Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - Season 5, Episode 8 Review

"The Last Day" is another excellent episode in this season of Agents of SHIELD, and in many ways is a fantastic follow-up from last week's installment. While "Together or Not at All" was predominantly focused around Kasius and Sinara, "The Last Day" is very Team SHIELD-centric, resulting in some key character points. Fitz and Simmons are back together again, Daisy is facing the very real possibility that her role as the destroyer of Earth is an inevitability, and May starts to question her own future.

Actually, despite everything else going on, this is clearly a Melinda May episode, even if it doesn't seem as such at a first glance. At the start of the episode, May is starting to question her role in the team. Beforehand she was a fighter and a pilot, but with her injured leg she can no longer protect the team as well as she wants to, and while stuck in 2091 cannot pilot any of the vehicles with a great deal of success. Without the scientific knowledge of Fitz and Simmons, she's feeling pretty useless.

But that's where Robin comes in. Introduced back in the third season, Robin has lived through from 2018 to 2091, and upon realising that it's her last day is trying to help the SHIELD team as much as possible, despite living her life completely out-of-order. This allows the episode to show us various out-of-context scenes that make perfect sense to Robin - living out of the moment - but make absolutely no sense to anyone else. And what's so interesting is May's key role as Robin's mother. Presumably something must've happened to Robin's birth mother (or will happen), and May has taken up responsibility for the girl, in part because (as it turns out) she's seen her die, and in part because this is what May really wants to do. The reason she cut herself off at SHIELD was because she was forced to kill a little girl, and in looking after Robin sees a shot at redeeming herself, at making some kind of amends - and that's just a lovely way to end May as a character.

Whether or not any of these scenes will come to pass in the show, or if they'll be left as remnants of an alternate dystopian timeline remains to be seen, although it seems unlikely that Agents of SHIELD will end with the whole planet having been destroyed by Daisy. Speaking of whom...

Daisy has been left in a rather precarious situation in Agents of SHIELD. In the first season, she filled in as the audience point-of-view character, as well as being an expert hacker and having a mysterious past. Then in the second season Daisy became a hard-as-nails, badass May copycat character with a lot of her signature character traits from the first season removed before making the big reveal that she was in fact Daisy Johnson A.K.A. Quake, Inhuman superhero. Then in the third season Daisy is reworked into a fully-fledged superhero working with SHIELD who seems to be the main character without any real character arc as such.

Why was this a problem? Because there was a character arc staring the writers in the face. Daisy was first introduced as an irresponsible hacker trying to find out who she was, and in the third season was going to be a superhero leading a small team of Inhumans to help SHIELD. The hiccup came in her complete character-change in Season 2, which meant that Daisy completely changed from being a second lead, point-of-view character to Agent May mark 2, who by her very nature is as far from being an audience point-of-view character as one can possibly get. Therefore when the show tried to keep pushing her forward in the story, her character never really developed because her personality felt like it could still very much be in flux. Thus, her reveal as an Inhuman wasn't particularly well-handled, and her turn into fully-fledged superhero didn't have quite the same kick it could have if Daisy had up to that point sill been a relatively down-to-earth audience point-of-view character.

This has all left Daisy as a character in a rather precarious position because she doesn't really have much growth as a character being forming relationships with new characters, such as Robbie / Ghost Rider or Deke, neither of whom really expand Daisy as a three-dimensional character, leaving her still feeling a bit underdeveloped because all of her genuine character development seemed to happen over the course of the first season and in the non-existent episodes between Season 1's finale and Season 2's opener. Thus when Daisy discovers that she's going to destroy all life on Earth, its difficult to truly empathise with what she's going through because the writers have detached her from the audience. Daisy isn't a bad character, but she's much less compelling because she's just relegated to "superhero badass" status now, without having a strong character arc building up to that.

Now, I really, really hope that Agents of SHIELD can actually do something with Daisy as this destroyer of worlds, and give her some real character development building up to that moment, because I feel like that's the big hurdle Season 5 will have to climb in order to execute that story-line effectively. Essentially, the show needs to deconstruct Daisy as a character and build her back up again to face off against this potentially inevitable threat - which, if executed well enough, could be the foundation for a terrific season and potentially series finale.

But all that is just me considering the season as a whole, because "The Last Day" is a really terrific episode. So terrific in fact that I went a great long ramble about why I'm worried the rest of the season could drop the ball when its all going so spectacularly at the moment. Let's hope the show doesn't lose its winning streak any time soon.