I fully admit I was a little distracted when watching this episode, so I apologize if I don't go into too much detail. That being said, I think this episode was a great success!
Cons:
Were I to complain about one thing, it's the villain. We've been hearing rumblings about the Superior all season, and I already mentioned in my last review that meeting him was a bit of a letdown. Here, we learn through a series of flashbacks that Coulson and May once went to retrieve an 0-8-4 from a base in Russia, and said Superior was one of the men also tasked with getting to the alien object. Due to his men's failure to retrieve it, all of them were killed, and the Superior has sought revenge against Coulson for this. There are two problems here. First of all, there's the fact that the character himself seems ridiculously boring and generic. Giving him a personal vendetta against Coulson doesn't really count as giving him a personality. And secondly, that personal vendetta feels kind of strange. This whole time, we thought this was a battle between the Watchdogs and the Inhumans. But apparently the leader of the Watchdogs was just after Coulson? It's a little convoluted, and it feels like it came out of nowhere.
This is a bit of a nitpick, but I do have to mention it: Fitz and Mack have a conversation about ethics in scientific advancement. Mack makes the argument that all the bad things Aida has done are Fitz's fault, and that May is trapped in the Framework because Fitz is the one who made it. Fitz mopes about this briefly, and then Simmons makes a speech about how scientific advancement is net-neutral, and that Fitz creates things to help people. He's not responsible for what Radcliffe has done with that technology. Fair points, and a lovely little moment of Simmons encouraging Fitz, but still. Isn't this a bit overdone? Are we really going to have the cliche "what have we created?" message be spelled out for us? We're already embroiled in an ethical tornado when it comes to the LMDs. I really think the audience could figure out the conflicting feelings going on here, without having an after-school-special style moment to explain it to us.
Pros:
In many ways, this episode is only of vital importance for one reason: the twist at the end. The crew goes on a rescue mission to get Mace and May. They break in; Coulson and "the Superior" have their showdown. They get Mace, but May is not there. They leave. Then, Fitz and Simmons put together a troubling truth: there's unaccounted time when everybody on the mission lost contact with one another. They discover, to their horror, that the rest of the team - Coulson, Mack, Daisy, and Mace - have been replaced with LMDs.
There was a part of me that wanted to roll my eyes at that twist, because, I mean, come on. How many times can you turn a main character into a secret robot and still have it be a surprise? But I actually was surprised. This has turned into a regular pod-people nightmare, and that's always fun. To have not just May, not just Radcliffe, but suddenly virtually every main character not be themselves? I trust this show to do something really cool with the concept. And it makes for some really intriguing possibilities for next week's episode. Fitz and Simmons are going to have to find a way to definitively prove to one another that they haven't been replaced, too, and if it's possible to program somebody to not know they're an LMD, that might be tricky. I hope they're both really themselves, because it would serve us right. I feel like the whole fandom suspected the next secret LMD to be Fitz or Simmons. If it's everybody but them, we instead get to watch the two of them team up to protect each other. That's never not going to be great.
This episode gets especially high praise from me because it didn't have to do as much as it did. Like I said, the twist was pretty much the only important thing going on here. It would have been all too easy to just mark time until the end. Instead, we got a number of other really interesting elements to take up the hour, so that the twist felt like an extra treat on top of everything else, instead of the only reason for the episode to exist.
The flashback material between Coulson and May was every different kind of adorable. It was kind of a punch to the gut to see this version of May - a younger, happier, very flirtatious woman who knows she's great at her job, and who definitely has a thing for Coulson. A mutual thing. We learn in these flashbacks that the two of them very nearly got together a long time ago. They talk about how if things don't work out with the guy May has just started seeing, maybe they'll go out for drinks. That guy ends up being Andrew, and the whole Coulson/May thing ends up as a big what-if. This season has been laying on the romantic tension between these two characters pretty thick, and this series of flashbacks was just the thing to make us understand just how far back these two go. All of the things they've been through, all of the pain they've suffered... pretty much the only consistency they had was each other. It makes the fact that May has been imprisoned, and that Coulson has now been replaced, all the more tragic. The moment at the end when LMD-Coulson wakes up LMD-May was heart-wrenching, because you just want the real people to both be there. You want them to be okay, and to be together.
While I wasn't thrilled about the Superior and his origin story, I did love the way that Coulson reacted to it. There's something so interesting in having the hero of a story be the trigger for a bad guy's whole life mission. We often see the reverse, having a hero vow revenge on a villain for something the villain doesn't even really care about. But Coulson is the one who doesn't care about the Superior's whole situation. He tells him so, quite plainly: "Cool origin story, bro. But this means nothing to me." While the Superior has been focused on Coulson, Coulson knows that this is Daisy's fight, not his. It was cathartic to see Daisy come face-to-face with the head of the Watchdogs, after everything she's suffered in trying to track these jerks down.
Mace gets MVP for being a way better person than he ever needed to be. In this episode, we see him tortured, but he never cracks. Despite the fact that his abilities were artificial, he doesn't back down and beg for his life. He's an exemplary S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, through and through. Now that he's been replaced by an LMD, it might be a while before he gets the recognition he deserves. I was seriously impressed with him this week.
Comedy shout-out: There's a very cool scene at the start of the episode where Daisy and Coulson fight hand-to-hand inside of a training simulation. Once they come out of it, Coulson remarks that it was a little cold in there. Fitz says he wanted to make it realistic, and that Coulson always leaves the AC blasting: "I exaggerated it. Kinda like a silent protest." I love you, Leo Fitz.
I'm really thrilled with the way everything has been going this season. I gather that this show isn't exactly a lock-in for renewal, but I hope it can eke out another season at least. I'm still a big fan!
9/10
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