Agents of SHIELD Stolen Television 

Five Thoughts on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s “Stolen”

By | July 31st, 2020
Posted in Television | % Comments

As we grow closer and closer to the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. finale, more questions and complications arise. Nathaniel Malick is disrupting the timeline like it’s no one’s business, Inhumans are being drained for their powers, and the team just barely avoided getting crushed beyond time. All in all, it’s about time to build up for an epic conclusion.

1. Meet John Garrett… Again

Nathaniel Malick’s mission is to create a team of people who are about to die. Any villain that will one day be bested, he recruits them and powers them up. So guess who’s next on the list of former foes: John Garrett.

Yes, we meet his younger self, before he was wounded, became a Deathlok, recruited Grant Ward, and started the Centipede Project.

He’s also incredibly annoying. While the older Garrett was focused, cold, and appropriately snarky (with plenty of old war stories to tell), his younger self is… very loud. He laughs while talking about how he saw his older self die at Coulson’s hands, doesn’t seem to take anything seriously, and can’t stop smiling even when he’s getting people killed. Does he ever, in fact, shut up?

Boy was it satisfying to see May beat the crap out of him, even if he teleported away.

2. Three Steps Ahead

Speaking of Malick, he’s teamed up with Sibyl to use the Chronicoms’ knowledge of future events and probability. This lets him predict where Coulson’s team will be, what their plans are, and when they’ll do it with uncanny accuracy.

So Coulson and Gordon teleport in to Afterlife – and Malick is waiting. If Yo-Yo zooms in, it’s likely that’s a trap too. They know when the team will be split. They know where to find Simmons. Basically, anything the S.H.I.E.L.D. team thinks of doing, they see it coming.

This will absolutely make things more difficult for the team, to the point where it’s almost unfair. With that said, the predictions don’t have a 100% accuracy – so there’s still a small chance they’ll be able to do something unexpected.

3. Goodbye, Timeline

Early on this season, the S.H.I.E.L.D. team was careful about how they impacted history through time travel. “Ripples, not waves” as Mack put it. Even when they saved Sousa, they did so in a way that maintained his history and the timeline.

Yeah, that’s all out the window now.

With Nathaniel Malick alive and recruiting other people who should have died, history has gone completely out of whack. Garrett’s early betrayal more or less changes the entire first few seasons of the show, and Kora’s betrayal (instead of death) may have prevented Daisy’s parents from even meeting in the first place.

Now, considering Malick also tells Jiaying how her future is supposed to go (including the daughter she never knew) then kills her, that future is definitely changed. Of course, Jiaying’s power allows her to survive by draining the life force of others, so she could always come back, but there’s no way her history is getting back on track even if she does.

So either a big reset button is going to be hit at the end of this season or Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. will end with a very different timeline than it started with, now even further away from the Marvel cinematic universe.

4. Family

Okay, let’s take a step back and return to Daisy, Kora, and Jiaying.

Now, of course Daisy can’t let Jiaying know that she’s her daughter from the future, but at Sousa’s urging, they do still get a heart-to-heart. It’s mostly about how Daisy never really knew her mother, and when they finally met, she’d already gone a bit off the deep end. So when Jiaying learned the truth, she was a bit shaken about what she would have become.

That revelation comes after Daisy learns about Kora, the half-sister she never knew she had. At first, she’s pretty upset that May didn’t tell her, but she was literally right about to when Jiaying was teleported in. Before that, they didn’t exactly have a chance (as May points out) because they were stuck in a time loop heading towards doom.

We don’t get a sisterly reunion yet, but considering Coulson stunned Kora (mid-monologue, at that) we’ll likely get that next episode.

Continued below

5. The Target

So, what was Malick’s end goal? All the minions, the death, the changes to the timeline – what’s he after?

He tells Coulson his goal is “anarchy,” which makes sense to an extent. Remember, he was raised by one of Hydra’s top agents. In the original timeline, he died being sent to Hive because he refused to cheat during the ceremony while his brother did. So learning about how he originally lived and died would certainly be enough to derail one’s own life and views; he’s lashing out against a history that lead him to die and a structure that enabled it. At least that’s what I’m assuming, we’re not really given a reason why this version of him is so different from the one we saw in flashbacks.

Perhaps that’s why he let most of his minions get captured when Coulson and team freed the Inhumans. But while we thought he was trying to capture Jiaying to steal her powers, or Yo-Yo for hers, it turns out his true target was entirely human.

So now Simmons is captured, Malick and Garrett have control of the Zephyr, and Deke is the only one on board to do anything. Malick wants to find out where Fitz is, and Simmons is the only one who knows, assuming she can remember it. Considering what happened the last time Simmons had her memories restored, and how she and Deke are now worried that Fitz might not be alive and controlling their time jumps from a distance… it’s a tough spot to be in. But the fate of Fitz might be the one thing Sibyl can’t predict.


//TAGS | Marvel's Agents of SHIELD

Robbie Pleasant

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