Pete Messum Reviews...

' Inescapable ' might just be the best episode so far in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s sixth season, centring entirely around Fitz and Simmons as they find themselves trapped inside a Chronicom mind prison, and have to face their fears together. Whilst the meta aspects of ' Inescapable ''s trippy, mind-bending dream sequences may seem obvious - Fitz is haunted by his potential for evil, Simmons is haunted by the fears and anxieties she'd locked away in her music box - they do serve to give the episode stakes. The characters' inner demons are given physical form to pursue them through the maze of their own shared dreams, which helps to keep up the pace when things seem to be getting a little too slow. Once everything is all resolved and FitzSimmons are back together as a unit though, so are their demons - in a rather humorous end to the episode. It's probably worth mentioning that Iain De Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstringe are both fantastic through...

After the baffling tonal inconsistencies of ' Code Yellow ', Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. attempts to get back on track with ' The Other Thing ' - an episode that feels like it's simply there to set things up for later. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. abandoned its villain-of-the-week format a long time ago, but it still feels somewhat dissatisfying when episodes feel like smaller pieces in a larger puzzle. It's as though the show is being produced for a streaming audience, bingeing the entire season in one go, as opposed to working as week-to-week entertainment. It's also at this point that I really started to feel the length of this season - and we're only five episodes in. I had thought that a shorter, thirteen-episode season would benefit the show, and while it might in the long run, I don't think that the story has gone very far in five episodes. May has been captured by Sarge and his accomplice (whose name escapes me, but she keeps mentioni...

When did Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. become DC's Legends of Tomorrow? ' Code Yellow ' starts off with Deke having reinvented himself in 2019 as the head of a tech/games company, with a girlfriend (played by Executive Producer Maurissa Trancheon) and a revolutionary new system called "The Framework". Sound familiar? Oh, and obviously the episode opens with a cheesy action sequence of Deke fighting some aliens in a corridor and then seducing Daisy in a fake-out dream/game sequence so obvious that for me at least, the episode started on the wrong foot. With this and the previous episode, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. seems to be trying to embrace a more humorous approach, with a style of meta-humour similar to that of DC's Legends of Tomorrow. Deke's look towards the camera in the pre-titles sting was a bit too on-the-nose for me, especially given how grounded Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has tried to be for so long. If the show wants to head into a new direc...

' 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 w...

The struggle with reviewing individual episodes of a serialised show like Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D . is that each episode naturally builds on the last. Not enough Sarge or Fitz in Episode 1? Give them more focus in Episode 2. And surprise surprise it actually works really well, even if it does highlight that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. would perhaps work best as a binge-able streaming show as opposed to a week-to-week network drama. Each episode is considerably more action-packed and engaging than standalone episodes of Marvel's Jessica Jones (or most of the Marvel/Netflix shows), but that partly comes with the format of a network television drama - you need to keep the audience hooked, not just to come back next week but to sit through horrific amounts of adverts. ' Window of Opportunity ' dedicates a lot of its time to setting up Sarge and his team, establishing their dynamic with one another and teasing their threat to planet Earth, which is thankfully handled w...

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. returns for its sixth season after what seemed to be it's definitive ending last year. Whilst I felt that Season Five was a rather small-scale season to go out on - more because of the low production values than the story - and that a definitive, planned-out ending would be better than running the show into the ground, I was encouraged by the news that a sixth season would only consist of thirteen episodes, and be set after Coulson 's death in the Season Five finale. About a year later, Season Six has arrived in the UK, set to be followed by a thirteen episode seventh season next year. ' Missing Pieces ' is very much a slow-build episode, pulling together a few strings and setting multiple ongoing storylines in motion, making it a rather uneventful self-contained episode but no doubt an integral part of Season Six. I felt very much underwhelmed by this opener, but that's mainly because of how little it can really achieve in f...

Originally, the showrunners of Agents of SHIELD wrote these final three episodes, including Episode 22 'The End' as not just the season finale, but the overall series finale of the entire show. Everyone involved put all their effort into a satisfying ending to the show, endeavouring to give the series (and its lead protagonist Agent Phil Coulson) a proper send-off. Since then, however, the series has been renewed for a sixth, 13-episode season set to debut mid-2019 (although filming reportedly began quite recently), potentially undermining this entire three-part finale. Does it? We'll have to wait and see for definite, but actually the way this season ended was open enough that I think a continuation is a valid option. I initially planned to review each of these episodes separately, but given that they're so tied-in to one another, I figured that it'd be better to evaluate them as a whole, chronicling General Talbot's transformation into Graviton. It's a...

