"I prayed for vengeance. I got it."
Ghost Rider continues to make a convincing transition into the world of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD as the various mysteries in Season 4 begin to come together.
Full spoilers for Agents of SHIELD episode "Meet the New Boss" continue below.
Robbie Reyes was easily the best part of SHIELD's Season 4 premiere, which leaned into the darkness allowed by the show's new time slot. Agents of SHIELD settled into the darker tone more comfortably in the second episode of the season, which brought together various key plotlines -- the spirit haunting people from the premiere and the mysterious origins of Ghost Rider's abilities -- and already is showing how those are forming one main thread.
Is Robbie Reyes the key to everything, like he thinks he might be? The show seems to be hinting "yes." That photo he grabbed in the lab seems to show the eight people who worked at Momentum Alternative Energy Labs at the time whatever happened to turn them all into ghost-like spirits. We've met four already, and the fifth seems to be the "Joe" Lucy kept talking about; could one of the remaining three be Elias (or some variation of him), Robbie's uncle from the comics who is the key to his abilities?
That would be an interesting way to bring everything together, but I get the vibe that Lucy and the rest of the ghost gang are keys to a bigger mystery, and the Momentum storyline is only a conduit to get us to whatever that is. SHIELD's showrunners have already said that questions from the season premiere will be answered in Doctor Strange, and with the very overt mention that another Momentum lab is in New York and the Darkhold -- aka the Book of Sins, which Lucy apparently was pursuing when they all got turned into spirits -- being a notable item from the Doctor Strange comics, it could be that this storyline could come to a major turning point in that film.
The ghosts from Momentum Alternative Energy Labs were the weakest part of "Meet the New Boss." The effects were lacking, and the characters didn't deliver on the great ghost story vibe of the cold open. Ultimately they weren't very scary, and Agents of SHIELD's brief dip into horror was one of the more fun parts of this episode. At least Ghost Rider continues to deliver; it seems SHIELD will continue to have Robbie Reyes transform into his flaming-skulled alter ego instead of having those be one-off appearances (impressive on a TV budget), and Gabriel Luna is owning the role.
The Bonnie and Clyde dynamic between Robbie and Daisy is delivering on the premiere's promise. It's a smart choice to introduce Ghost Rider's origin story from a cynical angle as Daisy writes off his "deal with the devil," instead thinking he's Inhuman. Some viewers might know that Ghost Rider's introduction means a more supernatural side of the MCU, but the slow burn (pun intended) of rolling out the origins of his abilities is the smart route to go as it eases SHIELD from a more science-oriented show into one that is open to other realms of possibility.
Speaking of science, Agents of SHIELD smartly didn't keep Fitz, Simmons and the rest of the original SHIELD gang in the dark long about what was in the box. Fitz, Simmons and Mack come around pretty quickly to the fact something is causing these seeming phantoms to appear, though there's still the question of why they are affecting contaminated people like May in the way they are. No discussion of AIDA this week, though based on the inclusion of Dr. Radcliffe in episode 3's synopsis, that likely will get brought back into the main story soon.
So where does the Director fit into all of this? After playing coy with his identity in the season opener, viewers finally met the new boss (as the title promises) in episode 2. Jason O'Mara's character's identity has intentionally been kept a secret, and here we learn his name is "Jeffrey." (Some simple Googling offers a pretty good suggestion of which pre-existing Marvel character he might be based on.) More importantly, he's an Inhuman, which is an interesting choice within the world of Agents of SHIELD given the Sokovia Accords. It also allows the show to continue to explore the question of whether Inhumans can live peacefully beside non-Inhumans, which it delved into in the back half of Season 3, as the Director is trying to distance SHIELD from the now-vigilante Daisy. He definitely isn't going to like it when he finds out she's working with Ghost Rider.
The Verdict
Ghost Rider continues to reinvigorate Agents of SHIELD, and the show picked up the pace in Season 4 by not letting any of the mysteries linger for too long. Is Robbie Reyes really the key to the big supernatural problems plaguing the show? While the payoff of the ghosts proved to be lacking (and the poor visual effects conveying them didn't help), the ghost story vibe of "Meet the New Boss" was a nice way to lean into the darker tone of Season 4.
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