Marvel's Agent's of S.H.I.E.L.D. | Season 5, Episode 13
‘Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ keeps the ball rolling with old friends, old enemies, and a sky-high mission in Season 5, Episode 13.
Juxtaposed with last week’s series landmark episode, which took us all the way back to the beginning, ‘Principia’ continues the show’s stroll down memory lane. It’s a little slower in comparison (which is understandable) but still a pretty darn exciting instalment.
A much-needed breather before the back half of the season kicks off, ‘Principia’ let the gang take a step back and carry out a straightforward mission to find the missing gravitonium – a throwback to the show’s freshman season when the team still did one-off missions.
SPOILER ALERT!
We check in with Yo-Yo, and Coulson gives her some advice about learning to live with prosthetics. Fitz, of course, is in charge of her new prosthetic arms but admits that with S.H.I.E.L.D. in hiding, it might be a while before he can get the materials he needs. In classic S.H.I.E.L.D. fashion, this isn’t the only problem that’s popped up on their radar. Deke’s belt buckle had barely enough gravitonium to seal the rift to the fear dimension, and now it’s starting to leak.
But thankfully, Daisy has come up with a way to kill two birds with one stone: Cybertek. The mastermind tech company behind Project Deathlok is also the last known possessor of gravitonium. The company’s last-known ties are all supposedly dead but with their death certificates all signed by the same man, Murray Jacobson. The team suspect it’s a giant cover-up and set out to find the elusive Murray.
With the rest of the team out in the field, Deke stays behind in the Lighthouse with Fitz and Simmons; and hilarity ensues. With all three characters completely oblivious to their familial connection, the writers let loose with the winks and ironies (bonus: Fitz dubbing Deke as the team’s Scrappy-Doo, which should tell you everything about their hilarious dynamic).
When S.H.I.E.L.D. manage to track down Murray, it’s revealed that he’s actually an old friend of Mack’s named Tony “Candyman” Kane (Jake Busey). The duo studied at the academy together when Mack was known as “Mack Hammer” (based on his love for MC Hammer - haircut and all). Unfortunately, Tony tells the team that Cybertek’s Deathlok program is a dead end; they won’t be able to use any cybernetic enhancements to get Yo-Yo back on her feet. And it’s a double blow to Daisy and May who, unbeknownst to the rest of the team, were hoping to use Deathlok technology to keep Coulson alive à la John Garrett.
Candyman helps S.H.I.E.L.D. track down Cybertek’s last-known scientist and he reveals that the cargo ship transporting the gravitonium sank some time ago. The team have no luck searching the seas for it until Deke figures it out. Due to his space-station upbringing, up and down are all the same to him; and he realises that, instead of sinking, the gravitonium-carrying ship floated up to the heavens after being struck by lightning.
This all leads to Mack, Coulson, and Daisy boarding the floating ship to grab the gravitonium. They’re not the first to arrive, however. Most of the gravitonium has already been taken by Hale, there’s only a tiny softball-sized ball of it left, and she’s left behind a few of her robot guards to man the ship. With no choice to grab the remainder of the element, the agents have 90 seconds to get off the ship before it falls from the sky. Mack, determined to keep his promise to Yo-Yo, unleashes “Hammer Time” in a pretty kickass action sequence; giving Daisy and Coulson enough time to get off the ship with the gravitonium, before escaping with one of the slain robot guards so Yo-Yo can have her new arms.
Meanwhile, Deke finally figures out what we all figured out last week. Thanks to another fear dimension anomaly, he hallucinates a vision of his mother and her old catchphrase – “the steps you take don’t need to be big, they just need to take you in the right direction” – which she always said she learned from her own mother. He later hears those same words echoed when Simmons is helping Yo-Yo with her recovery, and our Zima-loving time traveller pieces it all together. If you were worried that the show was going to drag out the Fitzsimmons familial reveal, then ‘Principia’ was a pleasant surprise. It didn’t take Deke long to connect the dots, so when will the newlyweds get wise to Deke’s identity? Stay tuned!
In this week’s B story, we check in on Hale’s latest recruit: Werner Von Strucker (Spencer Treat Clark). When we last saw him in Season 3, he was fading in and out of a coma, and zapped by Lincoln whilst in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s memory enhancer machine. This, naturally, had some after-effects and Werner, now going by Alex, has now developed some kind of super-memory. By episode’s end, young Ruby has convinced Alex to stay and join Hale’s team with the promise that the duo (and Creel) will overturn her mother. Whether or not she was telling the truth is anyone’s guess but the prospects of a battle between S.H.I.E.L.D. and its obverse at the season’s end sounds exciting.
It’s still anyone’s guess where this particular arc is going, but there’s a lot happening on the show right now: the fear dimension is still at large, Coulson is dying, Yo-Yo is healing, Deke is adjusting to the past and ‘bonding’ with his grandparents, Daisy is trying not to destroy the world, and Team Hale are ready for war.
We’ll have to wait and see how all of this will feed into the back half of the season, but if the first half is anything to go by (and if the show continues to thread in material from its earliest days), ‘S.H.I.E.L.D.’ will come through with a confident and satisfying season end that fans will no doubt lap up.
New episodes of ‘Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ are updated weekly on Amazon Prime Video.
