Agents of SHIELD S07E12-13 Review: Excelsior

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)

One huge CGI fest as everyone gets zapped into the original timeline (where there is also a Chromicom armada) is... it's all right. We get the huge backstory about Fitz and Simmons's impossible time-loop plan. We get a sequence where some of the SHIELD agents 'fix' the time-loop by showing up as the people in hazmat suits at the end of season six's finale... which is kind of neat if I actually remembered that we had this plot thread hanging. I mean, okay, sure, they closed the time loop by showing up after going through their own wacky journey through time and whatnot. There's also the very welcome return of Piper and Flint, who have been guarding the time machine (with little baby Alya!) for like, five minutes their time; a season SHIELD's time; and a lifetime Simmons' time. Ey, time travel. A bit eye-rolling, but very appropriately comic-book-y.

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!

Agents of SHIELD S07E11 Review: Multiverse Theory

Agents of SHIELD, Season 7, Episode 11: Brand New Day

So this is... uh, kind of interesting. As the buildup to the two-part finale, "Brand New Day" ends up focusing a fair bit on Kora, Daisy's unknown sister, who totally buys into Nathaniel Malick's speeches, although she claims to at least want SHIELD on their side so that they can clean up the timeline of evil villains before they can do their villainous plot -- citing Grant Ward as one being that the timeline would be infinitely be better off without. It's certainly a pretty interesting concept, but other than a couple of shocked reactions from our characters, we really don't give this offer to essentially clean the world of all its supervillains too much thought. Maybe it's because it's veering too close with playing god (although arguably they also did the same thing in season five with 'righting' the timeline) or maybe because apparently the multiverse theory is in full play here, and that our SHIELD agents have been mucking around in an alternate timeline from day one in this season. Which is why Jiaying, Gordon and all the other characters can die before they are supposed to.

The thing is, though, this episode... is not the most interesting one. Nathaniel Malick is still kind of a bland villain other than his insistence on not being called 'sir'. Kora's ties and parallels to Daisy is neat considering how Daisy is easily one of the main characters in the show, but she also seems to be a rather obvious plot device character. One of the biggest problems that this season and the previous one really has is the lack of good pacing, the lack of having our characters actually sit down and consider just the sheer impact of what's going on. Sure, we get that nice little Mack montage and the Elena-therapy episode, and Daisy/Coulson in the time loop is neat-o... but as far as the big plot revelations go, things like Kora or the alternate timeline are basically dropped onto us as bombshells and sort of just handwaved aside as the characters scramble to save the day. It's like... didn't we have this whole little sub-story earlier in the season about half the team wanting to kill Wilfred Malick before his descendants can fuck people up? And now everyone's just 'nah, changing the timeline is the worst'? I wouldn't have minded it if there was an admission moment or whatever, but I dunno. 

    

Another thing that I'm not a big fan of is how the Fitz/Simmons story is being handled here. I'm not even frustrated that we're not getting answers, because at this point... I really don't care? Whether Fitz is dead all along, or if we roped in an alternate universe Fitz, or if he's a Chromicom or whatever, I dunno. It's been stretched out for so long and Malick trying to dig into Simmons's mind and just going through a bunch of flashbacks of them living together or whatever is just kind of utterly underwhelming. Henstridge and Caestecker have amazing chemistry as always, and are a delight to see finally interact with each other on screen, but their scenes really felt like it's lacking any sort of huge impact. The fact that Malick and Sibyl keeps insisting that no, Fitz is so important and will be the only thing that can screw up their plans also feels very lukewarm. 

Another thing that is rushed very quickly is Kora. The actress, Dianne Doan, is competent and charming enough, but she's just this ball of ambiguity that I really am not at any point convinced that she's actually willing to join SHIELD/ Sure, there's that moment with her seeing Jiaying's corpse, but again, Kora's been so one-dimensional that I was never ever swayed in thinking that she's anything but a Malick loyalist. Maybe if the show had given us more time to actually get to know her as a character beyond 'troubled teenager who is now a huge Malick fangirl', I would've questioned her loyalty to Malick more... but when, surprise, she betrays SHIELD and blows a hole in their base, it's not like it's anything surprising. (Also, Durant dies when Kora wants to prove that she's totally on the good guys side. Yawn.)

LMD!Coulson and May accepting who they are and making do of their new powers -- Coulson being able to 'read' digital and May finally reveling in abusing her emotion-reading powers -- is kind of a neat scene, but, again, like everything else here sort of happens a bit too quickly without the huge punch of an impact that the moments deserve. I really felt like that whole 'we are not who we used to be' sequence could've been given more oomph, or at least more of a follow up. 

Credit where credit's due, for all of my complaints about plot points not being given time to breathe, one of the strongest scenes in this episode is Daisy, Mack and Sousa on board their ship as they fly off into space and try and do something unpredictable, with Daisy confessing that Enoch's little prophecy-statement about how this is their last mission together has gotten her shook because she's not sure who she is without SHIELD. Mack and Sousa kind of palling around talking about Daisy is also fun, with Mack essentially playing the protective dad/big brother figure... and making fun of 'Quake' as a superhero name is actually kind of funny, as is Daisy pretending to not know how to fly a ship.

