Spoiler Alert!

The one thing that sucks about having something to watch in the summer: it’s the only thing I have to watch in the summer. All the other seasons of anything else I might watch are all completed by now. Heck, I’m not even sure have anything left of my weekly lineup come this fall. But oh well. There’s always Netflix! (at least, for now)

Agents of Shield

6.05 “The Other Thing”

This is one of those times, I think, when two threads that seem to be so very far apart are turning out to be far more intertwined.

At the Lighthouse, Mack and Yo-Yo are having their drama, which they endure stoically because they aren’t connecting emotionally. Yo-Yo actually forms more of a rapport with Benson, the scientist guy, over how they’ve both made choices, the right choice, but it’s so painful that it feels like the wrong one. Mind you, in Benson’s case, I’d argue that taking his significant other off life support within days, instead of months, is a little different than plunging a special knife into Keller’s chest in order to kill the thing possessing him and turning him into a bomb.

Speaking of, apparently those blue knives actually do kill them, just not instantaneously. The knife paralyzes it, and eventually it expires, provided said knife is not removed, say, in the course of an autopsy. Once it finally dies and stays dead, it reverts to a sort of crystalline structure, like the one it was turning Keller’s body into, something that Benson has never seen… but Shield has: the three obelisks.

One controlled space, and was used to exile Hive to Maveth, and then used by Hydra to feed Hive, until they were able to use it to bring Hive back to Earth. The second controlled time, and was used to send the agents into the future, to learn of the impending danger to their world, and then was duplicated and used to send them back to the present, inadvertently bringing Deke along. The third was unknown, and it was destroyed alongside the other two, which destruction ripped a hole in the fabric of the universe, bringing people’s fears into the Lighthouse, and sealing that hole required a bit of gravitonium and the genius of Leopold Fitz.

Somehow, these three obelisks, of immense power, which were unearthed, stored, and used, are connected to this new threat.

Moving over to May’s corner, she is a “prisoner”of Sarge and Snowflake, and they want to recruit her. She and Sarge are a bit at odds, as he has Coulson’s face, and he wants to know about this Coulson. In his view, Coulson must have been something else, while in May’s view, Sarge is the “something else.” There are freakish similarities between what Sarge is saying and what Coulson already said, on the beach in Tahiti before he finally drifted off. But whatever the truth of this particular mystery, there is an end-of-the-world scenario in progress here, so it’s going to wait for a bit.

Sarge’s approach to recruiting seems simple enough: give May an inarguable introduction to the threat, and then provide answers to her questions.

The first part is easy. Snowflake just kidnaps one of their targets, and they leave May alone with him, after shooting him in the head. So he’s supposedly dead, but he gets up and tries to kill her, tries to possess her. Failing that, it does the same thing its fellow did with Keller’s body, powering up to explode. May uses the blue knife as instructed at that point. And that is her introduction to the threat at hand.

Sarge calls them the Shrike. They invade worlds, killing people and taking their bodies, tapping into energy. First it’s biological energy but, as Benson says, there is planetary energy as well, in the form of the ley lines. If they can take the energy within an average human body and turn it into an explosive that could take out the lighthouse, odds are that tapping into an entire planet’s energy would destroy said planet, which Sarge confirms in his talk with May. He’s been to countless worlds throughout the stars, and he’s been fighting the Shrike for a hundred years. He’s met with a lot of failure, seen a lot of worlds die, but he keeps going, and he certainly believes he has a way to end it all: kill the invading Shrike, and when their creator appears, “burn it all to Hell.”

Something tells me that might not work out for the Earth either.

Sarge is thinking May is coming around to his way of thinking, but she’s a lot stronger than that. Strong enough to get the drop on Snowflake easily, and then beat Sarge unconscious. She takes them and their truck straight to Shield.

Meanwhile in space, Daisy, Simmons, Piper, Davis, and Enoch are captured by a fleet of Confederate ships. But they’re not the Confederacy. Enoch realizes this when he recognizes that the Remmorath would just cut their ship in two, like they did a year ago. (answers one question, at least) He believes he knows who it is, and he is right: it’s the Chronicoms, led by a female-looking model called Atara (I think).

Atara wants something simple: to save their people. But it turns out to be very complicated.

They had heard whispers for some time about worlds being destroyed by something they did not know, but they were still helpless when it came to theirs. Spatial distortions were soon followed by the absolute destruction of their people and their planet. Something tells me that was the Shrike at work. The Confederacy came to pick the bones clean, but the Chronicoms resisted and took their ships, a small fleet. They are certainly formidable, which makes it all the more disquieting that their population has been reduced to the crew of this small fleet, and that is all that is left of them.

This brings us to their reason for hunting Fitz and Enoch: time travel. They know that it is real, that it was involved in the events which saved Earth from destruction. Now they want to use it to go back in time and save their own world. Seems reasonable, if also difficult, but they have no sense of care for what is not immediately useful to them. That becomes evident when Enoch convinces Atara that Fitz can help them, but they need Simmons to make that approach viable, and Atara responds by agreeing to use Fitz-Simmons… and kill the rest.

Needless to say, things do not end on a happy note on that score. It’s Simmons who steps up and offers to cooperate in exchange for the lives of her friends. Daisy doesn’t intend to allow it, but Simmons convinces her. She thanks her, and Davis, and Piper, for following her, and getting her to Fitz. Whatever happens, they’ll be together. So, now it is time for the three of them to go home, and Fitz-Simmons will see about rejoining them whenever they can.

Fitz is absolutely furious at a regretful Enoch when he hears about this, as what he ultimately wants is for Simmons to be safe and his friend just ensure the opposite, but he’s rendered unconscious anyway.

It’s a happy reunion when the Zephyr lands in the Lighthouse, but there’s a pall cast on it in the absence of Fitz-Simmons and the message from May informing them that she got Sarge. Considering how close Daisy and Coulson were, this is not going to be easy for her. It was kind of a good thing, in a way, for her to be in space while things played out on Earth. Now, she is going from losing two friends in space to seeing a familiar face as an enemy. Yeah, this is not her best day ever.

So we have Sarge, whatever he is, and whatever his connection to Coulson is, fighting the Shrike and trying to kill their creator, because they kill entire worlds, probably including the Chronicom’s, and the Shrike are connecter to the three mysterious obelisks, one of which enabled time travel, which the Chronicoms want Fitz-Simmons to make possible for them. Complicated, much? And obviously very dangerous. Thank goodness they have Shield to take on all the weird crap, which now includes multiple alien parties and the Earth poised, again, to join a long list of destroyed planets. Just another day for the agents.