So, the last episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. aired. And I will miss this show so much. To me, it was the main thing which kept me invested in the MCU as a whole, which gave it layers one just can’t get from just watching the movie. I guess the Streaming shows are supposed to now take its place, but I don’t think that they will ever go to the length Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. went to fulfil the “everything is connected” brief. And don’t think that I’ll stop whining about the need for an Agents of Sword spin-off anytime soon. (Disney? Feige? Do you hear me? You BETTER use Daisy and co when you get to Sword, they are easily the most qualified Agents for such a project).
But I also wanted to honour the show, and what is the best way to explore the highs and the lows of a TV show other than some good old fashioned ranking list? But not ANY ranking list, oh no. I will pick what I consider the worst episodes of the show, discuss why they don’t work, and then present some examples where she show excelled with a similar concept at another point. Partly because it is just easier to find the weak episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. than it is to rank strong ones. There are just too many great ones to discuss them all at length. But by covering the low points of the show, it is possible to appreciate how few of them there were, that they never were that low in the first place, while also covering a few examples of episodes which represent the highs of the show. So, let’s look at the top nine worst Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episodes. Yes, top nine. Because I was unable to even find enough examples for a proper top ten.
9. The Totally Excellent Adventures of Mack and The D
I know, I know, a lot of people enjoyed this episode. And it is not like I hated it. But I consider it one of the weaker offerings. This is one of those episodes which delve into the relationship between two characters, but if one compares it to other episodes which have a similar purpose, like “FZZT”, “The Hub” and “Inescapable”, it just falls flat. “FZZT” for example worked so well because it featured the existing bond between Jemma and Fitz, and how strong it is even in their darkest hour, strong enough that Fitz would risk his life by being close to Jemma rather than staying out of the containment room. It also had a real sense of danger, because it was pretty early in the run of the show, when it was still a possibility that one of the billed main characters might die. But nobody would expect either Mack or Deke dying in the middle of he last season of the show. Not to mention that Deke is telling the story in hindsight. The biggest suspense here is “will Mack snap out of it” and that he will is pretty much the expected outcome from the get go.
But then, you don’t really need to have anyone at risk to create an engaging episode. By the time “The Hub” aired, I certainly wasn’t particularly concerned about either Fitz or Ward dying during their mission. This episode completely lives from having two very different characters playing off each other. You have Ward, who doesn’t expect Fitz to deal well with a field mission, and Fitz, who wants to prove to Ward that he is a full fledged agent, and keeps pulling tricks out of his sleeve. This conflict is actually very similar to the one between Mack and Deke. Mack doesn’t think very highly of Deke and his often childish ways, and Deke is seeking his approval. The problem is that there is very little direct interaction between Mack and Deke. Most of the communication happens via Deke’s team. Who, btw, could have all died and I wouldn’t have cared.
And frankly, it doesn’t help that the last episode which was all about the relationship between two characters was the widely praised “Inescapable”. This episode had everything: Two main characters in a situation in which they are utterly trapped, a deep dive into their psychology and the feeling that it is an important step in the story. There was a need to catch up Fitz with everything his older self did. There was also a need for Fitzsimmons doing some pair therapy, and this was a very creative way to get them on the same page again while also reaffirming the healthy core of their relationship.
“The Totally Excellent Adventures of Mack and The D” is theoretically about trauma too, but most of the grieving Mack does happens in his own mind, the audience doesn’t get to see it the same way it does in “Inescapable” or even the very next episode “After, Before”, where May and Elena are forced to delve deep into Elena’s psyche in order to help her. That episode doesn’t just work because it is kind of funny to see the two characters who are most resistent of the notion of soul-searching being forced to do exactly that, but also because what they find is a culmination of all the trauma Elena experienced during the show and beforehand. Between all the losses Mack already had to experience in his life, Deke’s ongoing trauma of being from an apocalyptic future, and the fact that he killed a person just one episode earlier, there was a lot of material which could have been explored in “The Totally Excellent Adventures of Mack and The D”, too. Focussing just on Mack’s grief over his parents seems to be a very limited view, Hope at the very least warranted a mention.