Speaking of moments that this episode does well? Kora's Iron-Fist-meets-Dragon-Ball-Z powers. I'm honestly not quite sure what her powers are beyond 'me blow shit up', but it sure looks pretty. Also pretty and actually impactful is the huge CGI explosion of the Triskelion as Sibyl summons in a gigantic Chromicom fleet to arrive and blow up SHIELD bases all over the Earth. Oh, and Simmons also loses all memory of who Fitz is from her little mind-jaunt with Malick. That's a fun setup, with our SHIELD agents up against the huge threat of the combined supervillains and a giant alien fleet. Next up is the two-part finale, and... well, the setup is neat, I guess. It's just could've really been better. Thankfully, as usual, Agents of SHIELD has the benefit of a pretty fun and charming cast, so the episode is fun to watch as rushed as it is. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Yo-Yo's callsign is '616', which, of course, is a reference to Earth-616, the multiversal designation for the 'mainstream' Marvel comics universe. 
• Among the various characters in the show's story that gets brought up, Grant Ward from the first three seasons is noted as one of the biggest targets they could pre-emptively take down. Dead characters Andrew Garner (Lash), Lincoln Campbell and Rosalind Price are all brought up. 
• The Triskelion from Captain America: The Winter Soldier totally gets blown the fuck up!

Agents of SHIELD S07E10 Review: Mommy Blues

Agents of SHIELD, Season 7, Episode 10: Stolen

Okay, after last episode's pretty fun but ultimately standalone time-loop episode, we sort of go back to the Inhumans-vs-Neo-Hydra storyline that was set up in episodes 7 and 8. And it's around this episode that I really did get a sense that the story is building up to something huge and not just either delaying or doing standalone episodes. And... and there's nothing essentially wrong with either of those, but for a season that's basically built up to be the grand finale or whatever, I've felt like a combination of the lukewarm Chronicrom threat and a lot of unanswered questions regarding the FitzSimmons or the Zephyr time-travel situation felt like they were just being dragged on and on for no real reason. 

And... well, Nathaniel Malick is apparently going around recruiting minions from time. It's cleverly all the seasons that don't quite get represented in season five's original finale, so we've got an evil (or, well, misguided) Inhuman in Kora and the extremely welcome and unexpected return of young John Garrett, played to the hilt as a SHIELD agent's equivalent of a frat-bro by Bill Paxton's son. Nathaniel Malick isn't like, bad or anything (especially compared to the Chromicoms), but he's kind of stilted and John Garrett hamming shit up is a very, very welcome addition to the ever-growing Clubhouse of Villains With No Supervillain Team Name. Malick seems to really like the word 'anarchy' but that doesn't quite fit as a supervillain team name either. 

It's a bit odd how Jiaying and Gordon seem so gung-ho with SHIELD basically disappearing and reappearing, but hey, they're here, and they are allies. Malick's group (I'm going to call them Neo-Hydra until we get a better name) has taken over Afterlife off-screen and is funneling Inhuman powers into Malick's goons. The show doesn't need to show off a huge scale war or anything, but this is one where I really wished they had shown more because from what we get, I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking that Afterlife had like, a population of maybe ten Inhumans tops. Also, RIP Li, whose powers are drained to fuel one of Malick's goons, Durant.

This also means that sending in actual Inhumans into Afterlife is dangerous because Malick will be hunting for them, so Jiaying and Daisy have to sit this mission out, while Gordon and Yo-Yo are only used sparingly. Of course, this ends up with Jiaying dropping the casual bombshell that Kora is her daughter, leading to Daisy having to confront May... and the clueless pre-trauma Jiaying about her stance on motherhood. All Jiaying can see from Daisy is that she's also a young girl that's hurting after some bad blood with her mother, and she doesn't quite realize just how much her own advice about 'trying to do the right things, but it comes out all wrong' ends up clicking with Daisy in a way. 

Speaking of emotional sequences with your own parent-that-is-much-younger, we get Deke talking to nana Simmons and we get a pretty interesting question from Deke, which seems to be the huge question that's bothering Simmmons. What if the time drive isn't actually communicating with Fitz? Simmons have been having faith more than anyone, but Daisy's description of Simmons' absolutely distraught reaction does raise some questions. What if Fitz was already dead, or incapacitated with some way? A very, very great scene. 

That whole emotional sequences with Daisy and Simmosn were great, but not so great is SHIELD's attempts to get into Afterlife. Apparently Sibyl and Malick have predicted it, and they quickly capture Gordon and funnel his powers into John Garrett. Who also gets to meet Coulson and ham shit up with "buddy!!!!" and being absolutely terrified of the potential of becoming an eyeless Inhuman like Gordon. 

Turns out that while Coulson, Mack and Yo-Yo were raiding Afterlife (and freeing like the six unnamed Inhuman extras), Malick takes teleporting Garrett and bamfs over to the Lighthouse. Everyone assumes that they are after Jiaying, which seems to be the case, but May is a bit overwhelmed by John Garrett's teleporting around, while Malick shows up and starts rambling, telling Jiaying that Daisy is her daughter from the future and the 'terrible mom' Daisy is talking about is actually her. The scene isn't completely unexpected, but there is a great twist of the knife when Malick brutally kills Jiaying in front of Daisy just to spite her. 

Also, turns out that Neo-Hydra's main plan wasn't even to get Jiaying, but rather Simmons. As Garret uses his powers to run circles around May and Sousa, he captures Simmons, evacs Malick from fighting a very angry Daisy, steals the Zephyr and buggers off. Speaking of something unexpected, in Afterlife Gordon gets killed (rather anticlimactically) while Kora seemingly surrenders and offers to help. I don't trust her at all, and the actress does play her as being pretty shady. We'll see. 

