Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - Season 6, Episode 3 Review

'Fear and Loathing on the Planet of Kitson' is a rather bizarre episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., attempting a more bizarre and humorous installment without actually having the story to justify this. The tonal shifts throughout the episode border on the bizarre, and do serve the remove a lot of the tension. On the one hand, it's a story about Team Space SHIELD (Daisy, Simmons, Davis and the other one) desperately trying to find Fitz (and Enoch), coming so close and yet again losing him at the last possible second. A new threat emerges in the form of a hunter Chronicom, and the episode ends on a very dour note with a short epilogue showing Sarge's plan coming to fruition.

The issue here isn't so much with the story as much as the execution of said story. Initially the scenes of Enoch trying to blend in at an alien casino are fun, and a welcome relief of tension, but then Daisy, Simmons and Davis get high off some alien drug and the whole thing meanders about with "humorous" scenes of characters just hallucinating and staggering about. Quite why bio-chemist Simmons would so casually eat extraterrestrial food given to her by the two shiftiest-looking aliens in the galaxy is beyond me, and feels like an odd plot contrivance to give the episode some levity - which it admittedly already had. Watching Daisy and Simmons stagger about high as a kite may be fun at first, but when Simmons briefly reunites with Fitz at the end of the episode, all of the emotional weight has dissipated in favour of the humour. This isn't 'Thor: Ragnarok' where the humour is used to contrast with the dire stakes (and also feels much more naturalistic), nor is this the sort of humour that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. usually goes for, so one has to ask: why?

I also couldn't help but feel that the episode was a bit cheap. For a fun alien casino, the set looked very small and cramped, whilst the alien characters looked a bit too much like humans who raided the costume cupboard and/or put a bit of face-paint on. I wasn't expecting anything too incredible, but given the various species in the Marvel Universe, couldn't they at least have put in some fun cameos? More interesting aliens, surely? I just felt that there was a lack of effort to really make the casino feel alien - the set itself just looked like a warehouse, so much so that it might well have been a re-dressed Lighthouse HQ for all I could tell. It doesn't really sell the whole space opera angle that this story-line has been going for (with some strong results).

I just found myself waiting for the episode to get to its point. There was a lot of meandering about, and I think that the writers could've come up with a better idea to pace the story out other than "Daisy and Simmons get high". Even the new Chronicom hunter seemed a bit dull. That all being said, the fight sequence at the end with Daisy against the casino was a fun distraction, but was perhaps too little too late, as I'd already lost interest. On the one hand, I want more of this storyline, but I also want more from this storyline, and despite having an entire episode dedicated to it, I don't think that the space elements are working as well as they could. I assume that the next episode will be straight back down to Earth again.