Agents of SHIELD Season 7 Episode 10: Stolen Recap

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After spending last week in a time loop, episode 10 finds the team stranded in the 1980s again. They set up camp in the Lighthouse but are soon visited by Jiaying and Gordon, who tell them what Nathaniel and Kora are up to at Afterlife. Nathaniel recruits S1 villain John Garrett before he’s injured and recruited by HYDRA. While most of the team try to stop Nathaniel from transferring inhuman powers to villainous humans, Deke continues to work on the Zephyr’s time drive.

Recap

The episode opens in the SHIELD bar where SHIELD recruit Young John Garrett is playing darts. Adult John Garrett, who was Grant Ward’s SHIELD SO, surrogate father and HYDRA recruiter, plus S1 Big Bad the Clairvoyant, was played in a tour de force performance by Bill Paxton (Apollo 13, Big Love). Bill died in 2017, but the show pays tribute to him by bringing back the character and casting his son, James Paxton, in the role his dad originated.

Keep the box of tissues out.

Nathaniel shows up at the bar to recruit Garrett for his chaos crew by telling Garrett about his own future. Garrett doubts Nathaniel’s story about his devastating injury, abandonment by SHIELD, and recruitment by HYDRA, but I’m not sure why. Has Garrett met Nick Fury? Or Victoria Hand? SHIELD has never had a problem with leaving men behind. Even when SHIELD was the SSR and HYDRA hadn’t infiltrated them yet.

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Dark Season 3 Episode 4: The Origin Recap

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Dark S3Ep4 Hannah & Helene

In episode 4, Young Tronte and Claudia each have an encounter with a creepy old man, Hannah makes a decision that will have wide ranging consequences and Yellow Raincoat Martha gets to know Stranger Martha and her even stranger ideas. Tronte and Jana spend some quality time together, while the Unknown trio check some important items off their To Do list.

Recap

The episode opens with Tronte walking through the woods toward the mouth of the cave. He seems drawn there, though he doesn’t seem to understand why.

This stretch of woods reminds me of the German fairytale Hansel and Gretel, which is ultimately a variant of Ariadne’s thread. There have been so many kids who’ve walked through here while on their way to be sacrificed in one way or another. Tronte doesn’t die, but his life is frequently interrupted as he’s drawn to serve the needs of the knot and the White Devil Witch Claudia. Jana acts as his Ariadne/Gretel, providing the thread/trail of crumbs/home and stability that he always returns to.

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Dark Season 3 Episode 3: Adam and Eva Recap

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In episode 3, we meet Stranger/Adult Alt Martha and Gustav’s father, Heinrich Tannhaus, for the first time. Old Eva and Young Jonas have a long talk before she sends him to another time period with her youngest self again. Alt Martha helps out Stranger Jonas and the teens before going back to the future, but there’s a twist. She goes to the Prime world future. After weeks of frustration, Stranger Jonas begins to find some success in the lab.

Recap

The episode begins in the Prime world 1820s, when Old Gustav Tannhaus was Young Gustav Tannhaus. We find Young Gustav and his father, Heinrich Tannhaus, riding in a carriage in the dark of night, in a raging thunderstorm.

When else would they go out for a ride?

Heinrich reads from the play Ariadne, choosing from the same speech we’ve heard Martha perform at least once every season: “From then on, I knew that nothing changes. That all things remain. The spinning wheel turns, round and round, in a circle. One fate tied to the next. A thread, red like blood, that connects all our deeds.”

Heinrich is the man who started Sic Mundus. As he reads, lightning flashes as if time travel is occuring.

Maybe it is.

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Agents of SHIELD Season 7 Episode 9: As I Have Always Been Recap

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ELIZABETH HENSTRIDGE, JOEL STOFFER

In episode 9, the team get stuck in a time loop inside a time storm heading toward a time vortex. Every loop brings them closer to the event horizon, but the loops turn around quickly, so they have to work together to find a solution. Coulson and Daisy, who both start the episode unconscious, are the only ones who remember previous loops.

The episode was directed by Elizabeth Henstridge, who also plays Jemma Simmons. It’s a fast-paced, tragicomic episode that must have been hella complex to put together, but it came out great, so kudos to Elizabeth, writer Drew Greenberg, editor Kelly Stuyvesant and rest of the cast and crew. It’s hard to pull off either an episode full of tonal shifts or an episode full of repetitive scenes. To do both at once, on your first try as a director, is amazing. Joel Stoffer, Chloe Bennet, Clark Gregg and Enver Gjokaj also shine in this episode.

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Agents of SHIELD Season 7 Episode 8: Why Use Avatar The Last Airbender as the Theme for an 80s Episode?

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NATALIA CORDOVA-BUCKLEY, MING-NA WEN

Episode 8 Recap

Throughout S7, Agents of SHIELD has used film and TV themes and tropes from the eras it’s visited in each episode to help tell the story. In S7Ep8, After, Before, which took place in 1983, the show broke from this tradition and explicitly referenced two 21st century shows- Avatar the Last Airbender (2005) and its sequel series The Legend of Korra (2012), both from Nickelodeon.

