After last week’s twist-filled episode, the agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. have to figure out what to do about Izel and her body-snatching ability. Now that everyone knows Sarge is connected to her, and maybe the same kind of being, Daisy wants to seize on that and turn him into a weapon they can use against her.
May and Simmons are a lot more hesitant, however. Now that we know Sarge really was made from Coulson, May is desperate to try and bring out the Coulson side of him. Daisy doesn’t even want to entertain this idea, and Simmons calls her out for refusing to accept the possibility of Coulson’s return. Simmons even theorizes that the reason Daisy spent a whole year out in space with her had as much to do with escaping Coulson’s legacy as it did with finding Fitz. But Daisy’s not budging on this. She locks herself in a room with Sarge and asks if his memories and powers became enhanced after he came back from his bullet wounds. Once he confirms that’s true, Daisy kills him again with her shockwave powers.
Turns out Sarge does get significantly more powerful after near-death experiences, just like Superman’s enemy Doomsday or the Saiyans from Dragon Ball Z. Once he regenerates from this one, he’s strong enough to knock Daisy flat and rip a door off its hinges. His new power-boosts are visualized by his hands disintegrating to dust and then reforming before an attack, but the special effect at play is more confusing than anything.
Meanwhile, on the danger plane, Izel needs help finding the temple she wants to bring the monolith orb to. So she summons Benson and hides in Mack’s body. When Benson says he thinks the temple in question sits at the intersection of two Ley Lines just like Yo-Yo’s late ex Keller theorized at the top of the season, Yo-Yo tips him off by acting like Keller’s still alive and watching Izel-Mack unknowingly go along with it. The charade is up, but she’s still dangerous, and she proves it by stabbing the neck of the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Benson came with.
But Izel’s not done proving her strength. She locks Mack and Yo-Yo away and exposes Benson to the monolith orb in order to figure out his weakness. The monolith with the power of “creation” reads his mind and creates a lookalike of his dead lover Thomas. The Thomas apparition accuses Benson of pulling the plug on him while drunk even though Thomas was still conscious. Though Mack and Yo-Yo warn him to ignore it, Benson can’t help but be shaken and agrees to show Izel the way to her temple.
Daisy decides that instead of turning Sarge into a weapon to use against Izel, she’d rather kill him with one of his own swords to see if they would work on Izel. Neither May nor Simmons can talk her out of it — but Sarge does, inadvertently. When she goes to strike, he tells her to do it. He wants to sacrifice himself to take down Izel! But what really shakes Daisy is when he calls her “Skye.” Just as his powers are increasing in strength, so are his Coulson memories! And isn’t self-sacrifice exactly what Coulson would do in this situation? Daisy can’t go through with it. She drops the sword and hugs Sarge instead.
But the sword turns out to be useful in another way. Desperate to find a means of counteracting Izel’s body-hopping powers, FitzSimmons and Deke realize that the blades emit a unique frequency. Izel’s powers, they realize, involve realigning her atoms through harmonic resonance; the blades emit a counter-frequency, which is why they’re so good at killing Shrike. So all they need to do is figure out how to build that frequency into something wearable for the team. FitzSimmons were already good at science, but now that they have their genius grandson from the future, there’s truly no problem they can’t solve. It reminds me of video games like Fire Emblem: Awakening where you can pair up your characters to create even more powerful children that inherit and combine all their parents’ best abilities.
Izel makes it to her temple, though Mack and Yo-Yo are able to free Benson beforehand so he can pass the information back to S.H.I.E.L.D. She explains that she wants to make the monoliths resonate with the temple in order to open a portal to her world and let her whole “family” through. That won’t work with the monoliths in their current disembodied orb state, so she needs to repair them. In order to that, she’s used the monolith energy to recreate Flint from their memories so he can use his powers to rebuild them. Remember Flint? He was the Inhuman kid from the Lighthouse future who used his rock-controlling abilities to recreate the time monolith and send them back to the present. If he did it once, he can do it again!
The episode’s kicker scene brings us back to the Chronicoms, but sadly not Enoch. We watch a coup happen, as Malachi kills Altea because he’d rather colonize a “Chronyca-3” than rebuild their lost “Chronyca-2.” Something tells me we’ll only continue to get sporadic check-ins from these characters for the rest of this season, but that they’ll play a major part in the upcoming final season.
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