In episode 2 of season 7, the Agents of SHIELD have to protect Freddy and get him to his rendezvous point before the Chronicoms can kill him. Knowing who he will become makes the job more difficult for some. Ernest Koenig comes along for a ride in the Zephyr.
Recap
Mack drives the getaway car as he and Deke help Freddy escape the Chronicoms with the vial of serum and some cases of bootleg liquor. Freddy convinces them the liquor is what he’s transporting to his contact and hides the vial of serum in one of the bottles.
Deke tries to contact the rest of the agents using his radio. Mack explains to Freddy that it’s like a phone. Freddy tells him it’s not working because he needs to plug it in to something.
Koenig figures out that Daisy and Coulson aren’t who they say they are and gives them a hard time. Jemma and Elena arrive, dressed in period clothes, so that Jemma can remove the bullet from Freddy’s Hydra contact. Koenig goes through more fussing over his lack of control in the situation and their dislike of his ward, Freddy.
Daisy argues that they should kill Freddy, since it would save so many lives. Elena wonders if they could try changing the course of his life, instead of killing him. Jemma explains that either plan would change history enough to give the Chronicoms the future they want, allowing them to conquer Earth.
Once Jemma has removed the bullet, Koenig tells the team that the Chronicops are searching the neighborhood looking for them. Coulson checks in with Enoch on Zephyr 1, since they can’t reach Mack and Deke. He asks Enoch to work on increasing the signal to their radios.
Enoch tells them that May is awake and active. Jemma orders him to get her back in the healing pod. Leaving too early could cause complications. May won’t listen to Enoch. Her memory seems to be affected. She fights him rather than going back to the pod. He’s upgraded to Hunter level fight programming, but still can’t beat May.
May remembers going to the spirit realm. She doesn’t know that she died temporarily and doesn’t react to the news. She injects Enoch with the sedative meant for her, but it doesn’t affect him.
Good to know that Chronicoms aren’t affected by sedatives.
Mack and Deke take Freddy to the train depot. He’s meeting his contact 500 miles away. They insist on escorting him the entire way to keep him safe from the Chronicops.
The Chronicops reach Koenig’s before the team can leave, so they hide in a backroom with Freddy’s contact, who’s unconscious. Koenig chatters at the cops while they search. The Chronicops are about to leave when the contact wakes up and gets noisy, making the cops suspicious. The contact knocks a bottle to the floor, alerting the Chronicops that someone is definitely there. Before they can search the backroom, another Chronicop calls them away because they’ve found Mack and Deke’s getaway car.
Elena saw the bottle start to fall, but couldn’t make herself move to stop it.
The team questions the contact. She’s a friend of Freddy’s father who wanted to help him. Jemma notices a drop of green liquid on the contact’s shoes and recognizes what it is. She does a chemical test to be sure.
Mack and Deke chat up Freddy while they ride the train. He tells them that his family lost everything in the 1929 Crash. His dad jumped off a building and his mother hasn’t spoken a word since. He does what he needs to do to survive, but he has big dreams. This delivery should help him move forward. Mack is skeptical that a few crates of bootleg liquor can change his life.
Daisy asks why Elena didn’t use her speed to catch the bottle. After a minute, Elena admits she froze, maybe because of the shrike that’s still inside her. Her body is absorbing it, but it’s still a scary thing to have inside.
Jemma discovers that the green serum is a key ingredient of the supersoldier serum invented by Abraham Erskine and used on Steve Rogers and the Red Skull.
While Freddy naps, Mack and Deke search the crates. Freddy gets angry when he wakes up and discovers them.
May overhears Enoch’s conversations with the team about issues they’re having and decides she needs to get out in the field to help them. She puts on her 21st century outfit and radios the team, but reception is still spotty.
The team continues to argue about whether to change the timeline in front of Koenig, who thinks they’re crazy. The contact finally tells them that they’ll find Freddy in H*ll.
Koenig happens to know where that is. He’ll show them if he can go along and catch a ride on their fancy ship. The Chronicops also figure out where Freddy is.
Freddy tries to stop Deke and Mack from searching the bottles, but they muscle past him. He pulls a gun on them.
Enoch tries to stop May from leaving Zephyr 1. They have a physical fight. The team drive onto the ship in a period car. Coulson stops the fight. May recognizes that he’s not the real Coulson or Sarge, but she doesn’t act surprised to see him. She says he’s still dead.
May goes back into the healing pod without any more trouble. The rest of the team is concerned about her lack of emotion.
They brought Koenig on board wearing a blindfold. When they remove it, he’s stunned that he’s on an advanced rocket ship with a robot Chronicom.
Freddy holds Mack and Deke at gunpoint and tells them to admit who they really are. Deke says they came to protect him. He doesn’t understand why he would be important. Mack says it’s complicated, and asks how Freddy knows the people he’s making the delivery to won’t kill him afterward. Freddy says that he knows his contact and she wouldn’t betray him that way. Mack and Deke take the gun from Freddy just as the train reaches its destination.