The question I keep coming back to with this episode is a very simple "but why?" And how the writers didn't pick up on the fact that they were contriving their greatest plot twist in order to rocket this season towards a finale fans weren't expecting. Any sense of narrative or character arc is forgotten in a short moment that serves to undermine the rest of the season. Thankfully, there's only three episodes left and not much time for any real damage to be felt, but enough time to hopefully retroactively justify such an awkward plot contrivance. Anyway, "Option Two" is a surprisingly standalone installment of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, mostly revolving around the Lighthouse being attacked by Qovas (yeah, I did have to look that up) and the Confederacy, who are after the Gravitonium. Most of the episode consists of characters running around the locked-down Lighthouse to try and stop Qovas and his men, and from that premise we get some interestin...

"All Roads Lead..." is an interesting example of serialised television; on the one hand, very little really happens in the episode itself, but as one installment in an ongoing narrative, the episode concludes Ruby's story-line effectively in such a way as to set-up the following episodes' narrative thrust. The presentation of the gravitonium as storing peoples' clashing personalities is an interesting concept, and one that the episode attempts to tackle with Creel and Ruby, but alas the blending of archive footage into the episode serves to only act as a hindrance. Had the series brought back the respective trapped characters, perhaps this inner conflict could have been explored to a greater extent. Perhaps if this was even a Netflix original, or subscription-based series, the creative team could have shot a back-log of these scenes with the respective guest stars to feature in a few episodes. Agents of SHIELD is, however, a standard network show, and that sor...

I'm writing this about a week after having watched "The Honeymoon", so I apologise in advance if this review isn't as detailed or specific as it probably could have been, but it's worth mentioning that this episode is much busier than previous installments this season, so much so that I was stunned how much was achieved by the first ad break. Ruby finally had her first big showdown with Daisy, which was a well-choreographed action sequence, even if I was hoping for it to take a more interesting turn. I suspect that now Ruby's going after SHIELD on her own terms we'll get a much more interesting second round between the two. Ruby herself is a bit of an odd villain, partly because she's been designed from scratch to be the most effective killing machine ever, and yet doesn't seem to be a strong as quite a few other "strongest" henchmen characters that Hydra's thrown at SHIELD over the years. Ultimately though, this episode very muc...

"Inside Voices" marks a very clear point in this season of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD: the point at which it becomes clear that the writers couldn't quite drag this storyline out over 22 episodes, despite having solved that problem last season, and seemingly in splitting this season in two. So what happens in "Inside Voices"? Well, Talbot and Coulson escape Hale's base, and Yo-yo and Fitzsimmons escape the Lighthouse. Yup, that's pretty much it. It's not that "Inside Voices" is a bad episode, but after last episode felt a little too much like padding, the show just seems to have really lost a sense of momentum. There's another six episodes to go, but it feels like we only really have two or three's worth of story to actually wrap everything up in a satisfactory way. Robin's return in this episode felt very much limited to setting a seed for the next episode/s, and re-establishing her close bond with Agent May, which wou...

"Rise and Shine" is a very interesting flashback episode, mostly in that the episode ends without quite affirming it's point, despite throwing quite a few vague ideas at the wall. Some of General Hale's backstory is filled-in, giving us an insight into the Hydra recruitment program headed by Daniel Whitehall - did I mention how good Agents of SHIELD's cameos have been this season? The lack of them in "The Real Deal" is definitely forgiven. There's a really eerie aurora to the Hydra school, demonstrating how the organisation manipulated and shaped their children into the perfect agents. We even get a cameo from a younger Jasper Sitwell (who appeared in Season 1, as well as several Marvel One-Shots, Avengers Assemble and Captain America: The Winter Soldier), as he becomes a mole within SHIELD. I'd actually be interested to see more of this in the future, and it makes me wonder why SHIELD hasn't really touched on this aspect of Hydra recruit...

Well, that got dark pretty quickly. An interesting addition to the previously segment in "The Devil Complex" was the reference to Fitz's alternate persona in the Framework, that being of 'The Doctor' (no, not that one) - a menacing Hydra scientist, and the idea of such a personality being very much inside Fitz. Yet the episode brilliantly misdirects us in that respect, setting up 'The Doctor' as Fitz's greatest fear having emerged from the fear dimension ruptured a few episodes ago. In fact, the episode even opens with Simmons seeing the mysterious astronaut creature from a couple of seasons ago. "The Devil Complex" is clearly setting up The Doctor as the physical manifestation of Fitz's Framework alter ego, right up until he tries to remove Daisy's power inhibitor. Because why would he? Sure, Dr. Fitz gives his justification, but it seems like more of a normal Fitz explanation... ...And that's because it is. Because there i...

