Final Episode EVER spoiler thread!

I promised a ten-page analysis, but this bit over nine-page analysis will have to do for now. It has already been over eight days since I saw the finale, and longer than that for other people. I have not had a chance to read the other comments on these last two episodes (or other comments on other threads), but I had better post this before too many people move on to other topics on other sites. I hope that I am not simply repeating points that have already been discussed to death. I plan to return to comment on other posts on this thread, which should push my analysis beyond ten pages. I will also try to comment on posts on other threads that I have been meaning to get to.

To keep things simple, I will italicize all references to the star, Alya, while not italicizing references to the FitzSimmons daughter, Alya. For those who are curious, this term appears to refer to the fat tail of a sheep or to fat from the tail of a sheep.

Random Observations

I guess that May has Obi-Wan level powers if she could feel the deaths that the Chronicoms caused.

Was Sibyl lying, or did she really not anticipate Daisy charging in to danger without any thought? If it is the latter, I have to question the quality of her time stream device. Another explanation could be that Sibyl saw Daisy doing this so much that Sibyl assumed that Daisy would have learned her lesson by now. Also, Sibyl may have assumed that Daisy would try to be unpredictable, which, for Daisy, would mean waiting until there is a solid plan coordinated with other people.

Nathaniel told Kora that Daisy quaked the world apart. Did Sibyl lie to Nathaniel, did Nathanial lie to Kora, or can Sibyl see into the timeline shown in "The Last Day?"

When Nathaniel left Garrett to his fate, I remembered immediately that Garrett has an issue with being abandoned. Nathaniel should have remembered this as well.

I do not remember what they called the pole that gets pounded on the ground to stun anyone who is not ducking. I was glad to see it. It gets annoying when one episode establishes that a specific form of technology exists only for it to be forgotten in a future episode in which it would be useful (e.g., Fitz's dwarfs).

I found brain-addled Simmons to be amusing, for a couple of minutes. It got tiresome quickly.

Am I supposed to believe that Garrett did not know what an 0-8-4 is?

I suspect that some of the hostility toward Fitz in the beginning of "What We're Fighting for" represented fans' frustration over where Fitz had been. It might also represent writers' frustration over where Iain De Caestecker had been. I have seen interviews in which the show runners said that De Caestecker's absence was due to him working on another project. I also noticed that the interviewers were nice enough to believe the show runners when they said that.

Of all the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in the Swordfish bar, not one of them had the technical knowledge to send the entire team, including Deke, to the sixth-season timeline?

I have been wondering what was up with the four people in hazmat suits who accompanied Simmons at the end of the sixth season finale. I am glad that this episode explained who they were. It did not explain why nobody on the show asked about them. I am also glad that we finally learned what Piper and Flint were up to. I wish that there were an explanation for Benson, Snowflake, and perhaps Diaz. There also should have been an explanation for why Deke never asked about Snowflake.

Kora recovered from being drained much better than Gordon did. I am going to assume that Daisy's difficult recovery came from Nathaniel using a primitive means of extracting her power.

If Fitz was always in the sixth-season timeline, then he should have been completely safe from Sibyl, who was in the alternate timeline. Fitz could have been hiding from Malachi, but Malachi would not be able to extract information from Simmons when she is in the seventh-season timeline.

So if I understand things correctly, the team was sent to the seventh-season timeline to fetch Kora with the rest of the important things being done in the sixth-season timeline. This means that the show spent 12+ episodes covering one part of the solution while all the other important parts were done off screen. Meanwhile, going back in time to the temple at the end of the sixth season should have at least created a fork in time. This would mean that in the series finale, the team saved the world from Chronicoms in this tine of the fork while they abandoned earth to the Chronicoms in the tine that Fitz, Simmons, and Enoch (and Alya) were in. This is what happens when one tries to make sense of time travel.

The previous paragraph would have been much easier to understand if the English word for the point of a fork, "tine," were not spelled identically to "time" except for substituting one similar looking letter for another.

