The show takes us back to the diner to see how events played out from Fitz’s perspective, as he tries to find out where his friends have gone and why he was left behind, all while struggling with the burden of guilt he still carries for his actions in the Framework.

The shock reveal of Fitz under the mask at the end of the last episode meant that we were always going to have a lot of questions for the show to answer, and as the episode title suggests, it does this by taking things right back to the beginning, with the gang sitting in the diner. Seeing the abduction from Fitz’s perspective is every bit as disorientating for the audience as for the character, a blink and they’re gone moment which leaves poor Fitz baffled for all of thirty seconds before armed men and women burst in and surround him, demanding answers.

Imprisoned, and being asked very shouty questions by a bunch of people who are still extremely annoyed that Daisy ‘assassinated’ Director Mace, Fitz must find a way out of a very deep mess. But this is Fitz, so of course, he has a plan. That plan involves the return of a familiar, much missed face, and also allows the show to add a bit of a lighter touch to proceedings which have been – thus far – pretty damned bleak.

As Fitz pieces together answers, we the audience go along with him for the ride, an effective device that engages the viewer, leading us along by just enough to keep interest, without making things too obvious or signposted. There’s a lot to explain of course – time travel, the use of a monolith, the identity of the mysterious man who sent the rest of the gang where they went and the source of his information for doing so.

But it all leads to a tense cat and mouse chase between Fitz and his erstwhile captors, along the way giving us the return of other familiar SHIELD mainstays, and then leads to an elegant solution to the issue of how to catch up with his friends stuck almost a century in the future.

De Caestecker gets a lot to do, this episode focusing exclusively on him and his plight, and it’s genuinely nice to see the character after four episodes with him almost entirely absent save for brief flashbacks. His interplay with his rescuer is lovely as well, and although it’s not a character you’d necessarily expect to work well with Fitz, the chemistry is undeniable.

To say much more would be to spoil an awful lot of good stuff – this really is an episode that has everything – emotion, drama, laughs, genuine moments of happiness balancing out others of dark pathos. It’s SHIELD doing what it does best, and honestly there’ll probably be people who are left wanting more of this kind of thing after the previous four episodes of fairly relentlessly grim alien dystopian future stuff, but what this does is reassure us that when the gang inevitably do solve their current predicament, all that familiar stuff we know and love is waiting there for them.

Verdict: A nice change of pace and style from the horror of the current predicament of the SHIELD gang in future space, and a really smartly directed and paced episode. 8/10

Greg D. Smith