Trying to focus on "Principia" as a standalone episode is really quite difficult, mostly because in retrospect it's very much an establishing episode, awkwardly sat in between "The Real Deal" and "The Devil Complex" - two much more notable episodes due almost entirely to the fact that they each have their own respective standalone plots to work from, whereas "Principia" is moving different pieces into place for the over-arching narrative to progress. For example, a key sub-plot in this episode revolves around Von Strucker's son, in a guest appearance that failed to resonate much of a "oh, was he thingy's son?" While I appreciate returning to certain characters and story-threads, when the show has distanced itself from them for some time, it's difficult to really remember them, unless they've stuck in your brain. Garrett returning from the first season, or Daisy's dad, or Ghost Rider would be significant retur...

100 episodes later and Marvel's Agents of SHIELD is still going strong...just as a more niche ABC comic book show. In fact, the comic book show landscape seems to have really changed since SHIELD's debut, with even long-running series such as Arrow and The Flash losing their audiences. Shows like Legion and Agents of SHIELD, however, which have garnered a lot of support from a relatively small but encouraging audience seem to be garnering much more positive feedback. In fact, I think its the fans that have kept Agents of SHIELD going for 100 episodes, and that's thanks to the quality of the series itself. It hasn't "lost its mojo" - it's actually kind of gained it over the course of four and a half seasons. In this 100th episode special though - complete with a title-card compilation from each season - the show seems intent on rewarding fans as much as they can, resulting in an episode filled with lovely little bits of fan service, but nothing that re...

So here we are, back again with another set-up episode of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD as the team at long last return to present day at...the Lighthouse. Again. Yup, it seems that Agents of SHIELD spent too much money on that rather standard Lighthouse interior set to let it go to waste. Maybe it replaced the old SHIELD HQ set? Either way, it's not a bad location to set the rest of the season in, acting as a constant reminder of the imminent threat to the planet - a threat that the show is very keen to emphasise in this mid-season opener. There's a real sense throughout this eleventh episode that while the team appear to be temporarily safe, they have very little time left. So little, in fact, that they discover a Kree beacon mid-town that may be the cause of the Kree's arrival...or it may not, as the team discover that the US Government are hunting them down as "most wanted" criminals and have used the signal to lure them into capture - which, admittedl...

With all the excitement surrounding Marvel Studios' Avengers: Infinity War, its easy to forget that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is still ongoing elsewhere with Marvel's Agents of SHIELD reaching its mid-season finale last night in the UK...about two months later than in the US. "Past Life" brings Season 5's first pod to a close as the team embark on a last-ditch effort to escape 2091. Its an episode very much designed to resolve key plot-threads from the previous nine episodes, resulting in a rather peculiar installment of the series that probably flows much better when watched immediately after the previous episode (and vice-versa). The plot's already in motion, meaning that we have little time to 'get in' to the episode before things start kicking off. However, due to the nature of the story, its not as 'epic' as some big episodes have been in the past. I recently discovered that ABC had actually slashed the budget for the show, hence w...

As we hurtle towards Agents of SHIELD's fifth mid-season finale, the cards are laid down on the table as the agents prepare for their final confrontation with Kasius, and their eventual journey back to the present day. Unlike with previous episodes I'm finding it very difficult to work out what to say. In many ways, this was an transitional or checklist episode that filled in important plot details while the narrative moves from one clear beat to another. It's establishing the final "act" of this half-season, putting the characters under-pressure to succeed against all odds. There's nothing wrong with this of course; the episode is filled with tension, action and key plot developments, laying the groundwork for next week - and presumably beyond. If there's a problem with this though, its that episodes like "Best Laid Plans" are a little forgettable in the long run. As in, I cannot tell you anything that really happened in the episode beyond ...

"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...

Given how serialised Agents of SHIELD has been over the last four seasons, its difficult not to repeat oneself in these episode-by-episode reviews, but I'd once again like to talk about Kasius and Sinara, because "Together or Not At All" is a brilliant and compelling look at the dynamic between the two, so much so that it's virtually a B-plot, and even so features very little interaction between the two. In fact, correct me if I'm wrong but the two only share two scenes together in the episode, at least in terms of interaction. Their dynamic is very interesting in part because the writers have done such a wonderful job at characterising them, and making them much more compelling characters than one could've possibly thought with Kree overlords.  With 90% of the Kree in this show and in Guardians of the Galaxy all being male, Sinara represents a rarity in being a female member of a very hyper-masculine species who prioritise war and violence, choosing to d...