4x09 Broken Promises

8.9/10. It’s nice to see Agents of Shield move past all the underwhelming Ghost Rider business and get down to some more Inhuman and Evil Robot business. I remember a time when the complaints were about the pacing of AoS’s season-long arcs, but now they just burn through plot like it’s going out of style (and given the show’s ratings, it they may be

But it’s nice to see the episode have not only some focus, but some clear stakes, character work, and even some visual inventiveness. The opening sequence of Aida examining her own wounds, replacing her clothes, looking in on May, was one of the more formally interesting bits of direction and editing on the show in a while. There was an artsy bent to it, and even the re-cocooning of Vijay at the end of the episode. It’s nice to see this show, which has often been a bit behind the curve in terms of its visuals and production values, get a little more adventurous.

We get two main stories here, that mildly intersect but which mostly work well as two independent tracks. The first is Daisy, Simmons, and Director Mace tracking down Senator Nadir to see if she’s holding her brother Vijay, a.k.a. the Inhuman that Simmons treated in the fall half-season, against his will. On the Shield side of things, I appreciated the tet-a-tet between Mace and Daisy, who are not at a level of trust yet, and have divergent views on several things, but have common ground as Inhumans trying to save one of their own. I like the pair’s dynamic, as its frosty but cautiously optimistic, or at least willing to go forward. And as I’ve mentioned in other write-ups, Daisy and Simmons make for a surprisingly great pair with their natural rapport.

On the Nadir family side, things weren’t as good. Neither the Senator nor Vijay showed off the acting chops necessary to pull off what the show was going for, and their dialogue included a lot of awkward exposition and backstory dumping. Still, the story the episode told with the two of them, about their mom dying in the Chitauri invasion in The Avengers, a fear that the Inhumans were an offshoot of that and an alien infection, and a promise that they wouldn’t allow one another to succumb to it, proved interesting in concept if not execution. I appreciate that they gave Senator Nadir an understandable if misguided motivation, and had her make hard choices.

That includes the fairly surprising move of her shooting her brother. Of course they wash it all away in the end, but it was still a legitimately shocking moment that doubled as both major plot point and character development. The fact that she’s working with The Watchdogs, replete with a mysterious “Superior” (Mack’s brother, who gets name dropped here?) still feels a bit unnecessary, but it does provide some easy mooks for Vijay to inadvertently demonstrate his new powers on.

In the other half of the episode, Aida goes rogue, attempting to steal the evil book from the first half of the season. As somebody who grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation and loved the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, I’m a sucker for stories about robot becoming more human. The notion that the dark book had given Aida something approaching a soul, or at least allowed her to feel real feelings, to where she had a sense of self-preservation, a desire to have agency and self-control, and an intent to avoid pain and hardship, is endlessly interesting. And in the same way, I loved Fitz’s explanation that part of Aida acting out had to do with the fact that she had to deal with all of these emotions in one big hunk, rather than having years to develop and acclimate to them like regular humans do. There’s a lot of philosophically interesting stuff there that “Broken Promises” dips into.

That’s why it was so frustrating that it turns out Dr. Radcliffe was pulling the strings the whole time. I don’t mind them taking the story that direction – making Radcliffe a true bad guy and reaffirming his immortality-focused motivation – but wiping away the truth of all we saw from Aida in the episode was a lame story choice that almost instantly made the events of the episode have less force in hindsight.

Still, it did give us some other cool moments. I enjoyed Mack’s instant prejudice against robots as a character choice. It’s natural that someone would feel like that, and his annoyed “why would you think this would work out, stupid?” mentality was amusing. But even more fun was how that concern was expressed, with more fun back and forth with Yo-Yo and lots of references to old killer robot films. (The line about Terminator: Genysys was especially funny.) There was a lot of well-deployed self-reflexive humor in this one, like Daisy commenting that Simmons gets kidnapped all the time or Coulson noting that however many times he and May have been locked up together, this was unique since it was the first time it had been accomplished by a robot.

Speaking of which, the show continues to tease the May-Coulson romance (which is not to be confused with a May-December romance), with the wrinkle that May is a robot. I’m not crazy about this tack, since it seems poised to lead to a weird robot love triangle (with seeds of the same thing for Fitz/Simmons/Aida) that doesn’t feel likely to go anywhere good. But we’re still taking our first steps in this storyline, so I’m willing to see where it goes.

Overall, it was a superbly done episode of Agents of Shield. The visual flair and robot-fueled action led to some engaging and exciting moments; the humor and sort of self-aware Whedon-y asides were there in full force, and the story was focused and potent in a way that not all *AoS episodes are. As a kickoff to the new season, “Broken Promises” worked like gangbusters and portends good things for the back half of Season 4.

(Oh, and a weird aside, but Simmons's Southern accent made her sound like a weird Britney Spears impression.)