This review contains spoilers.
Last episode, we left off on HiveWard playing the worst game of ‘pull my finger’ known to man, whilst Coulson and the team gear up to take on Malick, to take down the final head of Hydra once and for all. Alongside this, we find out the President has assigned our favourite General Talbot as the new head of the ATCU.
This weeks episode is largely a good, old fashioned undercover episode. It’s good to see these kinds of episodes where the whole team work undercover with new stories and names, and show the spy work SHIELD also does outside of helping the Avengers.
The episode starts with a flashback to the mid-season finale scene where Coulson kills Ward by crushing his heart inside his chest – because what better was to violently and personally kill the man who shot the person you love?
The flashback then proceeds to show the gross and violent possession of Ward’s corpse, and a series of flashbacks of Ward’s life before and after Shield before it cuts to his possessed face opening it’s eyes and saying “Grant Ward. I wish we could have met under different circumstances.” It makes Hive all the more terrifying that to accompany his ever decomposing Ward-Suit, that he constantly refers to himself as “we.” – and the other part of the “we” there probably isn’t Ward.
Then, they proceed to drag in Lucio, the Inhuman cop from Bouncing Back who can paralyze people simply by looking into their eyes – at first he’s bandaged, but then Hive demands to see his eyes. Creepily (but kind of predictably enough.), Hive isn’t hurt by this Inhumans particular power, which naturally causes Lucio to be just a little bit on the afraid side. Then Hive proceeds to step backwards out of an outline of his body, and when Lucio asks “what are you?”, Hive responds with “What are we?” before sending the outline of himself forward. Yikes.
Then, we open up the episode post the Agent’s of S.H.I.E.L.D logo and we’re in an airport with General Talbot and his very angry wife, Carla. He’s asking her not to leave like this, to which she angrily responds telling him he’s always put his work above his family, and now they’re paying for it. Talbot calls after her, looking rather defeated, that he will fix it – and Carla storms away with one last disappointed look. I can’t help but feel a bit sad about it – it was fairly obvious from their last interactions that they have a deeply loving relationship. (Taco Tuesday’s was so adorable.) Then Phil meets up with him, and they proceed to talk/argue about their roles and relationship now, and about the undercover operation they’re involved in – and then we find out shortly later, much to the others agents horror, that Talbot has Creel on his side.
The next 40 minutes of the episode, we’re treated to Talbot and his overwhelming inability to do espionage. The man was in the army for God’s sake, and yet, the man can barely hold it together. He makes casual racist ignorant (“I don’t just wear a dress for anyone!” – regarding the ceremonial robe he’s been asked to wear to honour the country he’s in, and “It’s good to finally put faces to all of your unpronounceable names” – oh, oh dude. Why have you been made head of the ATCU when it requires being a people person.) There’s also some really cool spy moments in there, including Coulson using his high-tech prosthetic to create film gloves for his team-mates to break into their targets rooms and try and find out which one of them is working for Malick.
Then, during the meeting in which three very important politicians want to make a sanctuary state for Inhumans, the absolute unthinkable happens – Talbot blows Coulson’s cover wide open. He exposes the team, Phil’s arm, everything – and then just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, Malick strolls on in and tells the room that Phil Coulson is the director of Hydra.
At the point, I briefly started to worry about the direction this show is going in – because it makes literally no sense for Talbot to be Hydra, and it wouldn’t have held the same shock value as say, when Ward turned out to be Hydra. However, it turns out that Malick has Talbot’s son (which explains Carla’s fury in the beginning of the episode.) – and Talbot is bound to helping him to save his son.
There’s also some side action going on with Lincoln and Daisy but it’s not an awful lot – it’s mostly them fighting and being cute. And oddly enough, pushed to the side is this little tidbit – Creel’s blood contains the secret to stopping people with Inhuman blood from transforming. Why this is only a side story and not a massive focus, I’m not entirely sure, but it does crop up an argument between Daisy and Lincoln, with Lincoln on team “not everyone should change” and Daisy on team “It’s a birthright and if this gets into the wrong hands they will wipe us out”. Both have really valid points – it’d be nice to have control over the people who could turn and use whatever powers they’re given to murder or hurt people, but who gets to decide that path for another person? I wish this had been given more focus than just fleeting scenes between the spy-story side of things.
Overall, this is a fun episode. It doesn’t hold anything too consequential in the main characters story lines, because by the end of it, Talbot’s son is safe again and Phil and Talbot go back to their “hate-buddy” routine. I think if they’d kept the child with Hydra longer, kept using Talbot as a pawn, it might have held some more weight, but this was just more of a filler episode. That’s not a bad thing – it was still a lot of fun, and I always really enjoy the undercover SHIELD stuff a lot. The gadgets, the cover stories, it’s just good old-fashioned spy stuff that makes the show enjoyable. It’s a bit of a fluffy episode with some action, a few character pointers and very little development, but that’s honestly fine, as long as this is just a bit of ground work for the adrenaline pumping stuff we’ve become used to on this show.
Well, all was fun until the end of the episode.
About halfway through the episode, Hive asks for five regular, healthy humans to be delivered to him. Under the assumption he’s going to choose one as a host body because Ward’s is literally rotting around him, he’s left alone with them – and outside, you hear a lot of horrifying screaming that seems to even make the bad guys deeply uncomfortable.
And then the end of the episode reveals why they were screaming. Because standing in the middle of five skeletons, red bloody and still with a bit of flesh on them skeletons, covered in human slime and blood, kneels Hive. And slowly, oh so slowly, he rises up and stands, dripping so much of this sickly ooze, rising until he looks dead into the camera through the muck, staring right into you for a really uncomfortably long measure of time, before the episode ends.
It’s very rare of Marvel, particularly Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to go all out on the gore like this. While it has had it’s gross connotations and it’s violence, I can’t pinpoint much of a moment when it’s been that grim and visually shocking. It had a tonne of weight behind it, and it’s made me scared and excited to see what Brett Dalton’s character is going to do next.
I’m hoping next episode, more actual plot will start to weave it’s way into the main team, and that we get those full rich episodes that make this show fantastic.
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