A familiar face and a surprising farewell.
Full spoilers for Marvel's Agents of SHIELD continue below.
Going into this "Agents of Hydra" arc as the third and final pod of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD: Season 4, I expected that the season finale resolution would come with our favorite SHIELD agents finding their way out of the Framework in time to move on to the next issue facing them in a prospective Season 5. But the deeper we get into this storyline, the more intrigued I am by the promise of longterm ripple effects on SHIELD's central characters, even after they hypothetically get out of Aida and Radcliffe's virtual prison.
We'll talk about the Mace of it all in a bit, but first I'd like to deal with Fitz as the main, least-likely-to-die character who seems like he's going to be dealing with this the most in the episodes to come. The big question going into this week's episode was what could cause Fitz to be so dark that he would kill a woman in relatively cold blood. We learn that the answer is that his big regret was his poor relationship with his father, not the death of Simmons, and fixing that relationship turned him into the frigid man he is now.
It remains to be seen how much of an impact this time in the Framework will have on these characters in the real world, but I wonder if he's in pretty deep. We've now seen Coulson and May come back from the dark side, but could some of this character change transition with Fitz back even as he likely will turn his back on Ophelia, his father and Hydra? Daisy and Simmons' reactions to his murder of Agnes makes me think that's something they won't quickly forget either.
These real-world consequences are part of what make Agents of SHIELD so effective, but Mace's death lacked a bit of a punch because he'd been absent from our minds up until the last episode. (This likely won't be as much of an issue for people who consume this season in a binge, but the delay between pods two and three means we haven't had a lot of Mace time in a while.) The most powerful part of his final episode was his taking Simmons to task for never really knowing him. Mace was a character we suspected and then judged for being a fraud, but in the Framework he is the hero he always wanted to be. Seeing him make the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of heroism was moving because this was the Patriot at his best, but it did feel like it came at a time when Mace wasn't the audience's top priority.
Meanwhile, the "What If..." idea continued to play out when SHIELD's writers found a way to bring back Trip. This rotating showcase of deceased characters has been a fun way to play into the Framework gimmick, and also a nice reminder of the losses we've already had as we said goodbye to our first real person stuck in Aida's digital world. Hopefully Trip sticks around for a bit as another alternative perspective of what could have been because having a good version of Ward around has been welcome and impactful. It would be nice to see another character who we loved from the same era offer the same sort of outlook of how different things could have been.
The big question in this episode was "how do you determine what is truth?" It's a relevant conversation, and I can't help but wonder what it will mean as these characters find themselves more embedded in this happier world. Will Mack choose to stay behind with Hope instead of coming back to the present? Or will that loss stay with him even more in the present as he experiences what his life could be? Fortunately we're already seeing the end in sight as Daisy learns what the backdoor is out of the Framework, and May has given Daisy the ability to turn Inhuman and bring down Hydra. (That change in heart happened a bit quickly, for what it's worth, though we'll chock it up to May feeling her heart tug her back to the side of the good guys.) But it's appreciated that Agents of SHIELD is making the choice between the real world and this fake "paradise" a hard one.
The Verdict
The fact Agents of SHIELD seems like it's building up to some real-world consequences after the time spent in the Framework is welcome, especially in an episode where we experienced our first real-world loss. That concept of "what is the truth" is an interesting concept that's thread through this episode pod. As this season gets ever closer to its climax, it's nice to see the writers not afraid to pull punches by both saying goodbye to recurring characters and bringing back ones we didn't think we'd see again.
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