The journey through the Framework continues! Daisy’s got her powers back, the team is coming back together, and Fitz is getting more and more evil. So let’s take a look at the latest episode and see how it goes.
1. May’s Redemption
We all knew May would be switching to the side of SHIELD sooner or later, but this episode did it quite well. First we get a good old fashioned shootout (wherein she pulled a really nice flip-and-shoot trick), then we get some character-driven revelations.
“When an enemy sacrifices his life for yours, you have to question if you’re fighting on the right side,” she says, making the dramatic moment in last week’s episode all the more poignant. It was clear she was already torn after learning the building she ordered an airstrike on had children inside, but since it also resulted in Mace’s death, she’s got a new layer of guilt on top of her already massive stack of things to feel guilty about.
Speaking of, Mace’s death is probably another thing that’s going to torment the characters responsible after they leave the framework.
2. Virtual People are Good People
Isn’t it nice when a game gives you helpful NPCs that provide plot-relevant information? That’s essentially what Trip and Ward are. In fact, this is as close to a redemption arc as Ward’s ever going to get; he gets to prove that he’s not like the Ward from the real world, and even Daisy admits that there might have been some good in him for this version of Ward to be such a good guy.
As for Trip, he’s the first one to just accept the story about there being another world. Though one does have to wonder: how did Radcliffe and AIDA know exactly how to program Trip? There’s a lot of nuance there that they shouldn’t be able to get just from old SHIELD records and AIDA’s algorithms.
Hell, I’ll just suspend my disbelief in this case, because it really is nice to have Trip back, temporary though it may be.
3. Meanwhile, in the Real World…
Well, I totally forgot about The Superior and his robot body. He’s… not really serving too much of a purpose, other than giving AIDA someone to talk to when she’s unplugged from the Framework. He’s just as pointlessly homicidal as ever, though the scene does establish that there’s a threat coming from outside the Framework as well as within.
We do learn some interesting things about her programming, at least – since she’s programmed to protect the lives of the people in the Framework (so long as they don’t compromise the Framework itself), she can’t even program anything else to harm them. That’s the Three Laws of Robotics kicking in, I suppose (or it would be, if Radcliffe had remembered to program her with those freaking laws in the first place).
4. AIDA’s Pinocchio Complex
AIDA (or Ophelia, if you prefer) has had some interesting character development. We know she resented quite a bit about her artificial existence (again, programming her to feel pain was probably not the best of ideas), and is trying to break free in the Framework. But now we learn she wants a physical, flesh-and-blood body, so she can be a real girl.
In short, she has a Pinocchio Complex.
Not to say there’s anything wrong with that, especially since it’s consistent with her character and it’ll let her step around her programming. Probably, at least. I predict a 5% chance that her programming won’t let her transfer her mind into a human body because then she’d kill people, and we just established that she can’t even intentionally take actions that would indirectly lead to killing someone. Now wouldn’t that be a twist?
Either way, she’s going through a whole lot of trouble for this, and it’s nice to see the Darkhold come up again, rather than being left in the first half of the season.
5. Media Matters
The problem with Hydra only having one source of news is that it’s really easy to hijack all the news outlets just by taking over that one. Still, the episode used the power of the media well, both in showing how it can be used to manipulate people and twist facts, and how it can be used to reveal the truth and tear down lies.
Considering the season hasn’t been holding back on the subtle political jabs, I think this is a message that can be applied outside the show as well.
