

Airtime: Tuesday at 9ET on ABC

Tweetable Takeaway: Agents of SHIELD is back for real now, y’all! Tweet

Agents of SHIELD is back for real, y’all, and I am giddy. During hiatus I formulated an elaborate, 50-point personal MCU rating system that I won’t get into. “Purpose in the Machine” gets 50/50 plus bonus points because I can. This is the show at its best. This is what the series has been doing so damn well since Winter Soldier. Every time I start to trust that they can keep it up, I remember the beginning and weep, or they stumble and come up flat. But this week, man oh man. This week who cares where we started. Who cares what hackneyed bullshit was trying to pass for exposition last week. Who frickin’ cares? I sprained my foot and drew my own blood watching a TV show, y’all. That’s goodness. There was humor, mystery, character development, suspense, plot nuggets, a whole mess of world-building brainyness for me to chew on for weeks, everyone missing is now accounted for, characters were actually interacting, and (lawd jesus) even something that might pass for romance. All that screaming I expected to do last week? Well, I guess they were letting me save up for this episode.

In order of ascending importance to me: May makes her reappearance in a pleasingly low-key fashion. I didn’t realize how much I missed her until she showed back up. May is the hardest character for me to grasp, and what she contributes is also the easiest to overlook. But without her resolve and her heart somewhere at the center, the entire thing flies to pieces. I need to remember that more often. I loved the stuff with her father, her paranoia, and goofass Hunter tracking her down to go after Ward. All good things. Additionally, Hunter’s pure delight when he hears that Simmons is back would have made me fall in love with him if I wasn’t already there. Because, yes, I am back on the “I love everyone” train.

About one third of the reason I screamed myself hoarse is Ward. Ward, Ward, Ward. I am a creature of villains. I just tend to love them more than is called for. And Ward is particularly compelling because he still has a slew of identity issues and a wicked vengeful streak. It seemed a bit out of nowhere that Von Strucker suddenly has some son, but the scenario is just so delicious that I don’t care that it’s random. It not only sets Ward up as the sort of manipulative mentor that Garrett was to him (“I brought tacos” drew a literal full-bodied shriek from me), but it lets Ward vent a ton of the family issues that flambéing them still hasn’t settled. Additionally, I swear to god, that Ward talking about re-building Hydra “right” were nearly exactly the words that Fury said to Coulson about re-building SHIELD. The instant parallel that that birthed is enough to watch the show for just on its own. On a related note that tag is what I was talking about last week. It punctuated all three of the episode’s storylines and created a boatload of anticipation for the future. It was both a reveal and a turn without being just a simple bomb drop or a one-liner. The way Agents of SHIELD uses its tags when it’s good is one of the primary factors that took me from loving it by the end of Season 1 to being hopelessly and ragingly obsessed with it since the beginning of Season 2. This shit is good, y’all.

Now, when we came on Daisy (! I typed that automatically! Am I getting better?) and Mack talking about Joey, that felt more organic and believable than anything they did last week. It was down-to-earth and not trying to shock. The same goes for every other character here. Rather than running around explaining in sequence how the team is falling apart and what has happened since we last saw our babes, they dive right back into the way they usually interact with each other and you suddenly feel what was missing. The entire team rushing to drag Fitz off the monolith was when it was like “oh hey. These guys actually do all like each other. Who knew.” I loved that we came back in on Fitz’s meltdown for so many reasons that it would take an obscene amount of space to articulate. I do feel that it’s uncharacteristic for Mack to not try to give Fitz some straight talk. Mack is the one who pulls no punches. But given Fitz’s extreme mental state I’m thinking both that Fitz just wouldn’t have heard him and Mack didn’t want to break him. Them actually speaking made me feel better about it, as last week Fitz’s only interaction was a weirdly stilted intervention from Coulson.

I’d like to be clear that I sprained my foot over a series of things (none of them involving my romance), beginning with finding some sort of late-19th century monster-movie-looking machine. Give me all the sci-fi science, and then drop Fitz in the middle of it to figure it out and watch me flip my shit. Skye’s massive headache/nosebleed was another thing that had me leaping around on my couch because all they’ve ever told us about the (now shattered) monolith is “it’s lethal to [Inhumans]” when “in the wrong hands,” so a little bit of damage to an Inhuman is super-hella interesting. The real death knell for my foot was when Fitz gabbled about sci-fi quantum physics, figured out the room needed to shake, and then Skye’s superpowers had real, useful meaning. I was over superpowers after last week. They were just a huge gimmick with no purpose except for everyone to pretend they were in Dragonball Z. But, man, when they mean something they mean something. Using them for plot instead of flash was fantabulous.

