Mostly predictable but good episode. Phil & May escape almost, but not quite, in time to stop Aida, Mac stays (though the previews imply that’s not the best idea), Fitz regrets everything he’s done. Aida has apparently built herself with Gordon’s Inhuman transporting powers, which isn’t a terrible idea.
Nice little redemption for Radcliffe though. I admit I was fooled, I thought he was just betraying the real world people yet again.
Daisy should have just knocked Mac out and tossed him through the portal.
I fear Fitz will not forgive himself and his guilt over this will lead him down a dark path IRL.
I wonder if that’s not the only Inhuman power she gave herself…
There were far too many heartfelt speeches while sitting at the edge of an escape while people were firing guns at them.
This was my thought too. I think they’ll probably limit it to one, not all three of those. My money’s on Hope. It might be the only way to get Mack to leave.
Loved that episode. Loved it. Hit every button for me.
I’ve really liked this show for a long time. It’s had its ups and downs, but the LMD/Agents of Hydra arc is a high point. Yet, in all these years, the show never crossed that “tears threshold” of emotional involvement for me. But Mack’s speech to Daisy did it. I was a mess.
I was a bit thrown by Aida’s transporting power, and why didn’t May just move two feet to the left to take the shot? I also felt there were two many speeches during crisis, but folks weren’t aware of the problems in the real world.
The group is still split up (May and Coulson on the sub with the Superior, Daisy and Jemma with the leftover SHIELD agents on the Quinjet, Fitz with Aida somewhere, and Mack still in the Framework with his body on the sub) so the next episode is going to be a bit scattered.
Radcliffe ending up doing good was a twist I didn’t see coming. I thought he’d jump at the idea of immortality. Why didn’t Aida use the machine immediately? Why wait? Why did the Framework glitch when Coulson went through? Pretty convenient for moving the plot along. Nice job playing Moses on the molten metal - is there anything Daisy can’t do? (Sarcasm)
I liked Mack’s choice to stay, but that was pretty obviously going to happen. Without Daisy, how can he get through the portal? I suppose they can dismantle the factory if Hydra is overthrown.
Good lines by Mack (Don’t tell me she used the Bible against me) and May (I don’t report to you in this world or any other). Too many people getting shot with no consequences. Why didn’t Fitz’s dad have any guards?
Overall, fun episode and I’m glad most of the are out of the Framework. I hope it and Aida don’t survive the season finale, but fun while they lasted.
I have probably missed something along the way, but at least while Radcliffe was still alive we saw that he could get brought back out of the Framework by AIDA. Someone “running things” where the physical bodies were strapped in could press some buttons to wake up that person and bring them back out of the Framework (even against their will, as we saw).
That said, Radcliffe’s and AIDA’s super-advanced megaFramework may have removed that option, I dunno if that was mentioned or not. It was clear that Daisy and Jemma couldn’t be brought back out that way, but I don’t remember if we were told that method was no longer an option or if they just didn’t have the know-how/equipment on the quinjet.
Not that I think they would bring Mack out that way even if they could, but Radcliffe jumped in and out plenty earlier.
That, combined with the overall pointlessness of the storyline itself, is pretty much why I’m “meh” on this arc. It’s like a six-episode holodeck story.
So you’re just discounting Fitz’s giving the order to bring down the building that killed the Patriot as well as shooting Agnes himself.
Then it’s even worse - it’s an extended holodeck story with mind control!!!
I hate mind control stories. We need one of the good guys to act like a bad guy so let’s just mind-control him for a while, change his personality all around, have him do stuff totally inconsistent with past characterization, no problem… mind control stories cover all.
You’ve completely missed the point that Fitz did those things in the Framework of his own volition. AIDA wasn’t mind controlling anyone. Fitz was acting of his own free will.
I reject your suggestion. Fitz’s memories were extensively tampered with, indeed arguably his entire adult life was erased and rewritten. Calling it “mind-control” (or “brainwashing”) in the comic-book sense is perfectly fair - they took a normally protagonistic character and made him temporarily evil (and incidentally the partner/lover of the primary antagonist) and this was supposedly just the random outcome of events if Fitz had been reconciled with his father? Bullshit. You may as well claim Fitz was under the sway of a mind-controlling telepath (who kept denying any control was being used and that Fitz was doing exactly what Fitz wanted to do) and the premise could remain unchanged.
