Goodbye Ghost Rider, and bring on the LMDs.
Full spoilers for Marvel's Agents of SHIELD continue below.
With the Ghost Rider arc wrapped up (for now), it's safe to say that Agents of SHIELD has delivered an incredibly satisfying twist on the iconic Marvel character. In addition to discussing the successes of SHIELD's fall finale, "Laws of Inferno Dynamics," I also want to reflect back on the strengths of this stretch of the season. So before we move fully into the realm of science with the twist at the end of the episode about Aida, LMDs and May, let's talk about how SHIELD brought magic and the quantum realm into their corner of the MCU.
Gabriel Luna proved to be fantastic casting as Robbie Reyes, and the decision to age up the character allowed the show to play into the darker storylines it's exploring. While it's not always easy to make the audience immediately care about a new character four seasons in, SHIELD made Robbie feel like an integral part of the cast quickly. It didn't hurt that the Ghost Rider VFX were killer too.
With Robbie and the darker tone of Season 4, Agents of SHIELD also has played up the action. The midseason finale had a couple standout sequences, specifically Yo-Yo setting off the explosion and then running away from it. The show has done a great job of balancing magic with the supernatural and science sides of the MCU, and the first arc of Season 4 grappled with all three. The climax at the end of the episode with Robbie and his uncle Elias might have felt a bit open ended, but that's the point. This is act one of Season 4.
It seems like a fair assumption we'll see at least one of those two back from the space in between dimensions (or wherever they went) before the end of the season. Though we never definitively found out that Johnny Blaze was a previous Ghost Rider (though it was all but confirmed), Coulson's nod to a previous Ghost Rider seems to imply that we're going to get a bit more meat and backstory to the Spirit of Vengeance down the road -- or at least I will maintain that optimistic outlook and hope this all wasn't one elaborate Easter egg.
Ghost Rider's storyline might be wrapped up and his vengeance completed, but there's a whole new realm of trouble waiting for the SHIELD agents. As I previously mentioned, Season 4 has been particularly adept at balancing its various storylines, though clearly the Ghost Rider was a priority thus far. Looking ahead, there's still the Inhuman question of what Mace and Nadeer's true aims are, and the biggest question of all: what is going to happen with the LMDs?
The bait-and-switch at the end of the episode was fantastically executed, with May's disappearance seemingly coming out of nowhere after she had a role in the final fight against Eli. But like last week's episode toying with our expectations until partway through revealing we hadn't been seeing the full picture, here we realize that Aida must have taken May and created an LMD of her much earlier in the episode, and we've been seeing the decoy all along.
As a big fan of Mallory Jansen's work on Galavant, I'd been excited to see what Agents of SHIELD would do with Aida, and so far she's delivered. It makes me excited to see what happens when suddenly she becomes the focus, as Aida has primarily been relegated to the background. The concept of an AI gone bad isn't anything new, even within the MCU, but even with this storyline touching on a familiar idea, the set-up gives the impression SHIELD is going to take Aida's turn in a more interesting direction -- or maybe I'm just optimistic coming off the awesome conclusion of Westworld, another show featuring artificial intelligence with burgeoning sentience.
After a run of episodes away from SHIELD, Daisy is finally an agent again, and as much as her time away from the organization was justified, the show hurt for her being kept separate from the rest of the team. Daisy and Robbie were a great dynamic, but she's best when she's alongside Simmons, Coulson and everyone else. Agents of SHIELD is smart for mixing up the core group dynamic, especially after Daisy's storyline where she kept being drawn back to Ward and Lincoln got a bit stale last season. (The show really blew that up at the end anyway, so clearly the writers also thought some changes needed to be made.) At least being on the run with Ghost Rider gave Daisy some awesome fight scenes, and her return to SHIELD should give Chloe Bennet some fresh dramatic material to chew on.
All of which brings us back to Jeffrey Mace, and how he fits into the rest of SHIELD. Season 4 has done a good job of establishing him as an untrustworthy character; there are plenty of justifications for disliking him, not the least of which is that all the other main characters still in SHIELD do, but he still comes off as a largely pro-SHIELD good guy. But that lingering doubt is important to this next storyline when we see him bringing the LMD program under SHIELD control. And with Coulson continuing to guide Mace and essentially SHIELD, I'm still holding out hope we might end this season with him as director once again. With Daisy in the team once again, hopefully she can help cut through Mace's BS. (Bonus points to the writers for tossing in a great nod to Daisy running SHIELD in her comics arc.)
The Verdict
Agents of SHIELD brought the Ghost Rider storyline to a satisfying conclusion, and even more satisfyingly didn't close the door on it for good. This act of Season 4 has worked across the board, though Daisy was kept away from the rest of SHIELD a bit too long. Now that she's back in the mix, we can look forward to the show digging into its next big conflict: as set up in a twist ending, Aida is going to be causing a lot of problems with LMDs.
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