The New Deal

The final season of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is here! A year ago, after a more dour season that was the series' least engaging, it was wild to think there were 13 more episodes -- already filmed -- that were just going to sit on the shelf for a year. Now, some fluffy fun is  just the right kind of escape.

Getting acclimated to this seventh season premiere, "The New Deal," was not easy. There was no recap, not a lot of dialogue to remind you exactly where every character had been left hanging and how, and so a lot of potential for the audience to be stuck struggling to remember things. ("Wait, where is Fitz?" or "what happened to May?" and so forth.) On the other hand... like I said, season 6 wasn't the series' best, and it's probably a good call to just jettison its baggage as quick as possible. Everyone can remember (or quickly get caught up with) the two most salient points: we've time-traveled to the 30s, and Coulson is back as a robot.

If that's enough and you can just go with it, this premiere was pretty rewarding. I maybe didn't realize how much I'd missed the character of Coulson until now. Clark Gregg did fine with the change-up of Sarge in season six, but this sort of joyous quippiness is the whole reason audiences liked him enough to spin him off the MCU movies (and resurrect him!) in the first place. And it's not like the show made this return 100% consequence-free; there was a nice thread through the episode that while advanced technology may be able to provide "quick fixes," emotions don't heal that quickly (Coulson's flood of memories; Yo-Yo's new replacement hands).

We basically didn't get to see two characters -- Fitz or (mostly) May -- but at least the people we did see all got their nice moments. There was simply a base pleasure in watching everyone dress up in 1930s costumes, fight, and bump up against history. I think the writing even did reasonably well with the moments acknowledging sexism and racism -- that's a tricky tightrope there, in that it really should be acknowledged, yet to portray it too realistically would really be against the escapist tone this series is trying to strike.

Ultimately, it all set up for pretty much the perfect premise for the final season of this long-running show: that to save the future, they'll have to save the bad guys. The potential is baked in for a lot of circular references to both the series' history and franchise at large (including a likely inclusion of elements from Agent Carter). Yes, it was confusing in moments, but it generally felt to me like things were moving in the right direction. I give "The New Deal" a B+.