Welcome back to our weekly recap of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, this week with 90% less Inhumans! Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Lets find out! (Spoiler alert: it’s not a good thing.)
1. Oh, there’s Ward
Missing from the premiere, this episode brought Ward back into the fold as the new head of Hydra. Re-building the organization from the ground up after the devastation the terrorist group saw between Civil War, two seasons of SHIELD and Age of Ultron, Ward’s new Hydra is for cool hip young people — and who cooler and more hip to recruit than Baron Von Strucker’s song, Justin Bieber Von Strucker. I do like that they’re keeping the Von Strucker legacy alive; the character’s role in Age of Ultron was a tremendous letdown, at least for me personally, and if they’re really going do a Secret Warriors storyline on SHIELD then a Strucker seems like a pre-requisite. Hopefully this ends up being something interesting, and not just a cop out to delay actually killing Ward. Which, you know, should happen by the end of the season; mid-season finale if we’re lucky.
2. Oh, there’s May
Similarly missing from the premiere, May has returned with her father character actor James Hong. Hong was a fun choice to pull in the show for at least one episode, and while this really doesn’t give us much insight into May so much as it does a reason to stall character development for an hour, Hong is always a pleasure to have on screen. My complaint remains, though — nothing happened with this story that couldn’t have been resolved in a much shorter sequence, and this ultimately illustrates the main flaw SHIELD has always had: focus and pace. Since we really don’t get much new information about May from this interaction, there’s not a lot of added value to it. It’s a shame, though, as I was hoping May’s return would be a bit more impactful.
3. Now You’re Thinking with Portals!
As we learn this episode, the Monolith is not so much something taken out of 2001 as it is a strange portal to another world. The premise of how it works is interesting, if not very well done; the opening sequence of the episode seemed rather pointless and I feel like we got Jemma back too quickly (though it’s great to have her back on the team), so the entire sequence doesn’t feel particularly earned. That being said, if we compare the speed of which it took us to get through this story (I imagined we’d be dragging it out for another 6 episodes), I’m actually somewhat impressed; while it may limit what we’ll learn about what’s on the other side and it certainly makes it seem like we won’t get any weird fun outer space adventures, you have to give some credit here that the show wasted no time in transitioning between a weird liquid stone to something that could help fuel the plot.
This does, however, bring us to my main thought from last night’s episode:
4. Oh. Is That It?
The Season 3 premiere, while it had it’s flaws, set a good precedent for what I was hoping we could expect from the latest season: good, weird, comic book flavored fun. And no sooner did we have half-naked porcupine man on TV then we get to spend the entire next episode with a small budget, our primary focus of attention being distilled down to a single set-piece in the world’s first subwoofer. I’m glad Jemma was rescued, but this episode was pretty dull compared to the season opener — and I’m hoping that this was the only instance of a filler episode we’ll get this season, because at this point SHIELD‘s competition is so much more fast paced (pun intended) it’s easy to see how our attention will waver here if the showrunners fail to get to the point again.
5. There and Back Again
Next week teases a return to what this season promised us: Inhumans on the run and the world dealing with this new race of people running around in the wild. Seeing as the Inhumans are the main plot point of the season (ostensibly, anyway), I do have to wonder how the Inhumans tie more directly into this episodes narrative. We get a lot about the Monolith being a portal, and we have to remember that it was a big deal last season to the Inhumans that Daisy’s mother used to be in charge of; they wanted this portal assumedly to access whatever is on the other side. So what is on that planet? What could possibly be of relevance? And how to the Kree fit into this, if the portal really is related to them?
The portal being destroyed by episode’s end is an interesting decision, because it leaves us assumedly at a stopping point for its role in the season. Yet, there’s so many unanswered questions about its purpose, where it goes and why it was there in the first place; it had been around and active since the 1800s at least, so how could it suddenly and so easily become destroyed from a little vibration? With luck we haven’t seen the last of the portal or the other planet, and I can only hope there’s some great secret pay-off in store.
