With Season 5 due to begin broadcast with a two hour special on December 1 in the US, Marvel treats fans to the first seventeen minutes of the pilot on YouTube. Greg D Smith gets his stream on to see what’s what.

Season 4 ended on perhaps the weirdest cliffhanger of the show to date – as the gang sat in a diner waiting to be arrested, they were approached by a shadowy agent and put in some kind of trance, before Phil woke up on a space station somewhere, taking in a view of the stars.

This preview gives us a little context on the diner raid from the perspective of the agent running it, although in truth it asks more questions about who he is and what his motives might be than it answers. Then the raid goes down, the gang get put in the trance, and… well things happen that make it clear Phil’s taking in the view skipped quite a lot of important stuff inbetween.

To say more might risk spoilers. Suffice it to say that yes, the gang really are in space, somewhere, and it would appear that much of the two-hour opener will be devoted to them finding out exactly where somewhere is, and what they are doing there. Maybe even how they can get home. Those two hours have a lot to fill in before we can get Phil waking up in a room and calmly telling himself to get to work.

All I really hope for is that things get a little lighter. Even on a big screen, with all my lights turned off, it was difficult to impossible to make out detail of certain scenes. There was one scene in particular involving May which had me scratching my head for several minutes as to exactly what was going on. I get that it’s space and it’s supposed to be mysterious, but the mystery shouldn’t extend to what is actually happening on my screen.

That aside, everyone is as you remember them, Mack in particular is on top form and the show is still not afraid – through its characters – to call itself out on some of its more extreme absurdities.

Verdict: SHIELD is back, and looking interesting. The old trope of sequels going bigger until ‘in space’ is the last place they can go may dangle over this one, but as a fan, I have faith they can pull this one off, assuming they remember how to properly light their sets!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDBwsMIXlMk

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