The team’s adventures in 1931 continue, with plenty of shootouts, fight scenes, moral dilemmas, and potential time paradoxes. Some of it works, other aspects… not so much. Let’s take a look and see how the second episode of season seven played out.
1. May is Pissed… Or Maybe Not
The last episode ended with Melinda May escaping her healing tube and hiding on the ceiling to avoid detection. This episode has her back in action and fully healed physically… but probably not psychologically.
She mentions at one point that she doesn’t feel anything, although it does look like she can still feel plenty pissed off. Other emotions, on the other hand, are somewhat more suppressed. The other characters even note that she doesn’t react at all to seeing the LMD Coulson, which is a stark contrast to how she reacted to Sarge last season.
Considering she did just come back from the dead, there’s no doubt going to be some lingering side effects. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
2. Know Your Malick
So, Wilfred Malick, AKA Freddie… we spend some time getting to know him this episode. His father committed suicide when the market crashed and it drove his mother mad, so a pretty basic tragic backstory for the era.
We do see his determination to do better at any cost, no matter who he has to pull a gun on. The closer he gets to his goal, the more Hydra-like his dialogue becomes, but at the same time, he does spend some time insisting he hasn’t done and won’t do anything wrong.
Still, history will do as it does, and Freddie still ends up getting in a mysterious car and driving off. But it does give us a nice scene with him and Koenig first, where Koenig tries to convince him that this isn’t him. The line “You just stepped off a building, Freddie” worked particularly well given what we learned of him earlier. In fact, the entire scene helps build the history between the characters and shows how Hydra and S.H.I.E.L.D. are intertwined.
3. The Serum
Okay, let’s talk about plot holes and continuity, because I have some issues with the MacGuffin of the episode.
So Freddie is smuggling these vials filled with green liquid, with the Hydra logo printed on them. Even though Hydra doesn’t exist yet. And we saw through flashbacks during the Hive arc that the logo has changed significantly over the years.
Then Simmons sees a tiny little bit of the green liquid on the contact’s shoes. After she’d been lying unconscious and bleeding out, plus spent some time kicking in shock. Yes, somehow that little drop stayed on her shoe throughout all of that.
Now I can buy that Simmons, with all her expertise, can use the materials just sitting around a speakeasy to study and identify the liquid. Even with Koenig asking her to skip the technobabble, it’s all in-character for her.
So what is this mystery liquid? It’s one of the chemicals used in the creation of the super soldier serum. You know, the serum that was so top secret it’s never been able to be recreated – Simmons can apparently identify one of its ingredients with ease, and there’s no possible way it could ever be used for anything else.
Of course, this is before World War 2, so it will be used to create the Red Skull first. In Germany. By a German scientist. Remind me again why this top secret ingredient is being smuggled through New York?
There are just far too many plot holes that it falls apart under any close analysis.
4. Daisy’s Bad Idea
So the mission is clear: keep Freddie alive so he can make the delivery and go on to help make Hydra happen. That way S.H.I.E.L.D. becomes a thing in response, and history continues on. It sucks, but they have to keep him alive, right?
Well, in spite of all that, Daisy decides “Nope, let’s do exactly what the Chronicoms are planning on doing and kill him to prevent Hydra from ever forming.”
This would, of course, cause a ripple effect that would prevent S.H.I.E.L.D. from ever forming. It would probably prevent Captain America from existing as well, given the aforementioned super serum ingredient being smuggled. That would, in turn, put the world in a much worse off state without Captain America around as part of the Avengers.
Continued belowOh, and without S.H.I.E.L.D., Daisy would never have met Coulson or the rest of the team, probably wouldn’t have unlocked her Inhuman abilities, and wouldn’t have traveled back in time to stop Freddie in the first place, so then we’ve got a big paradox on our hands.
Yeah, Daisy really didn’t think this through. It’s a good thing the rest of the team was at least a little more sensible about it.
5. Left Behind
Speaking of time travel, we now know that both S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Chronicoms can only travel to select points and have very limited windows of opportunity to do so. When one of those times is approaching, an alarm goes off and they have to get on the Zephyr or get stuck behind.
It’s an acceptable limit on time travel, even if a 17 minute warning isn’t exactly much. It mostly exists to add an additional sense of urgency to the mission and give the Chronicoms a reason to retreat at a set moment.
And on that note: Enoch doesn’t get back to the Zephyr in time, so the team’s resident Chronicom is stuck behind in 1931 (or as he calls it, “Year One-Nine-Three-One”). It’s not the first time he’s had to take the long way around as other people travel through time, but hopefully the team is traveling into the future for their next mission, otherwise he might have to wait even longer. (Who knows? The next point in history might be prehistoric times, so the Chronicoms can just wipe out the common ancestor to humanity and save themselves a lot of trouble.)
That brings the episode to an end with Enoch in Koenig’s speakeasy, passing on a little bit of information about the future. So Enoch is now a key player in the creation of S.H.I.E.L.D., however that may impact their future.
Though I particularly like the line the episode ends on: “This looks like the start of a marvelous friendship.” It’s a nice little Casablanca reference with the Marvel branding. Well done.