The episode ends with the revelation that Deke, who is obsessed with his walkman, not realizing that the Zephyr was raided and has taken off with him in it, while Malick reveals that the reason he captures SImmons is that he wants to find the location of Fitz from her brain, because according to the Timestream Fitz is the only factor that will cause him to fail in his ambiguous plan of world domination and timeline-shattering.  

Also, while Sousa does lampshade it a bit earlier when he tells Daisy to talk to Jiaying, the timeline's pretty much already fucked, huh? Some of the changes SHIELD has done might be handwaved with 'well, maybe the end result is the same if the specifics are different'. Like the death of Mack's parents, or the Lighthouse being active years before our SHIELD got to it, or Enoch being stuck in the history, or Wilfred Malick surviving a couple of extra years... but now actual characters who are involved in things we see have clearly befallen different fates. Jiaying and Gordon are dead, while John Garrett knows a whole lot of future knowledge and has superpowers now. 

Ultimately, more of a setup episode with a couple of huge twists near the end, but I've never actually held too much faith about this season being 'the untold adventures of SHIELD throughout history' or whatever. Which, admittedly, would be pretty cool if we had one where they influenced and 'righted' history in some way or other, but at the same time this storyline of them basically fighting an alternate timeline history or whatever is certainly a pretty neat one as well. I do know that I am far more invested with this eclectic group of villains in Malick, Garrett, Kora and immobile-Sibyl moreso than I ever did with the Chromicoms. We'll just see if the final couple of episodes will conclude the story well. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• John Garrett, of course, is the main villain in the first season of Agents of SHIELD, played by late actor Bill Paxton. His son James Paxton takes over the role as a younger John Garrett here. 
• Garrett brings up Coulson's first death at the hands of Loki in The Avengers movie, although he doesn't quite know Loki by name. 
• The Triskelion, most prominently featured in the movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier, shows up here.
• We get another "discovery requires experimentation" line, a reference to Daniel Whitehall's catchphrase from the second season. 

Agents of SHIELD S07E09 Review: Obligatory Groundhog Day Episode

Agents of SHIELD, Season 7, Episode 9: As I Always Have Been

So we have a Groundhog Day/time loop episode? Did Agents of SHIELD never do this before? I guess I got Legends of Tomorrow on the mind, huh.

Anyway, this episode is pretty top-notch. Ultimately it doesn't really serve to amend my opinion that this final season could've done better with a tighter pacing, but this is certainly a very solid episode. After the events of the previous episode, the time-drive has fucked up and shunted Zephyr One into some weird timey-wimey nebula dimension. The episode makes a nice way to segue into Daisy discovering all of this seemingly for the first time... and then we get the revelation that as far as LMD Phil Coulson is concerned, they've done this a couple hundred times. Again, I really do like the way that the episode tells this to us, and the exasperated ha-ha-I-am-so-tired-and-pretending-to-be-cheerful "this guyyy!" delivery that Clark Gregg makes as he explains to Daisy for like the twelfth time that Daisy and Coulson are the only ones to be able to remember the time loops (because they start the loop unconscious... don't question the video game logic too much); that Coulson remembers everything because he's a robot; and that Daisy remembers everything but forgets them if she dies at any point in the loop. And almost everything happens identically to how they do in previous loops with the only difference being the timer counting down as they reach closer and closer to the event horizon of the timey-wimey dimension.

There's a combined mystery of how they can get out of the time-loop, but also the fact that the only real way that they can do it is to finally, finally broach the question of what the fuck has happened to Fitz in-between season 6 and 7 since Simmons has that weird implant that causes her to forget where Fitz is. And also someone seems to be deliberately sabotaging them, but who among the SHIELD buddy-buddy team is out there willing to doom everyone on-board into ambiguous time-related cessation of existence? The mystery is pretty fun, and best of all? The episode is so dang funny. I'm not sure just what makes it work, but the performances of everyone, how some of the other characters react to Daisy's time-loop talk without batting an eyelid, and even the fun little jump-cuts and casual 'oh we just got beaten up so easily by Enoch' all work out perfectly.

Speaking of which, yeah, Enoch is the somewhat-unwilling instigator of the murders in Zephyr One, because he's got a subconscious routine that tells him to protect the secret of where Fitz is... even if it means killing everyone. Even if it means killing Simmons. Thankfully, there's the time-loop to reverse every single time that Enoch succeeds, whether it be when he outsmarts everyone, or when he beats up everyone. Ultimately, though, after many many timeloops and in literally the final iteration of the loop before their destruction, Enoch proves that the sweet, lovable emotionally-flat alien robot is still everyone's best friend, and we have a genuinely great and touching moment as Daisy and Coulson stick around with Enoch after he rips his robo-heart out and is just waiting for his death. A great scene that is emphasized because of Enoch's inherent lack of over-the-top emotions. The fact that Enoch says everything he says with a calm and factual demeanor makes a lot of his existential questioning about fear and the uncertainty of death hit home a lot more, as is his sacrifice. Where the humans are still wringing their fingers at essentially sacrificing one of their own, Enoch just calmly and efficiently rips out his heart with no fuss because that's what he hopes his buddies would also do for him. What a good friend.

