Spoiler Alert!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Whatever holiday you celebrate, I hope it is most fun and joyous for you, and if you don’t celebrate any holiday, then I wish you well anyway. 🙂

The Holiday Drought will be mercifully short this year, but this week still lacked all the shows in my lineup, with exception to Agents of Shield. They’re skipping next week too, but at least we got a few answers first. So, diving right in:

Agents of Shield

5.05 “Rewind”

Most of the team was zapped to the future through a rock. This is the story of how Fitz got there.

When the agents were at the diner, and the strange alien man came in with his men, of course they raise their hands to surrender, and Fitz is just in the middle of admitting his own guilt, that he’ll take full responsibility, when suddenly the lights come back on and Fitz finds himself alone at the cafe bar, all his friends gone. Seconds later, before he can even begin to grasp what just happened, legitimate federal agents swarm in to arrest them all, and find only him.

It’s fairly reasonable for the feds to assume that the rest of the agents got away and Fitz would know how, so he’s taken, imprisoned somewhere off the map, and interrogated. They get nothing except a nigh-unbelievable story about robots, and all he wants is to find his team, so when he passes a test to gauge if he’s lying, they decide to join forces. He’s one the most brilliant minds Shield ever saw, and he’s motivated, so they want to use him to find the others, while he wants to use the feds to find and save his team.

They give him books, any books he asks for, and they even let him watch soccer. …wait, soccer? Why’s Fitz suddenly into soccer? And what’s with those letters he asks them to send to the editor of a magazine? What is he up to?

Well, that would be “buying time and calling for help.”

Six months later, Fitz has come up with one hair-brained scenario after another, though he has put a few pieces together. The device that bald alien guy used, for instance, emitted a sound that stunned them all. That’s not much to go on, though, so when his latest (hilariously accurate) theory of alien abduction is shot down, it looks like he’s going to just be locked away in his hole forever. That is, until Lance Hunter shows up, posing as Fitz’s lawyer.

The sudden interest in soccer was a cover so he could send coded distress calls out to Hunter. Who was in Bangladesh, unable to receive them through the magazine for awhile. But now he’s here, just in time, and, after brief, brotherly row about soccer, the two old friends hug, and escape federal custody. The latter, Fitz had thought would involve Hunter smuggling parts of a device in for him to assemble, but Hunter came up with one of his own: blow a hole in the wall, hire a pilot to distract their pursuers (he immediately crashes, so not a very good pilot), and drive away in a camper to avoid suspicion (the feds aren’t fooled, and aren’t far behind them).

Fitz and Hunter are able to pick up a trail six months cold and follow it within the space of an afternoon. And that would be the difference between Shield and the regular military: spies think outside the box. When they notice that the security cameras record vans with different logos on them, but which are all the same type of van, they realize it changes disguises and follow it to its source: the bald alien guy who took their friends away.

They invade his home, but he is not surprised. He’s been expecting them. That sort of throws a wrinkle into their plan of “surprise and intimidate,” but they adapt.

Their host of sorts is called Enoch. He was sent to Earth some thirty thousand years ago to observe humanity, like a real-time archaeologist. He’s not permitted to interfere (this is sounding a bit like another version of Uatu the Watcher), but there is an exception: he is allowed to act in the prevention of an extinction-level event. There is a prophecy, one that dictated the agents were needed in the future, in the year 2091. That is “where” Enoch sent them. He did this under the guidance of the seer with whom the prophecy originated.

Fitz wants to meet this seer, and when Enoch advises him that might not be wise, he snatches Hunter’s gun, shoves Enoch against the counter, gun at his neck. Enoch later assures him that was unnecessary, and Hunter is surprised by this new side of Fitz that’s grown in place of the man he remembers, but it gets the job done.

I was not expecting the seer who spoke the prophecy to have been someone we’ve already met! And there’s just something emotionally powerful about who it is. Her name is Robin, and she’s a little girl who Daisy has a special interest in. Her father could foresee the moment of someone’s death, alongside whoever he had just come into physical contact with. He saved Daisy and warned them about one of them dying, and she failed to save him in return, so she made it her business to look after his wife and daughter. Now Robin is a seer, and she sees what’s coming. She draws it, with her crayons, images of things that have yet to happen.

