Agents of SHIELD, Season 7, Episode 12-13: The End is At Hand / What We're Fighting For
I originally reviewed these two separately, but decided to talk about them together. And... and it's really interesting. Agents of SHIELD was my very first superhero TV show -- something that, at the time of my watching it as it aired, made me go 'whoaaa, they really made a full TV show about superheroes'. Sure, I had watched cartoons and a whole lot of superhero movies before, but I never quite realized that superheroes could be material for an ongoing television program and that people would take it seriously. Obviously, there were flaws in my first impression. Agents of SHIELD was far from being the first superhero show, or even the first serious superhero show. Hell, as I have reviewed nearly the entire run of the show myself, it's far from being the best superhero show to have came out in the past decade with the huge superhero boom.
It is also far from the worst. Sure, there were problems. It had a really rocky start when it had no idea what stories it could tell. It got wrapped up too much in its own continuity at one point. There is always perhaps an unnecessary emphasis on shoehorning a romance subplot into every damn character. I am still of the opinion that season six was unnecessary, and season seven could've been structured better, and that season five was a far more poignant and far better ending.
And yet. And yet I really love this show and its cast. Maybe part of it is familiarity with these characters. Maybe it's just wanting to see how the story ends. Whatever the case, though, I was happy to see this show finally end on its own terms. Sure, this season could've been better. It certainly could've been paced better, and had better villains. But all in all? I certainly enjoyed my ride through this final season of Agents of SHIELD. It certainly is a season that worked better when I binge-watched it, I'll tell you that much.
Granted, the final two episodes (epilogue aside) did feel like an action movie. But I kind of made my peace with that. With the revelation that our SHIELD agents found themselves in a splinter timeline thanks to them mucking around with time, the question is not merely just how to get back home to the 'prime' MCU universe, but also how to stop the Chromicoms from destroying this newly created timeline.
The Chromicoms' plan with Simmons is still the weakest link of this storyline, and of the season in general. Sure, part of it is caused by actor Iain De Caestecker's scheduling conflicts, but I felt like they just pile on the melodrama one after the other with Simmons going through a sequence of being ga-ga-amnesia and forgetting everything about Fitz and being sort of cuckoo throughout episode 12. Thankfully, the actual payoff scenes with Simmons remembering Fitz; and Fitz finally appearing in the flesh in a present-day scene is great. Fitz and Simmons are always a delight to see together, and there is certainly a huge moment of d'awwww when Simmons finally remembers Fitz. But at the same time, it doesn't really make me care all that much about the whole amnesia or mystery, it's just that with the backdrop of the show finally having budget for action scenes (the past five or six episodes have been absolutely light with them) it's a lot easy to handwave it. Speaking of which... we don't get a lot, but Mack and Sousa salvaging random stuff and fighting off the dumb Chromicom soldiers is pretty fun.
Kora also gets an... all right storyline. Hers feel absolutely rushed because of how little she's been in the show. A lot of her story is also pretty obvious, too -- she is still loyal to Malick, but May's conversation last episode rattled her, and when she questions Malick, turns out that, hey, Malick's a huge asshole. Malick also falls out with Sibyl, who wants to focus on allowing Simmons to reunite with the SHIELD agents so they can find Fitz and kill him, while Malick just wants to murder everyone because he's kind of a flat villain that way. Daisy and Kora get a too-brief standoff, which is enough to give Kora more doubts... and Malick shoots her. Again, all playing out just as expected, and paced juuuust enough to not be frustrating but definitely leaves behind the feeling that they could've expanded on it more. Honestly, Kora feels like such an oddity... but at the same time, I really do appreciate that the show doesn't fall into typical melodrama crap because, as Daisy puts it in an earlier episode, she already has a sister in Jemma Simmons and she's not going to wring her hands in angst that she suddenly has another one. I appreciate that so much.
Teleporting, shit-talking John Garrett arrive on the Lighthouse, but Coulson, May and Elena trap him with the Gordon trap, and just like Kora, Malick leaves Garrett behind to die, causing him to switch sides... and any 'people can change' story for Garrett is cut short with a darkly hilarious bit where he teleports our main characters to the Krazy Kanoe and gets shot dead in the head. That is so dark, but also so funny.
Anyway, turns out the extremely convoluted plan that Fitz and Simmons have thought out is bafflingly bordering on 'yeah, you peeked at the script', and only really works thanks to a Dr. Strange-esque "ALL the possibilities is accounted for". Sure, at this point, why not? All the random SHIELD agents that survived gather in the Krazy Kanoe and they all have mysterious device pieces that Enoch have left behind during the couple of decades that he was left behind, and that ends up being a machine that zaps Fitz back from the Quantum Realm.
Apparently the key factor in Fitz's crazy plan is Kora surviving, and then Deke (who the show makes fun of for not being relevant -- they said it, not me) offers to stay behind in this new timeline to open the gateway while he zaps both SHIELD and the Chromicom armada to 'Prime' Earth. I really want to say that I cared enough about Deke over the past couple of seasons to treat him as anything but a secondary character, but honestly... the actor's fine, but even the show pokes fun at how much of a bit character he kind of is. (The fact that Deke's a rockstar in this timeline is probably a factor)
We also get a couple of action scenes. Daisy fights Malick with Quake-powers and Daisy ultimately unleashes her powers and blows up not only Malick but also the ship they are in... though she somehow can survive the vacuum of space long enough to be rescued with Kora's magically ambiguous powers. Plot armour, I'd call that. Sibyl also gets killed, hilariously and appropriately anti-climactically, by May (who finally accepts her moniker of 'the Cavalry'). The huge Kora plot ends with her agreeing to help SHIELD, who use her ambiguously-defined powers to... spread empathy and friendship to make all the Chromicoms no longer unfeeling robots but buddies with humanity. I mean, sure, why not??? Among all the random plot points in this finale, Friendship Beam(TM) is the weirdest and most out-of-nowhere.