The team explain who they really are to Koenig. Then they try to convince him that Freddy will turn into a supervillain. He doesn’t want to believe it.
An alarm goes off, alerting them that Zephyr 1 will be making a time jump in 17 minutes. When the time window closes, the ship jumps whether they are onboard and ready or not. Jemma says, “There’s no way to predict when the next launch window will open, it could be 24 hours, 24 minutes or 24 weeks.”
Daisy goes into the next room to contact Deke and Mack to give them the news. She gets Deke on the radio and realizes he’s with Freddy. And he has a gun. She orders him to shoot Freddy. Deke doesn’t want to do it, since it goes against his orders and Freddy is just a kid, but Daisy talks him into it.
They’ve moved the crates outside, but Mack is still searching them. It’s a pointless action, because they shouldn’t make any large changes to the future and removing the serum would be one. Just as Mack finds the serum, Deke tells him who Freddy is.
Deke prepares to shoot, saying he has orders to kill Freddy. Mack orders him not to shoot, reminding Deke that he’s the director, not Daisy. Deke brings up all of the terrible things Freddy and Gideon will do. Freddy is confused, because he’s never hurt anyone before and doesn’t have kids.
Just as Deke backs down, the Chronicops show up. He gets in a gunfight with them instead. When Deke runs out of bullets, Mack charges one and gets in a fistfight. The Chronicoms have large energy weapons.
The rest of the team arrive, including Ernest. Freddy grabs the serum and makes a run for it. Ernest follows him into an empty building. He tries to talk Freddy into making different choices.
But it’s already too late. If there ever was any hope for Freddy, the things he’s seen and heard and the way he’s been treated in this episode have taught him that taking care of himself is the only way to survive. They told him that he’s going to survive and prosper, so now he feels invincible. He shoots Ernest in the shoulder just as a car pulls up for him.
Freddy: “You think you know me. You don’t know me. You don’t know nothing.”
The Chronicoms watch Freddy leave and realize they can’t stop Hydra from forming. Having lost this battle, they speed to their ship before the launch window closes and it jumps. The SHIELD team runs for Zephyr 1.
Enoch finds Ernest sitting in the empty building, complaining about his minor bullet wound. He tells Enoch that Freddy left with his contact. Enoch leaves for the Zephyr.
The rest of the team makes it to the Zephyr with only 30 seconds left before the jump. Jemma says they have to close the door, or the ship will be torn apart when they travel. Enoch makes it within sight of the ship, but is too late to board. He watches the warp monolith time bubble form and the ship disappear.
He walks back to find Ernest and returns to the speakeasy with him, which in the future is one of Peggy Carter’s super secret safehouses. Behind the bar, Enoch makes Ernest his specialty from the pleasure planet, Kitson, a Barracoolada.
Ernest loves it and hires Enoch to tend bar on the spot. They agree that Enoch knows his onions.
But Ernest has some conditions. He wants to know all about SHIELD and all about robots. He feels like he could be of service to SHIELD and he’s fascinated by robots. Enoch corrects him- Chronicoms, not robots. And tells Ernest that his grandchildren will also find this whole thing fascinating.
“Enoch, this looks like the start of a marvelous friendship.”
Commentary
And at one of their next few stops, the team will discover that Enoch and Ernest have made SHIELD a fortune which will sustain its independent budget for at least 7 seasons of television, built a remote base for each grandchild to staff, figured out the timing of the Tides and created all sorts of exciting new technology with FITZ!
Freddy wouldn’t say that Deke needed to plug his radio/phone in, because phones belonged to the phone company and were wired into the wall until the mid 80s when the phone company was broken up into many smaller companies under antitrust laws. Then phones became modular and were made to snap into the wall with jacks. Plugs didn’t come along until the 90s with cordless phones and cell phones.
I guess AOS really is in a different timeline from ours.
“I’m a doctor, not a dame (Jim)!” — Star Trek reference.
I’m a biochemist, not a bird (Jim).” –Also a Star Trek reference.
Daisy comes off as selfish for her insistence that they end Malick, despite the known dire consequences. She’s admittedly had a tough time with love, losing both Grant and Lincoln, while the others all have successful pairings (relatively speaking). But this isn’t her first time travel rodeo- she knows how it works. It’s obvious that she wants Malick dead because of the role he’ll play in her boyfriend Lincoln’s death. Is it her turn to be the emotional basket case of the season again, after Fitz has carried that burden for a few years?
Being the best friend of Leopold Fitz is now a standard part of Enoch’s introduction. But where is his bestie? How long is it since they’ve seen each other? How many years is a “considerable amount of time” to a Chronicom?
So the Tides, or launch windows, work like the monoliths, opening and then closing according to their own predetermined schedule, with the time travel bubble, or tide, covering a certain area. The jump windows probably are predictable, but using an extremely complex algorithm.
Freddy’s female contact will also turn out to be someone important, since she never gave even a first name, after all that screen time and dialogue over two episodes.
Images courtesy of ABC.
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