Friday 8 April 2016

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. 'Spacetime' Review


This review WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS for the episode to be discussed, if you do not want certain plot points or story spoilt, please do not read further.


Last week Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. tried to give us a personal story between Mack and his brother and fell slightly short of what they were hoping to achieve, in 'Spacetime' the series delivers a real personal story that not only has great action and intrigue, but delivers one of the series most poignant stories.

When a homeless Inhuman man with the ability to show people visions of the future is captured by Hydra it's up to the team to try and mount a rescue attempt, but things are complicated by the fact that Daisy has seen a vision of the future where the rescue mission goes horribly wrong and Coulson shoots her.

The whole vision of the future thing has been done before on other shows, a lot, but it really, really works well on S.H.I.E.L.D..  At lot of that's down to some excellent writing that relied on the reactions of the characters to drive the story forward rather than time high jinks.

I particularly enjoyed watching how Fitz continually butted heads with the other members of the team when trying to make them realise that the future is set once it's been seen and can't be changed.  the best thing about it was that throughout it all he was right.  Everything Daisy saw in her vision of the future actually happened, even if it wasn't what she thought it was when she first saw it.

The team might not have been able to change the future, but it didn't stop them from trying.  The scenes where they practised storming the security room over and over again were a lot more fun than you would first think, especially with bad arse Melinda May doing half hearted kicks at Simmons because she didn't want to accidentally hurt her.

As Fitzz predicted, the future can't be avoided and when May was ready to go on the mission something happens to prevent her going, the return of Andrew.  To be honest, I wasn't expecting his return to the series so quickly, I thought we'd have May and the team trying to hunt down and capture Lash again, so Andrew suddenly walking into the base came as a shock.

But it worked, it was the one thing that would conceivably keep her from going on the mission, and the scenes between the two of them were well written and well acted as May saw her husband for what could very well be the last time.  It's nice when Ming Na gets given these kind of scenes, as it can become very easy for the writers to fall into the trap of just having her as the stoic warrior, rather than giving her range and emotional scenes.


The Hydra developments this week are particularly interesting as we see Hive taking a much more active role now that he has rejuvenated his host body.  Decked out in a swanky matrix outfit he's started to lead Malick down an interesting path, encouraging the Hydra leader to get his hands dirty and kill for himself.

The scenes with Malick in the power armour add a neat twist as we get to see him actually do something other than make plans and act menacingly, and whilst there was no real danger of her actually dying his rooftop fight with Daisy was certainly eventful.  Also, the moment where he crushes a mans head was particularly gruesome.

The biggest development from the whole episode has to be the fact that the team are aware that Ward is back, and it's nice to see that Fitzz and Coulson immediately made the right assumption that he's a host for Hive, rather than playing a 'how could he be alive' type of plot.

'Spacetime' does the trying to change the future plot with a lot of style, humour and some genuinely tense moments that manages to deliver one of the best episode of S.H.I.E.L.D. in a long time.


Amy.
xx

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