Agents of SHIELD S07E05-06 Review: Insightful

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, Season 7, Episode 5: A Trout in the Milk; Episode 6: Adapt or Die

So this is an interesting two-parter (which I'm going to review in a single go). I guess this is going to be the format for this season? We spend two episodes foiling a Chromicom plot in a single time period, fighting the Chromicoms as they try to wipe SHIELD out of existence while Hydra rises to power? The fifth episode, "A Trout in the Milk", takes place in 1973 and our heroes quickly discover that thanks to Chromicom interference, neither Wilfred Malick nor his son Nathaniel Malick died, and with the knowledge from the time-traveling robots, Wilfred Malick has been able to basically fast-track Project Insight, the plotline for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, three and a half decades earlier than it should've gone off.

And it's a nice little nod to the fact that the first season of Agents of SHIELD was basically just sort of bumbling along with second-rate adaptations of random minor villains until the big Winter Soldier tie-in happened and SHIELD collapsed as Hydra took over. That's actually pretty interesting as a two-parter premise, even if this two-parter still has the same problem that I felt has been plaguing this season of Agents of SHIELD... somehow, time-traveling history-altering robots feels so... boring. Granted, the genuinely boring and robotic antagonists themselves are a huge problem, but the fact that we know that eventually none of this history-changing alterations are going to sit is kind of leading to a huge shrug from me -- particularly since Agents of SHIELD has already done a protect-the-timeline season more effectively in preventing a bad future from happening.


And... sure, the plotline nods are pretty neat. Daniel 'whoa, high-tech' Sousa joins the team and basically acts as the group's Steve Rogers as someone who's completely baffled after being plucked out of time. I like him enough for him to be a welcome addition, but at this point I am wondering what he's going to really add to the show.

"A Trout in the Milk" does give us a bit of a surprise in the format by showing us the Hydra-infested-SHIELD celebrating Project Insight's launch only to immediately jump three years later to when they are launching (from season five's Lighthouse, which was supposed to be abandoned at this time period)... but, again, other than the Project Insight tie-in bit, I felt like this was kinda just there, nothing too much more epic than the previous two-parter's Project Helios.

Episode five does give us a bunch of interesting moments, with Deke immediately shooting Freddy Malick after having a lot of guilt for not shooting Freddy in episode 2 and seeing how terrible Freddy becomes. There's the bit with Coulson and May infiltrating the base and them having an interesting conversation about May's own lack of emotions and Coulson being an LMD now. There's the slight bit of out-of-nowhere drama where Mack's parents are revealed to be captives in the Lighthouse, preventing the plan of flooding the base to force an evacuation since Mack's parents would drown... a revelation that, by the way, fell absolutely flat because I don't think over the five seasons he's been around, Mack has ever talked about his parents once.

Anyway, episode five ended with a bit of a cliffhanger. Mack blows up the Project Insight satellite to protect his parents but also not let the Chromicoms win, causing Coulson and May to get captured by SHIELD General Stoner (which I think shows up in the Lighthouse introduction VCR's or something), who spends a good chunk of episode 6 being the doubting government dude until the Chromicoms (who can now mimic emotions) try to steal his face, and he gets rescued by Coulson and May (and basically keeps this hush-hush, thereby handwaving any sort of inconsistencies in the timeline).

The episode is pretty fun and tense as an action and story piece, with everyone moving pretty quickly and taking out their respective threats. It's just that... I dunno, everything felt kind of expected? The Chromicoms being not particularly exciting villains means that it's more of a "oh, wait, they're all gone? 'Kay" when Coulson went down and met with Sibyl in the little digital space before blowing the Chromicom pods to hell by self-destructing. It's a badass scene and the show immediately reassures us that Coulson isn't dead quite yet because not being able to stay dead is apparently his superpower. Okay, if you say so, show. The Sibyl/LMD-Coulson discussion about why Chromicoms are better than humans because they don't have the irrational fear of death is an interesting one, and it did give us LMD-Coulson's badass one-liner. It's a pretty all right scene and a pretty all right setup, but ultimately just kinda there.

The Mack/Elena stuff is a bit more interesting, I suppose, because after some ha-ha-funny jokes of Mack meeting his parents who call him 'sir' and Elena getting cute baby stories from them... turns out that in the third act, Mack's parents have actually been dead all along and those two are Chromicoms. The fight is brutal and quick, and the twist felt a bit random and mean-spirited... but it does make the interesting twist of this episode's ending --  that Mack's so mopey he (and Deke) missed the Zephyr jumping into the future -- a bit more believable.

There are two B-plots running along the two-parters. Sousa and Daisy got kidnapped by Nathaniel Malick and it's basically a perfect side-quest, isn't it? Nathaniel knows all about these Inhumans from his buddy Daniel Whitehall, and he ends up trying to inject Daisy's blood and spinal fluids from his train-carriage makeshift lab. It's a bit unnecessarily brutal, and all it really functions is to give us the admittedly well-done Sousa speech... and then Nathaniel blows himself up because he doesn't have Quake gauntlets or Quake training, the chump.

There's also the Simmons/Enoch bit, and we get a bunch of exposition because Simmons actually has a chip in her brain to stop her from remembering where or when Fitz is; and to help her remember details like the time periods that the Chromicoms are supposed to teleport to. The random three-year teleport in the fifth episode causes Simmons to sort of panic, and after a misunderstanding between Deke and Enoch, we get a whole lot of exposition. I feel like this ended up taking a bit too long, honestly... but is also a much-needed interpersonal scene between some members of the cast. (Also, Enoch is back, and his 'come to me if you wish to continue to exist' line cracked me up)

The two-parter are all right... but it feels 'all right' in the same way that Agents of SHIELD's sixth season felt 'all right'. The story is solid, the action is good, the cinematography, scripting and acting are great... but the story just sort of made me shrug. It feels like a filler episode, and it shouldn't -- there's a huge revelation, a bunch of MCU tie-ins, the Chromicom threat is utterly ended, there's a lot of dramatic moments for Mack and Deke and Daisy and Sousa, and yet I just sort of felt like this two-parter is just kinda there, not quite a fun filler episode but not quite the epic mid-season punch that the show needs.

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Project Insight, of course, is the plotline of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and what the good Captain ended up preventing in that movie.
• Named as part of the targets on the new Project Insight include Bruce Banner, Nick Fury and Peggy Carter, but pausing the list of names would reveal that Howling Commando members Jim Morita and Gabe Jones (from Captain America: The First Avenger) are on it; as well as SHIELD higher-ups Victoria Hand and Robert Gonzales (from the first couple of seasons of Agents of SHIELD) are also on it.  
• Gideon Malick makes a cameo, of course, and he's one of the secondary antagonists in the third season of Agents of SHIELD. Daisy makes a little snarky comment that refers to the fact that Gideon would die at her hand in said season. 
• Daniel Whitehall (a.k.a. Werner Reinhardt) and his 'very Mein Kampf vibe' is noted several times by Nathaniel Malick. In episode six, while experimenting on Quake's blood, Malick quotes Whitehall's catchphrase, 'discovery requires experimentation'.