Meanwhile, what was the point of the Chronicoms going to the seventh-season timeline? It would not matter what they did to S.H.I.E.L.D. in that timeline as S.H.I.E.L.D. would still exist in the sixth-season timeline. Was it to keep the team busy? Was it to keep Kora out of the team's hands? It would have made more sense if the Chronicoms were focused primarily on taking the team out regardless of whether the Chronicoms scattered advanced technology across the past. Again, this is what happens when one tries to make sense of time travel.

I am surprised that Nathaniel made as far as he did without a split from Sibyl. It seemed obvious that he was Sibyl's unwitting lackey who would be shoved aside once he was no longer needed like what happened to her first lackey in "The Totally Excellent Adventures of Mack and the D."

Some people have been assuming that Alya is Deke's mother. My best guess is that his mother was born around 2025. It is theoretically possible that Fitz and Simmons spent enough time off earth that Alya was born in 2025. However, being brought back to earth in 2019 would make her age effectively the same as someone born around 2015. This would make it more likely that Alya is Deke's aunt. I based my estimate of Deke's mother's age on my best guess for the age of the actress who played the fear-dimension version of his mother. I assumed that this version would be around the same age as his mother was when Deke last saw her, when he was around nine years old. If the version was instead the same age as Deke's mother when Deke was born, then Alya would be close to the right age.

Of course, this assumes that there will be a Deke born in this timeline. Considering the huge difference in timelines, there is a very high likelihood that, for example, Alya or Alya's sister will never even meet a "belligerent space goon." This might be a good thing as the space goon in question has been described as being prone to violence.

All this speculation of time spent on Alya must take into account the fact that Simmons and Fitz have not aged visibly from when Enoch rescued them in the sixth season finale. Given Alya's age, it is stretching credibility even if Simmons were already pregnant when Enoch rescued her in the sixth season.

In some ways, this season has anticipated current events in 2020. In two different episodes, a character said, "I can't breathe." One of these episodes had tear gas. Early in the season, Simmons used the very same Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) that a grocery store cashier uses today. In the finale, the team held a reunion (in what would be 2020 in their timeline) via what is effectively an advanced version of video conferencing. It was even interrupted by a child wanting attention.

On the other hand, the show suggested that Sousa was able to mail paper letters. This would suggest an expansion of postal services when, in 2020, they are going the opposite direction.

I get that actor availability and affordability was an issue, but it seems to me that Hunter and Morse could have been at the meeting. Piper, Sousa, and LMD Davis could have been there as well.

I do not know what it means that Daisy, Sousa, and Kora are "Astro Ambassadors," but Daisy would be close to the worst choice to be an ambassador. Under ordinary circumstances she is not particularly diplomatic. She also spent several months in space creating diplomatic incidents. For example, her actions in the sixth-season premiere would be considered an act of war if she were an official of a legitimate government.

I wonder if this was an attempt to try to get characters into future MCU works. S.W.O.R.D. is supposed to be an important part of one of the Disney+ series. Were the writers trying to get at least some Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. characters on that show? Given politics within Disney, I fear that no Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. character will be seen again in anything new except for possibly another Coulson appearance in something that takes place before The Avengers.

This might be the first season since the second season in which Fitz did more good than harm for S.H.I.E.L.D. How did he accomplish this? He was absent for nearly the entire season.

There was a lot of talk about marriage in these two episodes. Do the writers or the characters remember that Simmons and this Fitz are not married unless something happened off screen? The ceremony that we saw in "The Real Deal" was not a legal marriage. Coulson explicitly noted that he was not legally authorized to perform marriages ("Now, by the powers vested in me by, well, by the two of you..."). There was also no way that two highly-wanted fugitives would dare do something rash like apply for a marriage license in their own names. Finally, the groom in that marriage died ten episodes later. The Fitz that we see now was busy gallivanting around the galaxy when the ceremony took place. I concede that it is theoretically possible that Alya recognizes common-law marriages.

I also believe that Fitz and Simmons will never be together forever because they have been split far too often. They appear to be together for the moment, just as they were at the end of the fourth season. However, they were split almost immediately after the fifth season started. I understand that Iain De Caestecker's schedule played a role, but the pattern has been established. Nothing happened to break the pattern. At the beginning of the seventh season, I decided that there were only two situations in which I would accept that they were together forever. The first would be if they were both killed off, making them together forever in death. The other would be if the universe, or at least an in-universe power, literally cursed them and/or actively split them apart. If this entity were defeated or at least convinced to cease meddling, then I might believe that they had a chance.

