Season 6 ep 12&13 discussion

At times throughout this season, Izel was described as being a god. In a bit of a twist ending, it turned out that Simmons was the one who really was a god. In particular, she was the kind that came from a machine. Seriously, the writers had better show us how the ending was not a deus ex machina and was instead earned, with an emphasis on show. Merely having Simmons tell us in a five-minute exposition scene will not cut it, although having Simmons brief the other characters could be a framing device for an episode showing us what happened. Fortunately, having a whole lot of important things happen off screen with minimal explanation is something that this show tends to do at the beginning of even-numbered seasons, not odd-numbered seasons.

So it looks like the seventh season will start with Fitz and Simmons being separated from each other. This has happened in only four of the previous six seasons. Is it so hard for the writers to come up with something original?

I doubt that I was the only person watching the end of the final episode and wondered why they could not have arrived about 15-20 years later and see if Hayley Atwell might be available for a guest appearance. Seriously, time travel stories are very risky, but there is potential. If the team visits their past selves, it could lead to some very good character-driven stories.

There does not appear to be a seventh season promo out yet. At least, there is not one that I know of. Therefore, I will take advantage of the opportunity to propose another of my wacky theories. At the end, the monoliths were still present. What if they were not completely neutered and were still capable of creating an emanation? In other words, could the Simmons that we saw really be a creation of one of the characters? Perhaps, for some reason, it could create something out of a character's hopes and/or guilt rather than that character's fears, with Daisy as that character. She was feeling guilty over May's death and may have imagined Simmons coming to the rescue and saving May. This could parallel the scene in "Inescapable" when Simmons imagined Daisy coming to the rescue. The biggest hole in this theory is that it is unlikely that a creation of Daisy's hopes and guilt would have information that Daisy does not have (i.e., the Chronicom attack on the Lighthouse).

The hairstylists made a point to give the Simmons that we saw at the end of the episode almost an exact opposite hairstyle from what was saw in the rest of the season. For nearly all of the season, she had a hairstyle that seemed designed to hide as much of her face as possible. Such a hairstyle might make sense for me (which would make me look like I was in a hair metal band), but Elizabeth Henstridge does not exactly have a face that needs to be hidden. I am not an expert in hairstyling, but Simmons's and Daisy's hair looked like they needed maintenance. Is there a hair salon on the Zephyr?

Simmons's new hairstyle keeps her face fully exposed, but it mostly hides her hair. Henstridge does not exactly have hair that needs to be hidden either.

Given how often the characters mentioned Robbie Reyes or Ghost Rider, I thought that there would have been an appearance. Izel felt like the sort of character that the Rider would have a problem with (i.e., one that jumps dimensions or realities for evil purposes). I wonder if these mentions were a stealth promotion for the new Ghost Rider series or, perhaps, foreshadowing an appearance in the seventh season. A backdoor pilot perhaps? On the other hand, why would Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. promote a show that, if reports are true, plans to ignore everything that happened on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.?

After Daisy quaked Sarge, he did not look like someone with Coulson DNA, or even just human DNA. Was the Coulson DNA only in the outer shell? I wonder if this was done so that we in the audience would not see Mack bisect someone who looked like Clark Gregg.

Security at the Lighthouse must really stink. I am not talking about the Chronicom assault as they were aliens with advanced technology. I am wondering how Deke could set up his business in S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters and have his employees move in and out without anyone noticing.

Earlier in the season, I was wondering why Deke was made a regular character on the show. My (wrong) guess was as a love interest for Daisy. It is now clear that Deke's role on the show is to be the character who comes up with the technological solutions to problems. The question that I should have been asking was why Fitz was still a regular character on the show? Mack is probably at least Fitz's equal by now (e.g., Mack was the one who upgraded the Zephyr for interstellar travel), and Deke may have surpassed Fitz. Since returning to S.H.I.E.L.D., Fitz's only accomplishment was guessing Sarge's origins, information that the team got from Izel anyway. If Mack were Viro, Fitz would have already been dumped out of an airlock as Mack has a better engineer who not only is working for free but is actually paying Mack in increasing amounts of stock in a fast-growing company. Fitz's role may be to do the work that Mack and Deke are too busy to do and to be a love interest for Simmons.