There is a second reason why the episode doesn’t quite work: The framing. AoS is a show which can go quite crazy, but it is not a show which can get away with putting a slasher vibe into an episode or getting completely ridiculous without some sort of explanation. “Fear and Loathing on the Planet of Kitson”, maybe the most hilarious episode of the show, gets away with going all comical because for one, the episode is set in an alien casino and there are no hard rules or expectations how aliens ought to behave, and two, the main characters are drugged. “The Totally Excellent Adventures of Mack and The D” offers at least some explanation for the different tone of the episode by having Deke as the narrator, the same way “Out of the Past” explained away the black and white aesthetic and the narration with Coulson’s malfunction, but the thing is, the story itself is not really told from Deke’s point of view. Sure, even in “Out of the Past” there were scenes in which Coulson wasn’t present, but he and Sousa were still the focal point of the episode. This time around though, Deke might be the narrator of the story officially, but the point of view of the episode is practically all Mack’s. We basically discover what Deke has done through his point of view, but since Deke’s is the narrator, it should be the other way around. And if the story isn’t told from Deke’s perspective after all, there is no excuse for the slasher movie vibe.
And frankly, it is another missed opportunity. Deke is an inherently ridiculous character, which is why an episode like “Code Yellow” gets away with being full of ridiculous moments. With him as unreliable narrator, they could have gone even more crazy than they did. (Personally I will always consider it a crime that they didn’t put Coulson’s mind into a car).
All in all this is a very uneven episode. It has it’s moments, especially once Mack realises that Deke has looked out not only for him but also the child version of him, and it is easy to at least crack smile over having “cute robots” which are through and through dangerous. But overall, it just feels out of place in the show.
8. Missing Pieces
“Missing Pieces” is overall an okay episode. But compared to the other season openers it just feels rushed. The Pilot aside, every season opener has the job to allow the audience to catch up with the characters, introduce new players and establish a new mystery to follow. This episode does reasonably well with the catching up part, but struggles to make the new characters interesting. Elena suddenly having another love interest comes completely out of the left-field, and the character just screams “canon fodder” even though he survives this episode. And Benson just comes off as a Fitzsimmons replacement. Compared this to the introduction of Hunter, who got a complete arc in “Shadows” centred around him loosing his team, all this without his story distracting from the established main characters. Or the introduction of the Ghostrider in “The Ghost”, whose mission intersects with Daisy’s feeling of guilt perfectly. Or the really sneaky introduction of Freddy in “The New Deal” who is first sold as a side character before it is revealed that he is actually the focal point of the Chronicom’s actions. Or the introduction of Joey in “Laws of Nature”, in order to represent the perspective of someone suddenly getting caught up in world of powered people.
Part of me wants to cut the episode some slack. After all, the season 5 finale was written like a series finale. Hence “Missing Pieces” had to restart new storylines. But then, it’s not like it had nothing to work with. Between Ward’s mentioned but never seen sister, the fate of Agents Calderon (remember, the guy Daisy impaled in self-defence) and Blake (the leader of the watchdogs), as well as the fact that there is still an inhuman in a cocoon under the sea, there are lose threads which have never been addressed to this day. In addition, this episode is just missing the “big gut punch” which most of the other season starters delivered. Remember when it turned out that Fitz was talking to himself and not to Jemma during “Shadows”? Or when “Orientation” revealed that the team was not in space but in some sort of apocalyptic future? Or even the gut wrenching moment of Fitz screaming at the obelisk in “Laws of Nature”? Jemma tricking her team in order to search further for Fitz and the not really revelation that Coulson might be back are just not on the same level.
All in all “Missing Pieces” is an okay season starter, but compared to what Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. usually delivers, it was just a little bit disappointing overall.
