SPOILERS FOR SEASON 3, EPISODE 19 FOLLOW!
By: Tyler Miller
Last night’s Agents of SHIELD wasn’t as good as the past few episodes, but it was still a pretty solid episode. The first half kind of dragged a bit with not much happening, but the second half of the episode more than made up for the slow start, delivering an exciting and emotional conclusion.
The episode started with a flashback to thousands of years ago and followed a hunter in the woods that was running away from something. That something turns out to be two Kree Reapers who end up capturing him and taking him away. They perform an experiment on him, putting their blood inside of him, causing him to go through Terrigenesis. It’s then that it’s revealed the hunter was Hive before he became an Inhuman, as he explains the origin of his creation of Daisy and three members of Hydra that are going to have the same experiment done to them.
On the SHIELD side of things, Lincoln is desperate to help Daisy in any way can since he’s totally lovesick for her, but May refuses his help since last time he took things a bit too far. His desperation shows when he then proceeds to volunteer to test an anti-toxin that Fitz and Simmons believe can cure Daisy and bring her back to her senses. They shoot him down though because the anti-toxin is potentially fatal, and could result in his death. Meanwhile, Coulson spends hours looking at camera footage to see if he can find Daisy. Eventually he does, but he believes it to be a trap while Mack thinks its a cry for help from her. Coulson then decides to have Mack and May lead a strike team to Daisy’s location to find and kill Hive once and for all.
At the town in Wyoming, Radcliffe is ready to perform the experiment on the three Hydra members. They begin, but things go wrong and the three volunteers end up dying via their faces melting off Raiders of the Lost Ark style.Turns out that the experiment didn’t work because Radcliffe needs DNA from a living Kree, and the DNA that Hive offered didn’t fit the bill. Hive almost kills Radcliffe because of this failure but decides to let him live after Radcliffe pleads for his life so that he can see the experiment to completion.
Back at SHIELD, Mack and May are getting ready to head out with their team while Fitz, Simmons, and Lincoln continue to mull over whether or not to allow Lincoln to try the anti-toxin. Fitz and Lincoln are willing to try it, but Simmons is completely against it. She also gets Coulson on her side, who shoots the idea down and tells the science duo to try and find a better option. Shortly after, Fitz and Simmons talk about their disagreement and reassure each other that they’re both still on good terms with each other since they won’t always agree and will keep their work relationship separate from their personal one.
As they’re walking back to the lab they spot Lincoln with the anti-toxin in his hand, injecting it into himself, causing him to end up discharging some of his powers before falling to the ground. Although he’s drastically weakened, Simmons has something that will be able to fight it off for him to keep him from dying. They take him to a medical room to recover, and Simmons gets a drill to get a tissue sample from Lincoln’s brain to see if the anti-toxin worked.
May and Mack make it the town where Hive and his crew of Inhumans are and spot James. May decides to go in and talk with him to try and find out what she can about everything that’s going on. At the same time, Hive is talking with Daisy and asking her if she’ll kill the people at SHIELD if necessary. She says she will, but she wants to put them through the same experiment to try and help them understand where Hive is coming from so they don’t have to die. Hive is happy to hear this because she’s about to be put to the test in a way that she never was before.
May ends up getting the information that she wants from James and knocks him out, heading over to a nearby building. Inside they find the artifacts that James had are activated and doing something. Coulson sees that something is flying down to Earth fast and tells them to get out of there, just in the nick of time too. A ship crashes into the building they were in and out come the two Kree Reapers that we saw in the flashback at the start of the episode. Hive activated the artifacts to get the Reapers to come for him, that way he can kill them and get their blood for the experiment. He requests that Daisy kill one while he fights the other one.
The Reapers start looking for Hive and kill anyone that gets in their way, including the multiplier Alisha. May and Mack’s team follows from a distance, but Mack breaks off from them when he feels a tremor in the ground, alerting him to Daisy’s presence. Daisy attracts one of the Reapers and takes him out with some impressive (and brutal) use of her powers, allowing Radcliffe to start draining it of its blood. As they’re doing this, Mack appears and tries to talk to Daisy and get her to come back with him. Things don’t go his way though, so he destroys the Reaper body, inciting Daisy’s wrath.
At the same time, Hive is fighting the other Reaper in a nearby church while May and the strike team watch. Hive ends up killing the Reaper, causing May’s team to fire on him. Of course that doesn’t do anything other than piss him off, so they get the hell out of there. They make it to Mack and Daisy just in time as she’s about to kill him. May shoots her and they get out of there in a hurry while Hive holds Daisy and watches.
Back at SHIELD, Simmons patches Mack up and then informs Lincoln about the result of the mission, causing him to feel even more useless. She also tells him that the anti-toxin didn’t work so his stupid sacrifice was for nothing. In Wyoming, Hive is upset with Daisy because he believes she has more of an attachment to SHIELD than she believes, and that it caused the Reaper she had to be destroyed. To prove her loyalty, she volunteers herself to be drained since she had Kree blood pumped into her back in season one when she almost died.
Other thoughts:
- Although James never really gets to do much on the show, he’s always an entertaining character to watch. His whole conversation with May was a delight to see play out since he had no idea she was playing him and continued to try and get with her.
- That scene with Daisy and Mack at the end of the episode was crushing (pun not intended). Seeing these two former partners on opposite sides of the fight like this just cemented how far gone Daisy was. It reminded me of this scene from Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
- Hive’s reference to Iron Man and Captain America, along with him saying that a civil war would come from them was just classic “check out the movie coming this week!” and made me chuckle a bit.
- I was honestly hoping the Kree Reapers would be around a bit longer because they’re definitely a force to be reckoned with. I wonder if there are any others floating around out there in space.
So I think it’s safe to say with this episode that things have gotten even more complicated for the team at SHIELD. Daisy’s basically a lost cause, Hive is still winning (even when it looks like he’s lost), and there’s nothing that our heroes can do about it. If things weren’t bad enough for SHIELD, they’ve gotten even worse now.
TheComfySpot 