TV Roundup: Person of Interest – ‘QSO’, ‘Reassortment’ and ‘Sotto Voce’, Timeless – ‘The Red Scare’, Agents of SHIELD – ‘Wake Up’ and ‘Hot Potato Soup’

Aptly enough, the them of the Shaw link in this episode is that Root wantsto believe.

Person of Interest gets heavy with 'QSO', when the team is given the number of a conspiracy theory radio host, one of whose listeners has stumbled on a Samaritan communication code embedded in AM radio signals. Reese and Root rescue the host, but he chooses to put himself back in the crosshairs by revealing the conspiracy on air. Tragically, he receives nothing in response but an ongoing parade of self-aggrandizing theories from his listeners, and a cup of poison from his producer. Root is, however, able to use the Samaritan system to send a message to tell Shaw that they are still looking. Shaw, having just been tricked into killing an innocent woman under the belief that she was in another simulation, takes heart. Fusco quits the team over Reese and Finch's refusal to tell him the truth of their situation.

There is a degree to which the show is just playing Root dressup, but it must
do wonders for Amy Acker's portfolio.

In 'Reassortment', Samaritan engineers an outbreak of a deadly flu strain to kill three medical professionals who have noticed its manipulations of an automated medical system to effect its adjustments. The team is able to provide a cure - thanks to the Machine's open system and a hastily conjured CDC alias for Root - but the outbreak still provides the justification for widespread flu vaccination, allowing Samaritan to create a massive DNA database. I wasn't clear if Samaritan was going for Worldwide, national or New York with that last one, because Person of Interest often conflates the three somewhat.

In Johannesburg, Shaw breaks out of her cell and shoots her chief jailor, Lambert before high-tailing out of the city in his car.

Elias is right; what did he expect?

In 'Sotto Voce', remote control killer the Voice returns and throws the precinct into chaos in an attempt to kill off a former associate. He is successful, but Reese and Fusco work together to survive, while Finch and Elias track his true identity. Finch confronts the Voice, and Elias kills him, challenging Finch to claim to be surprised by that outcome having asked for his help. Realising that he is in it regardless of what he knows, Reese opts to read Fusco into the Machine's existence. Shaw makes it back to New York, and after Root threatens to kill herself if Shaw decides to take her own life now, is reunited with the team.

Person of Interest remains quality TV, but more and more the deeper arc is less interesting to me than the earlier procedural set-up, delving more into human nature rather than the more speculative realm of ASI psychology. As a show that used the Machine to be about people it was excellent; as a show about the Machine, it's just pretty good, and the specifically New York setting makes less and less sense as Samaritan moves on global domination.

I never trusted her, but I only just realised that that's because she's Moira
Queen.

Timeless closed out its freshman year with 'The Red Scare'. Forced to jump with an injured Rufus and four people, Jiya – as the fourth passenger – began to suffer blackouts. Despite Flynn's machinations, setting Senator McCarthy onto them as Communist spies, they are able to contact Lucy's grandfather, Ethan Cahill, and gain access to the summit, offering Flynn an alternative path. They return to the present, where Mason assists them and Ethan provides all the records they need to set the US Government against Rittenhouse. Agent Christopher arrests Flynn before he can save his family, but promises Lucy a shot at saving her sister, but before she can take that trip, Lucy discovers that her mother is a high-ranking member of Rittenhouse and that they still have active plans for the time machine.

This has been an interesting series, and the twist with Lucy's mother gives a potential second season legs that it wouldn't have had otherwise, but something about its earnest tone has tended to make its fanciful incorporation of every famous figure in a twenty year radius into the plot of each episode seem laughable, where Legends of Tomorrow is actively improved by Einstein punching. I'm not sure I'll bother with Season 2, if it happens, given my reduced TV watching time.

When she actually wakes up, someone is in for a universe of pain.

Agents of SHIELD ploughs ahead with its LMD subseason. Agent May breaks out of her pod, only to discover that this is her new simulation, an ever expanding conflict created within a metacognitive space called the Framework. Ultimately, she finds herself captive in a recreation of Bogota in which she is able to save the Inhuman child she was once forced to kill. An attempt to bug Senator Nadeer is uncovered during a senate hearing to ratify Quake's registration under the Sokovia Accords. The team realise that someone is bugging them using LMD eyes and May realises it is her. She confronts Radcliffe, but can't turn on him. Fitz reveals he has been working on Aida as part of an investigation; they pick up Radcliffe, but Fitz realises that the real Radcliffe is already with Nadeer; this is another LMD.

The family Koenig (well, some of them.)

The Watchdogs go after Billy Koenig, who was given the task of hiding the Darkhold. The team taps Billy's brothers and big sister to retrieve the book from the Koenigs' vault. Coulson and Maybot make out - cross that off my list of things I don't really want to see in the series - but then they find the book, May's programming goes off, and while Fitz realises that Radcliffe could have used a brain scan from her treatment for ghost madness to duplicate her in time to save Coulson, Radcliffe and the Watchdogs end up with the Darkhold. The original Aida and Radcliffe LMDs are destroyed.

