Sarge and his extradimensional crew attacking the people there, and the fight this time is just guns shooting at each other, and the lack of anything particularly interesting ends up making this episode feel particularly bland. I'm afraid Deke just isn't that interesting, honestly, and the revelation that one of the background employees, Trevor Khan, turns out to be an Agent of SHIELD, ends up really falling flat. Again, like the previous episode, there's a bit of a plot development at the end of all of this comedic stuff -- May gets captured by the villains, Coulson's two male minions are captured by SHIELD, and Deke seems to be in contact with SHIELD more closely now. Except, y'know, all the Deke stuff is nowhere as fun as the Enoch, Fitz, Daisy and Simmons stuff.
(Can we just dump Deke, and have Sequoia and her boba obsession hang out with the main cast? Please?)
The B-plot doesn't fare much better either. Apparently, in addition to stealing quartz jewels, blowing up museums, looking at weird star-maps and hunting down extra-dimensional travelers, Sarge and company are also going around stabbing people with... uh... weird-ass alien parasites. Initially looking like a fungal infection that Dr. Benson compares to the Cordyceps fungi (it's Parasect!), it turns out that inside the victim that they're autopsying is a weird-ass tiny bat dragon creature that ends up flying down the throat of Agent Keller, leading to an oh-so-dramatic bit where Benson and Yo-Yo has to essentially mercy-kill Keller before he blows up or turns into a fungus zombie or something, and... I dunno. Other than the constant "oh no we got to tell Mack / don't tell Mack" soap opera drama nonsense that I've never been invested in, I don't really care about Keller, so honestly, as much as Natalia Cordova's acting is pretty great in that scene, it moves too quickly and I really don't have any investment in Keller as a character that when he died and turned into a mass of spikes, I just sort of shrugged.
I am a big fan of the special effects, mind you, from the initial mutation of Keller's arm, to the resulting effect of him exploding into a mass of crystals or whatever. The threat just sort of really fell flat, is all, and the tonal whiplash from boba tea jokes to Yo-Yo's angst at being forced to kill her boyfriend really end up not working out as well. Overall... it's not terrible, and very much a solid, enjoyable hour, but it's definitely a sub-par outing.
Episode 5 takes a different sort of pace compared to the previous two, which were relatively self-contained fluff, and starts actually moving the plot forwards since we're slowly reaching the mid-season point. And this time, the focus is May's relationship with Sarge Coulson, and while the constant flashbacking might be a bit too much, I felt like it was pretty neat and a way to make the episode at least somewhat more memorable than "Sarge tries to make May evil, but May's not an idiot so she just bides her time". Because honestly, if not for the fun and sad little flashbacks to their time together in Tahiti or wherever, that sentence right there essentially describes May and Sarge's talk. May's clearly disturbed by Sarge, but she's not an idiot and she's clearly just buying her time. There's an action scene and a weird initiation sequence where they lock May in a room and force her to fight one of those weird fungus-bat zombies, and apparently Sarge's team is trying to... stop the planet from the invasion of these "Shrikes", and those people Sarge was hunting down were... carriers of the Shrikes, I guess? Sarge also claims to be like super-duper old, and keeps talking about "cutting off the limb", so I think he's just a super-extremist alien hunter.
Meanwhile, fresh off the crazy tripping-balls casino planet, Team Quake have been debriefed by Enoch about what's going on, and I keep forgetting that these two specific iterations of Enoch and Fitz genuinely don't know what happened throughout the fifth season. But their ship quickly get attacked by a massive alien fleet... which turn out to be the entire Chronicom race whose planet was destroyed in a catastrophe (implied to be the Shrike apocalypse) and they have taken over Confederacy ships and are desperate to find a way to fix this. Mostly, we get to see the Chronicom leader Atarah arguing with Enoch.
