Agents of SHIELD S06E12-13 Review: Darkest Hour

Agents of SHIELD, Season 6: Episode 12: The Sign; Episode 13: New Life

It's kind of a disappointing end to the sixth season, to be honest. Like, sure, everything introduced at the beginning of this season was wrapped up neatly, while also building up the seventh season, but honestly... after how well-done the fourth and fifth season revolutionized one of Marvel's longer-running TV series, it's kind of a disappointment to say that season six of Agents of SHIELD ended up feeling like, well, a filler season. Sure, there were some pretty great moments overall, but ultimately it felt more like a generic superhero sci-fi storyline. Which is all right, to some degree, but at the same time it is also pretty unimpressive, y'know? Especially since we don't even have the luxury of going "oh, it's the first outing for [insert character here]" anymore.

A good chunk of these two episodes play out kinda like a generic superhero conflict, with a huge "will the producers actually do it?!?!?!?" in regards to the fate of certain characters. Is Fitz and Simmons really going to go out in a blaze of glory, blowing themselves up and finally finding themselves together? Is Melinda May going to die stabbed by an evil Coulson doppelganger as the true villain of the season is revealed? Or is Melinda May going to die after a defiant last stand in the alternate dimension? Is Elena doomed to die when that Shrike enters her mouth? Is Deke going to die in one last blaze of glory? Turns out that, nope, nothing of the sort happens, and the only casualty in this entire season are the villains and poor Davis.

And I dunno... the whole back-and-forth between where Sarge's loyalties lie just doesn't grab me, y'know? After we spent the entirety of the last episode and half of episode 12 clumsily insisting that, no, the bit of Coulson within Sarge is going to be enough and that this is going to be the return of a version of Coulson... turns out that Pachakutiq or whatever the name of the mysterious alien entity within Coulson is too powerful, and he ends up stabbing May through the gut at the end of episode 12 because he's going to "cut out the love within him" to return back to unemotional alien purity. Which is... honestly, kind of a bland storyline.

Izel herself also ends up as a pretty generic doomsday villain. Sure, actress Karolina Wydra has a great job hamming things up, but she ends up feeling like all ham and no substance, and despite all the promise of some sort of backstory with Sarge, we really don't get much in lieu of concrete development or answers. She spends the majority of episode 12 tormenting Mack and Elena, and taking over Flint's body, in order to do her vague plan of creating a portal to allow the rest of her race to go through. And also she releases a bunch of Shrikes into the air to find host bodies, because we need a zombie army of disposable goons for the finale.

Honestly, everything that happens throughout episode 12 is genuinely pretty bland setup. The Flint/Mack/Elena moments kind of fell flat for me, and despite the little bits of "haha Sarge made a joke like Coulson", the whole Sarge/Daisy/May moment felt a bit too muddled. Honestly, and I cannot believe I'm writing this, but the best moment out of episode 12 was the massive outburst from Deke ranting about how no one fucking respects him despite the amount of shit he's been through, everyone calls him a hack despite him doing his best, and even his grandparents don't respect him. It's actually a pretty great analysis on Deke, and even if it's full of a lot of self-pity (and Deke could stand to communicate better with his SHIELD friends), that was a well-done speech, and the badass moment when he activates that portable teleporter, and then proceed to nullify Izel's body-snatching powers, is pretty damn well done and badass.

And then there's the huge cliffhanger at the end of episode 12 and goes on throughout the beginning of episode 13. Oh no, darkest hour time! In space, Enoch is attacked by the Hunter Chromicron Isaiah, whatever the fuck's going on in that B-plot, while the rest of the Chromicrons teleport into the SHIELD Lighthouse and start shooting shit up. Elena gets infected by a Shrike while fighting against the zombie army, while the rest of the away SHIELD team is pinned down by a zombie horde. And worst of all, Sarge's stabbed May and throws her into a portal, seemingly changing sides to Izel. Flint's wounded and taken out of the storyline and sort of forgotten. Darkest hour, darkest hour...

And the climax just felt muddied, as I mentioned above, as we kept going from "OH NO THEY ARE GOING TO DIE" and then PSYCH, nope, they get saved. Fitz and Simmons basically spend the entire episode running around the base and going through that near-death grenade sequence until it's revealed that Enoch's disguised himself with the skin of one of the other Hunters, and then goes off to set up season 7 off-screen.

Meanwhile, after a whole sequence with trying to get the Quinjet to fly, the climax sort of happens simultaneously as they meet each other in the weird sacrificial chamber. Daisy's Quake powers only succeeds in blowing off Sarge's skin to reveal the CGI alien monster beneath, May's fighting Izel in the other side after off-screen killing a bunch of other weird hooded alien monsters, with a bunch of random stones in random slots that are never really explained. Oh, and Elena's Shrike infection ends up being set off right there because they didn't want to work her superpowers into the fight, I guess? Is that why the episode felt so mundane? With Slingshot and Quake there, and even Izel and Sarge, none of their superpowers really matter, and a lot of the climax is just a lot of standing around. Eventually, Sarge gets destroyed once and for all in perhaps one of the most anti-climactic ending out there. Daisy and Mack just sort of kill him, and we honestly never get an answer to the muddied "how much of Coulson was in Sarge" in favour of an underwhelming CGI monster fight. Izel vs May is pretty neat, but they spend too much of that fight scene with their swords locked. And because of the whole "shut down the enemy boss and the other troopers die too" means that this ends up also killing all the zombies menacing Deke, and the Shrike within Elena, when Izel and Sarge get dusted. Hooray, darkest hour averted! And it's... pretty anticlimactic, honestly.

And while May's faux death scene was well done, turns out that we're not done yet. Fitz and Simmons made some deal with Enoch off-screen that we never really learn the real significance of, but a strangely robotic Simmons shows up with a lot of backup to calmly evacuate everyone from Izel's temple, right before the Chromicrons blow it to kingdom come with missiles. Because apparently the Chromicrons have won, or something? May's also kept alive with a bunch of science techno-babble, and apparently a lot of things have happened while we follow Team Mack in the temple... and it might involve some bizarre thing going on, either a time-jump to the past or a time-jump to the future or maybe an alternate reality which is a time-jump to the 1930's, because I have no fucking knowledge about the history of America, or that the alcohol prohibition was supposed to clue me in to the time period.

And while it's kind of a cool setup and I am curious to know what deal Fitz and Simmons made that separated the two of them ("I must never know where Fitz is") and kinda turned Simmons robot-y, the fact that so much of the finale is spent setting this up while also sort of going through the motions of the supposed main plot is kinda underwhelming. And also, there's L.M.D. Coulson, so that is yet another setup for the final season of Agents of SHIELD... and I kinda wished we just skipped one of them, y'know? It's kind of underwhelming to kill Coulson off in such an amazing, emotional moment at the end of season five, then have this muddled, confusing affair with Sarge in season six, and now to get another 'good' copy of Coulson for the seventh season.

Overall... it's kind of a messy finale. The way we get rid of Izel and Sarge is pretty underwhelming and honestly kind of anticlimactic, and so much of the post-Collision-Course episodes either just go back and forth on either just foreshadowing season seven and the Chronicrom plotline, or just giving rushed exposition about Izel and Sarge's mysterious energy-being race. I dunno. There's a lot of great individual moments scattered across the sixth season, and I did actually enjoy the earlier half of the season a lot, but ultimately, the sixth season felt very, very lukewarm, just kind of a season that's not a trainwreck... but definitely nowhere as interesting as it could've been. Oh well, hopefully the final season will be a sizable ending, right?