Dud
(This review contains
spoilers!)
Sometimes to write a truly good story
you have to take a chapter or 2 to rearrange characters and figure out where
they currently are. That’s what this episode felt like: a quick one-off that
doesn’t move the overarching plot that much, aside from shuffling around where
a few characters are located.
The biggest upheaval in this episode
is that Senator Nadeer is killed off, with strangely little fanfare. One minute
she’s alive, the next she’s exploded. While this is a great fist-pump worthy
moment to see her get what she deserves, it also feels kind of weak considering
how much of a pain she’s been to our main characters all season. This also robs
us of a potential reunion with her brother, so it’s anyone’s guess where that
story’s going to go should it come back.
So how did Nadeer die? Well, as a
negotiation tactic, one of those Russian guys who was introduced last week showed
up at her office with a terrigen crystal. After setting it off, it turned out
Nadeer didn’t have any inhuman genes, but the Russian guy did, turning him into
a human bomb that can blow himself up and reform at will. It’s a cool power
that definitely feels threatening, especially when he’s brought aboard a
Quinjet with Daisy and Mace.
Speaking of Mace, he’s once again the
best part of the episode…sort of. For whatever reason most of his dialogue this
week is a bunch of football references, as he tries to figure out where he fits
in on the team. Was it because the Super Bowl was last Sunday? Whatever the
reason, it quickly grew annoying and kind of broke my immersion. Much more
interesting is a revelation about the super-soldier serum he’s taking: it has
the potential to kill him, with each dose being more dangerous than the last.
This adds a neat extra layer to his character: while he clearly wants to help
out in missions, it’s becoming more and more lethal for him to do so.
Aside from the bomb plot, the other
half of the episode focuses on Coulson and Mack, who are trying to find a lead
on May’s location. Their search leads them to Spain, where they find Agnes, a
woman who looks remarkably like Aida. It turns out she’s Radcliffe’s
ex-girlfriend who’s spending her last days in paradise before she’s due to die
by cancer. Coulson attempts to get some information out of her, but things go
awry.
The entire Agnes plot feels like
running around in circles over and over again with nothing actually
accomplished. The episode starts with her refusing to help Coulson, but she
jumps onboard the plan in literally her next scene. Then, she jumps ship again
to leave with Radcliffe, who uploads her consciousness into the same program as
May…and then she dies.
Honestly, this entire subplot was an enormous waste of time.
Coulson got no closer to finding May aside from getting a hint that she was
alive, and we received an overcomplicated reason as to why Radcliffe wants to
defeat death and why Aida looks the way she does. Maybe it’ll play into
something later on, but with the LMD storyline beginning to wrap up this just
felt like the show finding something for Coulson to do this week that didn’t
really have much overall impact. You could’ve cut Agnes entirely and nothing
would’ve been missed. Hell, you could’ve had her be already dead and give
Radcliffe a much better reason as to why he wants to stop death! If she were
long gone, that could lead Radcliffe to creating the memory upload system
because he didn’t want other people to go through the same pain he did after
losing her, and it would’ve added an
extra creep factor to Aida, as she would be based on Radcliffe’s dead
girlfriend aside from his still-living ex! There were so many ways this
storyline could’ve been done better, and instead they went with the least
interesting way.
Anyways, the episode ends with Mace
getting captured by the Superior’s goons, and the bomb guy is defeated rather
easily. Aside from Mace’s story and Nadeer’s death, this episode just felt like
filler content made to pad out the LMD storyline. While the bomb inhuman felt
threatening, he never really did anything aside from blow up a diner, and
Coulson’s B-plot was a hugely missed opportunity to create a compelling
backstory for Radcliffe. Every show has bad episodes and S.H.I.E.L.D is no different. I just wish that they gave me more of
a reason to watch them.
FINAL SCORE
4/10
Mediocre
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