For an example of the latter, Dollhouse had an evil corporation that wanted to keep the character who looked like Jiaying away from the character who looked like Sousa. They were able to be together forever after the evil corporation was defeated.

The problem arose from a 1980s show called Moonlighting. There was a perception that it started to go downhill once the two lead characters slept together. We now have a generation of writers who are convinced that the only way to handle a couple like this is to keep them apart. This is BS. The way to handle a couple like this is for the couple to advance. Statements from the show runners about how they kept throwing obstacles at Fitz and Simmons only to give them a happy ending just serves to emphasize how these were artificial barriers rather than anything that would happen normally.

Over the course of the season, we saw the death of two characters, Enoch and Jiaying, who appeared to be resurrectable, but neither one was resurrected. With Jiaying, I am willing to accept that a broken neck might be one thing that she cannot recover from. In the second-season timeline, she never recovered from Cal killing her. We even saw her skeleton in the fifth season. Enoch not resurrecting makes less sense. Mack or Sousa could have swiped a spare Electrochron Displacement Mechanism (EDM) from the Chronicoms outside the Zephyr or May or LMD Coulson could easily have swiped an EDM from one of the defeated Chronicoms around Sibyl. It appeared to be rather easy to remove. Even if this were not possible, they did not need the time drive any more. They could easily dismantle the drive, remove Enoch's old EDM, and reinstall it into Enoch.

I wish that they resurrected Jiaying so that she could meet LMD Davis.

I have been obsessing with Fitz's absence for nearly the entire season. My latest theory is that the writers did not know Iain De Caestecker's availability until they were making the final episodes of the season. I suspect that "As I Have Always Been" was filler that was inserted when it turned out that he would not be available when they hoped. Had De Caestecker been available earlier, Elena's intervention could have solved the problem at the end of "After, Before" allowing the show to go straight into "Stolen" with room for a flashback episode. If at the end, De Caestecker would not be available at all, the twist might have been that he was actually dead rather than a father.

I am guessing that Simmons and Fitz have not read the novel, Sarah's Key or seen the film by that name. If you have not read or seen the novel/film,
In season six, Atarah stated that, "All that remains of the Chronicom race are aboard this fleet." As far as I could tell this fleet was destroyed, which meant that the only surviving Chronicoms were the ones in the Lighthouse. (I do not know why destroying the ship that Daisy was on would cause the other ships to be destroyed, but the visual effects showed other ships being destroyed.) There must be a word to describe wiping out (or nearly wiping out) an entire race. I will take a look in a dictionary...

I found a suitable word in the Gs: Genocide. This means that the triumphant ending was seeing the team enact a genocide. I hope that I do not come across as being intolerant of moral ambiguity. I like moral ambiguity. The problem is that moral ambiguity requires ambiguity. This was not treated as being ambiguous. I understand that earth was in peril. It could have been a choice between saving humans or sparing Chronicoms. Let this be a debate. Let characters try to find other options. The sixth season suggested that the Chronicoms were normally a peaceful race who went bananas when they lost their home world. Could May have reverted them back to their natural state and let them be anthropologists again?

Things I Did Not Like about the Finale

Too Much to Do in Too Little Time

So, what did I think of these episodes? My reaction after finishing the finale was, "Well, that sucked." There are a few reasons. Perhaps the most important was an issue that I noted over the last couple of spoiler threads: there was a lot that needed to be accomplished before the end of the season and too little time to accomplish everything without cutting too many corners.

There was a need to deal with Afterlife. We were simply told in a previous episode that the rescued Inhumans were dumped in a hospital. Nothing was discussed on what to do once they left the hospital. Would they be able to integrate back into normal life? Would there be an attempt to rebuild the society at Afterlife? With Jiaying dead, who would do so? It was probably not realistic to see anything on this in the finale.