I would say that Deke was dead on here. Fitz has probably figured out what I have noticed and is realizing that, in Deke, S.H.I.E.L.D. has an engineer who is superior to Fitz without the baggage of having fiddled with a latch, which led to Simmons being transported to Maveth. Or going on the mission to bring Hive to earth. Or playing a major role in creating both LMDs and the Framework. Or failing to notice that Hale created a booby trap in a Kree beacon. Or failing to destroy and helping to repair the Destroyer of Worlds machine. Or accompanying Izel to earth. Or...

Benson was brought in as a substitute for Simmons. He had already been shipped off the South America by the time Simmons returned. I want to believe that Fitz has performed prodigious feats of engineering off screen between when we last saw him and when we heard him over the radio at the very end of the season finale. However, he may have been little more than Enoch's assistant.

Deke, I understand that Sequoia's fickleness may have hurt you, but she is not a psychopath.

With all of Deke's teleporting, he was lucky that he did not end up in a wall like Tinker did.

Is there a problem on any of the aircraft than cannot be solved by rerouting power? It almost seems as if the following were actual dialogue in the episode:
Was I the only one who saw a similarity between the shrike zombies and the alpha primitives from the fourth season? In both cases, people were turned into blind servants of the big bad. Both first appeared to be mindless mooks but eventually became clever antagonists.

Throughout these two episodes, S.H.I.E.L.D. was doing battle with Sarge and Izel, the very beings responsible for the destruction of Chronyca-2. Malachi and his minions came to earth to do battle with... the very people who were fighting the beings responsible for the Chronicoms' homelessness. One of the problems of this season was a slew of uninteresting villains who often defied logic for the sake of being evil. I doubt that Malachi will be the ultimate big bad of the final season, but having him as the initial villain is not a good sign that the seventh season will be an improvement.

The former anthropologist Chronicoms continued the trend of having names of Old Testament figures. However, none of the Enochs in the Old Testament had the surname, "Coltrane."

Could Enoch somehow sense the presence of FitzSimmons despite them being out of his line of sight, or did Enoch make a very good guess as to where they were? My guess is that Enoch could tell that Fitz's communicator was in the room and fired on the two other Chronicoms as soon as it looked like they found someone.

I am going to assume that there will be some explanation that Enoch, Fitz, and Simmons could build LMDs only from people who were scanned by the Framework on S.H.I.E.L.D. premises even though in the fourth season they could access AIDA 2's framework from S.H.I.E.L.D. Otherwise, there will be questions on why they did not choose to resurrect Mace, Agnes, and Radcliffe as LMDS as well (or did they?).

Hear hear! Sure, Deke is good and all, but he really functions more as the comic relief on the show than as the resident tech genius. 

That said, I hate how they've written especially Fitz in that regard in the recent episodes. "You're a wizard, Deke!" Ugh, are they for real?

Thought I'd add my own 2 cents after all. 

Apologies for the rant!



At this point I’d really like to talk about the final two episodes of the season of one of my all-time favourite shows, which were by no means perfect, and yet had everything one could wish for in a finale. They were exciting, dramatic, heart-breaking and downright cruel at times, but also hopeful and triumphant in other aspects, with a cliffhanger of what might come next, which left me craving more.

However, since all that is regarding Swamp Thing, which I saw a day earlier, I will postpone a full analysis on that topic for my next post in the appropriate thread. Instead, I’m just gonna talk about the utter mess that was the season finale (or really the whole season) of Agents of SHIELD.



Honestly , I don’t even know where to begin to complain. I mean, it’s not that the show is outright bad, even at this point. If it were, I would either quit or just finish the rest of the episodes while treating it as a guilty pleasure. But it’s not. 90% of what goes into the show’s production is still amazing. They have good to great actors all around, with some outstanding talents like Iain De Caestecker elevating the whole cast. They have mostly top notch special effects, that continue to deliver, even when you can tell that the budget isn’t quite what it was in the earlier seasons anymore. Plus a team of set designers, composers, make-up artists, etc. that can easily keep up with anything network TV has to offer these days.