I found this confusing, since both series were influenced by the Japanese animation style of anime and by Eastern cultures, but they are made by two white, American men, so they are actually neither anime nor Asian. It didn’t make sense to include them in this episode as 80s or Eastern shows. When I write it out like that in a single sentence and you’ve already seen the episode, I imagine the connection becomes obvious, but it took awhile for me to remember those facts about the Avatar series and make the connection.

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Agents of SHIELD Season 7 Episode 8: After, Before Recap

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MING-NA WEN, NATALIA CORDOVA-BUCKLEY

In season 7, episode 8 we find out what the rest of the team were doing while Mack and Deke were stuck in the early 80s. Jemma and Enoch attempt to fix the time drive, but realize it requires a quick fix, as in, the skills of a speedster. Now that we need them to save the team, it’s time to get serious about solving the issue with Elena’s powers.

Her powers didn’t matter to the team when the loss only affected her. It’s every man for himself in S7. There’s so little trust that even a crew of fewer than 10, who are fighting for their lives, are forming factions.

Daisy suggests they visit her mom, Jiaying, at Afterlife for a consultation on inhuman genetics and powers, so May and Elena fly there in the quinjet. Jiaying hasn’t yet been tortured by Dr Whitehall, met Daisy’s Dad, Cal, or given birth to Daisy yet, so we meet a younger, more compassionate version of the character. Spending a little quiet time at Afterlife is as illuminating and refreshing for May and Elena as it was for Daisy and Raina. The two agents also run into some new and old acquaintances.

Wait- can I put in a request for a visit from pre-terrigenesis Raina before the season ends? We should be getting to her storylines soon.

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Agents of SHIELD Season 7 Episode 7: The Totally Excellent Adventures of Mack and the D Recap

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Agents of SHIELD’s lucky double 7s episode is just what it says on the tin: Deke and Mack’s excellent and not so excellent adventures while stranded in the 1980s after the Zephyr’s time drive goes on the fritz. They get stranded when Mack needs some alone time after the untimely deaths of both of his parents in 1976 at the hands of the Chronicoms. Introvert Mack takes the rest of 1982 and much of 1983 as much needed “me time” to process everything that’s happened to him, probably going back to when he joined SHIELD in S2. Maybe even back to the death of his infant daughter, Hope.

Extroverted Deke makes himself at home in the Lighthouse- wait, that is his home. Poor guy, he can never get away from it. At least he always knows where he can live, rent free, in every era. Always landing on his feet is Deke’s talent, so he gets to work exercising it by creating a cover band that’s also his spy team, with the band as their cover identity. Get it?

He also keeps an eye on Mack, whether Mack wants him to or not.

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Agents of SHIELD Season 7 Episode 6: Adapt or Die Recap

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In episode 6 of season 7, Agents of SHIELD continues to celebrate July 4, 1976 in the Lighthouse. Coulson and May are interrogated by Rick Stoner while the Chronicoms quietly steal the faces and personalities of SHIELD agents. Mack and Elena break his parents out of the cell Hydra and the Chronicoms have locked them in. Deke discovers that Nana Jemma has become a cyborg. Enoch helps Nana Jemma with her malfunctioning cybernetic implant, Diana, which helps her stop thinking about her missing husband, Bobo Fitz.

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I need one of those implants. This is a fun season, but I miss Fitz. What if they can’t get back to him at the end of this adventure? Will he be lost in time and space FOREVER? Isn’t the real world bad enough without making us worry that FitzSimmons won’t find their way back together???  #BringFitzHome

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Agents of SHIELD Season 7 Episode 5: A Trout in the Milk Recap

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MING-NA WEN, CLARK GREGGIn episode 5, Agents of SHIELD visits the 1970s, complete with stylish new opening sequence and bicentennial celebration for the USA. As Elena points out, we’re in something akin to a Bond film this week, crossed with a Charlie’s Angels/Starsky & Hutch hybrid TV procedural. Coulson is in his glory, but this is also the height of the Cold War and of Hydra’s hidden influence on SHIELD, which is now combined with the Chronicoms bad influence. The 70s were really just not a fun decade, okay?

However, this episode does see the return of Enoch to the Zephyr after 40 years in exile wandering the desert streets of NYC. Just in time, too, because something’s going on with Jemma and she needs him.

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Dark Season 3 Episode 2: The Survivors

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After the Harry Potter costume party of getting to know Martha/Eva’s world in S3EP1, in episode 2 it’s finally time to visit Adam’s post-apocalypse world, which is a form of the world without Winden that Hannah and Ulrich have dreamed of for decades. Ironically, Hannah and Ulrich both flaked out on the apocalypse and have retired separately in the Winden of previous decades. Katharina followed Ulrich.

Peter and Elizabeth serve as our point of view characters for the aftermath of the shockwave as they search for Charlotte and Franziska. Charlotte has jumped forward 33 years and is now in the barren future with Adult Elizabeth. The version of Young Alt Martha who transported Jonas to her world, then left him behind, is with Stranger, Bartosz, Franziska and Magnus in 1888.

We spend much of this episode in 1987, where things have changed in the last 3 months.

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