It's just such a shame that Enoch himself has been criminally underused in this season, relegated to 'ha ha he got left behind in time but it's okay because he's an immortal robot' jokes and being kept off-screen most of the time, but he's been a likable character and easily the best part of season six (some would argue the only good part).

In addition to the obviously great emotions that revolve around the death of Enoch as well as the fun madcap and wink-wink-fourth-wall-leaning writing (the logo shows up twice as part of the time loop!), there are still also a couple of great moments here. The show is still extremely oblique with Fitz's fate and I feel like it's going to be a thing that will simply be saved for the final episode or something, but Elizabeth Henstridge gives us a great performance as Simmons gets an emotional breakdown when she finally remembers, but the urgency of their timeloop situation means we (or the 'restored' Simmons after the time loop) don't get to learn any of the information that she learns. Honestly, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if we learn that Fitz is dead all along or transformed into a computer or some shit, but at this point... eh. As much as the writers basically stretch the 'star crossed lovers doomed to never be together' aspect about Fitz and Simmons, I really do feel like the writers wouldn't give the two of them a 'bad ending'.

Best of all, however, has to be Daisy and Coulson. The two of them have always had some of the best chemistry in the show, with a surrogate father-daughter vibe going on, and they just play well together. Whether it's them cracking jokes at each other revolving the time loop, making jokes about vinyls and record-skipping, or the surprisingly raw moment of LMD Coulson just ranting about his existential crisis regarding his fate and life as a Life Model Decoy and how "having to watch everyone he cares for die over and over" is not just a reflection of the time-loop, but also his eventual fate as a robot that will outlive May, Daisy and the rest of the team. And ultimately Coulson essentially gives himself the Coulson Speech (we haven't heard one of that in a while) when he talks to fellow robot Enoch about the place of someone immortal among their far more mortal human friends.

Also, apparently Daisy and Sousa are a thing. It... it honestly kind of came out of nowhere. Sure, Daisy and Sousa had that whole thing where they shared a mission or two together in the Nathaniel Malick thing, and Sousa was watching over Daisy in the loop... but I dunno, I feel like their little romance came literally out of nowhere beyond Sousa having a type for main character protagonist superhero women. It's like... I like Sousa from the Agent Carter TV show, and the actor is sure charming, but the random romance feels like some typical 'everyone needs a love interest' typical early Agents of SHIELD move.

Overall, though, other than a couple of hiccups (and my general dissatisfaction with the pacing of the season as a whole) this is a very top-notch episode. 

Agents of SHIELD S07E08 Review: Return to Afterlife

Agents of SHIELD, Season 7, Episode 8: After, Before

So I guess this season of Agents of SHIELD will take a form similar to the fifth season (a.k.a. the other one that I will keep referring to as the intended conclusion of the show) where we basically take some of the best hits of the show's seven-season-long history and build up stories from it. That's pretty cool, and the Inhuman community of Afterlife is certainly one of the best parts of the first two seasons. Say what you will, but it's easily one of my favourite parts of the show, and, honestly? Despite featuring mostly original characters they did a far, far better job at introducing the Inhumans as this exotic secluded tribe of superhumans with eccentric customs far, far better than the trainwreck of their actual Inhumans show. 

With the previous show being a bit of a bizarre distraction with Mack and Deke stranded and parodying horror B-movies, "After, Before" is probably one of the first episodes in this season that really felt like it was building up to some larger story instead of just sort of jumping and sort of bouncing from one episode concept to the next. And sure, it's been fun, but I for one am happy to get into the meat of the season. 

Of course, there's still a bunch of obvious 'plot-phlebotonium' stuff going on that pervades this entire season, with the Zephyr's increasingly unpredictable time-jumps and Simmons being utterly baffled at everything that's going on being something that's honestly kind of a huge shrug from me. I don't hate it, but the fact that it's basically a way for the show writers to just split the cast apart into whichever time periods and sets is kind of clear. Sure, I'm sure we'll be building up to the huge Fitz/Simmons/Enoch twist that'll also involve the finale of the previous season, and there's a revelation there, I'm sure, but at the same time it also feels very artificial in a way. Oh, and adding to this? The time-drive is busted, teleported between dimensions or planes or something, and only Elena regaining her Slingshot powers can really fix this. Okay, sure, that's a neat catalyst to finally address Elena basically not being able to access her Inhuman powers for the past seven episodes or so. 

The only person that they know that's an authority on Inhumans... is Daisy's future mom, Jiaying, which means we get the glorious return of Dichen Lachman! Elena and May go off to Afterlife to talk with Jiaying, all ware of the Inhumans' distrust of outsiders, while the rest of the crew... sort of have a bit of a character moment while they kinda await their doom. Coulson's probably got the best scene here, with all the talk about the meaning of his existence as a robot, and his interactions with his surrogate daughter Daisy is always welcome. And the fact that throughout all of this Sousa is just going "parachutes! We need our parachutes ready!" is extremely charming. The 'I don't want to know' face that he has when Simmons talks about jumping off of a plane without a parachute is hilarious, too.

But, of course, the main focus of the episode is still the Afterlife shenanigans. After Elena proves herself to be an Inhuman by touching a Diviner without harm (a hilarious scene), Jiaying and her small cabal of '80's Inhumans in the Afterlife (including a curly-haired young teenaged Gordon!) are utterly warm and helpful. They keep saying things like having to keep the community secret and there's a constant tension on May's part since she knows what Jiaying is able to do in the future (this Jiaying's future, but May's past. Time travel!)... but turns out that pre-Hydra-mutilation Jiaying is utterly helpful. It's honestly the same question that we ask from Freddy Malick earlier this season, except unlike the one-dimensional Malick patriarch, Jiaying is a character that has more impact due to, well, having a larger impact on the show itself. 