LMD is definitely proving a less engaging plotline than Ghost Rider, despite John Hannah's excellent turn as the slippery antivillain Radcliffe. Patton Oswalt's Koenig brothers continue to be fun, but every time they turn up I'm afraid they're going to explain them and that would ruin it. Easily the most engaging thing going on is the burgeoning relationship between Mack and Yo-Yo, which hit a bump when he started keeping things from her. Then he confessed he had to go and be with his ex-wife on the birthday of their daughter, Hope, who suffered from a congenital condition which meant that she only lived for four days and apparently Mack could be more of a huggable, vulnerable hard man woobie bear after all.

TV Roundup: Agents of SHIELD - 'Broken Promises' and 'Patriot'; Person of Interest - 'Shotseeker' and 'A More Perfect Union'

With the Ghost Rider storyline wrapped up, it's time to move into the second subset of Agents of SHIELD Season 4, subtitled 'LMD'.

Also, Senator Nadeer takes her brother off somewhere quiet and offs him for
becoming an Inhuman.

In 'Broken Promises', Aida continues to hold Agent May hostage and attempts to break into SHIELD HQ to steal the Darkhold before it can be taken away for disposal. When the LMD Agent May tries to stop her, Aida turns her off, but it's clear that this May thinks that she is the real deal. Aida gets a fair way, but ultimately Fitz cuts off her access to the system and Mack cuts off her head. Fitz and Simmons have a bit of a bust up over whether this is a glitch in a worthwhile programme or – as Mack insists – robots are bad. Mack and Yo-Yo's banter about technohorror movies is adorbs. The big reveal is that Aida – the real deal, the decapitated one was a duplicate – is still operating under instructions from Radcliffe, who wants to get hold of the Darkhold for his own reasons, although he is clearly freaked out that Aida has jumped to murder to keep their plans secret.

 

Coulson and Mack decide to go dutch.

'Patriot' puts the arc on the backburner for a week. Aida and Radcliffe have to contend with the real May, who can't be contained in a soothing simulation because of who she is. I'm putting even odds on next week being set largely or entirely in May's subconscious as she navigates a more violent simulation to break out of her sedation again. Elsewhere, a Watch Dog sniper takes a shot at Mace during a medal ceremony for Quake, and then his Quinjet is shot down. Mack and Coulson are forced to protect the director when it turns out that he isn't an inhuman at all, but given superstrength by Project Patriot, a sub-Captain America supersoldier drug(1) which is currently wearing off. Mace comes through by ballsing it out and pretending to be badass, but after confessing that even the initial act of heroism which brought him to prominence was an accident, cedes operational control back to Coulson.

LMD is currently proving a less interesting arc than Ghost Rider, if only because bad robots have been done before. The fact that Aida is still working for a largely well-meaning Radcliffe has mitigated some of the more obvious courses, but I remain sceptical that this will go to any really new places. Also, Fitz is talking to Aida's severed head, which can't be good.

The cyber-war hots up in Person of Interest's final season, and I am more than ever convinced that I liked it best as a procedural.

It's that man again.

In 'Shotseeker' a technical consultant is in danger as he begins to suspect that an automated system for distinguishing gunshots from other noises in public audio feeds has been got at to ignore certain incidents. Obviously it is Samaritan doing the getting at in this case, using Shotseeker to steer emergency responses away from inconvenient crime scenes. Fusco takes note of the fact that, while murder is way down, suicide and disappearances are up, and begins to press to be read into the secret even as Samaritan takes note of him. Also getting on the radar, Elias' accountant Bruce is pushing to find out who arranged the hit on his friend, only to be taken to meet with Elias himself, who was saved by Team Machine and put into hiding. Elias warns Bruce to back off their new enemy. Meanwhile, tests against a clone of Samaritan show that in any open conflict, the Machine is doomed to lose, and Harold ponders the possibility that the Machine should be creating its own code now.

The upbeat ending where all of our characters realise that they're going to die
alone. Woo.

'A More Perfect Union' sees the Machine throw up a marriage licence, so Harold and Reese infiltrate a wedding - Harold as an overseas uncle and Reese after netting an invitation while acting as the hen party stripper's security guy - where possible horse-doping, social climbing and Harold's Irish accent provide more than enough reasons for murder. Also, Harold gets to sing. Back in the city, Fusco continues to track missing person's reports, using a room with no surveillance, and discovers a cache of bodies in a condemned sewer tunnel. Unfortunately, at that moment the tunnel is destroyed with explosives, trapping Fusco – and worse, Bear – in the collapse.

In an unrelated C-plot, Grier shows Shaw the people he claims Team Machine overlooks who are still deserving of 'adjustment'. Later, Samaritan's analogue interface – still creepy – explains that only Samaritan can prevent mutually assured destruction, before blowing up a Russian embassy and allowing the nuke to rain down on what turns out to be another simulation.

So, yeah, I'm not so into the Samaritan thing since Samaritan became able to completely control Shaw's perception. Something about it has taken the show that one step beyond its day after tomorrow SF premise and now it feels a little silly to me, I think. It's all subjective, of course, and the bulk of the show is still good, but this appears to be my breaking point.

Expect a slowing of TV Roundup in the future, as I am becoming a full time Dad, which is bound to impact my TV viewing. On the other hand, my partner is also moving in, so we may yet catch up on Arrow and The 100.