And then we cut to a very low-key and quiet one-year-later epilogue as they meet in the Krazy Kanoe via holo-avatars. Turns out that all of Enoch's warnings and doomsayings about how this is the last time that the core Agents of SHIELD will spend its time together is true, but not in a tragic sense. They sort of just drift away not because of anyone's death or whatever, but just because life takes them in different directions. It's sort-of-kind-of the message that May and Coulson were sort of discovering before, but at the same time the season didn't really focus that much on.
The ending scenes are all right. The long-suffering Fitz and Simmons are now retired, happily raising their daughter after seven seasons and three lifetimes' worth of grief. Elena is still a SHIELD field agent, hanging out with Piper and LMD!Davis. Mack is still director, on a Helicarrier. May is teaching at 'Coulson Academy', and Flint is there, and May as a teacher is probably one of the sweetest endings for her. Daisy has taken Sousa and Kora to do some space missions. And Coulson is on very good terms with everyone else (the ending makes it clear that the Coulson/Daisy paternal relationship is what works best and what we're ending off on), and is off on his own journey of self-discovery, flying off on an upgraded Lola.
And scene. That's a very bittersweet ending; that the epilogue is just these old friends who drift apart but still think the world of each other, having to meet up and realizing that the moment they do (even via holo-glasses!) they have to immediately jump back into doing what they needed to do. It's a more comprehensive ending compared to season five (which was basically a huge funeral without answering what happened to the rest of SHIELD), but also a far more open-ended one at the same time. The theme is at least there, 'how did I become the me that I am now', and looking back at any one of us seven years ago... yeah, everybody changes, even the show. That's a neat message, I suppose.
And... and it's an all right ending. The space battle segments were all right. But me really not caring for the villains also meant that I just chuckled when Sibyl was dispatched carelessly, and Malick... he gets reduced to a generic bad boss supervillain. At least we get this season's most impressive superhero fight out of it. Again, a lot of the two episodes' runtime is devoted into explaining Fitz and Simmons's master plan through time and space and... as well-acted and well-directed everything is, it's kind of eye-rolling, really, let's just leave it at that without using any harsher language. At least they moved straight into it -- I could've seen a version of this finale that was a lot more hand-holdy than it already is. Plus, there's also the fact that as much as Fitz and Simmons have had their whole 'we lived peacefully and had a baby, and this is our little payment to rescue our friends' thing felt like it didn't have the oomph that it deserved -- it honestly could've been stretched out to a whole episode if the revelation didn't have to happen in the finale. Oh well.
There's also the whole 'Chromicom Friendship Beam' thing. On the core of it, I agree vehemently that finding a non-violent solution is a good message to preach in a superhero show. As truncated as it feels, that was what they did with Kora. But there wasn't really too much of a buildup to them wanting to rehabilitate the Chromicoms at all so it really all comes as an ass-pull. And for a show whose ending is to really give villains a chance, the darkly comedic way they dispose of John Garrett is also something that could be raised into question.
Still... it's a pretty nice ending. I really don't have much to say about it... it's a fun watch, especially when I binged the entirety of season seven. I think I said all that there is to be said, and the show had also said all that there is to be said about a long-running show ending.
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Speaking of which... I did go through a fair bit of burn-out, so for the time being I think I'll be taking a break from doing TV episode reviews. I'll maybe do TV season reviews, but as you'd probably expect those would take a bit longer for me to write and wouldn't facilitate the same daily post routine that I've been doing for the past couple of years. With three of the TV shows I originally covered on this blog -- Agents of SHIELD, Arrow and Gotham all ending in some shape or form this year, I suppose it's appropriate that I also try and change things up a little. It's been a while since I just sat down and enjoyed a TV show I'm watching instead of taking notes and trying to see where the cut-off-point was for a review. I'm mostly just taking a break to... just enjoy some shows I want to watch without necessarily talking about it, and spending my writing time doing articles that I feel I actually enjoyed doing much more.
Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:
- The Quantum Realm from the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies -- most relevantly the two Ant-Man movies and Avengers: Endgame -- make an appearance here basically identical to how it was portrayed in the movies. More importantly, it also basically ties in to the somewhat-unclear fact that time traveling to the past in the MCU creates splinter timelines.
- What Fitz creates is basically a small-scale version of the Quantum Tunnel that Iron man built in Endgame.
- These two episodes mention a lot of previous seasons' plotlines, but among them include Fitz wearing Deke's space-suit helmet from season five; the Sonic Staff from season one; 0-8-4's as a codename for powerful objects; the Framework; the original Gordon fight in season two; and the welcome return of Coulson's flying car Lola.
- Coulson's briefcase unlocks with the code 136. This is the 136th episode of Agents of SHIELD.
- Victoria Hand returns from season one, and it's even her original actress! Nice!
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