7. Watchdogs
“Watchdogs” is a perfectly serviceable episode. But I don’t think that it really manages what it sets out to do: being a character episodes for Mack and, to a lesser degree, Lincoln. In Lincoln’s case, the scenes related to him are quite brief and in both cases the episodes doesn’t really tell the audience anything new about the characters. Yes, we learn more about Mack’s family, but nothing we learn is in any way interesting or opens up new layers. This could at least have been an opportunity to explore Mack’s original feelings towards people with alien powers and how they changed over time, but the episode didn’t even do this, which is why the whole episodes feels very much like a filler.
Which is unusual, since usually the episodes which focus on specific characters are some of the best. Naturally one of the first examples which comes to mind is “Melinda”, an episode which had a lot riding on it, because it revealed a backstory which had been teased at this point for nearly two seasons, and yet it didn’t disappoint at all. The truth of what happened to May was even more gruesome than anyone ever expected, and watching her experience so much trauma was simply heart-breaking. Or “4,722 Hours”, one of the more experimental episodes, which also doubles as an opportunity to explore the inner strength of Jemma Simmons. Or “The Devil Complex” which actually managed to hide that it was all about Fitz’s mind breaking until the very end of the episode. Or the various episodes which aim to give us some background for the villains of the show, like “Paradise Lost” and “Rise and Shine”, which are both designed to shine the light on the motivation of Hydra members without making them overly sympathetic. (For the record, all the Ward-centric episodes, but especially “The Things We Bury” are pretty amazing, too).
A better dive into Mack’s character is offered up in “Identity and Change”, in which Mack first betrays Daisy in order to protect his (virtual) daughter Hope and then joins the resistance after realising that he can no longer just lay low in a world in which Hydra is in charge without betraying his principles. If “Watchdog” had either revealed something about Mack’s past which informs his character or had created a situation which challenges his believes, it could have been a great episode.
As it is, it is the equivalent of a narrative shrug. Look, Mack’s background is as standard as it gets and look, his view on Inhumans is still different than it used to be. Good to know. Can we move on now?
6. 0-8-4
A lot of people have said that one problem in season one of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was that it moved too slowly. Maybe, but at least this episode moved way too fast for my taste. “The Pilot” while not necessarily amazing did a pretty good job establishing the world, but it is very hard to do more than the basics when you deal with so many characters. The logical way to proceed from this point onwards is to let characters clash with each other, so that you can learn more about them based by exploring their differences. But there is no reason to rush though the process in one episode.
Everything about this just feels forced. I also feel that the writers overdid it with the bickering in the beginning. Yes, Fitzsimmons and Daisy are meant to be quite young at this point and none of them are trained as field agents yet, but they are not four-year olds either. And it would actually be more interesting if they were struggling more with suddenly being under fire during a routine mission, instead of going the “everyone misunderstands each other but then they pool their resources and win the day” route. That is so paint by the numbers. And it feels so unnecessary, because if you take out that episode, the ones which come after do exactly the kind of careful team building which allows the audience to get to know the characters.
This is also the first attempt of the show to play with narrative structures. A very clumsy one. Did they really expect the audience to be on the edge of the seat over the notion that there is an explosion on the bus in the second episode? You could do the same episode without this first scene and it would make no difference. A better approach to that kind of story structure can be seen in Parting Shots, which starts with Bobbi and Hunter in an interrogation room and reveals bit to bit how they ended up there. It’s a very classic set-up, though, and frankly, most people remember Parting Shots not for its narrative structure, but for the last scene in the bar, which might be the biggest tear jerker the show ever delivered. But it is still a better construct to start with a situation which makes you really worry about the characters in question instead of one where the savvy viewers just knows from the get go that what he sees is only revealing part of the story, and the situation is most likely not as dire as it seems to be.
Somehow the master of telling stories in hindsight is Season 5. For one, there is “Rewind”, a through and through amazing episode. That is because the audience genuinely wanted to know what happened to Fitz and the episode itself answered some overdue questions along the way of mapping up his journey to the future. Sure, the crazy adventures of Fitz and Hunter are fun, but I don’t think that they would have worked nearly as will if the narrative underpinning of their shenanigans hadn’t been that solid. Another masterpiece of reverse story-telling is “The Last Day” in which the audience learns how the timeline in which the characters are came to be. Again this is information the audience cares about, but what works about the episode so well is specifically the story how in this reality May, whose trauma lead to her not pursuing motherhood anymore, ended up raising a little girl. It’s the emotional core which makes the episode, not the various flashbacks in itself.