Jiaying quickly surmises that Elena's problem isn't with her body or alien toxins or whatever, but rather with her mind. And realizing that May has empathic powers, the attempt at meditation (as embarrassed as the two badasses end up being) ends up devolving into May and Elena sparring against each other, with May getting flashes to Elena's mind. And there are a couple of interesting parts that really causes Elena to be emotionally traumatized -- the Shrike infection, sure. The death of the girl from the Lighthouse. Elena being forced to kill Ruby (a moment that I did criticize about season 5, since Elena never dealt with the fallout, so yay for that). But there's also a memory from Elena's childhood, where Elena's speedy theft to save a family heirloom ends up indirectly riling up the debt collector that shot her uncle dead. 

It sure is a powerful scene and is thematic with Elena 'freezing' and being unable to run, yet also kind of feels artificially inserted and feels like it came out of nowhere. I kinda would've preferred that Tess or Ruby's deaths were the real catalyst for this. Still, everything is executed pretty well and Cordova-Buckley gets an admittedly rare chance to show off some acting skills instead of being a snarky badass.

There's also a running storyline in Afterlife that... maybe it's an effect of reading a lot of X-Men comics recently, but it's kind of a pretty basic premise. One of the younger members in Afterlife, a girl named Kora, keeps trying to flee and seems to have some problem controlling her powers and there's always this hint that Jiaying and her main thug Li (hey that is Byron Mann!) are being evil overlords that are confining Kora and are one step away from killing her. Li sure is, but Jiaying, despite all the hints that she's actually evil... turns out to take a far more mentor-like quality and even wants to try and use the information aobut Elena losing her powers to remove Kora's uncontrollable and extremely destructive powers.

Kora ends up actually running away, stealing Li's gun, and is about to shoot herself dead. It's a very dark scene (and I assume what happened in the 'proper' timeline, since Kora never showed up in Agents of SHIELD)... but she ends up being interrupted by Nathaniel Malick, who knows where Kora will be, and ends up sweet-talking her into accepting her powers and using it against her oppressors. A very, very dark turn from what would otherwise be an uplifting moment for an Inhuman accepting that she's not a monster and her powers can be used for good... and honestly mirrors Daisy's own interactions with Jiaying in season two. Except where 2015-era Jiaying at least had noble intentions in tutoring Daisy... Nathaniel Malick clearly is all slimy and evil. Nathaniel and Kora end up attacking Afterlife, and we get the revelation that Kora isn't just a girl in the community, but Jiaying's own daughter. Our heroes escape, and Nathaniel's little army (Hydra? Neo-Hydra?) ends up taking over Afterlife. Or, well, the half-dozen or so extras they managed to cast for the scene, which feels very underwhelming. 

This plot point is kind of interesting, but we have to put a pin on it because while Gordon and Jiaying survive via convenient teleporting, the two of them sort of go into hiding because the rest of SHIELD end up having to time-jump once more. Elena ends up actually getting past her mental block and develops her power even further -- she realizes that it's all been symbolic, that her Slingshot/Yo-Yo powers is a sign that she's tied to her past (and why she keeps returning to the same spot) and now she can just super-speed in one direction without bouncing back. So she fixes the Time Drive. I'm not going to lie, it's honestly pretty cheesy (and, again, Elena's traumatic I-caused-Uncle-Ben's-death storyline kind of comes out of nowhere) but Cordova-Buckley really sells all her scenes in this episode and I really can't help but like it. 

...and then the Zephyr time-jumps-in-a-time-jump anyway. Whoops!

Overall... I do have mixed feelings about this episode. The Elena/May stuff is simultaneously an ass-pull and also some of the best character work to come out of the season. I do really like the Afterlife/Inhumans storyline, and Kora is kind of interesting, except it all feels like it's being rushed and only the bare minimum of exposition and plot development is being done. I dunno... we've had a lot of episodes earlier in the season that I feel could've been spent building up Nathaniel Malick as a villain (he's certainly more interesting than the Chromicoms, sure, but his personality is just a generic Hydra prick) or building up some of the plotlines that are building up here. Then again, I'm not sure if the Afterlife/Inhumans stuff will stick for more than two or three episodes, so maybe it doesn't matter? A solid, entertaining watch, even if the season at this point is kind of a mess in terms of pacing. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Jiaying, Gordon and the Afterlife storyline are all explored in season two of this show, although Kora the powers-are-too-great girl and Li the knife-making Inhuman is original to this season. 
• Simmons falling out of a plane without a parachute is actually a nod to one of the very first episodes of Agents of SHIELD, where she fell out of a plane without one and was rescued by Grant Ward. Remember when Ward was a sickeningly charming gentleman-spy-man?
• The necklace that Elena stole in her flashback is, I believe, the same necklace that gets passed around the cast in season three and ultimately was vaporized with Lincoln when he died. 

