Because of this, I'm wagging my finger a bit at the most recent episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D -- especially at the Mack and Yo-Yo storyline. Back at the Lighthouse, the two were trying to unify the oppressed humans into a resistance against the Kree, but stopped short when they discovered that bombs were planted throughout the superstructure of the base -- Kasius would use them to kill everyone without a second thought. In rather direct terms, we're told that there's absolutely no way all those bombs could be removed in the time they have, and that there would be no way to unite all the people of the Lighthouse on that task or any other.
Cut to the big showdown with Kasius, where Flint shows up at the last minute with nonsensical news. Somehow, off screen, all the people have banded together, and they have managed to remove and relocate all those bombs. What the hell? I didn't even fell like I got a real thrill of surprise out of this climax, because it flew in the face of what we'd been told. If Mack and Yo-Yo found a way to pull off the impossible, I wanted to see it! What words did they find to inspire everyone? How were they able to break through the "everyone for themselves" mentality drilled into these people from birth? It's not like it's actually a surprise that Kasius is going to lose in the end -- this is "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.", after all. So how about showing how the heroes triumph and not merely that they do?
That wasn't the only nonsense infecting that particular story line. The Tess component of it had problems too. Not the actual return of the character; I actually found that an effective "unringing" of the bell that killed all the characters a few weeks back. Returning a character from death actually made more torment for Flint in a dramatic way. It was also compelling to have her more under the sway of Kasius, believing (as you'd expect she would, after being resurrected) that he was a god. But here again, we got surprise over character. What happened to break the spell over her? What was said to convince her that she should turn on a god and help? What convinced her that Flint, Mack, and Yo-Yo could actually win? It's all left for us just to imagine.
The rest of the episode seemed a bit more solidly built. I liked the echoes of last week's episode into this one, of May having to reckon with the notion that she had been/could be a mother. (Daisy's jokes about it were especially great.) I also like the increasingly fatalist outlook from Fitz, in the face of what he sees as the immutable flow of time. After everything he went through to get back to Simmons, he's now checking out, believing that nothing can be done to alter destiny. Both these story threads are making main characters double back on something core to their identities in a believable way, which is a great thing for a show in its fifth season to have found.
I like that we got one last big fight involving Sinara before her end... though I admit to some confusion here. Did she lose her flying balls of death at some point that I'm forgetting? I kept waiting for her to set them loose, but it never happened. Instead, with a little (very little) last minute help from Deke, Daisy got the drop on Sinara and we heard her ominous little theme music for the last time. But actually, here's another moment where surprise displaced character development. When exactly did Deke decide definitely not to kill Daisy? What made him do it? Has he made that decision with finality, or might he be revisiting it?
The episode advanced the story well enough, and did right by some characters. Still, the way it mishandled others put a definite ceiling on my opinion of it. Fun though it was in moments, I'd give the hour a B-.
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