Then, however, there are the writers. On a good day, those guys and gals have proven time and again that they are capable of amazing things, yet apparently these days are fewer and further in between as time progresses. I’ve repeatedly seen the pledge to “trust the writers” here on this site, and for a while there I felt the same, but recently I’ve begun to wonder why exactly. I mean, we’re talking about the same people here, who built Agent Davis up from a glorified extra to an actual team member over the course of several seasons, only to then give him one of the stupidest red shirt deaths I’ve ever seen! Not just that, but they also had pretty much the entire team forget about it two seconds later.

Then there’s the disjointed mess of the finale, with the Chromicon attack coinciding with Izel trying to enslave the world, yet neither of both parties giving a damn about each other. How’s that for logic? Also, how many times in the past have we heard any SHIELD agent making a reference to “SHIELD protocols”, while making an escape from an attacking enemy? I’m gonna lean myself out the window here and just go ahead with ZERO. They said that zero times. Unless of course said attackers had access to some SHIELD agents’ minds earlier. In that case, everyone will suddenly start to announce that what they’re doing right now is according to said SHIELD protocols. Because, you know, why should this show’s writing include any subtleties? I’m sure the viewers much rather prefer to be hit over the head with what’s going on.

Speaking of subtleties, or any lack thereof: I just HATE what they’ve done to Deke this season. I really cared about him so much last year and was accordingly psyched to hear that they’d made him a regular. But, honestly, by now I kinda wished they hadn’t. Not only has he degraded even further into the comic relief, but it seems as if everything around him just stops making sense. Now let me see that I don’t forget anything:

- So the guy is apparently a tech wiz, who is able to built stuff without any sort of instructions (unlike Mack for example), but then doesn’t know how it works? Wut? Are we talking about the same guy here who rebuilt the framework based on a few code fragments? Okaaaay…

- Fitz was able to figure out a way to stop Carl Creel back when he had severe brain damage, yet doesn’t realise that the way to go after Izel and to block her powers is with sonic frequencies? Huh, who would have thought...

- Fitz turning fanboy after Deke produced ten of those anti-possession bracelets instead of the one he and Simmons had. “You’re like a wizard!” Ugh, seriously?!? I’m curious, just how many takes did it take until Iain stopped throwing up in his mouth after saying that line? Because I know I did.

- Deke being able to bring his whole posse into the secret base without anyone noticing anything. Just... I have no words anymore. This would be embarrassing to happen on The Flash, but on AoS? You know, maybe it IS time for this show to die...

- So, according to his rant, Deke is apparently still crazy about Skye, and yet, just a few episodes ago when they were on that truck with the bomb, staring certain death in the face, he’d rather focus on the chick he met two seconds ago than so much as glance at Skye. For real?

- Oh, speaking of Snowflake, anyone filed an M.I.A. report yet? You know, if she’s gone, I’m gonna take that flatscreen TV from her room. Just saying.

Despite all the ranting about Deke, though, I can’t move on without mentioning just how utterly awesome the scene was with him blowing up at Fitzsimmons and then taking the untested jumpdrive to help the rest of the team. That was ridiculous, stupid and utterly badass, so 100% in character for the guy who once said “f*ck it!” and stood in front of an exploding time travel device in order to save a bunch of guys he barely knew.

Truth be told, though, that was one of the only things about the finale that I thoroughly enjoyed. Well that, and the awesome design/cgi for the thing inside not-Coulson.

Speaking of not-Coulson. I mean, I know how that guy came to be. The energy of the destroyed monoliths came into contact with the real one back in S5, creating a copy that then ended up on some other planet out in the universe. Okay. But what about Flint then? First of all, how is he connected to Mack and Yo-Yo’s deepest fears? I mean, sure, they cared about him, but at the end of the day he was some kid in the future who they haven’t seen in over a year. So what gives? And also, how can he be a real person if he is only based on Mack’s and Yo-Yo’s memories? If he came from them, can he really know anything that those two don’t? Seems like a stretch to me.