Agents of SHIELD S07E07 Review: Ghost in the Machine

Agents of SHIELD, Season 7, Episode 7: The Totally Excellent Adventures of Mack and the D

So that went bizarre real quick. I get that the previous couple of episodes have been kind of... just solid spy/superhero/sci-fi stuff but not a whole ton that really jumps out at you. So we get some really Legends of Tomorrow style zaniness in this episode as Mack and Deke are stuck in 1982 and had to wait for twenty months for the rest of the crew to return. And apparently, they've been up to some hijinks here. Again, not really something I would expect from the final season, the final hurrah of a show... but it's still kind of entertaining. Especially the second half. Not to knock the first half, with Mack being depressed, growing a beard, making model kits of cars and shutting Deke out of his life; or the conversation about Mack telling Deke what a fraud he is for basically taking songs from the future and using it to fuel his career... but the rest of the episode is actually dang hilarious. 

So, to surmise... Sibyl and Coulson both survived because they are, well, computer programs and this is a superhero show. Of course they do. But Coulson's return and being hooked up to a VCR is presented to us (and Mack) as such a low-key event; while Sibyl's return feels like something out of a hilarious old-school B-monster-movie with a hilariously silly human that she manipulated into building a hilariously retro-looking robot that looks like a one-off enemy from one of the older seasons Star Trek or Doctor Who or something. It's great. And, of course, as Sibyl and her army of retro robots attack Deke's neo-SHIELD organization, we get some hilariously over-the-top grisly black comedy as the one member Deke scouts out just to be a drummer (and his girlfriend) gets hilariously killed with way too much blood as the Chromicom hunter goes "I am lost". Again, very zany, very loony, and approximately fifteen times more entertaining in the span of ten minutes than the Chromicoms have ever been in one and a half seasons. The fact that we actually get a hilarious scene near the end of the surviving Sibyl robot slowly making its way down stairs via side-ramps is pretty fun, too. 

The rest of the episode, though... the camp does distract me from it some, but it's basically a way to get Mack to mourn his loss and go through an episode focused on him without it being too much of a downer, I suppose. Mack has kind of been one of the more static characters among the long-runners, so it's nice to have this. The zaniness of Deke's weird neo-SHIELD (presumably for time-travel reasons, they can't contact the real SHIELD) band is kinda neat, but ultimately Foreign Spy Chick; Other Chick; Comedy Duo and Guy That Dies First are just kind of there. Again, I can understand why because they're mostly here just as a gag for to fill in the 'ha ha wacky team of agents and characters' of the episode's lampoon, but none of them really rise beyond being one-note tropes. 

Deke himself is an interesting character. I've expressed a massive amount of frustration about him -- he starts off as a pretty irritating character who somehow finds himself on the side of the protagonists, and the only reason that I don't rant about 24/7 because his actor is charming (and in later seasons he's relegated to background duty). Sort of like a less offensive Danny Bland. And it's kind of interesting that the show is trying to do something with him and, as Deke himself points out, he's trying to grow somewhat, actually trying to put the mission and SHIELD and his friendship with Mack first instead of just making a self-serving business with knowledge of the future. That's neat. 

Ultimately, the episode ends with Sibyl-in-a-VCR and a somehow-alive Nathaniel Malick getting the time-predicting-plot-device-cube. Okay, so I was wrong. We're not done with the Chromicoms just yet, but at least by virtue of having an army of B-movie robot mooks, they are visually more interesting if nothing else. I'm genuinely still not sure where the season is going, which is kind of a shame since I really would've liked to say that the show ended in a grand hurrah. It sure is more entertaining than the previous season, but I kinda wished that we got something more. 

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'. 

Agents of SHIELD S07E04 Review: Continuity Recap

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, Season 7, Episode 4: Out of the Past

This one was pretty neat! I keep complaining in the past three episodes of this season that there's simply kind of not a lot of content to carry the whole episode, essentially relying on the gimmick of 'hey, look, it's an Area 51 episode' or 'hey, look, 1931 gangsters'. But "Out of the Past" actually goes full in with the film noir parody by filming almost the entire thing in black and white, and even having Coulson go on internal monologues throughout the episode... that is how you do a throwback homage. The past couple of episodes just have something missing because, well, without a particularly inventive episodic plot and without interesting villains (the Chromicoms are terribly one-note), you really need the strength of your homages to carry the episode. Hell, the show even gives us a cheeky explanation, that this is LMD Coulson recapping the story to himself as he is repaired from the damage from last episode's EMP blast, with 'internal monologue' even spoken verbatim as a symptom.

And this one not only has a fantastic film noir homage, it also utilizes Daniel Sousa in a far, far better way than the previous episode did. We actually fully commit into more than just the black and white imagery, but even the story itself feels like something out of film noir with the mysterious MacGuffin package and corpses floating in pools and a long monologue telling us 'how we got there'. It's far from being perfect, but it's so much more enjoyable than the past couple of episodes that I was extremely hooked.

Even moreso, the episode is a far, far more poignant storyline than episode two's "should we kill Freddy Malick even though he hasn't done anything?" dilemma. With Freddy Malick in 1931, he's a (mostly) innocent man who's a low-level Hydra goon at worst, and the crime deserving death is something that is going to be tossed to his descendants. Meanwhile, by doing nothing and preserving history this time around, they'll let Daniel Sousa -- a somewhat bumbling but ultimately good man -- die. As the characters point out, it's a completely different feeling when you're not considering whether to kill an evil man, but whether to stand around and let a good man die.