TV Roundup: Agents of SHIELD - 'Laws of Inferno Dynamics', Emerald City - 'They Came First', Timeless - 'The World's Columbia Exposition', 'The Murder of Jesse James', 'Karma Chameleon', 'The Lost Generation' and 'Public Enemy No. 1', and Iron Fist - 'Under Leaf Pluck Lotus' and 'Immortal Emerges From Cave'

Vengeance!

'The Laws of Inferno Dynamics'(1) brings us to the end of the Ghost Rider subset of Agents of SHIELD's fourth season. With Eli rapidly growing in power, Coulson persuades Mace to bring in the big guns: Yo-Yo, Robbie and, of course, Daisy. Eli sets a trap for them by coating the walls of a passage with caesium, but Robbie strolls through the fire to find that he has managed to create a plutonium replica of the Los Alamos 'demon core'; an atomic bomb, in other words. Also, each time he uses his powers, the world gets a little wonkier. Coulson leads a bravura assault while Daisy struggles to contain the quakes. Although badly wounded, Robbie unleashes the Rider on Eli after it becomes clear that he plans to scrub the world clean and create life anew. Aida(2) uses her Darkhold knowledge to open a gate which Eli, the bomb and the Rider drop through, and Quake is exposed to the public, obliging Mace to undisavow her and claim she's been working undercover against the Watchdogs on behalf of SHIELD. Mace also brings the LMD programme in house, but PR guy discovers that Aida has knocked out Agent May and replaced her with a duplicate, and gets his neck snapped for his trouble, which can't be a good sign.

Also, d'aww.

The Ghost Rider weirdly muddies the waters of Agents of SHIELD, because suddenly they know magic exists and Coulson has even heard of the Rider before, yet they roundly rejected Clairvoyance a season before it turned out that there was a clairvoyant Inhuman. The story has been okay, and if Eli was a little low key for a major villain, I can't help but approve of them wrapping an arc in a quarter season, given how overstretched the season-long plots have traditionally become. It's an approach that worked well for Teen Wolf's third year, and would probably have been a stronger pitch for its fourth and fifth. Similarly, it did great favours for Gotham's sophomore year, if only by ditching some of the more irritating villains (by which I mean Theo Galavan) halfway through.

Ana Ularu is okay, but I am constantly disappointed by her failure to be 12
Monkeys' Emily Hampshire.

In 'They Came First', Dorothy and Lucas travel to Glinda's fortress while the Wizard tries to root out witchery in the Emerald City and now-Queen Langwidere is a dick to Jack, who is apparently into that. The last of these is purely fluff so far, featuring a sexed up version of the classic 'oil can' scene, because we totally needed that. West tries to save a young witch from a mob, but shit goes down, buildings asplode and to keep order the Wizard decides it is necessary to set fire to the entire High Council of nuns, because heaven forefend we get through an episode without some institutional violence against women. It is suggested that witches are themselves the Beast Forever. Oh, and someone realises that the knife Jack nicked from Momba when Tip was rescued suggests that she is Ozma, Princess of Oz, which was either obvious AF or means nothing to you.

In the A-plot, Dorothy busts out her inner witch to save young Sylvie from wolves. Sylvie has been fitted with earplugs for… reasons, and Dorothy removes them as part of a bonding process. She also gets it on with Lucas, and suggests that they should both come back to Kansas and join her in a land which welcomes the poor, the hungry, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free; especially those with violent tendencies, magical powers and no documentation. All she needs to do now is prevent Glinda's war against the Wizard, by hook or by crook. Unfortunately, as soon as they reach her fortress she's all 'memory returned' and next thing we know she's got her tongue down Lucas/Roan's throat and Dorothy is all kinds of betrayed because – title quote! – 'they came first.'

I predict that this happy domestic scenario will in no way implode.

Emerald City continues to struggle hard with, among other things, its sexual politics. I think that the idea is that women have the power in Oz and men like the Wizard fear this, but nevertheless, it is principally men who domineer and women who machinate. The transfer from a relatively children's novel to sprawling adventure epic also has the effect of leaving the protagonists – Dorothy and Lucas – unusually short on agency, with one essentially willing to uncritically undertake any course that will enable her to get home, and the other completely at the whim of his unreliable memory. They are, hands down, the least interesting characters in the show, surpassing even Jack and Langwidere, whose deeply unhealthy relationship at least has something of the grim fascination of a car crash.

Next we come to a bit of a Timeless marathon, although actually I watched them over an extended period intending to do an end-of-series review until I realised I could put them in my newly inaugurated roundup.

When you go back to the wild west and people are like 'dude, have some
respect for human life,' you should know you took a wrong turn somewhere.

'The World's Columbia Exposition' sees the show pin its colours to the mast in the War of the Currents, labelling Edison and Henry Ford as key Rittenhouse members whom Flynn sets out to murder. In order to prevent interference he decoys Team Lifeboat to a hotel transformed into a serial killer's death maze (true story) and captures Lucy, who manages to recruit assistance in the form of Harry Houdini to prevent the assassination and rescue Rufus and Wyatt. Then in 'The Murder of Jesse James', the crew travel back in time to stop Flynn saving the life of Jesse James by assisting legendary lawman Bass 'The Real Lone Ranger, but he's black' Reeves and his native American partner Grant Johnson. They discover that Flynn has no intention of letting James live; he is just using him to find someone in Indian territory; former timeship pilot and Rittenhouse oppose Emma Whitmore.

