This review contains spoilers
I love it when Marvel goes Sci-fi. And in Agents of SHIELD, the writers actually explain the “science” behind part of it. This episode started on a strange note with a homeless man carving a wooden bird. Soon, we’d realize that when this man touches somebody else, he gives them a vision of the future, and specifically, future death (because it wouldn’t be Agents of SHIELD otherwise). Daisy, of course, brushes hands with the homeless man right before he is kidnapped by Hydra, causing her to see his death and convince the SHIELD team to go on a mission to rescue him. This was a very fun episode at certain parts, and very sad at others. Here are the 5 best moments from this episode.
- Daisy kicks ass: Daisy, after taking a deep breath, goes in to take out a bunch of Hydra baddies, helped by the fact that she can see the future and knows who’s coming at her and when. I’m a sucker for one shot combat scenes. This isn’t the first time Chloe Bennet has done one of these, but I’ll never get tired of it. It’s really great to see a network show pushing what it normally has actors do, and making better television for it. The camera work was excellent as it followed her taking out bad guy after bad guy.
- Daisy and Charles talk: This was a sad moment that ended with a big cliffhanger. Daisy realized that after all, she could not save the man she saw dying. The future was fixed, and even superpowers wouldn’t change that. Even worse, the reason Charles was killed by Gideon Malick, was to save her. Before he died, she gave him back the bird he had carved in memory of the daughter he had left behind when he got powers. She touches his hand briefly after promising to watch after his daughter and gets another vision. This one is of the inside of a spaceship, lights flashing and a warning signal going off. Red drops of blood and a cross necklace float in zero gravity as the camera dollies back to reveal a person with a SHIELD logo on their arm*, right before the capsule is consumed by fire. Daisy comes back to reality, Charles says he’s sorry for giving her that vision, right before he dies and his bird slips out of his fingers.
*Side theory: given that the person with the vision has to be present at the death of the person seen dying, could this SHIELD agent be Daisy? No one else was in the ship as far as we saw, and no one else could survive that anyway.
- May and Andrew say goodbye: May agrees to stay with Andrew, who turned himself in after realizing Lash was so close to taking him over completely. Andrew is resting on the bed as an IV puts Simmons’s prototype vaccine into him. He tries to talk to May who says she can only see him now as a murder. Andrew admits that he is a different man now than the one she married, because part of Lash is inside of him, yet a part of him is also inside Lash. He believes that Lash is following a higher purpose*. May opens up and says she wishes they had never met, so none of this would have happened to him. Andrew replies that he wouldn’t wish that, because May “is still the center of the best moments of [his] life.” After some action from the team taking down HYDRA, we go back to the two of them and Andrew beginning to transform into Lash. He rushes into the pod and closes the door. After putting his hand up against the glass, to match May’s hand on the other side, he changes, for possibly the last time, into Lash. Melinda May does not deserve this. I, for one, refuse to believe that Andrew is gone.
*Side theory: maybe Lash’s cause is to defeat Hive’s (Ward 2.0) legion of inhumans.
- Fitz explains space-time: I just thought this was really cool. First, I always love exasperated Fitz. Especially exasperated Fitz who says “Simmons!” to get her to explain things in layman’s terms to the rest of the team. In addition, I really appreciate that the show took the time to make this explanation and to do it in a way that made space-time make sense to the average viewer. For those who missed it, time is just the way we perceive the 4th dimension. To explain, Fitz took it down a dimension and said, imagine if instead of 3D, we were 2D. We were pieces of paper. We would not be able to understand 3D except as a step by step progression of 2D pieces of paper stacked on top of each other. Such is the 4th dimension to us. It is fixed, we just perceive it as being changeable because we can only understand it in terms of progression. The physics nerd inside of me squeed.
- The practice scene: This scene was just fun. Daisy gets the team to reenact her vision so that May can get through the guards as quickly as possible to save Charles. Incredible parts of this scene include, but are not limited to 1) May saying “bang” in an angry voice every time she pretend shoots a gun 2) Fitz never coming in on time, yet being overdramatic in his pretend death all the same 3) Lincoln playing “freak out and go for the alarm guy” 4) Simmons having to be told to fall down and replying with “sorry” 5) Daisy making fun of May’s sidekick at Simmons to which May replied that she was trying to miss her face (mama May!). Any time most of the team are all together is a good time (we’re missing Mack, who’s healing, and Bobbi and Hunter, who left to go do their own TV show).