And... it's honestly mostly just filler and exposition, with the main focus lying on Enoch's conflict between his 'bestie' and his Chronicom responsibilities. It's a classic but well-executed robot-friend dilemma, and I do find the resolution somewhat... interesting. Enoch identifies to his fellow Chronicoms that Simmons is the one being in the world that can motivate Fitz, who the Chronicoms want to build the time machine, so Simmons ends up getting taken hostage while Daisy and the rest of the B-squad are allowed to leave (after some scuffles, of course). And it's an interesting third option that actually reunites Fitz and Simmons at last, kinda-sorta, but also still puts them in relative peril as they are forced to engage in some crazy alien time travel scheme.
The rest of the B-plots are... they exist. Mack and Yo-Yo acknowledge Keller's death but are way too professional to really discuss it in full length. There are some talk about Dr. Benson's alcoholism and competence and whatnot, but that's sort of whatever. Piper and Davis have some jokes, and Daisy acts badass. Snowflake's still crazy. Overall, though episode 5 was more about table-setting and moving characters around. May's seemingly knocked out Sarge and is bringing him back to base, while Team Quake has finally landed on Earth. It does bring a significant portion of the cast together, which is... it's neat. It's sort of a rocky stretch of episodes since a very strong season premier, but it's all right.
Episode 5 takes a different sort of pace compared to the previous two, which were relatively self-contained fluff, and starts actually moving the plot forwards since we're slowly reaching the mid-season point. And this time, the focus is May's relationship with Sarge Coulson, and while the constant flashbacking might be a bit too much, I felt like it was pretty neat and a way to make the episode at least somewhat more memorable than "Sarge tries to make May evil, but May's not an idiot so she just bides her time". Because honestly, if not for the fun and sad little flashbacks to their time together in Tahiti or wherever, that sentence right there essentially describes May and Sarge's talk. May's clearly disturbed by Sarge, but she's not an idiot and she's clearly just buying her time. There's an action scene and a weird initiation sequence where they lock May in a room and force her to fight one of those weird fungus-bat zombies, and apparently Sarge's team is trying to... stop the planet from the invasion of these "Shrikes", and those people Sarge was hunting down were... carriers of the Shrikes, I guess? Sarge also claims to be like super-duper old, and keeps talking about "cutting off the limb", so I think he's just a super-extremist alien hunter. Meanwhile, fresh off the crazy tripping-balls casino planet, Team Quake have been debriefed by Enoch about what's going on, and I keep forgetting that these two specific iterations of Enoch and Fitz genuinely don't know what happened throughout the fifth season. But their ship quickly get attacked by a massive alien fleet... which turn out to be the entire Chronicom race whose planet was destroyed in a catastrophe (implied to be the Shrike apocalypse) and they have taken over Confederacy ships and are desperate to find a way to fix this. Mostly, we get to see the Chronicom leader Atarah arguing with Enoch.
And... it's honestly mostly just filler and exposition, with the main focus lying on Enoch's conflict between his 'bestie' and his Chronicom responsibilities. It's a classic but well-executed robot-friend dilemma, and I do find the resolution somewhat... interesting. Enoch identifies to his fellow Chronicoms that Simmons is the one being in the world that can motivate Fitz, who the Chronicoms want to build the time machine, so Simmons ends up getting taken hostage while Daisy and the rest of the B-squad are allowed to leave (after some scuffles, of course). And it's an interesting third option that actually reunites Fitz and Simmons at last, kinda-sorta, but also still puts them in relative peril as they are forced to engage in some crazy alien time travel scheme.
The rest of the B-plots are... they exist. Mack and Yo-Yo acknowledge Keller's death but are way too professional to really discuss it in full length. There are some talk about Dr. Benson's alcoholism and competence and whatnot, but that's sort of whatever. Piper and Davis have some jokes, and Daisy acts badass. Snowflake's still crazy. Overall, though episode 5 was more about table-setting and moving characters around. May's seemingly knocked out Sarge and is bringing him back to base, while Team Quake has finally landed on Earth. It does bring a significant portion of the cast together, which is... it's neat. It's sort of a rocky stretch of episodes since a very strong season premier, but it's all right.
Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:
- The VR game that Deke's company is developing is called "Remorath Rumble". Remoraths, of course, are one of the races that opposed SHIELD as part of the Confederacy in season five.
No comments:
Post a Comment