"A soldier, a scientist and a stewardess(3) walk into a bar..."

With Flynn having given Wyatt the identity of his wife's killer, Wyatt persuades Rufus to help him steal the lifeboat and prevent the killer's conception in 'Karma Chameleon'. He promises no harm, but ends up accidentally killing the man's father during a storm, only to learn that the killer was lying: He killed two other women, but not Wyatt's wife. Anthony contacts Lucy and offers to destroy the mothership if she does the same to the lifeboat, in order to keep time travel out of the grasp of Rittenhouse, but Flynn rumbles him and Anthony is killed. Lucy and Rufus realise that the man who threatened Rufus was Lucy's biodad.

Rufus is all flustered about meeting Baker, and asks Lucy not to tell his sort-
of-girlfriend Jiya, which a) is kind of tacky, and b) raises the issues of how
time travel affects a 'three for free' policy.

In 'The Lost Generation', Wyatt is arrested and replaced with the super decent Dave Baumgartner, who is killed by one of Flynn's goons as the team try to rescue Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh turns out to be a Rittenhouse legacy – like Lucy – who has been charged with becoming famous and then being a big old racist douche. With the help of Josephine Baker and Ernest Hemingway, Rufus and Lucy rescue Lindbergh, who plans to ditch Rittenhouse but turns out to have stuck to that for only a short time. As Rittenhouse-controlled NSA agents take over the time machine project, Agent Christopher busts Wyatt out of chokey and together with Lucy and Rufus they undertake to continue the fight against Rittenhouse by any means necessary.

The big joke this week is that they have the wrong costumes.

Finally, in 'Public Enemy No. 1', Flynn helps Al Capone to evade his tax charges and kill Eliot Ness in exchange for abducting the Mayor of Chicago to learn when Rittenhouse will next meet up en masse. Dispatched to assassinate Flynn's mother, Lucy and Rufus tranquilise their new muscle and steal the Lifeboat, leaving a worm in the project computers. Jiya is arrested after receiving a call from Rufus, but is able to cobble together a computer with parts while in custody to ensure her friends aren't tracked. Although at first intending to save Lucy's sister, the team determine that they can't let Flynn mess with Capone's history. After Ness's death, Lucy suggests that they work with Richard Hart, a prohibition agent and secretly Capone's big brother Jimmy (true story) to gain access to Capone, who shoots Rufus before being killed by Hart. Mason asks the NSA for access to the same data the Machine uses in Person of Interest. As the team jumps out, Rufus collapses at the controls.

Timeless has done the needful and changed up its game, although the jump of the week structure was already a bit stale. Wyatt's hair-trigger temper and failure to make and execute a simple plan – there are many better ways to prevent conception via time machine than trying to cock block the future father; I came up with several during the course of the episode, some of which didn't even involve fire – prevent his failure being all that sympathetic, especially given that it involved the death of a guy who seemed pretty decent. Similarly, Rufus has not only left Jiya in the lurch, by then calling her he has dumped her right in it, so a bullet in the collar seems little more than karma. Flynn may be a monster, but he's still in the top three for most sympathetic character in the series (number one is Lucy's unrealised sister.)

Not doing yourself any favours, Danny boy.

Iron Fist struggles gamely on with 'Under Leaf Pluck Lotus' and the inevitable Claire Temple cameo. A group of posh-slutty saleswomen introduce an exciting new line in synthetic heroin to the city, and Danny determines that it is being imported via the pier the Hand wanted Rand(4) to buy. With Ward refusing to act without proof, Danny goes to Colleen for backup, bringing takeaway, which for him means ordering from his dad's favourite restaurant and paying for them to bring the food, tables and chairs to the dojo, because he's rich and clueless and so hilariously endearing, right?(5) This is where he meets Claire, who is taking private lessons from Colleen because of course she is. Danny and Colleen spy on the Hand shipment, but it turns out that they are not bringing in drugs, but the chemist who makes them. Danny 'rescues' the chemist, and I use sarcastic quote marks because this rescue involves the man being stabbed in the chest and hauled back to the dojo to be treated by Claire.

"Basically, Danny, you're just not as interesting as I am."

Moving on to 'Immortal Emerges from Cave', the Meachams move to deal with a viral video of Danny apologising for not-technically-illegal pollution from one of the company's factories and Ward is suddenly pitifully addicted to prescription-strength painkillers. One of the better scenes of the series comes when Danny basically hijacks Ward to trawl around warehouses looking for the chemist's daughter, who is being held hostage, but they find the body of the chemist's guard and an invitation to a duel. While Claire and Colleen take the chemist to hospital and the Hand swipe him from under their noses, Danny fights three battles under the watchful eye of Madame Gao. The first is against a pair of brothers,  the second an entomologist who fights using poison needles and high school seduction moves(6), and the third a psychopathic blade fetishist and karaoke enthusiast. Gao ultimately calls a halt by reminding Danny that the Hand doesn't do honour, but reveals a) that she was born in Kun Lung and b) that she is a way more ultimate a weapon than he is.

