With all the time travel and time loop shenanigans still being sorted out, there’s no time like the present to take a look at the latest episode. So let’s skip the small talk and take a look at the 101st episode and see all they’ve brought back and all they’ve introduced.
1. Strucker Junior
Agents of SHIELD is doing a great job at bringing back characters from seasons past. We’re quickly reintroduced to Alex Braun, formerly Werner Von Strucker, last seen having his memories extracted by SHIELD. I always did feel that he was under-utilized in his past appearance, but now he’s making a comeback, with violent tendencies and the newfound ability to remember everything in intense detail.
Yes, apparently being stuck in a memory extraction machine for longer-than-healthy stretches can have some unintended side effects.
It’s also clever how they explore that ability, from his vivid memories of traumatic experiences to remembering little details he overheard to use as leverage. There’s much to be done with perfect memorization powers, and I look forward to seeing how they utilize his new abilities in the episodes to come.
2. The Candyman Can?
Whenever someone has a nickname, it means they’re someone important, right? Well in this case, we meet Anthony Caine, AKA Candyman, an old friend of Mack’s who helped reassign former Hydra scientists to normal lives so they can use their scientific prowess for the good of the country.
Naturally, with a nickname like that, it sounds like he’d be connected to an existing character, but for the life of me I cannot tell who. There was a Z-list “Spider-Man” villain named Candy Man, and a drug dealer in “Cloak and Dagger” with the same name, but neither of them seem related to this character at all.
Then again, maybe it is just a college nickname, like “Mack Hammer” (and that was an amusing thing to learn this episode). But if someone knows any existing characters he’s supposed to be, bring it up in the comments and we can get back to that next time!
More importantly, though, we do see him agree to look into the Deathlok program, in search of a cure for what ails Coulson. Which brings us to our next point…
3. No Mecha Coulson
In spite of Coulson’s wishes to let him die in due time, the SHIELD team continues trying to find a cure. In this case, we go back several seasons to Cybertek, and the technology that they used to keep John Garrett alive.
I love all this callbacks to earlier seasons we’re getting now. With the chance of Agents of SHIELD ending this season, they’re really trying to tie everything together, and it’s great continuity for longtime viewers.
That said, Coulson has decided that a cybernetic arm is cyborg enough for him, and he’d rather not become Garrett 2.0. Nothing against Deathlok, of course, he’d just rather not be one himself. That even creates a nice parallel between who he is and who Garrett was – John Garrett was a man who became a cyborg and then sought the secret behind T.A.H.I.T.I. to preserve his own life, while Coulson was revived by the T.A.H.I.T.I. program and refuses to use the cybernetics to extend his life further.
4. Everything Floats Here
A floating ship, held aloft by gravitonium after it was lost in a storm. Now that is the kind of comic book cleverness I like to see in this show. It was a cool visual, a clever reveal, and made for a nice tense scene where they have less than two minutes to escape the ship with the gravitonium before it collapses.
Sure, I could nit-pick and ask questions like “How did it drift around in the skies and no airplane ever came across its path in all that time?” or talk about how quickly they found it, but that would be pedantic and take away from the enjoyment of the fact that we got characters exploring a floating ship lost in the clouds.
It’s nice when a show has reached the point where you look at something like that and think “This is entirely logical and reasonable within the established world.”
Continued below5. It’s All Relative
While we learned last week that Deke is the grandson of Fitz-Simmons (or maybe Simmons-Fitz now? I’m still going to refer to them as “Fitz” and “Simmons” respectively.), this week he puts the pieces together.
Admittedly, the phantasm of his mother dropping the line about how “it doesn’t matter how big your steps are as long as they’re in the right direction” felt a bit forced, but it’s for the audience’s sake so that we learn that this is a line Deke heard growing up and connects to his family, so that it makes sense to us when he hears Simmons say it and puts the pieces together.
That also made for an almost adorable bit of dramatic irony when Deke finds a baseball and glove and tries to play catch with Fitz. Sure, it doesn’t happen, but it’s still fun to imagine a grandfather and grandson playing catch before the latter is even born.
There was also a fair bit of tension between Deke and Fitz, as the two are often at odds in both personality and outlook. It will be interesting to see how their interactions are impacted now that Deke has realized how they’re related, but that will have to wait until next week.
