Mother May I?
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
"The Last Day" seemingly answered a lot, but it also sort of created more havoc in its own strange way. Most notably however, the episode provided us with an unexpectedly sweet Melinda May storyline. As we began to see snippets of everyone's time in 2018 and beyond, including the collapse of humanity post-cataclysm and the survival deal with Kree overlords, we learned that May fell into a surprise maternal role with regards to young Robin.
Early on in the episode, May expressed distress over the fact that she couldn't fight or fly - the two skills she possessed that routinely helped keep everyone safe. Her role in all of this, we'd learn, would be key, but not in the way we, or she, would expect. As the one who grew close to Robin, over the years, she became the only one old Robin could confide in before she died. It was a really cool use of May, who hasn't been lacking in fight scenes this year (just wins), and a refreshing exploration of her emotional side. Her romantic interest in Coulson, I feel, was the beginning of this and now her motherly role toward Robin has capped it off nicely.
In its own way, Robin's death, though we weren't privy to the majority of her life, was fairly emotional. That doesn't change the fact that this entire space saga, this fated loop that our heroes find themselves in, feels snowglobe-ish. It's a different sort of Framework - almost as if they're all trapped inside Robin's dream. Or, in the very least, in a timeline that only seems to exist because she sees it. I guess the reverse is actually being what's sold as the narrative - that she sees what's going to happen - but it sure does feel, most of the time, like she's the one dictating things.
It was nice to learn that Flint, somehow, has a larger, higher role in all of this. Robin, in a flashback/forward, mentions him helping Mack, and we saw them take care of those ferocious critters in the Lighthouse (hello again, Shotgun Axe!), but it would appear that this timeline needs more from him than heroics that only affect the future part of the story.
Here's where things get messy though. A bit spotty.
Apparently, there is no timeline that exists in which our heroes didn't travel to the future. Right? Am I absorbing this correctly? That it was always to be that they'd be whisked away by the monolith and then travel back in time, setting all future calamities in motion. Daisy, apparently, destroys the world after she's already seen that she's destroyed the world. She goes back to the present and does it regardless of what she's witnessed. That's...really weird. Also, there's something missing here because there's no direct proof that she had anything to do with that massive earthquake. I guess being named "Quake" was all anyone needed.
I kind of want/need a full timeline breakdown here. It seems as though all the agents got shot into the future to meet all the people they meet later on when they go back to the present and live the rest of their lives in the wake of the big global explosion. And it's those people who believe in the prophesy of them saving everyone in the future. Except they clearly didn't save them in the future because they came back to the past to meet them. My brain is broken. Sorry that I can't clarify any of this in my head.
The only people we know who make it back to the present are Fitz, Simmons, May, Daisy and Yo-Yo, right? Because the diner was the last time everyone was seen together and Coulson and Mack don't appear in those flashes. Also, it feels like Deke's father should be someone we know, or have met. There was such a build up for him and then all that happened was we learned he'd been killed off-screen. But then again, he also couldn't have been anyone that Deke himself met. Bah. It's all a jumble.
The Verdict
At first glance, "The Last Day" might seem like an episode designed to tie everything together, but in reality it worked to overcomplicate things a bit. With the flashbacks (to future times before this future) we were watching, basically, what happens. What's to come. Characters weren't learning about these moments from Robin, which would give them the option of changing things, we were seeing them as viewers. Meaning they're more or less fixed, right?
Anyhow, despite the landlocked, fated feel to the story (which collapsed on itself more than opened up), seeing May act maternal and sweet, even as the beacon of hope during the dark times that follow the cataclysm, was a really nice change for her.
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