Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, Season 7, Episode 1: The New Deal
Final season here we go! It's weird that we've had basically two 'final seasons' for Agents of SHIELD. Season five, which wrapped up a lot of the hanging plot threads in the first five years of this show, as well as season six, which was marketed as yet another 'final season' split into two half-seasons. Okay? Part of me really do feel like Agents of SHIELD probably should've ended at season five, but that's probably because I really did like the ending of the fifth season and the sixth... wasn't a bad season, but it was just kind of there.
The thing is, the show has been pretty great at dragging me back in. That's the ease of an ongoing show, I suppose, and while I'm not sure if the gimmick of this season (basically Legends of Tomorrow, but with a lot less tomfoolery) is going to be sufficient... but I'm in for the ride anyway. It's not like time-travel is a foreign concept for the show, with the fifth season's first half dealing with an alternate future. But hey, we're traveling through the past now, so that's something different, right?
I'm not sure if we'll be keeping this concept for the entire season -- all Agents of SHIELD seasons since its fourth have changed directions pretty drastically halfway through. Season four was the best at this, splitting the season up into Inhumans/LMD/Hydraworld storylines, while season five split its season into the alternate Kree Satellite future and the whole present-day alien invasion/Graviton storyline. Still, Jemma Simmons did basically rattle off some technobabble about how the Zephyr can only sort-of-kind-of travel through time by skipping through specific points in the timestream, but okay, sure. Also, yeah, 'ripples, not waves'. That's a pretty clever way to get the specifics of time travel on the table.
The thing is, unlike Hydra, the Kree or the hostile Inhumans in the previous seasons... I really don't feel like the Chromicroms are that much defined of a threat. Sure, I like Enoch a lot and they are a pre-established threat that doesn't feel like they came out of nowhere, but they're still a neat threat. At the end of the day season six has been kind of underwhelming, sure, but at least they established a threat, sort of?
The main interest, really, is the reactivation of LMD Phil Coulson. Last season features an attempt at an evil Clark Gregg in Sarge, which was a nice concept that I really don't think they explored far enough. They basically had Clark Gregg play a generic evil dude and that's about it. LMD Coulson, on the other hand, is a way to bring Gregg back as a character that's far, far more intriguing without sullying the grand exit that Phil had at the end of season five. LMD Coulson is essentially a robot who knows it's a robot, but also has all the memories of the original Coulson. It's sort of like Fitz #2 last season, but... I don't mind it that much? The scene where he basically goes through six years' worth of memories and superhero melodrama within the space of six minutes is extremely well-acted, and I really do like Daisy's desperation in getting her surrogate father back while Mack is... he's not un-trusting of robo-Coulson, but I do like that there's an amount of clear relief to see someone familiar back.
The episode itself is essentially our characters wandering in 1931 New York, trying to figure out what the Chromicoms are doing in their weird face-stealing (literally turning random people into Slenderman-faced corpses) bit. Sure, they want to change time and SHIELD immediately assumes they're trying to assassinate Senator Roosevelt. I mean, sure. The actual action scenes are pretty standard. The biblical-named Chromicoms are creepy, and we get the expected dress-up scenes and some obligatory action scenes with Quake-punches. I even find the very fun bit where Koenig's ancestor shows up as a bar owner -- although I do admit that Patton Oswald's name showing up in the opening credits spoiled me.
Of course, the episode goes through a somewhat stretched-out fake-out when Enoch and Simmons interrogates one of the evil Chromicoms on board their ship. They didn't want to kill FDR, they wanted to kill 'Freddy', who, of course, was the random bartender at Koenig Senior's bar... whose full name turns out to be Wilfred Malick, father of Hydra's head-honcho Gideon Malick from season two or three. That was pretty neat, a way to swerve the direction of a season that still feels like it's exploring the history of the show. And the episode ends with Coulson and company realizing that they'll have to save Hydra from the Chromicoms in order to preserve the existence of SHIELD in the present day. Okay!
Ultimately, I feel like the episode hinges a bit too much on the big reveal of Freddy Malick at the end and I personally didn't think that it's big enough of a twist to really devote an entire episode to it. But "The New Deal" was still a pretty enjoyable watch, and whether it's Daisy, Coulson, Mack or Elena going through their adaptation to this new time period, it's pretty well-acted. Oh yeah, and apparently Melinda May is like, a crazed zombie now? Huh. Looking forward to see what the season will bring.
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