The mission is relatively simple. They're going to deliver a package to Howard Stark, and Coulson manages to sweet-talk Sousa into thinking that they're part of the CIA or something. But Coulson and the rest of SHIELD are operating under the knowledge that this is the day that Daniel Sousa dies, becoming not only the first SHIELD martyr, but also someone that inspired many other SHIELD agents, Coulson himself included. Not telling them the Hydra conspiracy is one thing. Letting Sousa get shot and killed like a bitch? That's a whole different thing. You could make a long ethical argument, but ultimately Mack and Coulson decide that they are going to 'bend' history a bit in a way that doesn't send ripples through time. They switched Sousa with Coulson, who can take getting shot and floating in a pool since he's an LMD, and later took Sousa out of time and plonked him in the Zephyr, a man truly removed from time. Turns out we're getting a new crew member for this ride, then!

It's not super-duper huge of a twist, but, again, the execution and the commitment to a lot of noir tropes work very well, even the twist showcasing the revelation of Coulson and Mack's trick to fake Sousa's death. And Sousa later learning about Hydra's infiltration of everything, and his utter bafflement and his attempt to take time-traveling SHIELD agents from the future in stride, is pretty neat. I do like that the show does acknowledge that Sousa's at least familiar with the concept of wacky sci-fi from his own tenure in Agent Carter, so there's that.

Unlike the previous episodes, too, this episode had a lot of great B-plots. May fritzes out again, but she, Simmons and Elena figure out what's wrong, exactly, with May. Turns out that as a side-effect of her resurrection, May doesn't have emotions... but will get overwhelmed with the emotions of humans when she touches them. Which is why she got overloaded with fear while evacuating Area 51's staff last episode, but has no problem punching Chromicoms. I'm not entirely sure where we're going here, but it's a neatly explored scene, at least. Deke also finds himself in a B-plot where he's captured by Freddy Malick's people when investigating a house, and ends up sweet-talking himself out of Malick's grasp. It's... it's interesting? I guess he gets to see the face of the now criminal boss of the young man he spared in 1931? It's a neat one, but this is mostly just setup for Freddy Malick making allies with one of the evil Chromicoms.

Speaking of emotionless people... poor, poor Enoch! He has been spending the past 20 years being a bartender in Koenig's bar in a tacky hawaiian shirt. Sure, he doesn't outwardly show emotions, but he's clearly elated to see his friends return... except it's a running gag throughout the episode that all the SHIELD guys ever call him for is to make use of his period-appropriate 'connect me to the Zephyr' machine. It's funny the first one or two times, but then you start to hear the sadness and even desperation in Enoch's voice as he eventually laments that he is "alone in this world, as (he) has always been". No one even offers to pick him up, and he gets left behind by SHIELD as they time-jump again with a dismissive 'he's a robot, he'll be fine'. Poor Enoch!

Ultimately, easily the strongest episode in this final season of Agents of SHIELD so far. Not that the past couple of episodes have been terrible, they've just been... kind of there!

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Howard Stark, himself also a major character in Agent Carter, gets mentioned and is part of the delivery mission Sousa and Coulson find themselves in. 
• The Wall of Valor in the SHIELD base is seen here, and apparently Daniel Sousa (...not Captain America?) was the first name on it. 

Agents of SHIELD S07E03 Review: Picking Up on Agent Carter

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, Season 7, Episode 3: Alien Commies From The Future!

Yo, what? Okay, and I can't believe I geeked out over the whole Johann Schmidt thing last episode. Turns out that the MCU movies aren't the only things that Agents of SHIELD is tying together, because after half a decade of the show being utterly ignored, Agent Carter finally got a nod! And I know, that show's version of Edwin Jarvis did cameo in Avengers: Endgame, but the fact that this episode is essentially a 'distant finale' for the cancelled, forgotten Agent Carter TV show is an amazing one. And to think that I thought that this was just going to be yet another period-appropriate hijinks episode! I mean, look at the title, for crying out loud!

Again, just like the previous two episodes, the actual episodic plot of "Alien Commies From the Future" is... middling at best. This one feels a bit more concrete, but it's another show of the Chromicoms wanting to wipe out SHIELD by sabotaging an ion fusion reactor in Area 51, Project: Helios. A very simple and respectable supervillain plot. Meanwhile, our heroes have to stop it by infiltrating Area 51, with Jemma Simmons cosplaying as fellow British-accented SHIELD agent, Peggy Carter. That alone, I thought, was going to be the big wink-wink-continuity-nod moment of the episode, only for the episode to completely blindside me by bringing in not just a character from Agent Carter, but also a bunch of neat baggage that I'm going to assume is going to lead to some of the hanging plot threads of that show being wrapped up. Welcome, Daniel Sousa and your badass cane.

It's a shame that good old Daniel Sousa ends up fucking everything up. As Simmons and Coulson try to figure out who the LMD in the base is through a very hilarious montage of being dicks to random scientists, Sousa shows up to talk to "Agent Carter"... only to, of course, recognize that Simmons is an impostor. On one hand, it makes Sousa look like a complete putz. On the other hand... very on brand for Sousa. Daisy later shows up pretending to be the CIA in hunt for Hydra, and we learn that at the very least, Sousa is somewhat suspicious that Hydra has infiltrated SHIELD. Good on you, Sousa.