“0-8-4” doesn’t offer anything in this direction. Yeah, Coulson is betrayed by an old love, but their relationship isn’t established enough for the audience to care. Yeah, the team overcomes their differences and works together, but that development comes way too fast. The result is a pretty predictable run-of-the-mill episode, which strangely does little to really dive deeper into the various characters.
5. Leap
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is a show which constantly reinvented itself. But it still had some narrative stables it went back to again and again. One of those is the “Who can you trust?” episode, which turns up in nearly every season. The first and maybe most legendary was “Turn, Turn, Turn”, the episode in which S.H.I.E.L.D. fell and the audience was taken on a ride of misdirection, ending up in the most unexpected (but still sufficiently foreshadowed) twist the show ever pulled. A special version of this concept is used in “One Door Closes”, the episode in which the supposedly “real” S.H.I.E.L.D. invades the base. That episode is interesting because it is the only one which doesn’t try to misdirect the audience, for once the viewer knows more than the characters, but that doesn’t make the episode any less suspenseful and heart-breaking. Knowing that Mack and Bobby have good intentions doesn’t make the betrayal less impactful, especially the hurt Fitz must feel after all the trust he put into Mack during his recovery has to cut deep. Season three offered up “The Team”, in which one of the Inhumans has been infected by Hive, ending with the kind of obvious revelation that it was Daisy. To the show credits: It’s not obvious because of the writing for the episode, it does a really good job to distract from the notion, it’s mostly obvious because she was from the get go the choice which would create the most engaging story opportunities on a narrative level. But it still serves as a nice mystery till the end of the episode, and it explores how people react when they are suddenly under suspicion.
Though the pinnacle of “Who can you trust?” episodes is certainly “Self Control”. This episode does an excellent job to keep the audience in suspense who is human and who is an LMD in the beginning, and then takes full advantage of the emotional turmoil caused by having to fight people who look like your loved ones but aren’t, topping it all off with some philosophical questions baked into LMayD’s sacrifice. It’s not just any episode, it is what a lot of people consider the best episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., hence “Leap” had huge shoes to fill from the get go. And it didn’t. Though I think the problem is more in the execution. An alien who can jump from person to person? Great. If said alien is actually using the ability to sow distrust or realise some sort of plan that is. But it is never really clear what Izel’s plan actually is, and once it is revealed in which body she is hiding, it becomes a series of strange switches, which are creepy, but aren’t even close to having the same impact as the feeling of personal betrayal in “Turn, Turn, Turn” or the trauma of having to kill LMDs with the faces of your loved ones in “Self Control”.
But what mostly tips the episode over for me is the decision to kill off Davies, and not just because it feels kind of wrong to get rid of what might be one of the longest surviving red shirts that close to the finish line. The way he dies is just so silly. Really, there was no-one who could help to soften his fall? And it also looks like the easy way out. He could have died in an attempt to get rid of Izel, or Izel could have killed him in the body of another agent, or someone could have killed him in self-defence, honestly, anything other than one of the most awkward deaths ever. So awkward and unpopular, the writers actually felt the need to make up for it in the season finale (though it is better to not think about the ethic implications of that move).
