By: Tyler Miller
If you thought that Agents of SHIELD had been slacking a bit the past couple of weeks, you’re in for one hell of an episode with yesterday’s “Spacetime.” Last night’s episode had plenty of action for viewers, and it also pushed the Inhuman storyline with Malick and Hive back to the forefront of the plot.
It all started off with a homeless man named Charlie being told to go to a homeless shelter by a nice store owner. Thing is, Charlie is an Inhuman who ends up causing people to see the future when they come in contact with him. The poor store owner had this happen to him when giving Charlie some money, and called 911 asking for Daisy to help him because Hydra was going to come.
Coulson, May, Lincoln, and Daisy go to the scene and talk with him when Hydra appears and starts firing on everybody, killing the store owner in the process. Daisy tried to get to Charles before Hydra took him, but she was too late. She did manage to touch him though, triggering a vision of the future in her mind. This vision consisted of a woman crying, Fitz and Simmons holding hands and looking up at the sky, Lincoln on the ground with blood on his face, Daisy kicking some ass, Coulson shooting at someone, and Charles dying.
Jumping over the Hydra side of things, Hive is doing his best Neo impression (flowing black jacket and all) as he goes to meet with Malick, who’s surrounded by his daughter, the Inhuman Giyera, and another woman. Malick tells Hive how his ancestors believed that if they brought him back to Earth they’d be rewarded and be able to take over the world. Hive can tell that Malick wants something though and deduces it to be power, saying that he’ll show him true power.
Back at SHIELD HQ, Daisy is going over her visions with the rest of the team, telling them what she saw. Daisy wants to try and save Charles because she believes that she can change the future, but Fitz tells her that she can’t as he then explains to the team the way that time works and how the future is set in stone. To be honest, I didn’t really understand what he was saying with all the words he was using, but I got the big picture: they can’t change the future. It has to play out. With this knowledge, Coulson decides that Daisy won’t be going on the mission since she’s at the center of the visions, so May will go in place of her.
In the meantime, Coulson and Lincoln go to try and locate Charles. Once they ID him, they bring his ex-wife in to talk to her about him and find out what happened between the two of them. Daisy talks to her and finds out that he always sees someone’s death when he has the visions, and that the bird he had carved is a robin, the same name of his daughter. This causes his ex-wife to start crying, revealing her to be the woman that was crying in Daisy’s vision.
Our villains Malick and Ward are having a meeting with the company that made Coulson’s old prosthetic hand and Malick says that he wants to buy the company from the owner, who respectfully declines his offer. It’s now when Hive has some guards bring in Charles and has him touch the owner, giving him visions of the future, and boy are they graphic. They give us our first glimpse of Hive’s powers in action and it’s almost as bad as a Mortal Kombat fatality. It surprised me that it was even shown on ABC. The owner gives in and agrees to the deal, but Hive kills everyone else in the room anyway and leaves him alive.
Eventually they are brought an exoskeleton that’s for Malick to use, giving him some of the kind of power that he craves. He tests it out on a vase and a table before Hive tells him to kill the former company owner. At first he just holds the man and contemplates killing him and Hive goads him, but one the man punches him Malick doesn’t hold back and crushes his head with his hands. This didn’t get shown entirely, but seeing the man’s face start to get crushed and the blood flow out of his eyes some was possibly even more graphic that seeing what Hive did to everyone else a few minutes earlier.
Meanwhile, Daisy is having May do practice runs of the fight that she saw in her vision since she can’t go herself. After multiple tries that have a good run, and it’s just in time too because they found the building that Charles is at. As the team is about to head out on the mission, a group of guards walk into HQ with Andrew at gunpoint. He came willingly because his transformation into Lash is almost complete with just one left and he wanted to say goodbye to May before it happened. This throws a wrench in the plan with Coulson telling May to stay with him although she doesn’t want to, so Daisy ends up going on the mission anyway just like in her vision.
Andrew and May go into the big containment chamber at HQ and he gets the potential vaccine that Simmons had been working on put inside him. The two of them talk about changing the past and it’s pretty emotional, even with May trying to suppress her emotions. Andrew also reveals that he came back because he wants Lash to be in SHIELD’s hands in case they ever need the help. Unfortunately he begins to turn, so he goes into the second containment chamber and shares one last moment with May before the transformation is complete.
Before Daisy can even start her mission, things go from alright to pretty damn bad real quick as the team sees Ward on one of the security cameras in the building that Daisy’s going to, so everyone packs their stuff up and goes to help her out Daisy gets into the building just fine and kicks ass just like she did in her vision, but then she’s faced with a one way mirror with a guard behind it who’s about to shoot her. Thankfully, Coulson comes just in time and kills him first. He tells her that he’s here because Ward’s there and for her to just head up to the roof. She gets up there and then has a fight with an ego powered Malick and proceeds to beat her pretty bad.
Down in the building, Lincoln comes across Giyera who uses his telekinesis to toss a fire extinguisher at him, causing him to bleed on the ground like in Daisy’s vision. Ward then shows up, but leaves with Giyera to somewhere unknown. Back on the roof, Daisy is about to die when Charles touches Malick causing him to have visions and giving Daisy a chance to knock him out, but not before he damn near chokes Charles to death. The two of them have a heartfelt moment where she promises to keep his daughter Robin safe, and then she touches him accidentally and has a vision of the Quinjet in space, the same one we saw in the midseason premiere.
The episode ends with Giyera and Hive in a somewhere talking about future events when Malick gives Giyera a call. He tells Giyera that he should be by his side, to which Giyera responds that he’s right where he needs to be and hangs up. It’s clear through the way that Malick sounded that he was afraid of something, but what?
Other thoughts:
- That Terminator reference that Coulson made to Lincoln while they were looking for Charles was pretty funny. It was even funnier when Lincoln said he never saw any of the movies, causing Coulson to say that he’s off the team.
- Daisy’s one shot fight scene was pretty damn great, just like her one in season 2. This one wasn’t as long, but still awesome and shows that our girl has definitely come a long ways in her training.
- We’re starting to get a better sense of Hive and what he’s capable of, but we still don’t know exactly what he’s planning. Perhaps we’ll find out next episode, which is also when we’ll see his true face!
- That vision Daisy had of the Quinjet in space kind of makes me believe that she’s the one in there, since Charles’ visions were always of someone’s death. This could just be some clever misdirection though and Daisy isn’t on the Quinjet or she doesn’t die in it.
- The team is definitely going to have to use Lash at some point in the future, most likely against Hive. I predict that he’ll end up giving his life to try and kill him.
This week’s episode was a great one for Agents of SHIELD, as it had the right amount of action and exciting story to keep me interested. Next week looks like it’ll be continuing this pace that we have here, and I couldn’t be more excited to see what happens.
TheComfySpot 