Iron Fist is struggling, and not because no-one likes a billionaire post-Trump. It's because the show fails to make Danny likeable, fails to overcome its inherent cultural appropriation (seriously, Marvel; it's cool having Method Man weigh in to Luke Cage, but if RZA is your authority on the history of Chinese martial arts, then you're in trouble,) and fails to make the conflict interesting. Danny Rand's wealth takes the fight off the streets. With Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage we saw the street-level struggle, but Iron Fist lifts us right up to the level where Elektra briefly and tediously took Daredevil and the result lacks emotional punch. We don't not care about Danny Rand because he's a billionaire, so much as because we only see him fighting for abstracts – his name, his company, Kun Lung – and not for people.

Straight up the fuck is this shit?

Also… we need to have words about the entomologist assassin, because damn that was some nineties shit right there. An Asian American ninja poisoner in a black corset and fucking chopstick buns vamping her way in close to deploy her needles o'death? The only thing more disappointing than that particular portrayal is the fact that Danny fell for it. Sweet Christmas, Rand; if a pouty chick in black shows up for a duel to the death and suggests you could just make out instead, you say no. How hard is that one to wrap your head around? And how is it that you were trained to be the destroyer of the Hand but without any preparation for the fact that some of your opponents might be women? What the hell?

Iron Fist. It's disappointing.

(1) Points for trying on the title, at least.

(2) It is apparently Aida, not Ada, which makes me a little sad.

(3) They do make the point that in the 1980s they were still called stewardesses.

(4) At this point, I kind of expect to learn that the Hand are using Rand because when they take over they only need to change one letter.

(5) Wrong.

(6) Fortunately for her, Danny has the emotional maturity of a high school freshman.

Agents of SHIELD - 'Deals with Our Devils'

"I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."

In the wake of last week's explosion, Coulson, Fitz and Robbie have disappeared, while Eli is manifesting and manipulating carbon from nowhere to escape SHIELD custody. Director Mace is understandably shaken.

May suggests that Eli must have hired the Chinese to get the Darkhold for him and Mack is keen to pursue that angle at once, but Mace want to know what they are dealing with before he loses anyone else(1). He tries to call in Simmons, but she is examining the perpetually cocooned husband of Senator Hatesinhumans in a black site somewhere and gets bagged and dragged as soon as she manages to break some of it off him. Radcliffe refuses to even try to read the Darkhold, recognising that it is too much for a human mind to contain.

We then flash back to find the Coulson, Fitz and Robbie have been translated to some other phase of existence and are drifting further from the light, into… something bad. Robbie believes it is Hell, and apparently so does the Rider, which escapes from his body and drives Mack to seek out the Chinese gangsters who might be responsible. Robbie hitches a ride with Daisy in his car, while Fitz seemingly manages to communicate with Ada, prompting her to volunteer to read the book, since her mind can't be affected in the same way.

 

"Magic, bitches."

Robbie catches up with Mack and makes a new deal with the Rider: Come back to him, give him revenge on Eli, and he will be the vessel for all of the Rider's revenges. He vanishes, and Ada creates a magical portal through which Fitz and Coulson are able to escape just as Simmons returns to base. Later, Ada is seen creating a magical brain, because apparently no-one thought that resetting her brain after she learned the terrible secrets of the universe might be a major benefit of getting the robot to read the Notcronomicon.

I'm deeply concerned that Simmons may have been brainwashed or implanted with some sort of control technology, since she didn't follow up 'Fitz, you're alive' with 'you'll never believe what happened to me today.' I'd like FitzSimmons to catch a break, but they just look so adorably woobie when things go wrong that I can't see it happening. And speaking of things going wrong, Mace's reaction to the crisis – recover, regroup, reposition – made me like him a lot more; he's a good balance between the man of action and the considered strategist, and I hope he doesn't turn out to be evil.

(1) "We sharpen the axe, then we cut the tree."

"My axe is plenty sharp; and also a shotgun."

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.

Agents of SHIELD - 'Let Me Stand Next to Your Fire'

"Come on then! I'll throw a shrimp on ya!"

They say that if something is too good to be true, it probably is. It's understandable that your average spod on the street might ignore this truism, but I find it less forgivable when an Agent of SHIELD like Jessica Simmons blithely wanders off to view the perfect house which dropped into her lap via email.

Fortunately, it turns out to only be Daisy, who needs some help with a bullet wound courtesy of the Watchdogs, who are totes Up to Something Big™. Daisy coerces Simmons, officially at gunpoint, into helping her get hold of a copy of the list the Watchdogs are working from to track registered Inhumans via their GPS locators. Top of their list is James, who is working in a fireworks store. Simmons wants to help him to not get dead, but Daisy is pushing him to join her cause and hunt the Watchdogs.

Meanwhile, Coulson and Mack are following the trail of Momentum Alternative Energy to Robbie's uncle Eli, who is unwilling to give them the time of day. When they manage to capture Robbie by tricking him into colliding with the invisible Quinjet, Coulson takes the chance of making a deal with Robbie to work together. They learn from Eli that the man he put in a coma was responsible for the experiments which killed multiple researchers at Momentum by attempting to utilise the Darkhold, a book of ultimate knowledge. Green energy from black magic; who could have seen that going wrong?

"Did two fire dudes just fall into a fireworks warehouse?"
"You had to see that coming."

