I didn't love this two-part finale. But I appreciated a lot of what it set up for next season, and it had a few genuinely intense and emotional moments. I'm going to try and get through all of this relatively quickly.
Cons:
The plot is pretty basic, which I would normally compliment. But in this finale, it sort of felt like a lot of the two episodes was just buildup for the final moment of predictable sacrifice. In short, S.H.I.E.L.D. captures Hive. Hive escapes. Many agents are turned in to the deformed Inhuman slaves of Hive, and our team is forced to hide out on the base. Hive gets a hold of a Quinjet that he plans on using to distribute the Inhuman changes to large parts of the world. Lincoln manages to get inside the Quinjet with Hive. He flies it up out of the atmosphere, and the triggering substance is thus disseminated harmlessly into space. Hive and Lincoln both die.
Honestly, the reason this basic plot didn't work for me is that the only thing really going on here was one giant tease about who was going to die. All through the scenes with our agents running from Hive's men and trying to figure out a way to stop his evil plan, we get fake-outs. Things look really bad for May and/or Fitz at one point. Simmons nearly gets trapped. Yo-Yo gets shot trying to protect Mack. And the damn cross necklace ends up in the hands of Yo-Yo, Mack, Fitz, Daisy, and then finally Lincoln. Part of the problem was in the promotional materials for this finale. They could not have built up this death any more. They really pulled out all the stops to make us feel the weight of this epic death...
And then it was just Lincoln. I mean, nothing against Lincoln, truly! I never really felt his connection with Daisy, but over the past couple of weeks I started to get more and more interested in him and his motivations. I wouldn't have minded keeping him around to explore further. But seriously? To quote myself from my review a few weeks back: "The soft option is Lincoln. The medium-soft option is Mack. The hardcore option is May, Fitz, or Simmons." And then in last week's review, I said: "Who will die? Well, it'll gut me if it's Mack. Or May. Or Fitz. Or Simmons. I really won't mind all that much if it's Lincoln." And they went with the soft option. They just went ahead and killed the newest and least significant of our main characters. The only less significant death would have been if it were Yo-Yo, but I think even that would have packed a more emotional punch.
I did like the actual scene of Lincoln's death, and I'll talk more about in a second. But I will admit that they put the Jesus symbolism on a little too thick. I mean, at one point Coulson literally says: "he's paying for all our mistakes." Is that not essentially the same thing as "he's dying for our sins?" The ramp-up was beyond cheesy, and I had guessed it was Lincoln from very early on, when Coulson told Lincoln that he was ready to accept him as a full S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, and Lincoln said he wanted out once they were through with Hive. He wanted to work on himself before he could be a part of something else. At that point it just became painfully obvious that he was going to be the one to die, and I started rolling my eyes at all of the fake-outs they were trying to pull. The only reason I'm harping on this so much is that the show itself, along with its promotional materials, really stressed the intensity of this death, and when it came right down to it I felt more emotional about Hive dying than I did about Lincoln.
Pros:
It's difficult to fairly grade this episode, honestly. The entire buildup and execution of the death wasn't very good, and in a lot of other ways this episode simply played it safe, delivering a lot of action and intensity with a predictable ending - our heroes stop Hive from destroying the world. Color me not surprised. However, a lot of the smaller details within this flawed framework were really amazing, and that's where a lot of my praise will be directed.
Fitzsimmons didn't have a lot to do here, but we checked in with them and we know they're still on solid footing. Simmons tries to plan a romantic gesture. She wants to go on a trip with Fitz, just the two of them. Aww! As Fitz points out, he's the romantic one, and that is compounded by a brief moment at the end when Dr. Radcliffe mentions that Fitz is planning a surprise for Simmons. He's got the upper hand on romance. Sorry, Jemma. I also liked how both of them had their bad-ass moments of scientific brilliance, and each helped out in a major way.
Mack and Yo-Yo's relationship continues to grow. I thought Yo-Yo getting shot was a cheap ploy at trying to keep us on our toes, but I did like the way she only trusted Mack with healing her, and I'm relieved that she's going to be okay!
