The gang race to execute their plan to assemble the monolith and get home. But a vengeful Kasius has other ideas – can they overcome the odds and get out, and just who is the mysterious other ‘seer’ in Kasius’ possession?

Armed with the knowledge of what they must do, and having made it back to the Lighthouse, Coulson and co. now just need to avoid the attentions of Kasius and his men, find Mack, YoYo and Flint, get all the remaining people off the Lighthouse and travel back through time to try to stop any of this happening at all. If that sounds like an awful lot to squeeze into an hour of television, well, it is, and maybe that’s why this is one of the less effective episodes of the series to date.

That’s not to say that it isn’t without its emotional hits – they are there, and they are effective (I won’t spoil any of them here, suffice it to say at least some of them carry equal weight to what’s come before, this season), but overall, the episode can’t help but feel a little rushed, and therefore a little disconnected.

Dominic Rains gets to really chew the scenery in this one as Kasius; driven to the edge (and over it) by grief at the loss of Sinara, he really starts to cut loose. In a way, it’s fun, but it also rather undermines the character we have seen built up so far. The main thrust of Kasius has always been his quite menace and his almost casual cruelty. It’s fitting that the loss of Sinara would provoke an extreme reaction in him, but viewers might have expected a more controlled outpouring of rage than what we get.

The revelation of Kasius’ secret ‘seer’ also falls rather flat on several levels. Firstly, it’s never really explained properly, and it needs to be. Secondly, when they are revealed, too much time is spent with them with very little actually happening, breaking the frenetic pace of trying to fit everything else in (which is to the detriment of other subplots).

Henry Simmons gets some heavy lifting as Mack, but unfortunately other elements of the episode mean this strand gets little screen time and doesn’t pack the punch it perhaps should. Similar can be said for Chloe Bennett and Clark Gregg, between them playing out separate storylines of burden, anguish and duty that clash in a damp fizzle rather than the raging firework display they might have been. A last minute revelation about one of them also gets squeezed into an available few moments, again robbing it of the impact it could and should have had.

Thank goodness then, for Deke and Enoch. Deke has been without doubt the most interesting character of the show this season – certainly the most complex and nuanced. It’s never totally clear which way he will jump in any given situation, and the path he takes this week adds to that in the most satisfying way possible. As for Enoch, he’s a character that’s impossible not to love. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating that I hope he remains a permanent fixture of the team going forward.

As the episode stumbles towards its climax, having clumsily tied up the last few plot ends that clearly got a ‘not as important’ rating on the whiteboard in the writers room, there’s a sense of anti-climax at odds with the journey the cast have been on. I could hope that was a deliberate style choice, luring the audience into a false sense of security before some massive reveals next time, but in fairness, it just feels like sloppy writing and an artificial rush to a deadline the show shouldn’t have set itself.

Verdict: The first truly disappointing episode of the series so far. Not actually terrible per se, but underwhelming compared to what came before it and rushing to tie up too many threads at once, with some baffling choices along the way. Here’s hoping it’s a blip, and not the start of a downward slope. 6/10

Greg D. Smith