Scumbag James turns out to be a scumbag (shock, horror,) having decided post-Hive that all Inhumans are bastards. He has been working with the Watchdogs, letting them hack the database via his GPS, and has set Daisy and Simmons up for an ambush. In return for his aid, he gets to die last. Fortunately, Coulson gets an alert that an asset (James) may be in danger and shows up with Mack and Robbie, who is basically not fussed about a pyrogenic Inhuman what with the whole tempered in the flames of Hell thing he has going on. They fight, fall into a fireworks warehouse and Robbie drags James out unconscious and chained up.

Coulson recruits Daisy and Robbie for a mission to recover the Darkhold. When they stop to pick up May from Dr Radcliffe's, Simmons immediately makes Ada for an android, which could mean even more trouble on her next lie detector test.

Season 4 continues to struggle a little with two so-far unrelated plots: The Watchdogs and the Darkhold. It's actually a plot point that they are having to choose between two evils to fight (although in part this must be self-inflicted now that they're official again,) but unless something comes of it it's still just cluttered plotting. I'm more interested to see where the show goes with the Darkhold, and in particular the obvious crossover with the magical concepts introduced in Doctor Strange.

Agents of SHIELD - 'Uprising'

"This is Douchey McPR. He's either a red herring or a mole."

The world gets a little darker and scarier, as mysterious forces take action against the Sokovia Accords.

As SHIELD mobilises its scientific minds to save May before her (possibly Darkforce related?) hallucinations scare her to death, the world suffers a series of city-wide blackouts, followed by a broadcast demand from 'the Inhuman Resistance' that registration be ended and the Inhumans allowed to live in peace. The team heads to Miami, one of the first targets, where Elena is attending a hen do which is interrupted by a group of armed men who announce that they are there to protect the people by finding an Inhuman. Elena is forced to reveal herself to protect a close-up magician accused of being the Inhuman, but Coulson, Fitz and Mack turn up in the nick of time to help her subdue the posse, who are wearing Watchdog tattoos and carrying a copy of the registration list.

Personally, I'm calling douchey PR guy Douchey McPR for the mole, but the Watchdogs are also shown to have other backers.

"What? No. It was a good press conference. No, you're jealous. Shut up."

With the EMP generated by a sophisticated, continual device, Fitz is forced to go old-school, using compasses and draftsman's tools to triangulate the location of the Watchdog base, as the President considers drastic action and Radcliffe struggles to resuscitate May - having allowed her to die to initiate a 'reboot' of her brain - using Ada's(1) shielded battery as a power source. Elena gets to be full on awesome and the team saves the day, revealing that the 'Inhuman Resistance' was a Watchdog front intended to foster mistrust and fear of Inhumans and justify a purge. To counter the fear, the Director - whose full name is Jeffrey Mace - goes public and announces the reformation of SHIELD, to the anger of a senator whose brother is trapped in a Terigen cocoon and who is backing the Watchdogs' campaign.

Elsewhere, Daisy learns that Robbie has an uncle, now in prison, who worked at the place with the experiments and the magic and whatever. They get into a fight with looters and Robbie's brother Gabe, realising that Daisy is the vigilante Quake, tells her to stay away from his brother, because he needs good people around him. The mutual protectiveness of the Reyes brothers - Robbie is physically protective, and shields Gabe from any knowledge of his 'night job', while Gabe sees himself as defending Robbie from bad influences - lifts this section from pure B-reel fodder or Daisy puff material.

All-in-all, another solid episode, not least because it has plenty of Yo-Yo. I like Yo-Yo; I like her spiky-flirty relationship with Mack and the specific limits of her speedster awesomeness; I like that she stands up to Mack when he learns she has been helping Daisy. I am deeply, deeply concerned that she is going to end up getting fridged saving Daisy's precious butt, but I can still hope that I'm wrong. I also like the tension between Mace and Coulson, who is obviously regretting some of what he gave up with the big chair. The Ada subplot isn't really clicking with the rest yet, but it's early days and the season isn't looking too bad. On the other hand, it hasn't been steamrollered by the cinematic releases yet.

(1) Okay, she might be AIDA - Artificially Intelligent Data Analyser - but until I have confirmation, I maintain that 'Ada' is the spelling that makes sense from a compsci history perspective.

Agents of SHIELD - 'Meet the New Boss'

Significantly different from the old boss.

Episode 2 of Season 4, and we're already establishing a pattern of two otherwise loosely connected shows: Agents of SHIELD and The Daisy Adventures (feat. Ghost Rider.)

In 'Meet the New Boss' we meet the new boss, SHIELD Director Jeff, an affable fellow keen to employ Coulson's love of retro-SHIELD and SSR history to impress a gaggle of politicos on a tour of the base as part of the agency's move back into the public domain. Unfortunately, May is going increasingly nuts with what turns out to be exposure to a ghost-type-thing created using a mix of science and black magic; because that shit always ends well. She freaks out and tries to escape the base, seeing everyone around her as changed, but is unable to bypass Jeff, who is it emerges an Inhuman with immense physical power and resilience. May is taken away to be 'treated', and I can't see that sitting well with Coulson.

"Give me the brain! I'm locked in the reactor!"

Mack and Fitz track a ghost sighting with a similar effect to the one May has, and trail a number of spectral entities to a research complex, which they intend to blow up. Fortunately, Robbie Reyes turns up, after Daisy has done winding him up and drops a hint about the research centre. He skulls up and incinerates one of the ghosts, and later stops by and tells Daisy that he thinks he is the connection between the current Watchdog activities.