Compare this to “As I have always been”. Wisely the “who can you trust” question is just a side-plot in what is easily one of the best time-loop episode ever created, and the death of the episode is created with respect for both the character and the audience. It isn’t just a cheap shock effect, it is a long goodbye, not just to a beloved character but also the show itself. A timely but heart-breaking reminder that everything eventually comes to an end, even a show as amazing as Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
4. One of Us
“One of Us” is an episode which was somewhat hyped up before it aired. S.H.I.E.L.D. fighting against a team of enhanced from the index? Hell, yeah! But what was delivered was a disappointment, mostly because of the kind of enhancement offered up. They are either through and through lame (super-sharp fingernails? Really?) or so overpowered that they don’t offer up exciting fight scenes. In addition, this is one of those episodes which makes S.H.I.E.L.D. not just look stupid, but also unnecessary cruel. You have the victim of abuse who decided to basically put a bunch of blades on her fingers, and your solution is not to remove the blades, but to basically imprison her hands? That doesn’t make any sense.
Now, the episode isn’t a total loss. Andrew Garner is a welcome new character, his therapy session with Skye allows a deep look into the downsides of suddenly acquiring power, and Hunter’s subplot is ramping up the tension for the next episode perfectly. It is mostly the “monster of the week” plot which failed. Surprisingly Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn’t really go for this plot all that often, in general the show prefers to do more of a built-up for its villains, even the side-villains. For example none of the Donnie Gill related episodes “Seeds” and “Making Friends and Influencing People” really qualify as “Monster of the Week” episodes, despite both of them featuring the villain “Blizzard”. Those episodes are both more an exploration of a young man losing his footing than about an actual “monster”, with Donnie Gill always serving as some sort of reflection of Fitz. In “Seeds” he represents the lonely genius Fitz could have been without Jemma, in “Making Friends and Influencing People” he represents what Fitz’s fate could have been if Gareth had managed to forcefully “recruit” him.
The episodes which do go more for a traditional “Monster of the Week” approach, tend to be on the weaker side (see my number one pick for this list). The exceptions are “Boom” and “The Only Light in the Darkness”, a maybe somewhat underappreciated episode. The story about Coulson’s lost love is not just very emotional, is shows how deep Coulson’s dedication to S.H.I.E.L.D. truly is. But what both episodes get right compared to “One of Us” is coming up with a power which is a very real threat, but not to a degree that it can’t be neutralised with some careful planning. “Boom” also gets extra points for special effects and the creativity of entrapping the culprit in what was basically a giant poke-ball.
“One of us” could have been a great episode if it had offered up a truly interesting villain team. As it is, it feels like the whole plot is just there so that something happens between Daisy’s therapy scenes and the set up for the next episode. In short, it feels lazy.
3. T.A.H.I.T.I.
There is an inherent danger to what I call “the episode after”. The narrative of any show happens in waves, meaning the suspense is slowly ramped up (sometimes but not always just in time for the episode before the season finale), then solved (that would usually happen in the season finale) and then the show has to restart. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is a master not just in delivering this kind of structure in the season finale, but also during the season, sometimes in unexpected places. And that is so much more difficult to do, because while the audience is in general okay with starting a season slow (not that the show ever did), having a “slow down” episode in the middle of a season can feel like a waste of time.
Let’s take the pair of “What they become” and “Aftershocks”. In the former episode, all the threats which had been build up during the first part of season 2 are clashing together to one of the most memorable mid-season finales. A mid-season finale in which what up to this point looked like the villain of the season is killed (even though his actions continue to resonate all the way to the season finale), a team member dies and another is changed forever. Consequently “Aftershocks” has a lot of scenes in which characters are simply trying to deal with what happened on an emotional level, paired with a really enjoyable heist to clean up the leadership of Hydra. But those emotional scenes gain more and more weight during the episode, while also seeding new plot-lines.
T.A.H.I.T.I. isn’t half as successful. Granted, it has no easy task from the get go, following right after T.R.A.C.K.S., which was easily the most impressive episode up to this point. It had an unusual structure, a clever play with different perspectives expertly tied together, it had humour, suspense, a strangely meta Stan Lee Cameo and finally a dramatic show-down with a truly unexpected outcome. It is not easy to follow something in the wake of something that impressive in the first place. Especially not if you also have to solve a problem from a previous episode, in this case the fact that Daisy has been shot and is, for all purposes, dying.