Those images can be pretty specific, as the feds pursuing them discover. One of them finds a picture of the very scene they’re in right now right down to her and her partner in the kitchen, one of them eating a green apple. Their superior, an intimidating woman, absolutely wants Robin for herself, to control her. So they follow the men to the park, intending to arrest everyone and claim the seer they’ve discovered.

Fortunately, Enoch still has his tricks. He passes out earplugs in the moments before their pursuers make contact, and uses whatever that sonic stunner of his to buy them half an hour to escape. He takes them to where he sent the agents. Not the “when,” but the “where.” The name of the Lighthouse in the future comes from how the base was built beneath an actual lighthouse. Simple, but effective, that! Enoch doesn’t know who built it, when, or why, but he knows about it, and it serves as their refuge from the pursuing feds.

Hunter and Fitz have a little talk about his more nasty, formidable, ruthless side. Fitz is still fairly fresh off his experience in the Framework, and he has accepted that the man he was in there, that wasn’t programming. That came from inside him. It’s part of him. It’s there, for him to access as needed. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t taken with the team to future, he thinks. Maybe. But for an actual answer, he asks Robin directly.

She answers, “Because you need to save them.” As she hands him a drawing with two alien creatures (not sure those were Kree, with the lobster arms and how they weren’t colored blue, though they could have been), two little girls with black hair, one with green eyes, the other with blue eyes, and, on the floor, stabbed and bleeding, a woman with hair somewhere in the range of brown. It could be any of the female agents, or it could be Tess, as I think about it. Either way, it’s a terrible omen, and with her current track record, including the one with the Earth cracking open, it’s pretty clear: Fitz needs to get to the future.

Now that Fitz is part of the prophecy, Enoch is willing and able to help. When he was sent to Earth, he was in a pod which can help get Fitz to 2091. Small problem: the feds claimed it, and keep it back at the facility they had Fitz imprisoned in.

So, back they go! They get in with some convincing forgery, posing as repairmen come to fix the hole they themselves made, use a couple ferrets to make the base panic and lock down to buy them time, and find the pod. Getting out turns out to be even easier than they hoped, as the feds are keeping the Zephyr right next to the pod in question, complete with fuel, weaponry, and cloak. Fitz maybe scares Hunter a bit as he holds off some soldiers while Hunter flies them out, but it gets the job done. They’re free and clear.

That’s when the two who had been leading the pursuit of Fitz and the agents are brought before their superior officer. She apologizes for how this ends between them, but she no longer trusts them. They think they’re getting demoted, and upset, but nope. Their superior just pulls out a gun and shoots them both in the head.

Whoever that woman is, and whatever she is, she is definitely not a good guy.

And so begins Fitz’s journey to the future. The pod is a cryo chamber, it’ll freeze him and revive him in due time. He has to take the long way around, because that obelisk that took the others is activated from the future, so they can’t use it. Enoch will see Fitz is looked after, kept in one of his people’s spaceships in orbit a long way from Earth. When he wakes, he’ll rejoin the team and, bonus, they have a stash for their weaponry, so they’ll be fully armed once he can guide them to it. Of course, at this point, they’ll have to deal with the metrics, but one thing at a time.

In the meantime, Hunter will find Morse (they have this extended thing where they’re together but not always) and the two of them will look after Robin and her mother. One can only imagine that the end of the world was not kind to them, even if they managed to survive it somehow.

So, Fitz goes to sleep, and Enoch is there when he wakes, a long way from Earth. It’ll take them a few days to get back, which gives Enoch time to prep Fitz. He’s had time to formulate a more coherent plan, and their part begins with sending Fitz in undercover. He needs to hold his own among some of the worst the galaxy/universe has to offer, if he has it in him.

Fitz is certain he does.

So, that’s how Fitz managed to get to the future, into that illustrious gathering hosted by Kasius.

Turns out, Fitz didn’t have a much easier time of it than the rest of his team has had. The separation from them, the uncertainty, the isolation, the time to dwell on how the universe seems to keep pulling him and Simmons apart… small wonder he’s so willing to take the long way around. It’s his path back to Simmons and the others, to help them, and save them. No doubt he can rise to the challenge, but those drawings by Robin do not inspire much hope, ya know?

And on that note… see you next year! 🙂