One plot arc revolved around Fitz's efforts to close the rift into the "fear dimension." It ended with the powerful revelation that solving his problem meant tapping into his inner psychopath. He closed the rift, but only by hurting his friends, risking several lives, and generally behaving monstrously without regard to the cost. It was a truly meaningful development with far-reaching implications... but it didn't feel entirely earned to me because of the way the episode was written overall.
The Trouble With Fitz, as it were, was a bait-and-switch, of course. We were led to believe that the evil Leopold from the Framework had emerged as a phantom from the fear dimension. A lot of shoe leather went into convincing us of this. While it worked in the sense that I did not see the twist coming, for me it didn't work in that there wasn't a lot of time to explain what was actually going on.
As we were reminded, Fitz used to see people who weren't there (Simmons in particular), at the start of season two, after Ward tried to kill him. At that time, he also had linguistic difficulties and struggled to find words. Iain de Castecker gave a solid performance that called all that back... yet Fitz then confides that he's felt this returning for a while now. I get the distinct impression no one told de Castecker that before he saw this script. So I felt like he overcompensated a bit, playing extra weak, extra tongue-tied, to such a degree that I even began to wonder if Fitz's "greatest fear" was losing his mental faculties, and that the latest twist from the fear dimension was somehow bringing that to pass.
Perhaps that's all quibbling. What I simply mean is that I would have felt more moved by Fitz's slide into darkness if it hadn't happened all at once in this episode. (And really, all in one scene, after the Jekyll/Hyde gimmick was revealed.) When Daisy said she would never forgive Fitz, I want to believe that's true... or at least, believe it enough for it to land with dramatic heft. But if Fitz can turn evil in the span of one episode, there's really nothing to say he can't be forgiven just as quickly if the whim strikes. I love the twist that was made, and I think it will work well for future episodes. I just think the twist wasn't earned enough for maximum dramatic impact.
The other story line also ended up in an intriguing-but-unearned place in my mind. Showing Coulson's increasingly suicidal tendencies (though he'd call them self-sacrificial, perhaps) was quite interesting, and having him give himself up, going with Hale to save the rest of the team, makes perfect sense. But getting to that place required Coulson to be stupid enough to fall for a fairly transparent trap. Maybe we the audience have a benefit Coulson hasn't, of having watched just how conniving Hale has been, thus learning to take her seriously as an adversary. Still, it just seems to me Coulson should have known that Hale's "careless slip up" was in fact a deliberate baiting of a trap.
But like I said, I enjoyed where the story ended up, even if I didn't buy into all the steps that took it there. In any case, there were plenty of moments along the way I did enjoy. May and Coulson were unable to dig into their relationship "in front of the bad guys." Yo-Yo became increasingly despairing of being able to alter the future -- and that came with incongruous bliss, from her certainty that she will survive no matter what happens. Deke confessed to Simmons that he's her grandson (and she had a hilarious reaction to puncture the importance of the moment).
A good story overall that I think I wish had been paced more deliberately over a couple of episodes. I give it a B+.
No comments:
Post a Comment