4x07 Deals with Our Devils

8.5/10. Wow! The first legitimately good episode of the season! I love the conceit here, where you have half the team in one dimension, half the team in another, and you get to see the same events from both perspectives. It added a nice bit of dramatic irony to various scenes, and a bit of inventiveness and playing around with the format that you don't see nearly enough on the show.

The ambition also comes through in the way we get a brief bit of Ghostrider Mack. One of the episode's best cues is the way that events that happen in the real world are nicely recontextualized when we can see what's happening in the ghost dimension that Coulson, Fitz, and Robbie are inhabiting. The fakeout with Mack, seemingly just going to settle the score, but then turning out to be possessed by the rider, is a nice touch.

It's also really cool to see him rolling around on a motorcycle with a leather jacket and a shotgun, terminator-style. Robbie's never been more compelling than when he's selflessly taking the rider back on, in order to spare a good man from having to carry the burden and to settle a score against his own flesh and blood (who has Whitney Frost powers now, maybe?). Hearing him actually have a conversation with the demon he's been possessed by since we met him is a cool moment as well.

But the most emotionally charged moments in the episode, as usual, are founded onthe relationship betwee Fitz and Simmons. Fitz is (with some competition from May) the best actor on the show, and scenes where he tears Coulson a new one or threatens Director Mace eally benefit from his ability to sell the emotion in a scene. It's clear that Fitz, who is normally at least semi-staid, is on edge at the revelation that Mace sent Simmons to the evil Senator and has effectively lost track at her. Their reunion is sweet as always, but the way he gets into Mace's face and begs people who can't hear him to do something adds a force to the scene.

In the same vein, his recriminations against Coulson portend the most interesting thematic stuff of the episode. Again, this show isn't always the best at doing shades of gray, but there's interesting arguments on both sides of Fitz's disagreement with Coulson. Fitz is right -- Coulson used to be the guy who made the hard calls, and while it's unfair to blame him for the indirect chain of events that led to Simmons being shipped off to the Senator, he's right that Coulson stepping down led to Mace, a guy who none of the old team feels like they can trust and who seems to make decisions in a more detached manner, without the connections to the team members that Coulson had.

On the other hand, I actually like that about Mace. He doesn't seem like an evil guy so far, just an individual who has a particular way of doing things, one that involves more wheeling and dealing with other parts of the agency and the government than we're used to seeing, and that makes him a unique character among the frequently black-and-white morality of the show's heroes and villains. To the same end, Coulson has a point when he says he led a secret government agency that let people with superpowers roam around and threaten the world. There should be some soul searching from him, something to prompt him to take a step back, and it's interesting to see him and one of the show's best characters wrestling with that decision.

Of course, we're also continuing the romantic angle between him and May. I actually like the two together, but I liked them better when it was a certain understated but firmly present chemistry than this sense of missed connections and burning longing for one another. Still, May's soliloquy about what the two of them have left to do, and the way that Coulson seems to get through to her, despite there dimensional separation, is cheesy, but works better as an illustration of their feelings for one another versus longing looks after Coulson is rescued.

Speaking of which, the solution to the "evil book that no human mind can handle" being for Aida to take care of it is another canny narrative choice. Sure, as soon as you have an artificial intelligence reading some ancient tome that everyone we've seen has used for evil, you just know it's going to lead to bad consequences down the line (something the show at least acknowledged in a prior episode with an Ultron name drop), but it works as a solution to the problem du jour, and the desperateness of the situation helps justify the risk.

It also leads to a cool visual sequence in an episode that had better direction than many. While the show's effects are always a little chintzy, the way that Aida used her science gloves to construct geometric shapes out of thin air in front of the portal worked well as a visualization of the complex calculations she was performing to make this crazy plan work. Sure, Coulson choosing to fight the darkness for love is a bit much, but the visual of him being dragged by a blocky blackness and making it through the bright right angles of the portal made for a nicely set up scene.

The same goes for the other cool visual moments in the episode. From a solid car chase, to the aforementioned scenes of Mack as the rider, to the fairly neat shot at the end going from one room and focusing on Aida in another, there was a potency to the camera and design work that's not always there. And there's even the usual quantity of mystery and intrigue here. I don't know what Inhuman the evil Senator is keeping in a cocoon and why it's so hush hush, but Simmons trying to help him makes for an interesting loose thread for the show to pick up on later.

Overall, this is the best the show has been so far. The setup of the repeated scenes with different contexts based on which "dimension" we're seeing things from is a winning narrative choice, and the performances were above average to boot. Sometimes, Agents of Shield gets ambitious, narratively, visually, and creatively, and in episodes like these, it pays real dividends.

This is really good. Even if it's kind of a classic, the two points of views of the same scene with people in different dimensions is really well done here. And even without that there are so many things happening here !

I don't get Mack's reaction to Eli's victims. He didn't see how it was done. For all he knows he just threw pointy stuff at them. That's not specially evil. Even less so if you compare to what he's already seen in past seasons.

"Do we look that stupid on comms ?" Ah ah.

The Rider getting into Mack was a great idea, and good use of the two versions of a scene. Gives a chance to Robbie to talk face to face with it, great scene.

Radcliffe read the Darkhold but stopped himself really fast. Please don't make him evil, I really like the guy. Having Aida read it was the obvious solution, but almost sure she'll turn Ultron now. She's making a brain, but for what ? Building herself a real body ? Copying someone else ? Making herself a baby ?

Even if they can't see each other, the Daisy-Robbie tandem works really well.

Jemma is fucking badass, again. The way she kicks the guys out, nice. Also she just whispers at the cocoon and it opens ?. Wow. I'm gonna bet we have our final villain here, and he'll be in love with Jemma. But there's also Eli ? And obviously Aida. So many possible paths here.