In the interim, Mack treats Skye for a broken arm and realises that she's been getting SHIELD meds via Yo-Yo. He is very sad. Poor Mack.

'Meet the New Boss' is about 75% great and 25% contrived division between Daisy and SHIELD. Hell, I don't even mind the bits with Daisy and Robbie, it's the fact that she's parceled off into her own special place that niggles, plus the fact that she does remain my least favourite character. Still, I guess if you're going to explore someone's death wish, the Ghost Rider is someone to explore that with, as in this episode where, having tied her to a chair, Robbie goes through her stuff looking for a reason she might deserve to die, as that way 'my problem goes away, and you get your wish.'

Agents of SHIELD - 'The Ghost'

"So... do we have a real role in this series anymore?"
"... I have an exploding pen."

The times they are a'changing (again,) and the Agents of SHIELD are moving on. but don't make the mistake of assuming that this means it isn't still all about Daisy, because it is.

Coulson and Mack are running a globe-trotting team on the Zephyr, while May trains and leads the SHIELD strike team; Fitz is head of a large engineering team, and Simmons is the scientific adviser to the - as yet unseen - Director, who was appointed by the President when SHIELD became more public again. and Daisy? Daisy is running around having adventures and taking down the Watchdogs as the vigilante Quake, with help on the QT from Yo-Yo Rodriguez, who is acting as a loosely affiliated and Accord-approved SHIELD asset while failing to get Mack to put out.

After Daisy's takedown of an Aryan Brotherhood heist crew is interrupted by a flaming Dodge Charger, May subtly diverts Team Zephyr to investigate the burning car as an excuse to follow up on the Quake connection. As Daisy is diverted looking into what she takes to be an Inhuman killer vigilante known as 'the Rider', the team actually leapfrog her on the initial case, tracking the sale of a stolen relic which makes people go crazy and kill each other. Back at the lab, meanwhile, Fitz joins dubious transhumanist asset Dr Holden Radcliffe for an evening of niche football (the League Cup, if you will) and the surprise unveiling of Ada(1), a prototype Life Model Decoy driven by his personal digital assistant (not, as he makes clear in the wake of the Ultron brouhaha, an AI.)

I'm... a little conflicted on this matter. Fitz insists on 'she' instead of 'it', presumably to show that he is more likely to treat a creation as an individual than Radcliffe, but does so based on 'her' initial nakedness, which is pretty anatomically deterministic. He also decides that they need to keep the project secret from Simmons until they perfect the technology, as Simmons would have to lie to the Director or risk losing her position of favour, which she angrily defends to May as her attempt to make sure someone is in place to keep an eye on their new boss.

Daisy tracks the Charger to scrapyard mechanic Robbie Reyes, a nice guy who looks after a younger brother in a wheelchair and goes out at night to burn people in the soul. Confronted by her powers, he notes that she 'has the Devil in' her as well. He insists that those he kills are all deserving of punishment, and moreover that he does not decide who is deserving of punishment. Then his entire head burns down to a flaming skull, because surprise(2)! he's the Ghost Rider.

"Damn! My head's on fire. Why didn't you tell me?"
"I thought it was a look!"

Props here for using the lesser known, minority version of the character instead of Johnny Blaze, although I won't be truly happy(3) until we have a wild west flashback episode with the Phantom Rider and the cast playing old timey folks.

He beats Daisy in a fight and she begs him to kill her, because clearly she's still in the whole post-Hive self-loathing thing.

Back with the actual Agents of SHIELD, the relic buy turns ugly when the buyer opens the box and everyone starts shooting. May's strike team turn up and take down the bad guys, but as she is playing a celebratory game of backgammon with Coulson, she sees Coulson's face turn into a hollow-eyed mask of horror, just as those of the buyer's goons did. I'm calling it now that this is a sign that May is infected by the relic, causing her to see others as threatening aliens, which if nothing else is a timely political allegory.

'The Ghost' is a pretty strong episode of Agents of SHIELD, plus a so-so episode of Quake: Action Inhuman. Apparently, Daisy still rates almost half the screen time despite not being an Agent of SHIELD anymore. In fairness, this is part of a major breaking up of the band as SHIELD is restored to government control and tied into enforcement of the Sokovia Accords, and once more it does feel a little as if the show is stuck being the reactive junior partner of the MCU and thus forced to execute radical changes in plot based on the fixed, and often secretive twists of the movies. As a result, the ongoing plot of the series often suffers from a certain inconsistency, not truly offset by the palliative nod of being granted first crack at responding to those twists.

(1) The subtitles said 'Aida', but I'm assuming that a scientist would name his digital personal assistant after Ada Lovelace rather than an opera, or that if he did he would pronounce it Aye-ee-da.
(2) Or, you know, not, since they're billing this season as 'Agents of SHIELD: Ghost Rider'.
(3) With this series. I'm not saying that this is the sole and ultimate goal of my life; I have a daughter I want to see grow up to change the world for starters.

Agents of SHIELD - 'Failed Experiments', 'Emancipation', 'Absolution' and 'Ascension'

For identification purposes, I am not Apocalypse.

And so to the end, as the season finale and the death of the be-crucifixed one looms.