In general, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has a knack for solving cliff-hangers it sets up in a very satisfying manner. “Purpose in the Machine” is the best example for this, where months of worrying about Jemma Simmons ends with a tense scene, in which Fitz risks everything to pull her back from the Monolith, and the audience just doesn’t know if either of them will make it back. T.A.H.I.T.I. even had the solution for Daisy’s state set up beforehand. In fact, it later turns out that the whole point of shooting her in the first place was so that Coulson would seek exactly this solution. In this regard the episode works perfectly.
The problem I have with T.A.H.I.T.I. is more a moral question, one which the show never addresses, and that is that two people die so that Daisy can life. Most likely two good people, since those are trusted S.H.I.E.L.D. agents which for sure did not work for Hydra. Yet at no point it is addressed that Coulson went and killed fellow Agents based on what was basically a hunch. And yet his biggest worry is the effect of alien DNA on Daisy?
Speaking of which, the episode really struggles to built up tension. It really shouldn’t, after all there is Daisy dying and there is a literal ticking timebomb about to go off. And yet it doesn’t have the same level of suspense an episode like “Uprising” has, in which it is May who is about to die while the team tries to stop the power outages all over the country. And I don’t think that the lack of suspense is based on the fact that Daisy actually dying after all the effort put into rescuing her is very unlikely. I think the problem is more that T.A.H.I.T.I. is very one-note in its tension. It tries to keep the audience in constant suspense over the same situation for a whole episodes, without any changes in Daisy’s conditions or some sort of side-plot to break the tension up and then ramp it up again. But exactly that is what undermines the tension in the first place, the audience just gets used to this particular level and starts losing interest. It’s a difficult balance to keep, and at least in this case, I think that the show failed.
2. Repairs
It is pretty obvious that the writers of Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. had from the get go a pretty good idea where they were going with their show. Not that they had planned out every detail, but I am pretty sure that they had at least a rough idea regarding the backstory of the characters long before they got featured on screen. This is certainly a good thing, since there is nothing worse than a show without a clear direction. But it also lead to a couple of problems especially in the first season. There are some episodes in which the writers set something up for later forgetting to take the perspective of the audience into account. “Repairs” is one of those episodes. After “Melinda” aired it became much more meaningful. But without the context, it is easily the most generic of all Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episodes.
The plot that someone seems to have superpowers only for it to be revealed later on that someone else is having the powers instead has been done to death. Which in itself wouldn’t be a problem since the show is usually pretty good in taking what looks like standard plot points und still creating excellent episodes out of them. A prime example for this is “Spacetime”, which is based on the pretty run of the mill notion of the team trying to dodge a prophecy but ending up fulfilling it anyway. Honestly, hearing that episode description, one wouldn’t think that this is one of the best of series, because it is filled with so much humanity. A nice twist is also provided in “A Hen in the Wolf House” where one would expect that protecting Jemma’s cover is the top priority when in reality, Coulson has already planted someone to get her out if necessary (that this someone is Mockingbird with a badass first appearance really sells this twist). Even “The Real Deal”, the 100th episode, goes through the typical trope of a milestone episode, like the reappearance of past characters and the wedding, manages to do both in a way which feels fresh and unexpected. In any other show the wedding would have been the main event, but Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. offered it up as a nice surprise in the end, and with a little twist.
But “Repairs” is so predictable, one can easily figure out the majority of the plot after the first scene. It is the kind of episode you would usually expect to see in one of the later seasons of a show, when the writers started to run out of ideas, not in the first season. It is kind of unbelievable that after a generic episode like this Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. eventually became the show where tropes go to die.
1. Yes Men
There have been a lot of discussions about the degree Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is or isn’t connected to the wider MCU. But whatever one feels about the topic, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has actually been pretty good in taking elements from the movies and making them part of the story, weather they do it in a more indirect manner, by having extremis or magic books around, weather they directly address the fall out of the Socovia Accords in “Emanzipation” or weather they spend a whole arc on the Fall of S.H.I.E.LD. At least in the first two seasons it also included some guest stars, like Sitwell, Maria Hill, Sif, even Nick Fury made multiple appearances.