In these last two episodes, the first thing that we needed was to see what Fitz, Simmons, and Enoch were up to between the last time that we saw the three of them together (with Enoch in Isaiah's skin) and when Simmons showed up at the end of the sixth season finale. This would almost certainly necessitate a flashback episode like "Rewind." Instead, we had Fitz deliver a bunch of exposition in the beginning of the final episode. Television is a visual medium. It is much better to show something than to tell something. Unfortunately, this would require time. Time the show did not have.

Second, the team had to deal with the devastation done in the seventh-season timeline. The team did drag the Chronicom fleet away, but every S.H.I.E.L.D. facility except for the Lighthouse was destroyed. The wall honoring S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who died in the line of duty will probably have to be as large as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The survivors were so desperate that Deke became their new leader. The best case scenario is that the world continues on without major incidents, which would expose S.H.I.E.L.D. as an incredibly bloated organization that was a huge drain on the budget of whomever funds S.H.I.E.L.D. If S.H.I.E.L.D. is truly needed at its former size, then that world is in very serious trouble. I appreciate that the characters who experienced the timeline cared (a little) about it, but this was a pyrrhic victory at best. At worst, the Chronicoms have reinforcements on the way to finish what the first fleet started.

Next, the show needed to set up the final confrontation with Chronicoms in the sixth-season timeline. The show simply brought us back to where we were at the end of the sixth season, meaning that, over an entire (abbreviated) season, nothing happened in that timeline.

Then, the team needed to defeat the Chronicoms in the sixth-season timeline. While individual elements were good, everything was resolved way too easily as Fitz's plan turned out to be the deus ex machina that I feared would happen.

Finally, the team needed to gather together to say their goodbyes and go their separate ways. This did not necessarily need to include literal group hugs or statements about what an honor it has been to be an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. We got about ten minutes where we learned where everyone went after the events of the show. I would say that the show did the bare minimum necessary on this point, which is a lot better than it did on any of the other points.

Simmons's Retirement

There has been very little continuity in how Simmons was treated as a character. However, Simmons was usually portrayed as being a highly skilled scientist and quite ambitious. I am tempted to say that I would trigger every filter on this site to express how I feel about the ending that has this highly skilled and ambitious woman choose to leave her career so that she can be a stay-at-home mom. That would be an exaggeration. My feelings about this move have nothing to do with any hypothetical relationship between Daisy and Ward. I will say that I am completely and thoroughly disgusted that this show would stoop to such misogyny. I thought that the last few episodes merely took place in the 1980s rather than having been written in the 1980s, when this sexist trope should have died.

I do not want to imply that tropes suggesting that women are much happier in the home than when they have careers are limited to the 1980s. It is just that these tropes reappear whenever men feel that women are getting uppity and need to be put in their place. The 1980s took place just after the Equal Rights Amendment failed in the United States, which empowered a backlash. The popular media were having moral panics about "latchkey kids" (i.e., children who did not have a mother waiting for them at home when they got out of school). The front cover of a newsmagazine told women that, if they are not married by the time they are 35 years old, their chances of ever marrying were tiny (based on incomplete and nonrandom data from a poorly designed study). It also seemed like every childless woman in popular culture was obsessed with her biological clock. This was all to push women to hurry up and get married, have children, and stay home with them.

This was not the only time that society tried to push women out of the workforce. For example, this was also going on in the late 1940s and 1950s after many women joined the workforce during World War II and did not necessarily want to leave once the war was over. Those rewatching Agent Carter see different manifestations of the same trope. For example, Peggy Carter had to tell a prospective landlady that she planned to work only until she married because Carter correctly recognized the answer that the landlady wanted to hear. (One of the rewatchers can correct me if I misremember this scene.) The difference between Agent Carter and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was that the former celebrated a highly competent protagonist holding her job. The latter celebrated a highly competent woman giving up her job.

This is especially painful because Simmons had been seen as a role model for women in the sciences. In 2014, Elizabeth Henstridge (along with Iain De Caestecker and the show itself) received a SET Award for portraying science, engineering, and technology "in encouraging and positive ways." I understand that photos of Simmons in a lab coat are very popular among female scientists at conventions. After setting Simmons up as a role model, the show is now saying to women, "OK, you can be a scientist for a while until you have a child because you will then find motherhood much more satisfying than science."

