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Mission Briefing
It’s all comes down to this. Coulson and his team mount up for one last life or death mission to take out Garret and Ward, but as Coulson surely knows by now, nothing ever comes easy. Garrett has recently gotten a serious upgrade by way of GH-235, while Fitz and Simmons are still stranded at the bottom of the ocean. Can the team defeat a superpowered Garrett and save their missing tech team.
Mission Fallout
After getting injected with GH-235, Garrett is looking particularly limber. The chemical compound has not only healed Garrett and made him stronger than ever, but the drug has also changed his brain chemistry, making Garrett prone to waxing on about “the truth” and scrawling odd diagrams on walls. Ward fears his mentor has become mentally unhinged, but Garrett’s new outlook has given him newfound vision.
In Cuba, Coulson and his team have fought off the Cybertek soldiers, and managed to implant Skye’s trojan horse into their system, which allows her to break into all of Cybertek’s computer systems. The team is able to track down the bus thanks to Fitz/Simmons’ tracker, but the two agents aren’t answering the communications, and the team fears the worst. The agents mount up for a final strike on Garrett and Cybertek, and track him down to a Cybertek facility in New Mexico. The team breaks into the compound, and Skye reprograms the super-soldiers to lead them right to Garrett. Meanwhile, Fitz and Simmons have devised a plan to escape their underwater prison, but the storage unit only has enough air for one person to survive the ascent to the surface. Fitz sacrifices himself by giving Simmons the last of his air, and The two make it to the surface, and into the waiting hands of Director Nick Fury. Fury reveals that he’s been looking for Coulson, and heads to New Mexico.
Back at the Cybertek compound, May faces off against Ward while Coulson confronts Garrett and Deathlok. May is able to subdue Ward after some sexually charged fist-a-cuffs, and Fury (A.k.A Director deus ex machina) shows up just in time to give Coulson a much needed hand. Deathlok is about to incinerate Coulson and Fury, but gets a message in his system from Ace. Skye managed to save Mike’s son, freeing him of Garrett’s control. Mike changes his sights to Garrett and blasts a hole through his chest before stomping him seemingly out of existence. Mike ensures that his son is in safe hands before escaping, claiming that he needs to redeem himself before seeing his son again. With the day won, Coulson demands answers from Fury about project T.A.H.I.T.I., with the former director saying it was an emergency situation, and that he had to do what was necessary to revive his best agent. Fury gives Coulson a small box which he says will help Coulson rebuild S.H.I.E.L.D. before making Coulson the new Director. Coulson follows coordinates found in Fury’s box to a new, underground S.H.I.E.L.D. base run by agent Billy Koenig, an agent that looks exactly like the recently desceased Eric Koenig. They could be twins, but were betting Fury might have dabbled in cloning on his off hours.
Later, Rayna meets with a bloodied man and tells him that she knows where his daughter is before handing him a picture of Skye. Coulson wakes up in the middle of the night and begins scrawling the same cryptic diagrams that Garrett has been writing earlier. A likely side-effect of the GH-235 serum that they both ingested.
Most Valuable Agent Award
The final award of the season goes to Deathlok for giving Garrett what he had coming to in. Hopefully, this isn’t the last time we see Mike Peterson.
Mission Highlights and Other Observations
– It’s been rough ride, folks, and at times things looked bleak. But over the course of the season, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has settled into a good hour of television. The season finale was a perfect synecdoche of all the things that work, and don’t work, on the show. Good action is hampered by clunky dialogue, and ambitious setpieces are blunted by cheap looking sets and drab direction. Hopefully, S.H.I.E.L.D. can work on these things over the summer break and come back swinging in the fall.
– While the finale was enjoyable, and did its due diligence in setting up some intriguing mysteries for the fall, we do wish we received a bit more in the way of answers. Yarns that have been stretched and teased throughout the entire season still haven’t come close to being answered yet. We’ve learned precious little about who Skye is, and we still don’t know the full details about project T.A.H.I.T.I. Did they forget about the big blue alien?
– Ward: “Reminds me of the old days.” / May: “You were never on top.”
– When was the last time anyone saw a tag-team wrestling match with four dead guys?”