The connection to the show became weaker over time. Partly, I guess, because the show runners no longer had a direct link to the movies over Josh Whedon. But partly it was simply because what happened in the movies had less of an impact on S.H.I.E.L.D. After Age of Ultron, a lot of the Marvel movies were either set somewhere in outer space, or in another realm, or they were simply released while Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was on hiatus anyway. Hence the connection became more thematical than direct. Magic, Androids, Timetravel, whatever the movies did was explored in the show at length. And I would even go so far to claim that A.I.D.A. was a better villain that Ultron could ever hoped to be, simply because of all the time the show could spend on her development.
Aside from the whole Fall of S.H.I.E.L.D arc, the closest Crossover the show ever did happened in “The Dirty Half Dozen”. Interestingly the episode isn’t really that obvious of a crossover on the first glance, since the focus of it is on the original team going on one last mission together, in which the show quite literally blew up the notion that those old days can be revived. It’s brilliant on so many levels, from the tactics featured in the episode, to the clashes between the various characters, to the action scenes (shoot out to Chloe Bennet, who broke her arm during the long take fight scene and still finished it). But it also just happens to feature Dr. List and an explanation for how the Avengers knew about the Hydra base in Sokovia. Granted, it is not really important to know this, or where Fury actually got his helicarrier from, but it is still a nice extra-layer.
I think the weakest cross-over the show ever did was “The Well”. It is pretty clumsy that the team just happens to be busy with the clean-up in London when they get the news of a completely unrelated incident regarding an old Asgardian weapon. And I never could help but wonder if “Yes Men” was the episode which was actually planned as the tie-in for “The Dark World”, but had to be delayed because of scheduling problems. Having Sif turn up to hunt a prisoner who escaped during the movie makes way more sense as a direct tie-in than the berserker staff.
In case it isn’t clear yet: The cross-over aspect is not why I consider “Yes Men” the worst episode of the series. The idea makes sense, Sif is amazing, Lorelei is an impressive villain, this could have been a great episode. But it gets off the rails pretty early, when S.H.I.E.L.D. decides to send a bunch of male agents after a villain they know is able to control males but not females. It is this kind of stupidity displayed by what is supposed to be the best spy agency on the planet which turns up way too often in the early episodes hence making season 1 such a hard watch overall.
But I think what the episode lacks above all is empathy. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. features civilians less often than you would expect from a show which is supposedly all about protecting humanity, but when it does, it usually takes its time to show what the contact with the world of heroes and villains does to a “normal” person. In this episode, Lorelei’s victims are just discarded.
At the same time, this is the one time the show completely fails regarding gender roles. One thing I love about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is that character always act based on their abilities, not on their gender. The main distinction is always between civilian, agent and field agent. But this episode is oddly dismissive over the fact that Lorelei rapes her victims. And that makes it a very uncomfortable watch.
Doesn’t help that the one really clever thing this episode does is only revealed in hindsight. There is this scene in which Ward tries to kill May, but then suddenly says that his mind is free again, even though the episode shows that Lorelei was neutralised earlier. Watching the episode the first time, the audience is inclined to dismiss this as a very glaring editing problem. Which was naturally deliberate, the scene is one of the many carefully concealed hints the writers planted ahead of the Ward-is-Hydra twist. But as yet another detail one can only appreciate upon a re-watch, this hint not only does nothing for the episode upon the first watch, it actively makes it look worse.
To this day “Yes Men” is the one Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode I actively dislike. And maybe my dislike is stronger than it would be if the episode had turned up in a show of a lesser quality. But as it is, if you look for the low point of the show, there it is.
And this is from me about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – for now. The attentive reader might have noticed that I didn’t mention a single season finale. That’s because I intend to rank the various arcs of the show, during which I will naturally discuss their various finales, too. But I want the show to sink in a little bit before I do that. But what about you? Which are your least favourite episodes of the show? How do you feel about it ending? And will you join my cry for more of our favourite characters in future MCU projects?
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