Warning: Full spoilers for the final season premiere of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD follow.
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The official end of the Marvel Television era is upon us as Agents of SHIELD, which was once the MCU’s heavily-hyped TV flagship, kicks off its farewell season with, appropriately, a storyline that’s almost totally untethered from the overall goings-on in the Marvel-verse – so much so that everything starts with a rollicking romp back to 1931 for a few time travel shenanigans.
Obviously, the story still involves SHIELD, and thus Hydra (thanks to the reveal that the Chronicoms are out to eliminate Hydra from forming so that – er – SHIELD never forms?), but it’s still all nestled within the show’s insulated Hydra mythology (Gideon Malick, Maveth, etc) that doesn’t veer too close to the MCU’s big screen storylines, and the Chronicoms, which were beings created for the series back at the tail end of Season 4. The draw here, in the show’s sunset season, are the characters we’ve been following for almost a decade. Anyone still on board with the show is watching because of Quake, May, Coulson, and the rest of this bizarre, unstuck-in-spacetime “family” (as, truly, none of them have anyone else except each other now).
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Marvel Television (which was officially folded into Marvel Studios last October) was a modest success in its own right — with programming on Netflix, ABC, Freeform, and Hulu — but it was a noble failure on the MCU front. It was always a one-way street, with the TV shows alluding to the movies but never the other way around. Eventually, when Runaways and Cloak and Dagger started, the shows just stopped acting like the Avengers existed at all. And Agents of SHIELD, as of Season 5 (or really the second half of Season 4), decided the best course for itself was to remove its players from the game board completely – whether it meant putting them in a Matrix-style reality or wiping them from the timeline altogether so they wouldn’t be affected by Thanos.
Fortunately, by the time that was necessary, Agents of SHIELD had built up a solid-enough team dynamic, filled with enough love affairs and close bonds and (numerous) resurrections that allowed it to evolve into a soapy superhero joy in its own right, no longer needing to rely on the Marvel Studios films as a backdrop. The gang’s new adventure, which now has them surfing their own rebooted timeline in that timeline’s past, feels like the kind of fun and charming adventure these crusaders should be having as the series winds down. That’s not to say the stakes won’t rise as the season pushes on, but right now even with the “Wilfred Malick” twist right at the end, the show feels more dopey than dangerous. (In a good way, mind you.)
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“The New Deal” drops our prime time players back in the Prohibition, as the Chronicoms (except for Enoch) intend to muss up the works so that they can lay claim to Earth as their new home. As soon as Deke mentions a theory that allows the team to create a smidgeon of havoc in the past without Butterfly Effecting things too much, it’s off to the races. Quake takes down hidden enemies posing as cops, Patton Oswalt shows up as the original Koenig, and Coulson — who has now (finally) become a full LMD — geeks out while meeting FDR.
We don’t know yet how many of this season’s thirteen episodes will take place in the ’30s, though it feels like perhaps the bulk of the season will have this post-Great Depression setting, as even the opening title graphic is done up in old-style noir. We do know that Enver Gjokaj’s Agent Carter character (and Peggy’s love interest), Souza, is headed our way, so given the Hydra element and the (presumed) super-soldier serum we saw, this final run could lead into some really cool First Avenger stuff. And since Agent Carter got axed before its time, perhaps this series can offer up some mini-closure on that front. It’s doubtful that Hayley Atwell will pop in, but perhaps a teenage Peggy is in the cards.
The SHIELD team is, more or less, the best version of themselves right now. Coulson’s back, but not as a deluded manifestation from the fear dimension (did I get that right?). Quake is still a badass in the field. Mac is still a “heavy is the head”-style of director. A recuperating Yo-Yo now has her “real” arms back while Simmons keeps the Z1 home fires burning. Deke is a drip, but a delightful one. Fitz is, naturally, gone, as he’s wont to do. And May is…well, we’re not sure yet. After being almost killed by Sarge last season, she spent the premiere in a healing pod – but then popped up right at the end in menacing fashion. The Season 7 premiere is a good (and semi-goofy) start to SHIELD’s last hurrah, giving us just enough teases to indicate bigger things are on the way.
Source: IGN.com Marvel's Agents of SHIELD: Final Season Premiere Review