Television,  Uncategorized

Review: AGENTS OF SHIELD 5×08: "The Last Day"

*whew*

What a loopy episode.

*whew*

What a loopy episode.

*whe-WAIT a sec…

[Warning: The Following Contains SPOILERS for Agents of SHIELD 5×08.]

FINALLY!!!! FINALLY!!! The B-plot is FINALLY good, and Coulson FINALLY has something to do. HECK YEA!

We pick up from the last episode, with May & Enoch in the company of Robin, Coulson & co. crashing on the fragment of Earth, and Mack, Yo-Yo, & Flint camping out at the Lighthouse.

Coulson and the gang crash their ride and are rescued by the Human resistance, lead by Samuel Voss. Turns out Zephyr One survived after Earth’s destruction, and has become something of a survival bunker for these people. The elder Robin, who showed up at the end of the last episode, has spent most of her life living on the Zephyr, and over the course of the episode we learn that the Agents are stuck in a time loop where they visit the future, go back, crash the Zephyr, and return, back and forth multiple times, and that somewhere along the way, the Earth goes BOOM. Robin lives her life in a timeline jumble, so Coulson and May spend much of the episode trying to glean little bits of information from her.

At the Lighthouse, Kasius has begun to punish the humans to try and coax Daisy back to the station. Mack, Yo-Yo, and Flint head off to find the weapons cache Fitz left for them in the past. Kasius releases the “roaches” into the lower levels to pick off the humans, and the Agents bide their time taking them down.

Before it’s all said and done, Robin dies, and in her dying breath she tells May how to save the world, and reveals that May became a surrogate mother to her in the past.

LOTS to unpack in this episode. The chief thing I think is the character interactions. This episode felt more like a Season 4 installment, where the script was laser focused on getting to the core of these characters and then giving them something to do. Everyone’s busy actually doing something this time around, and it makes all the difference.

Some observations:

– Let’s face it: Kasius is most interesting boring villain this show has ever had. Boring, because his ambitions are dull; but interesting, because Dominic Rains is really charismatic and creepy.
– The monolith shard has me interested. How did it shatter? And how did Fitz & Simmons build that time machine?
– Sinara being sent down to Earth to track the Agents is an interesting twist. Gonna be fun to see how that plays out…

★★★★
4/5

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