There are a lot of other things that were utterly stupid in the finale, but since I’m rather late to the party with my review here, most of that’s already been mentioned. Like, for example Skye not quaking any of the bad guys, the nonsensical appearance of said bad guys, etc.



All in all, I think this is probably the weakest season of the show to date with a finale that’s even worse than that of S3. Season 5, especially 5b wasn’t all that great, either, but at least they really redeemed themselves with a kick-ass finale. This time, not so much.

I also think it is a pretty weak season. But I still like it. S3 contained stuff that I didn't like. I do like this finale though, but that is mostly with Jemma coming to the rescue by saying: "Sorry, we brought the Izel arc to earth and Fitz is responsible for Sarge, since he blew up the three monoliths. But, this arc is getting really old fast and we need something new. May is not going to die for this. And we have a better stand-in for Coulson that Sarge. We are going to repair this with a much better arc

Oh, Ayanami. Still good with the whole Mack the Director thing? 

I think you have been very calm about it

I am not sure that I made my point clearly. As you noted, there was not much engineering stuff for Fitz to do. I agree. In fact, this is my point. Without engineering stuff for him to do, why is he on the show? What role does he play? What does he do that no other character can do?

Specifically, what has Fitz done this season that Mack or Deke could not pull off? Fitz's greatest engineering achievement was probably attaching Izel's jump drive to the ship. Setting aside that it was Izel's drive, this was no more impressive than Mack attaching a jump drive to Zephyr One. If anything, Mack's achievement was more impressive as he was working in his spare time while being Director. Back when it was Viro's ship, Fitz found a clog in a pipe, repaired heat shields, and rewired controls so that everyone but those in the airlock would be blown into space. None of those things were in the service of S.H.I.E.L.D., and I have no reason to think that Mack could not have done those things.

I do not claim that Benson is the equal of Simmons or Fitz. Benson simply performed the actions that Simmons would have done if she were on earth as Deke performed the actions that Fitz would have done if he were on earth. When Simmons and Fitz arrived on earth, Benson had already been shipped of the show, allowing Simmons to resume her role. Deke still remained and performed Fitz's role.


I am only talking about the sixth season. I do not deny that Fitz was a brilliant engineer in the past. In fact, if I were asked at the beginning of the season what Fitz's role would be, I would have guessed that at least part of his role would have been to be the person who came up with engineering solutions to S.H.I.E.L.D. problems. He did not do that. When S.H.I.E.L.D. needed an engineering solution the most, it was Deke, not Fitz, who came up with the solution. Right now, Fitz is looking like a has-been, as if his skills decayed in the year that he spent hiding from whomever destroyed Enoch's spaceship.

Deke did not design the jump drive, but neither did Fitz. Deke at least used the jump drive to do something useful to S.H.I.E.L.D., bring the anti-Izel wristbands to the field team.


We do not know for certain how the Chronicoms were able to learn time travel, but gathering information from Fitz and Simmons's minds is the most likely explanation. In any case, are you saying that Fitz's greatest accomplishment was giving Chronicoms the means to take out S.H.I.E.L.D.? I do not think that he wants that on his résumé.

Chronicoms are advanced to the extent that they are advanced technology, but how advanced is the Chronicom society apart from the society that built them? They did not build their warships; they stole them. Did they create the mind device, or did they steal that too? Do they have any scientists in any field harder than anthropology?

In the paragraph after the one you quoted, I noted that I want to believe that Fitz performed great engineering feats off screen. The problem is that it was off screen. We do not know if Fitz came up with the solutions himself or if he simply followed Enoch's instructions. I hope it is the former, but we do not know yet.


Mack is busy as Director, so he will not replace Fitz. I also hope that Deke does not replace Fitz because Iain De Caestecker is a better actor and because Fitz is a more compelling character. However, I still see nothing in the sixth season to show that S.H.I.E.L.D. would be better off with Fitz than with Deke, whereas there is evidence that they would be better off with Deke. When S.H.I.E.L.D. needed an engineering solution the most, it was Deke who came up with the solution.