Additional plot things that I had me screaming: the secret society at the beginning, the aforementioned nosebleed business, all the talk about Death (more on that shortly), and the Asgardian Professor from the bad ol’ days. I was apprehensive about the Asgardian because the old episode he is from was pretty awful, and just kinda awkward. This go around, however, he was cagey and provided both a lot of the humor and a lot of the background information. Plus, we got some of that old investment paid off! See, I told you it was worth it to watch from the beginning. Quick aside, the fact that this episode made me laugh out loud at least six times in the midst of my intensely overwrought emotional state was pure genius. The jokes were off-hand and goofy the way they were last season and the brief bits of humor rounded out what would have otherwise been a deeply dark dire situation.

Warning: the rest of this review is a mess because, well. FITZ FITZ FITZ. This is a level of emotion my body is not even equipped to feel. It was in the process of calming down that I got socked sixteen gillion times in the breastbone. Fitz has always been prone to rash action when Simmons is in danger, and I mean always. Everything from Fitz’s desperation to him leaping into the portal himself was marvelously in-tune. I won’t fan fic you, primarily because fan fic is for when something doesn’t go your way. This episode was perfect. Fitz and Simmons were perfect. On a plot level, on a character level, on a suspense level, on a world-building level—this one plotline handed it all to me on a platter. It was so perfect to me that it feels unreal. This sort of thing never happens. Is this a mistimed April Fool’s joke? I tend to want things to happen in stories rather than expect them to. If you expect something to happen and it doesn’t, no matter how great what they give you is, you’ll always be a little bit disappointed. My cynical expectation was that Simmons would come back and the two of them would be messed up again. I expected that because that’s the easy way to fabricate drama. That’s what most shows would do. But Agents of SHIELD, when it’s good, it’s so very, very good. The entire scene of Skye keeping the portal open, Mack and Bobbi trying to keep the rig intact, and Fitz and Simmons reaching for each other was too much for my corporeal being. I have claw marks from it. SHOUTOUT TO MY MAN BEAR MCCREARY.

I loved that it wasn’t just Fitz on his one-man rampage—the entire team was in on his scheme and the entire team together got her back. And, lawdy, am I excited for Henstridge to bite into whatever issues Simmons has and whatever the hell happened on that planet. But what really got me, what burned me straight past tears into numbness, was this: Simmons is not nor has she ever been demonstrative with her affection. But she laid her head in Fitz’s lap and was calm. And that. I have no words for that. If I could harness this emotion I wouldn’t have to pay my power bill for the rest of year. What I want but do not expect is that Fitz and Simmons can be in an okay place with each other while still being massively screwed up individually. And hence we get our drama from actual character rather than artificial conflict. I need this. I need it like burning. PLUS, I think my girlfriend doesn’t have any superpowers? Cross your fingers for me on that one.

Seriously most of my anxiety about this week stemmed from last week sucking. Or, not sucking. It was just… boring. It was average TV fare with some boom-boom special effects and one “holy shit” performance. It was not my Agents of SHIELD Last week I was sorely disappointed. A comic-reading friend of mine staged an intervention where he attempted to tell me about Lash (the blue porcupine-lookin’ dude from last week) and “what Death means in the comics.” After threatening him with a painful ninja-demise, I was glad that he’d hinted these elements were something. Dropped the way they were last week, they were poor attempts at shock value. I’m sure they were supposed to excite me to the point of shaking like a Skye-quake, but everything was too disjointed and trying too hard to be a spectacle. It was like a magician walking on stage and demanding you be amazed, when you can see all the tricks falling out of his pockets. But now, my friends, I am down for anything. BRING IT WITH YOUR ALIENS. GIVE ME ALL YOUR FAKE X-MEN AND SUPER-TEAMS. I’M GAME. So long as you keep it at this level, you can take me anywhere, show, and I’ll follow. See, I’m easy to appease.

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Dana Leigh Brand is a digitization archivist by day and a masked pop culture avenger by night. She spreads the gospel of science fiction and fantasy wherever she goes.



Twitter: @DanaLeighBrand

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Dana Leigh Brand | Contributor