Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Best Laid Plans (5x09)

This was a bit of a weak installment for me, although it had its highlights.

Cons:

I find myself not all that interested in the Kree. I just don't care about their emotions and their goals and all of that. I just want to see our heroes get back to the timeline that we're familiar with, and I want the stupid Kree to go away. I know I'm not supposed to like them, but I also don't enjoy watching them.

Deke has been a somewhat bland character for much of his time on the show. His moral dilemma about whether to trust his dad's old friend or his new friends is not all that interesting, because I simply don't care about him as a character.

Pros:

In a weird turnabout, I ended up caring a lot more about Flint, Mack, and Yo-Yo in this episode than I would have thought possible. There were just so many cools moments. Mack and Yo-Yo don't exactly agree about the best method going forward, as Elena is all gung-ho to incite rebellion, while Mack doesn't want to turn Flint into a soldier. I liked the way this debate was handled. It was very subtle, and very intricate.

Tess returns! Apparently the Kree were able to return her to life, and she is sent as a messenger to warn Flint and the others to back down. This was such an unexpected delight. Like many of the new characters this season, I don't feel like I have a huge grasp on who Tess is as a character. But I felt cheated when she was killed, because I felt like she had more to offer. And now... we get to see her back!

There were some really cool action sequences in this episode, particularly Daisy and the Kree woman fighting in anti-gravity. I don't usually mention visual elements in my reviews, but this show always pulls out a couple of neat tricks.

I should also mention that I'm really starting to warm up to the whole time travel aspect of this season thus far. Fitzsimmons have a discussion wherein they comment on the fact that they may be stuck in a loop - they see technology here in this broken future that only they could have developed in the past, which means that everything Robin had been saying about what they'd been up to was true. So if they do make it back, they're doomed to end up back in this moment - otherwise they'd never have had the idea to make the technology in the first place. However, Simmons points out that their discovery also proves that they make it back home. Who's to say what they can change once they manage that? This is a cool kind of paradox and I'll be interested to see if they can find a way to handle it that feels realistic, given the circumstances.

One final note - May discusses with Coulson the fact that she was apparently a mother. Coulson and Daisy both say they could totally see May as a mom. She's sort of in disbelief about it. This was just so great, because the fandom has long seen Coulson and May as the parents of the S.H.I.E.L.D. team, and May doubting her maternal instincts was such a sweet way to gain some insight into her character.

As I said at the start of this review, this episode felt a bit weak to me. Maybe it's because it served as something of a bridge, setting up pieces for stuff further down the road. All that being said, the individual elements were still (for the most part) pretty darn strong.

7/10