Agents of SHIELD Lockup Television 

Five Thoughts on Agents of SHIELD’s “Lockup”

By | October 26th, 2016
Posted in Television | % Comments

Part prison break, part political drama, and with enough spooky ghosts, flaming skulls, and mystical artifacts of doom to be very fitting for this Halloween season. Let’s take a look at what this week’s episode has to offer.

1. The Darkhold

The hunt for this season’s MacGuffin continues, as we learn a little more about the Darkhold, AKA “the evil book of evil that made all the ghosts happen.” This is an artifact so dangerous even Nick “Let’s mess with the Tessaract and see what happens” Fury didn’t want to get involved with it. However, it seems the book itself wants to be read.

It has the interesting effect of appearing as a blank book until touched by human hands, after which the pages are filled in whatever language the reader knows best. They keyword is “human” hands, since apparently it doesn’t respond to ghost touch.

But as we see at the end, it may have a sort of “One Ring” style corruption effect as well, given how wide Morrow’s eyes grow after looking at a page of it.

All things considered, not a bad evil artifact to use for this season.

2. Prison Break

Murphy’s Law is in full effect for the SHIELD team, and when the list of things that can and do go wrong includes ghosts driving the staff crazy, prisoners getting set loose (including very angry Watchdogs), and Ghost Rider being unable to resist some sweet revenge, well, it makes for a fun episode.

Whenever Agents of SHIELD has a particularly nice fight scene, I feel it’s worthy of mentioning, and this episode was no exception. Quake versus multiple Watchdogs, and she can’t use her powers without breaking her arms – so there’s plenty of hand-to-hand combat, nice use of the kitchen environment for improvised weapons, and some good fight choreography. While it wasn’t quite as impressive as previous fights this season, it was engaging enough to be worth notice.

And during the prison riot (which was really as generic a riot as one could get), we also get Ghost Rider messing things up for the entire team. By going out of his way for some extra revenge (sweet revenge, admittedly, and a very personal one for him) he let Eli Morrow get kidnapped by Lucy the ghost, and gave SHIELD’s enemies some ammunition for the press.

But then, that sort of thing can happen when you take someone whose goal is to incinerate guilty souls and drop him in the middle of a prison. And in SHIELD’s defense, they definitely saw that coming (as did the viewers) so the show had events unfold in such a way where it couldn’t be prevented.

3. Simmons Has No Poker Face

What’s the best way to ensure everyone on a team can trust each other? With intense lie detector tests, of course! As we’ve seen in previous seasons, SHIELD has some rather advanced polygraphs (a necessity if you want to get one of those lanyards from any Agent Koenig) and now Simmons goes through them on the regular.

So of course she’s given a lot of important secrets right before her next test. So like a student cramming before finals, she takes a crash course on being the best liar possible.

It doesn’t exactly work, but she’s saved at the last second, in a scene that throws us for an amusing loop as it looks like Director Mace is on to her, before suddenly shifting gears and asking for her help.

While she does eventually get out of it, the fact that she clearly wanted to avoid taking the polygraph test should already be a pretty clear indication that she has something to hide. So is the test even necessary after this, or will her somewhat suspicious behavior go without notice?

4. Mace vs Nadeer

SHIELD is back out in the open, and that means one thing: politics! In this case, a friendly little debate about Inhumanity with Senator Nadeer, who we’ve already seen is staunchly anti-Inhuman, to the point of providing support for the Watchdogs. Given that she mentions a SHIELD mission that was still in progress in the middle of the episode, the SHIELD agents should figure out pretty quickly that she’s got something up her sleeve, but everyone is more concerned with her claiming that Director Mace “isn’t the man for the job.”

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Thus, we get an interesting turn of events, as Mace reveals on live TV that he’s an Inhuman himself. While this is no news to the audience, it certainly averted the usual plot of “keep the secret forever, until it gets out in the worst possible way and jeopardizes everything.” In fact, it even pays off for Mace, with high approval numbers. Yet at the same time, it certainly doesn’t disprove Nadeer’s claim from previous episodes about “Inhumans controlling SHIELD.”

Still, it was certainly a nice turn, and perhaps even a callback to Tony Stark’s famous “I am Iron Man” moment.

5. Secrets Upon Secrets

How could we have a show about SHIELD without all the many secrets they keep? Coulson keeps secrets from Mace, Simmons has to keep Coulson’s secrets, Mace has a secret that she knows, and now Nadeer has secrets that she’s holding over Mace.

In fact, it looks like most of the secrets are impacting the new Director most of all. But that’s SHIELD for you.

The interesting thing about Mace’s secret is that it connects him to Civil War. He’s credited as a hero during the bombing in Vienna, but Simmons knows that’s not the case. What the reality is, we don’t know yet, but it does provide another link connecting Agents of SHIELD to the wider Marvel cinematic universe as a whole. And considering we’ll never see the movies acknowledge the show, we’ll take what we can get.

Still, I almost feel sorry for Mace, once Nadeer reveals she has footage of Coulson’s team working with Quake and Ghost Rider (who just recently burnt a guy to death). It’s no secret that the team doesn’t trust him, but now he’s the one who’s got to deal with their actions.

And that will certainly make Coulson’s job a lot harder as well.


//TAGS | Marvel's Agents of SHIELD

Robbie Pleasant

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