Agents of SHIELD - 'Lockup' and 'The Good Samaritan'

Man, my annual performance review doesn't seem so bad now.

And lo, we have reached the point in the series where I am no longer driven to review each episode of Agents of SHIELD as they come.

Not that Season 4 is going badly so far. In this pair of episodes, Robbie Reyes joins the SHIELD team to rescue his Uncle from prison and find out what was going on at the energy lab. In 'Lockup' they engineer a jailbreak, but run into complications when the ghosts who are also going after Uncle Eli release the prisoners and Daisy decides to sacrifice herself to fight off a wave of them. Ultimately everyone gets out, but unfortunately the Rider pushes Robbie to enact vengeance on an imprisoned former gangbanger, and while he is distracted Eli is grabbed by ghost lady(1).

"Did someone get the Ghost Rider near the guilty people again?"

Elsewhere, Simmons has her lie detector test and is then assigned to prompt Director Mace during a televised bitch-off with Senator Inhuman-Hater, during which he opts to go off book and out himself as an Inhuman. He then tasks Simmons with a super-secret mission of secretness.

Moving into 'The Good Samaritan', Daisy brings Gabriel aboard the Zephyr for safety and, as Mace boards the plane via Quinjet to search for Daisy and Robbie, Robbie reveals the truth of what happened. He and Gabriel were attacked while driving Eli's car. Gabriel was shot and trapped under the car, crippling his legs, but Robbie was thrown clear. He was killed when he hit the road, but before that begged for any power in the universe to protect his brother. Gabriel saw a 'good Samaritan' on a motorbike stop and help them, but Robbie saw the Devil come to him and offer him life and revenge, although the figure in his flashbacks looks like another Ghost Rider. Gabriel is horrified and refuses to let the Rider's murders be for his sake. Mace searches the plane and finds his fugitives in the containment unit. Coulson argues for the need to stop the ghosts and the necessity of using Robbie and the Rider for that. Mace rejects his case, but then Robbie breaks out of the inescapable(2) containment unit by going all flame head and beats the snot out of Mace before Gabriel can calm him down.

The Devil! Men! GOD! (Symbolic horse.)

Meanwhile, Eli is also flashing back to the original experiments, which were essentially attempting to make a replicator like I Star Trek, creating matter out of energy. With the help of the Darkhold, the team made some progress, although Eli noted with some concern that the resulting set up ends up with more energy than it started with, in violation of physical law. Eli tried to get a look at the book, but the scientist who brought it in (Mr Ghostlady) was all 'the Precious is mine!' about it.

Fitz discovers a link between the work Eli and his colleagues were doing and Isodyne's zero matter research in the 40s. The team put down and Robbie confronts Ghostlady, who tells him that the hit her husband ordered was supposed to get Eli and not his nephews, and is then as surprised as any of her cohorts when Robbie can fight her. Coulson gets to Eli, but it turns out that it was Eli who pushed the experiments to the extreme and ended up atomising his colleagues in the quest to grant himself the power of a god, having become effectively the new Prophet of Dark Force, much as Witney Frost was, but without the Oscar nominations.

 

"Well, that's not good."

Eli activates the reconstructed test rig with himself in the chamber. A blast rips through the facility, catching Coulson and Robbie, and Eli emerges with a ball of Dark Force to play with.

The Ghost Rider arc is one of the more interesting in the run of Agents of SHIELD – I reserve the right to weep if Robbie, who is certainly more interesting than the Cage version of Johnny Blaze, dies to save Daisy – and of course is timed to tie into the introduction of the mystic in Doctor Strange. Unfortunately, by tying it into the Dark Force, it just reminds me of the Zero Matter storyline and, with the best will in the world, Agents of SHIELD is never going to do itself any favours by reminding me that I am not watching the vastly superior Agent Carter. What I do like so far is Director Mace, who appears to be a sort of bumbling, politically progressive boss with his folksy mottos and 'spectrum of security', was revealed to be a massively powerful Inhuman brick, and now turns out to be nowt so daft as he's cabbage looking. It makes him a complicated obstacle for the team to negotiate, even if he never becomes a direct antagonist, and I hope that he won't.

(1) It might be my failure that I can't remember the names of characters in this series, but then again it might be the show failing to communicate the name or make me care.

(2) Except for that one time when Marc Dacascos broke out of one.