Having passed through the portal and returned home to the Earth of the present, the team must set about preventing the apocalyptic future they glimpsed.

Episode 10 ended with the whole gang being sucked into the portal that would hopefully take them back home as the Lighthouse exploded around them. Now, back on present day Earth, they have a laundry list of things to sort out, starting with Coulson dealing with Daisy who must be super-annoyed at his having Iced her to drag her back to the present against her will, right? Well, no, not really. There’s a sort of five second exchange about it and then we’re done and moving on.

But Mack got seven shades of snot beaten out of him by a drugged up Kree before the escape, so there must be serious repercussions to that, of course. Nope, Simmons gives him a quick once over off screen and his injuries are never mentioned again. Super Mack, apparently.

If it seems like I’m being overly picky, I likely am, but this is a show that has always taken pains to deal with consequences in the past, and this episode felt like any chance to do that was just brushed over. As I recall, May had a pretty badly injured leg in the first part of the season that was hampering her ability to fight. Not here, being back on Earth has apparently 100% healed her. There’s even a point early on where she nags Coulson to get a cut on his face checked (not knowing of course the big reveal at the end of the last ep about him dying of what looks suspiciously similar to Tony Stark’s Palladium poisoning from Iron Man 2), yet nobody (including Coulson) takes the opportunity to go ‘Oh, and while we’re on the subject May, maybe get that severe leg injury that was still pretty much hobbling you five minutes ago when we were in future space checked out.’

However, the writers have other things to do. There’s an oh-so-clever twist plot that they string throughout that actually doesn’t really land for more reasons than I have space to go through here. There’s also another twist partway through the episode that similarly fails to really land because it just comes off as nonsensical. There’s also the ‘reintroduction’ of two characters who were so important previously that it took me five minutes to place the first and I’m still struggling on the second, and I watch this show really closely. I mention this because the show itself literally just casually throws them at you as if they’re people you should totally remember and have a reaction to seeing other than ‘huh?’ and then carries on leaving you to work it out for yourself.

There’s good stuff as well. Enoch’s comrade at the Earthbound version of the Lighthouse is pleasingly quirky (though not as likeable as Enoch himself), the Seventies chic of the Lighthouse’s automated presentation for a disaster scenario that never came has its moments, and it’s nice to see the gang get a bit of a breather and not be in mortal peril from every direction, even if it doesn’t last all that long.

But Shield has always worked (for me) because it’s a show that takes its characters seriously, and that means things that happen to those characters always have impact (look at how long it took Fitz to recover from his oxygen starvation in Season 2, and how sensitively and well-played out that was). This just doesn’t feel like it’s got the same commitment, missing a lot of smaller details that add up. It’s also got one too many ‘twists’ and a patented MCU ‘fish out of water’ sequence that doesn’t land because it plays out for too long.

Verdict: There’s nothing inherently bad about the episode – it’s science fiction spy hijinks and action as per, but it just feels a little lacking in the basic soul of what Shield can be. Here’s hoping it gets its groove back soon. 6/10

Greg D. Smith