There was a suggestion that Simmons was doing work on the side. However, she waited for Fitz to log off before even mentioning it and said that she would send the information to Daisy after Fitz went to sleep. People who are allegedly married should not keep secrets like that from each other. Even worse, people who are allegedly married should not have to keep secrets like that from each other. Is Fitz so controlling that Simmons feels that any work that she does must be in secret? There has been nothing on the show to suggest that he is that abusive. Where did that come from? The most generous interpretation for Fitz that I could come up with is that the work that Simmons did for Daisy was highly unethical or illegal on the level of designing fish.

This does not mean that Simmons should stay in her old job. There is a wide difference between remaining in a job in which one's life is frequently in peril and retiring completely. Simmons, and perhaps Fitz, could teach at a university or at the S.H.I.E.L.D. Coulson Academy or work in a lab for S.H.I.E.L.D. or in the private sector.  There are many places that could use a person of Simmons's talents.  My idea of a happy ending for her would have been to show a digitally aged Fitz and a 20-25 year old Alya beaming as they watch Simmons accept a Nobel Prize. Simmons does not have to and should not have to give up her career to raise a child.

I do not want to say that nobody should stay home with children. Suppose that Simmons were working at a job that she found to be dull and uninspiring or if the working conditions were unbearable or if she were incompetent at her job. Due to lack of training or opportunities, it does not look like she will be able to get a satisfying job. If she were to encounter a financial windfall that supplies her with enough money to live the rest of her life without working, then a happy ending might entail leaving her career to be a stay-at-home mom. My issue is that nothing suggested that her career had this effect on her.

By the way, where did Simmons and Fitz get the money to retire in their early thirties? I know the stereotypes about Scots and money, but even extreme thrift can go only so far. Are S.H.I.E.L.D. salaries so high that they built up a very large nest egg? Did Mack allow Fitz to patent some of their inventions? They definitely can live a very comfortable life off royalties from Fitz's prosthetics or from ICErs.

Having Fitz also retire bugs me less. First, there has not been the societal pressure for men to stop working once they have a child. If anything, they are pressured to be the breadwinners. Second, as I have noted elsewhere (such as the thread on who should be the next Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.), Fitz has caused a lot of trouble for S.H.I.E.L.D. to the point where I believe that S.H.I.E.L.D. would have been better off without him. In fact, he may have retired because his work with the time stream showed him how often he has screwed up.

Alya

The show had to make things difficult for me by making Alya so adorable. This makes me feel like a Grinch for having problems with Simmons and Fitz having her.

First, it would be irresponsible for Fitz and Simmons to have children when their lives are in peril so often. If it were just Fitz and Simmons and if one were to die (without a substitute in the freezer), the other would be heartbroken. However, the survivor is not dependent on the other. Alya is dependent on her parents. They owe it to her to reduce their chances of premature death.

Second, Alya was no place to raise Alya. I am sure that Fitz, Simmons, and Uncle Enoch were very loving toward Alya. However, this is not enough. Children also need to have the opportunity to play with peers. I suppose there may have been native children on Alya, but we saw no evidence of that. In any case, there were not human children. On Alya, Alya would be an alien, so she might not even be accepted unless there was unmentioned information about Alya being open to alien beings. These native children (or alien children from places other than earth) would almost certainly develop at a different rate than Alya would, making them less than full peers.  It will be difficult for Alya to learn to interact with human children her age when she has had no experience doing so over the first few years of her life.

Remember, Alya refers to the star system, and Alya refers to the daughter.

I understand that Alya may not have been planned. I do not know what type of birth control Simmons uses or how available it was on the Zephyr or on Alya. It might have been asking too much for Simmons and Fitz to remain celibate over the years.

Perhaps as a result of their isolation, I fear that Simmons and Fitz may be far too emotionally dependent on Alya, which is far too much of a burden to put on such a young child. Simmons was separated from Fitz at the beginning of the second and third seasons. She functioned perfectly fine without an implant. She may have had some issues when separated from Fitz at the beginning of the fifth season, but not too much more than the other characters had, making it unlikely that separation from Fitz was to blame. It was only when separated from Alya that Simmons needed to have an implant to have the strength to function. Plenty of women in the military are separated from their children when they are sent to combat. They do not need implants.

