*This review contains minor spoilers*
Click here for my SPOILER review on YouTube
“Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” season 5 is yet another strong season. While it didn’t progressively improve week after week like season 4 did, this season is a little more consistent with average episodes alternating with above average ones. Last season benefited from the three “pod” story arcs that took advantage of the various hiatuses, but the show is not as successful here with only the one break that forms two “pods.”
This season started off with a fantastic concept, as the team is not truly in space like we thought from the previous season’s cliffhanger, but instead they’re 70 years in the future on a destroyed Earth. While many people were excited that this turn of events would be a tie-in for “Avengers: Infinity War,” the blame for this destruction is instead placed anticlimactically on Quake. Also, the reason for the team being in the future is a bit murky. It seems like it would’ve been simpler to just tell them about the Earth’s destruction instead of them finding out from being in the future and only learning the vaguest clues onto what cracked the Earth in half and how they might stop it. (Although, there are some tantalizing clues that they’re doomed to fail once they return home.) Things begin to click once Fitz is reintroduced, both with his excellent flashback episode, and his undercover role as a mercenary. Unfortunately, the stakes seem a bit low as it’s hard to care about a future society’s wellbeing when the goal is to travel back in time and keep this from all happening. While Kasius and Sinara make quite the impression, most of the future characters are forgotten once the team returns to the present.
The second pod starts off a bit uneven, introducing new characters and bringing back old one. As it turns out, most of them are relatively inconsequential to the end of the season. This season overall featured a lot of callbacks to the first few seasons, and this is especially true of the show’s 100th episode. The concept of a “fear dimension” is one of the more clique sci-fi plot elements “Shield” has ever done, but it works well to celebrate how far the show has come. It’s a beautifully emotional episode, with both the happiest of moments and the saddest. The final leg of this journey ramps things up as the end of the world quickly approaches, and nothing the team does seems to make a difference. And, both the means of the Earth’s destruction, and the reason that the team seems destined to fail, comes out of left field but work extremely and also gives us one of the series’ greatest villains.
There are some strong character moments, especially in the second half of the season. And most of that revolves around Coulson, and his team’s love for him. In particular, May’s repressed romantic feeling for him, and also Quake’s father-daughter bond that allows Chloe Bennet to give some heart wrenching performances. The Fitz-Simmons relationship reaches some dramatic highs and lows, with both characters continuing to evolve more complexities. Agent May also has a separate arc that nicely takes advantage of her history and gives her a glimpse of the motherhood that she thought she would never have.
The fifth season of “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” is above average overall, with great episodes balanced by good episodes. They do an amazing job of tying up multiple loose ends, and even including some of the events of “Avengers: Infinity War.” However, this causes the show to miss the mark in the season final when they ignore the most crucial aspect of the recent Avengers film, while using a bait and switch to lessen the impact of a gut punch moment. Overall, the strong character moments propel the series along, even when the plot loses its way, and the long-awaited villain they must face off with is surprisingly tragic.
Season’s best episode: “Orientation, part 1 ” (Episode 1): The new status quo, and the exhilaration the viewer feels while learning of what is going along while the team does, gives the season an exciting start and quickly set the high stakes.
Season’s worst episode: “Orientation, part 2” (Episode 2): The new future quickly loses its luster, and the reveal that it was Quake that destroyed the Earth and not Thanos or something more interesting is a letdown.
**** out of *****