Saturday, 31 March 2018

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D Review: “Rise and Shine”


HYDRAwarts
(This review contains spoilers!)

          I think at this point it’s safe to say that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D Season 5 has been a pretty big miss for me. The budget restrictions have been pretty blatant with the constant reuse of sets, episodes go by without anything of value really happening, and the overarching plot really isn’t that compelling if you ask me.

          But we have had a few winners in the overall sludge, and this episode was one of them. This episode had the humour, surprises, and best of all the fun that made me fall in love with this show in the first place, and even better this was the first episode in years that truly embraced the ties S.H.I.E.L.D has to the greater MCU.

          Also, Cap’n Crunch is HYDRA. I always suspected something wasn’t right with him.

          Coulson has been taking to the ultra-secret underground HYDRA base where Hale tells him that it’s time S.H.I.E.L.D and HYDRA work together to stop an oncoming alien threat (Thanos tie-in maybe?).

Through flashback we see her origin in a creepy HYDRA boarding school alongside several baddies from MCU past, including Whitehall, Von Strucker and even Sitwell. This episode was full of fun nods to the wider MCU, something we really haven’t seen from this show in ages. In an age when fans are relentlessly debating whether to count the TV shows as canon to the universe or not it’s nice to have some new arguments for it.

It was also nice to see Talbot return again as we finally got a concrete answer of what happened to him in the wake of Season 4. His one-liners were as amazing as ever, but it was also nice to have a bit of a darker side to him this time with his injury. I’m really looking forward to seeing where they go with his character.

Speaking of awesome character development, Fitz had a few brief scenes this week too, one with Daisy and one with Simmons. It’s pretty clear that Daisy isn’t exactly a fan of his anymore, especially with him refusing to apologize for what he did last week. His scene with Simmons is far more interesting though. According to her since Deke is their grandson (much to Fitz’s hilarious disgust) the two of them are invincible, since they know they can’t die before raising a child.

I’m sure that’s going to go over well when they inevitably change the timeline.

Finally, we got a bit more development towards what’s going to cause the future we saw. It turns out Hale has a project that will infuse an Inhuman with gravitonium to allow them to destroy the oncoming alien invasion. The project’s name? “Destroyer of Worlds”. Coulson is of course unhappy with this revelation, and is put away for safekeeping.

The only real thing I wasn’t huge on this week is that I’m still not sold on Ruby as a character. She just seems like the type of character an angsty teenager would come up with: a ninja badass who cuts people’s limbs off with her frisbees of doom and just doesn’t care about anyone else around them? Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen her before on fanfiction.net. She doesn’t have any real personality as a result, meaning that I’m neither invested in her as a person nor am I entertained by her as a villain. Hopefully she’ll get some development down the line because right now she’s basically Sinara from the first half of the season except less blue.

This episode was a ton of fun. The HYDRA High School was cheesy in a good way, bringing back all these old characters and references to the outside MCU was great, and I loved all the great jokes and surprises. If we’re finally changing course back to the S.H.I.E.L.D I know and love, I can’t wait for next time.

FINAL SCORE
8/10

Great


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