Meanwhile, Fitz's inability to handle the implant (due to lingering brain damage from the first season finale?) was the reason he stayed behind, which implies that he too could not handle separation. On the other hand, he did not function well when separated from Simmons at the beginning of the second and third seasons. He did better when separated from Simmons at the beginning of the fifth and sixth seasons, but the Doctor may have been an influence there. If that is the case, I guess that even the Doctor cannot help Fitz cope without Alya.

I also hate that Simmons and Fitz needed Alya as a motivation to save the world.
By the way, this is not a review of the series finale. This is from a review of "All Roads Lead..." on their decision to repair the "Destroyer of Worlds" chamber that I quoted in my commentary on the fifth season. Other than removing an explicit reference to saving their own skins, this applies to their actions leading up to the seventh season. These two are S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. Saving the world is part of their job description. They should not need a daughter to motivate them. The other seven billion people in the world should be more than enough motivation for them to do the right thing.

Finally, the worst part of this twist is that... Aww, look at her. I do not see how the show could possibly have picked a more adorable actress to play this part. Wait, was I about to say something? I forget.

Ambiguous Issues

There are a couple of issues that are not necessarily complaints, but they gave an implication that might not have been intentional.

Unenthusiastic Reunion

First, I got the feeling that the team was not enthusiastic about the reunion in the final scene. It did not seem like something they looked forward to. They did not make much time to attend. After a few minutes, they were all ready to go their separate ways again for another year. They could not even be bothered to show up physically in one place, and, for some reason, I doubt that it was due to concerns over COVID-19. If I were to guess, all seven may show up again, virtually, the next year and perhaps the year after that. It will not be long before one or two people will simply send their apologies and not show up. A year or two later, they will probably just send Christmas cards to each other.

I get that it is difficult to get seven busy people to find a time in which they can all meet (or four busy people, two retired people, and a retired LMD). I noticed that Simmons, who was retired, seemed to be the most enthusiastic, or the least unenthusiastic, about these reunions. How difficult it is to find the time depends on how much the people in question prioritize reunions. This was not a priority.

As a contrast, I have been spending the past week watching Band of Brothers, which follows a company of soldiers from basic training to the end of World War II. The real-life survivors of the company held regular reunions. Not everyone showed up, but many of the members of the company actually made time for the reunions and bothered to show up in person. The relationships that they formed motivated them to do so. The relationships that LMD Coulson, May, Daisy, Simmons, Fitz, Mack, and Elena formed were apparently not as important to them.

This does not bug me because it might be intentional. It is possible that the writers wanted to suggest that each of the people in question have moved on with their lives. They may have some affection for the people they used to work with, but they are far more focused on their current lives. This is also consistent with Simmons at the end of the sixth season not being particularly enthusiastic to see colleagues that we now know she has not seen for several years from her perspective.

Promise to Piper

It also seemed weird that Simmons would promise Piper anything that Piper wanted if she would guard the containment pod. Why would Simmons need to do so? Piper is a hero. Unlike Fitz and Simmons, Piper would do the right thing simply because it is the right thing. Piper would probably have simply trusted Simmons that it was important to guard the containment pod without any further explanation or bribe. Piper definitely would have done so had she known that the pod contained a young girl.

Again, this might be intentional. The point might have been to show that Simmons is so far from being a hero that she cannot conceive of the idea of someone doing something simply because it is the right thing to do. There is a reason why, when I ranked who should be Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., one of my entries was, "You actually think that it should be Daisy, Simmons, Fitz, Elena, or Deke? Piper would be better."

Conclusion

Overall, I consider this to be a disappointing finale to a decent season. It might not have reached the highs of the Framework arc, but it was an improvement over the sixth season, particularly in the middle of the season when the show focused on the team rather than on the villains. I am glad that we had this last chance to spend time with (some version of) Coulson, May, Daisy, Simmons, Mack, Elena, and a couple of relative newcomers in Enoch and Sousa. I really wish that I could have included Fitz in the previous sentence, but he was not around that much. I also wish that we had one last great villain for a show that had villains like Raina, (old) Garrett, Ward, Cal, Jiaying, and various versions of AIDA. I may express my opinions on the season as a whole in another thread.