6x01 Missing Pieces

Finally! This is the longest I've had to go without AoS since I started watching it (nearly 5 years ago, bloody hell). I've missed my favorite characters. I've missed the poor lighting. I've missed the dreary color palette. So glad to see that some things never change.

Jemma and Daisy searching for Fitz in space is definitely the more interesting storyline for me at the moment. All the special effects were on point, as always, and Agents Piper and Davis are an unexpectedly fun duo. Obviously Jemma's desperation to find Fitz is creating some conflict within the group. I can sympathize with both points of view here, but at the end of the day my main girl Jemma Simmons can do no wrong in my book, so... go on, babe, I support you.

Daisy continues to be an absolute badass and I just wanna say that if we don't get to see her take one of those Destroyers down at some point, I will be massively disappointed. Her powers only seem to be growing stronger with each season, so I want to see some major destruction this year.

Meanwhile on the ground, Mack is trying to fill Coulson's shoes but it's no easy task to lead the team and try to to rebuild the organization. I like the addition of Benson, I'm curious what they will do with his character. Yo-Yo with a new love interest is somewhat of a surprise, we'll see where that will lead. May is my favorite character out of that entire bunch, so that ending... it hit me hard.

Speaking of the ending, do we think that's an alien somehow wearing Coulson's face, or is that brainwashed Coulson himself? I'm leaning towards the latter because I still think they wouldn't actually kill the character that this show was created for for good, but who the hell knows. Either way, the new villains seem interesting and I'm looking forward to finding out more about them and what the hell they're trying to accomplish.

Fitz, baby, what is you doing?

Good season premiere overall. Can't wait for more!

[7.1/10] Perfectly good premiere to the new season. I have to admit, I feel like we’ve seen all of Agents of Shield’s tricks at this point. Six seasons and 100+ episodes in, it becomes harder to surprise your audience, and while our Shield team is a long way from where it started, after all they’ve been through already, a lot of the proceedings here feel like old hat.

Still, it’s all solid at worst. The best thing here is, surprisingly, the big spectacle action sequences. A small team jetting through space, dealing with enemy ships, and seeing Fitz’s transport sliced in half amid a blanket of stars is surprisingly convincing. Pulling an Independence Day with the “Indiana Museum of Natural History” (which we all know is really just the Pawnee City Hall), was also an unexpectedly eye-catching effect. This show’s rumbles and explosions have the propensity to look a little cheap, but this definitely worked.

We basically get two halves of the episode here: Daisy, Simmons, and a couple recognizable tertiary character searching for Fitz on the one hand, and Mack, May, Yo-Yo, and a host of new faces trying to keep Shield together post-Coulson on the other. It’s a good way to split up the episode, allowing AoS to jump back and forth between the two storylines to keep things from getting stale.

The space-bound Fitz-search part of the episode feels vaguely Firefly-esque (hello, fellow Whedonites!). The small crew roaming around in a beat-up transport trying to keep a hold of their friend while being a small fish in a big pond is a nice setup. There’s conflict in how long they’ve been out there, how little success they’ve had, and how many dead ends they’ve plumbed in the process. There’s personal stakes and some good banter there, even if the show kind of throws us in the deep end without much of a rope in terms of the circumstances.

The bits back on Earth are a little more scattershot. Given how long it’s been, I’d frankly forgotten that Mack and Yo-Yo broke up, and so the love triangle material felt a little off to me. The introduction of a new group of reality-warp-using baddies is perfectly fine as antagonist setups go. And May trying to recruit one of Andrew’s old colleagues to restart Shield Academy to secure the future is a nice way to go.

The only thing I really don’t like here is that the tension that comes from one half of our heroes searching for Fitz and the other half trying to figure out what Shield looks like without Coulson is almost entirely undercut by the fact that, by the end of the episode, we see both Fitz and (at least some version of) Coulson. Obviously there’s still the mystery of where they are and what their deal is, but I wish AoS had held off for at least an episode or two.

Overall, this isn’t one to write home about, but it’s a creditable start to the season.

(P.S. Here’s my crazy fan theory about New Coulson: it’s actually the Skrull who mimicked him back during the 90s in Captain Marvel!)