The End Is at Hand / What We're Fighting For

It's actually shocking that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. managed to last seven seasons and well over 100 episodes, when rafts of other Marvel TV shows fell by the wayside for low ratings, creative doldrums, or active interference by a corporate Voltron looking to take its toys back. You could even argue that the series lasted perhaps a little longer than it should have. (I sort of will here, in a moment. With SPOILERS aplenty.) But overall, the finale was a solid and fitting end to a series that managed -- quite often -- to be better than you might expect.

Together, the two final episodes see Daisy, Mack, and Sousa rescuing Simmons and Deke from the Chronicom ship as Coulson, May, and Yo-Yo try to defend the Lighthouse. Finally, Fitz arrives from "the original timeline" to explain everything and help the team complete one last mission together.

Overall, I enjoyed parts of season six and seven enough that I wouldn't trade them away. But I would argue that seasons four and five were really the creative peak of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. And its season five finale (which at the time was written thinking it would be the series finale) not only would have been the perfect ending for the series, but was quite possibly its single best episode.

Still, I respect that the writers knew they had to come up with something else for this ending, and I think they did a pretty good job with that overall. I like that they essentially wrapped everything up with 10 or 15 minutes to spare so that they could give us a long, character-driven coda showing us where everyone ended up.

It was a bittersweet conclusion, interesting in that it didn't turn on any of the main characters being killed off (as with the season five finale). Instead, the sadness was in the explicit statement that these characters would never again go on a mission together. They aren't out there experiencing stories left to our imaginations; this is it. And given that this was all written and filmed more than a year ago, it's almost prescient that their final moment "together" was a holographic Zoom call with everyone dialing in for a long-distance reunion.

The sweetness of it, though, was that each individual in the team was given a nice and fitting ending for themselves: Coulson and May coming to terms with their new, changed natures (and doing so separately, not as a couple), Daisy and Sousa together out in the cosmos, Fitz and Simmons settling down with their family, Mack finding a balance between his leadership duties and his techie roots, Yo-Yo now leading a team of her own, and Deke off in another reality as the bona fide spy leader he once pretended to be. (I've heard there was talk of a post-credits scene showing Deke in a trench coat and eye patch. Why-oh-why did they decide not to film that?!)

So yes, the ending was good. But yes, some of the steps getting there were a little shaky. The twin desires of wanting to maintain surprise and wanting to withhold Fitz (and actor Iain De Caestecker) until the very end meant there was a lot of exposition explaining to us what had really been going on all season. A whole act's worth of exposition. And I don't think it really holds up to much scrutiny.

If this was all about Kora all along, why would Fitz not warn any of them how important it was to save her? What was all the time-hopping about in the half-season before Kora came along? (Was it just for Enoch to plant machine parts all over the place? Could there maybe have been an alternative approach there that wasn't at risk of failure if any one of a dozen people didn't survive to make it to the safehouse?)

There were some other moments that didn't play that well, even if not because of shaky story logic. Malick remained a weak villain to his end -- and there didn't seem to me to be any mileage in pretending Daisy died only to bring her back to life 15 seconds later. (I'm not saying they needed to kill her off; I just mean that her "sacrifice" didn't really resonate with me when it was so quickly undermined.) The fluctuating allegiances of Garrett and Kora didn't mean much to me, either.

On the other hand, there were plenty of moments that did land well. Elizabeth Henstridge was great playing all the wild extremes of Simmons' slowly returning memory. The material surrounding Fitz and Simmons' child (though not a surprise to me) were still moving. Seeing a few returning characters right at the end was nice: we not only got Piper and Flint, but a back-as-an-LMD Davis, and even a new version of Coulson's car Lola. More comedic elements worked too, from Deke's pretty solid Fitz impression, to the torpedo duct-taped with Chronicoms, to the unceremonious death of Garrett.

So while overall not as good a finale as Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. had one of the previous times the writers thought it was ending, it hit the notes you'd want it to hit. I give these final two installments a B+. Godspeed, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.