4x17 Identity and Change

[9.0/10] One of the thrills of doing a “what if” story like this is seeing what about the characters changes and what stays the same when their perspective and circumstances change. In a sense, it gives the audience a chance to see who these people truly are, or at least, what parts of them are malleable and what parts of them are fixed.

So when “Identity and Change” catches us up with characters who’ve been missing from the Framework so far -- Mack, Mace and effectively Aida -- and focuses on different sides of those we do -- Coulson, Fitz, and Ward, there is a great deal of intrigue in seeing how these people are different from the people we knew, deposited into this new environment.

The most striking of these changes is in Aida as Madame Hydra. She is not the robotic creature we know from the real world, nor does she present the more human side present in Agnes. Instead, she feels more raw and expressive, but also angrier, a Frankenstein’s monster rebelling at her creator and the world that would see her as a thing.

Notions of sentience are tricky in science fiction. In “Identity and Change” we see a being who wants to love and to be loved, who wants to preserve a place where Fitz would “cross the universe” for her in the way he once did for Simmons. She seeks physical affection and partnership. And most interestingly, she rails against the “other reality” as a place where she was enslaved, treated as property, and where the people who would do such a thing, Shield, must be the bad guys in any war they fought.

It makes Aida sympathetic and even understandable, despite the fact that she’s holding all our heroes hostage. If she is alive, and my TNG/BSG-influenced views of artificial life suggest she is -- then her griefs of not being given agency, seen as a tool rather than a person, not only explain her anger, but treat her doing the same to the agents of Shield as a learned behavior, a form of generational abuse passed down to someone just learning what it is to be alive and to be a human being.

Part of being a human being, as Aida learns and is desperately trying to replicate, is having a connection to someone that makes you willing to do whatever you can to save them. That’s what’s heartening about Mack’s story. His scenes with his daughter, Hope, are adorable and scary. The pair have a great rapport, as Hope scans endearingly precocious and Mack reads as a father who is incredibly proud and buoyed by the little girl he’s raising, but who is also desperately concerned about what the future holds for her.

There is more than a little social commentary baked in there. It’s not hard to look at a black parent telling his child to keep her head down, insisting to law enforcement that they’ve done nothing wrong, and get roughed up in his own home without seeing the intentional parallels to current social issues. Metaphors for real life issues is nothing new for Marvel, but Mack’s story works as both subtext and text. As much as the larger issues hinted at resonate, his role as a father willing to do anything for his child in harsh circumstances are just as resonant.

Those sorts of circumstances, and how subject to them you are, can direct the type of person you become. One of the most interesting things “Identity and Change” does is flip the roles of Coulson and Mace. Coulson is the office-dwelling (well, school-dwelling) guy who finds himself thrust into combat with aliens and superpowered threats, and Mace is the hardened agent who’s been in the game for years.

That the flip works so effectively speaks well of the performers. We only get a little bit of Mace, but he seems grizzled, mistrustful, hardened by the endless battle he’s fighting and by Hydra’s victory. He carries himself as a very different man than the green, teamspeak-spouting leader we met at the beginning of the season. Coulson’s presence is much more fulsome, and it’s an utter delight to see him as the neophyte who always harbored conspiracy theories and is in awe of all the cool stuff he gets to see and do.

That also flips him with Daisy, who is now the seasoned agent guiding him into this world rather than the other way around. His boyish excitement everything, as Daisy looks to him for support and a connection to the real world, adds a charm to all of the heady, metaphysical material in the episode. Coulson doesn’t understand much of what he’s seeing yet, and he is wholly untrained, but you can see the bravery and enthusiasm in him that would make him into a superlative agent.

But the episode also contrasts the major couples in the framework. One of the consistent characteristics of Ward, both before and after he went rogue, was a devotion to Skye. That remains true for the seemingly nobler Ward here. There’s still much more to explore with this new Ward, but there is a sense that whether he’s good or evil, real or digital, there is a commitment within him that persists and can spur him to great things or awful ones.

And yet, Fitz does not have the same steadfastness of character that Simmons might hope. He demands answers from Aida, gets them from her and Radcliffe, and ultimately takes an innocent life (well ...sort of). The Fitz that Simmons knew could never do such a thing. That raises all sorts of questions. Does the real Fitz have this within him? Has he been brainwashed in a more serious way by Aida than the others in her quest to make him a romantic partner? Is there something lurking in his past, possibly his daddy issues, that turned him into this person? It’s unclear at the moment, but it’s a stark reminder that however much these people sound like our old familiar friends, however much they look like friendly faces, people like Fitz, people like Aida, people like May (who gets a nice, telling line about youth not guaranteeing), are dangerous in this reality.

There is a complexity to that, a way in which our perspective is repeatedly flipped on what we think we know about the show’s protagonists and what we’re slowly but surely learning about this new world. Some of what’s revealed is telling, and not all of it’s pretty.