Is there even a hint in the “real” world of the show that Fitz’s vaguely regrets the fall of Hydra because he thought he might have been able to take charge of it, if he’d had his father’s support? If anything, I could picture Jemma having some thoughts along these lines because she actually infiltrated Hydra for some time and may have thought at one point “hmmm, if I could stay undercover long enough, maybe one day I could be running this organization, use it for good instead of evil”, though in a plausible outcome of this fantasy, she becomes corrupted in the process. Shocking twist - her lover is Ward (and he’s secretly in the resistance) , and we’re spared another trip into Daisy’s psyche.
So when the Flash goes back in time to save his mother from being killed by the Reverse Flash, the resulting apocalyptic world, where Wonder Woman and Aquaman battle for domination and Superman is kept away from the a yellow sun as a lab experiment, is due to mind control?
You’re arguing against one application of comic-book science (brainwashing) by invoking another (time travel)?
Sure, fine, whatever you want.
If AIDA had used the Darkhold to go back in time and change the one regret of each of our heroes, then let events play out until you got exactly the same scenario in the alternate timeline as what we saw in the Framework, you’d have been perfectly fine with it, But since it’s a simulation it’s all bullshit because MIND CONTROL!!!
Yeah Fitz knows that in a world that he thought at the time was just as real as this one, he could be swayed to commit atrocities.
Sure he had been lied to and had memories implanted, but no matter what, he chose to send a missile into a building full of children, and he chose to shoot a defenseless woman just to get information from someone else. Whether we should let him off the hook for that is meaningless - obviously he isn’t willing to let himself off the hook for it.
I reject the idea that it was pointless because it took place in a virtual world run on a global computer network… by posting said rejection on a virtual bulletin board run on a global computer network. We’re all here “talking” to “people” we’ve never “met”, who for all we know could be as “real” as Hope or goodguy-Ward. But I don’t find it pointless.
As a storyline, it was all about character exploration and “what-if?” which I always love to see, and never see as pointless. And in-world, it had real repercussions (ask Mace what he thinks…) and while the battle was fought in a virtual world, the stakes were paid for in the real world. Aida now has an inhuman body, and is free of her 3-laws style programming. She now has no qualms about killing people, and she’s got the power to do it, and she couldn’t have gotten there without indirectly getting Fitz to help her in the framework.
I think she was atrophied from being in the Framework so long. She was practically crawling on the ground.
Which reminds me of other clichés this story arc has embraced, which is a pity because this series has overall been clever about avoiding or even subverting clichés. We got a big load of “Evil twin” when the LMDs starting popping up everywhere (without even a token effort to explain how and where Aida was making them so quickly), then brainwashing, then “if you die in the dream, you die for real”, the mechanics of which are unclear at best and indeed even inconsistent with what we saw of May’s early imprisonment, i.e. she could violently bust out of the virtual spa, just to get sent back to the spawn point with her short-term memory (mostly) wiped. Aida even commented at the time that it was difficult to keep May contained (in part, I gathered, because May was subconsciously learning to quickly recognize that she was in a trap and how to escape it) and was just with one “player” in one virtual and empty building. I guess she installed more RAM because she seemed later able to support an entire virtual world, with multiple players and hundreds of NPCS.
Anyway, I’ll be happier when this arc ends. The Darkhold is being used to MacGuffin-support far too much weak writing.
She waited because she wanted to bring evil Fitz with her (although I don’t know if they could have built two bodies at once or not). Even without dual bodies, I think she thinks that Fitz’s love for her in the Framework will carry over. She is apparently wrong about that, with real Fitz not dealing well at all with what he did in the Framework.
Fitz’ll probably end up shooting her, since he had a chance to “practice” on Agnes.
Afterthought: Fitz will try to shoot her, but he’ll be too traumatized to do it. Jemma will end up shooting Aida.