Ultimately, though, Sousa sort of gets left in the wayside as more important things end up taking precedence. An evacuation is forced to go underway anyway, LMD Coulson fights a Chromicon and both robots get fried by the EMP, Yo-Yo and May both get hit with their own respective PTSD and fucked up in the first half of the fight... all pretty neat stuff, but perhaps not quite that interesting. Again, a good chunk of the plot is pretty basic sci-fi stuff. The highlight is still in seeing Coulson and Simmons hamming things up in trying to figure out who's the Chromicom infiltrator, as well as Sousa thinking he's in a regular spy drama only to be caught up in, well, crazy time-traveling spy-infiltrating alien-robots stuff. The good thing is, Sousa has captured LMD Coulson, so we'll be having him for another episode, at least.

It doesn't help that the B-plot is kind of shrug-worthy, I feel. Mack and Elena fail to extract any information from their hostage because he's racist. They send Deke in, and then they sort of... toss him out and he goes crazy and runs into a diner screaming the title of the episode? I dunno. I just felt like it was kind of a weak joke, and ran on for too long without adding anything to the episode.

Ultimately, as enjoyable as it is, this episode is kind of a slow one, and I will fully admit that if you didn't squee at Daniel Sousa's unexpected cameo as I did, this would be kind of a drag of an episode.

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• In addition to the obvious nod to Agent Peggy Carter from the MCU movies and her own show, the Agent Carter TV show gets multiple mentions in this episode. Major character Daniel Sousa makes an appearance here. Other aspects of Carter and Sousa's adventure through their own TV series, namely Isodyne Energy, the Council of Nine and Hugh Jones, are all name-dropped at some points of the episode. 

Agents of SHIELD S07E02 Review: Surprise Tie-In

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, Season 7, Episode 2: Know Your Onions

Okay, I guess that's what you do when you are unashamed of referencing the long, long continuity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and its on-off 'is this part of the same universe' TV shows). "Know Your Onions" basically ends up throwing our cast, still stranded in 1931, into dealing with basically the formation of the Hydra that would menace not just the Agents of SHIELD in their own show, but also the MCU heroes in The Winter Soldier. After last season being more or less divorced from the obligatory tie-in to Infinity War/Endgame, and the fact that more and more of the other supposedly-MCU shows like Runaways, Cloak and Dagger and the final Netflix seasons all had nothing to do with any other show, I really wouldn't have blamed Agents of SHIELD's final season for absolutely ignoring MCU's continuity and doing their own thing.

But here we are anyway, in the final season of Agents of SHIELD, and the show just oh so casually mentions Red Skull and Abraham Erskine, as seen in a movie released some time ago; and how Gideon Malick would rise to power in a couple of years, as seen five seasons ago.

And there's a huge drama, here, the same drama that plagues most fiction dealing with time-travel. Sure, maybe our heroes don't quite get the chance to kill Hitler (or Red Skull, in this case). But they have a way to severely prevent history from happening. Without proto-Hydra obtaining their super soldier serum, Johann Schmidt wouldn't become Red Skull and Hydra wouldn't be formed. And sure, you could argue that it would mean that SHIELD itself won't be formed... but what about all the people that Hydra would've hurt in their way? This ultimately comes to a head with poor Deke being trapped between two orders. Daisy tells him to take the shot and blow Freddy Malick to hell and damn the consequences as long as Hydra isn't formed, while Mack keeps them focused on target and not become the very time-changing criminals they're trying to prevent. (After all, two seasons ago they already had to deal with a 'wrong' timeline)

Ultimately the episode itself is very... simple. It's more period drama as Mack and Deke try to figure out what Freddy Malick's deal is and the fact that he's basically a (mostly) friendly face instead of this ominous 'the sire of Hydra'. We get to see Koenig Senior (100% the best part of the episode) be recruited into SHIELD, essentially by Coulson's team, and it's always welcome to see Patton Oswald joke around. And there's an obligatory shoot-out scene between the Chromicom cops and SHIELD. Ultimately, history is preserved, but not without cost. The Zephyr can only 'skim' time windows so there's a finite amount of time before it jumps through time, and poor Enoch couldn't run to the Zephyr in time and gets stranded in 1931 at the end of the episode. Thankfully, he's an alien robot and he ends up getting a job at Koenig's bar, clearly helping to support the dude in creating SHIELD and giving him a chance to show up in other time periods.

There are a bunch of B-plots that run throughout the episode, too. Yo-Yo is feeling off about her powers and some of the characters also realize it. She just 'froze', and whether it's part of the Shrike infection leaving some lasting damage, or something psychological, Yo-Yo isn't the most reliable Inhuman at the moment. May, too, is also out of sorts. Part of it is clearly her outright disdain and spite at the LMD Coulson, but she's also not really behaving like herself, and almost... devoid of emotions, I guess? Like she just wants to throw herself into the mission and damn the consequences? Granted, that sounds like regular Melinda May, but maybe that's why it doesn't feel too different? There's also the show dodging the question on how long Enoch and Simmons have been preparing for this, too. I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point, we get the revelation that Simmons is also an LMD or something.

I dunno. This one was a fun watch but not one that really ended up feeling all that impactful when I sat down to write a review of it. There are a lot of neat, smaller moments... but I don't think that this episode ended up being memorable on its own; it's just something to bridge episode 1 and 3.

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Various aspects of Captain America: The First Avenger gets name-dropped here. The Super Soldier serum, the scientist Abraham Erskine, and the original Hydra leader, Red Skull/Johann Schmidt. The fact that Hydra would be burrowing their way into SHIELD and other organizations, as seen in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the first season of Agents of SHIELD, is also referenced. 

Agents of SHIELD S07E01: What if...

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. 

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?