Most of the emotional weight of the finale rests with Daisy, who is suffering under immense guilt for everything she did under Hive's sway. She has really powerful moments with both Mack and May, as each try to convince her that they love and care for her, and don't blame her for her mistakes. I was particularly moved by Mack's refusal to keep his distance. Daisy is worried that she's going to hurt somebody, but Mack marches straight in to her containment unit and comforts her. In the end, when Daisy confronts Hive we don't get the predicted anger. Or at least, not the way we might have thought. She feels broken, and she blames Hive for that, but she doesn't think there's any way to fix that. She actually asks Hive to take her back! Luckily for everybody, that doesn't seem to be possible. Lash's healing touch last week apparently took away Hive's ability to control Daisy forever more. Still, that was an intense moment. It really emphasized how broken and desperate Daisy really is. I never would have expected Daisy, one of our heroes, to display such weakness, and it really upped the stakes.
Lincoln's death may have been very predictable, and way too "I am Jesus Christ"-y for my taste, but the actual moment where Lincoln and Hive were in the Quinjet, and both had accepted their imminent death... wow. I'm getting goose bumps just thinking about it. Hive seems so torn apart. He really did want to make the world a better place, even if we audience members understand his actions to be evil. These two men, Lincoln and the person who we once knew as Ward, accept their death with a kind of quiet grace that was actually quite moving.
Contrast that with Daisy back on earth, completely wrecked and sobbing that somebody has to do something to help Lincoln before it's too late. Just before communications cut out, Lincoln tells Daisy he loves her - it was the first time either of them said it, and in a Doctor Who-esque move, Daisy doesn't get a chance to say it back before it's too late.
Dr. Radcliffe is apparently sticking around. I think I complained before that he's really nothing but comic relief, but it's pretty darn funny comic relief, so at this point I don't really mind. He's a survivor, happily switching to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s side when they show up to catch Hive. He created those deformed Inhuman monsters, but he had to in order to stop Hive from killing him. I think there's potential for him to develop into a more interesting character moving forward. He's certainly someone to keep an eye on. I did really enjoy the fact that he wasn't magically adept at all fields of science. Unlike Fitzsimmons who are supposedly specialized but can pretty much do whatever the team needs at any time. Dr. Radcliffe is, realistically, an expert in one small field and can't just transfer his skills to any task.
We end with a flash-forward. It's six months after Hive and Lincoln have died, and Daisy has gone rogue and become some sort of vigilante, finally taking on the name Quake. Coulson and Mack are on a stakeout looking for her, and it seems that Coulson is no longer the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., although we don't know who has replaced him. We also see that Radcliffe has created artificial intelligence, a female-voiced entity named Aida.
I was tempted to chuckle at Daisy's new Goth persona. She's got the heavy eyeliner and long straight black hair thing going on, but I can accept it because maybe it's supposed to be part of a disguise. She helps out the wife and daughter of Charles Hinton, the Inhuman who died after giving Daisy visions of the future. She's clearly trying to help people, even if she has gone off the reservation. This could be an interesting move, as we've now got a fully powered Daisy Johnson acting a bit like the Skye that we met at the beginning of the show. Operating alone, with a serious chip on her shoulder. I also love the idea of Coulson no longer being Director. Was there a coup? Is - God forbid - Talbot running the show now, or do we have some unknown new party coming in next season to take over? The AI thing with Radcliffe is a big question mark for me, but I'm totally willing to see where it goes. I think this must be something that comic readers know about, but I'm going in blind. I've got faith that they can do something good with it, though.
I guess my final remark about this finale is that it was good, but it didn't come close to matching the brilliance of the two other finales we've seen this show do. Remember Season One, where we had the end of the "Ward is Hydra" reveal arc conclude with Fitz and Simmons at the bottom of the ocean, Nick Fury showing up and making Coulson Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., and the entire premise of the show shifting in a major way? And then Season Two ended in a blood bath, with multiple named characters getting axed off and several more being grievously injured, the collapse of Afterlife, and Simmons getting sucked into another dimension? By contrast, here we got most of the exciting story-altering material in the brief flash-forward at the very end, while the rest of the episode felt like pretty standard fare, even with the killing off of two series regulars. It's a mixed bag, for sure.
Flash-forwards can work really well, and they can also be really damaging. The foretelling of death in this season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was not concluded by a strong payoff, but maybe this time they will use a time jump more effectively. I do have hope that this show can keep coming up with creative ideas and new directions to move in. It's earned my loyalty for many more years to come, even if this finale can't match the brilliance of some of what we've seen in the past.
7.5/10
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