Drift partner and I love Agents of SHIELD with all our hearts, but sometimes we just get to talking about issues with it. During a recent long drive, we were talking about episodes you can hypothetically skip on rewatching (we’re watching Doctor Who, which I’ve not seen but she watched for a good long while, and she’s curating it for me, i.e. skipping episodes when she deems necessary) and the subject shifted to SHIELD. Drift partner said that there aren’t really a lot of episodes that are both bad and unnecessary in the show: there aren’t many episodes that are 100% unnecessary, and we like most of the ones that are more monster-of-the-week, while on the other hand most of the episodes we do not like either are very relevant to the plot or have at least some redeeming moments.
(For the record, two episodes that we definitely plan on skipping if/when we rewatch the show are episode 100, which drift partner deemed the most unnecessary victory lap and which we have both compared to the Buffy mental hospital episode but less purposeful, and the FitzSimmons mind meld episode, which, as I’ve previously discussed, we shorthand as The Worst Episode. I know these are not popular opinions, but they are our opinions.)
In the middle of a tangent about bottle episodes, I remarked that season 5a was basically a 10-episode-long bottle episode, and an unpleasant one at that. I will reiterate that I find 5a to be trauma all the way down; nobody is having a good time and there aren’t really even any funny or endearing or wholesome moments to make it worthwhile. The only good parts of 5a are Flint and Tess and Abby and Ava (Coy Stewart, Eve Harlow, Ciara Bravo, Tunisha Hubbard) and they could have existed just as easily in a different context.
After deciding that we would in fact be skipping 5a on rewatch, I started spinning out what I would have done to make 5a less upsetting, and that turned into discussing changes to 5b, which led to changes to season 6, which led to changes in season 7, and I figured I might as well just share this alternative plotline for all of you. And, well, like always I feel like I should put a content warning for how little I like Fitz (Iain de Caestecker, who seems very nice and it’s not his fault).
Full story here.