In 'Failed Experiments', Hive recounts his origins as a primitive hunter who was captured by the Kree to become one of the first Inhumans. His plan is to repeat that experiment, to bypass the need to track down suitable candidates by turning ordinary humans directly into swayable Inhumans. When the first tests fail, killing the remaining senior HYDRA members, Radcliffe suggests that this is because the Kree blood which Hive donated to the distribution cocktail is long dead. In order to secure a better result, Hive summons a pair of Kree Reapers from orbital stasis to provide live Kree blood, at the same time that SHIELD hit the Inhuman town after Daisy appears on facial recognition.

Creepy mind controller has people management skill gaps.

In the ensuing clash, Alicia is killed and Mack gets the snot kicked out of him trying to get through to Daisy. Daisy gets a Kree for Dr Radcliffe to drain, but as a parting shot Mack splinter grenades the body. Unfortunately, Daisy realises that there is another source of viable Kree blood, as she was injected from the living source at Project TAHITI back in Season 1.

In 'Emancipation', we catch up with the movies as Peggy Carter dies and the Sokovia Accords are ratified. Coulson makes an appeal to Talbot to allow SHIELD to remain in the shadows, with their own records of Inhumans separate from the main register. He brings in Yo-Yo as an indicator of an Inhuman doing good work against the cartels, who would be in danger of her life if exposed by the Accords.

Team Hive kidnap a number of Watchdogs and expose them to the new version of Holden's delivery agent, a mix of Kree blood, Terrigen and Hive parasites which transforms the Watchdogs into waxy-faced supermooks. At the same time, Daisy hacks repeatedly into the base systems to talk to Lincoln and, with Talbot bristling at him from the other direction, persuades him to make a break for it. They crack him out of containment and he heads for the hangar and the quinjet, which Daisy remote pilots to Hive.

I tell you, I could watch this scene all day.

Only... surprise! It's not Lincoln, but Lash, who has also been languishing in SHIELD custody for a while. He lays into Hive like the ancient one were a pinata, incinerating his control parasites and thrashing his primitives. Unfortunately, Daisy shoves her oar in and, instead of just punching her, he pulls the parasites out of her, carries her into the Quinjet and gets skewered by James's burning chain. The jet returns them to base, but this leaves Hive not dead, and another black man dead of trying to save Daisy.

To cap that off, Yo-Yo gives her crucifix to Mack, putting the last black man standing in the crosshairs of fate.

'Absolution' sees Daisy in a bad place, psychologically, but honestly I struggle to care. After a decent season, Daisy is becoming unbearable again, and I think it comes back to her increasing prominence in the plot. The series struggles to make her important without the whole show becoming the Daisy hour, and she's just not that interesting.

... I got nothing.

Ahem. Anyway, she reveals Hive's plans and, together with a stolen ATCU warhead, the team realise that he plans to disperse his metaphorical seed across half of the world's surface by detonating a warhead full of it in the upper atmosphere. The team use some crafty mo-cap shenanigans to disable the chosen missile and capture Hive by overwhelming him with the memories of his many hosts. Unfortunately Giyera and James follow and use a Terrigen bomb to transform SHIELD Agents into swayed primitives. In the confusion, Daisy breaks out, confronts Hive and... begs him to take her back.

It's really not very dignified.

It turns out in 'Ascension' that she is in fact now immune to his powers, so she tries to clobber him because Hell hath no fury and all. He smacks her down and sticks her in a box, then he and his team nick the Bus Mk.II (it's actually called the Zephyr,) intending to use its high altitude capability as the launch vector, escaping in a containment pod as it is destroyed.

Well then...

Yo-Yo is injured as the team regroups. May and Fitz stealth onto the Bus and Fitz kills Giyera with an invisible gun. Coulson insists on heading to the Bus alone on the quinjet, but his team won't be left behind, because they follow from choice, do you see. While Hive gloats at a hologram Coulson, they take control of the Bus. The plan is to remote pilot the quinjet into space with the bomb. Daisy takes this on as her martyr sacrifice, but an injured Lincoln double-trumps her by stealing the crucifix of doom, frying the manual controls and taking Hive into space with him.

Six months later, Coulson - apparently no longer Director - and Mack are tracking a vigilant named Quake, who turns out to be Daisy with a dye job and a bandana, because trauma makes her edgy and cool.

Oh look, she's all attitude and cool and stuff.

So, Ward is gone, but Daisy is still my least favourite and at the same time the largest part of the show. I'm not of the opinion that she ought to be punished for her actions while under Hive's influence. I could even accept that her attempt to return to Hive's influence is the act of a recovering junkie and accept that, but I don't have much patience for sacrifice pissing contests and so many more interesting characters - Trip, Andrew/Lash, even Lincoln - seem to die to allow her to continue to mope about how hard it is for her that all these people die.

Agents of SHIELD continues to be a really up and down experience. There are some good episodes, but the arc is overextended. It doesn't help that I don't much care for Daisy, and I like her less each time the show tries to convince me that she's cool. You know who was cool? Trip was cool. I liked Trip, but Trip turned to dust while we were watching Daisy's superstar moment and apparently Andrew turned into Lash with the explicit purpose of saving Daisy, because apparently the universe loves her too much to let her die.

No, I will not 'get over it.'

Oh well; Ghost Rider next series.