The gang race against time to protect the life of the ancestor of SHIELD’s oldest nemesis, but not everyone is convinced that preserving history the way it happened is a great idea.

So, you’re stuck in the past trying to stop your newest mortal enemies from wiping out your oldest mortal enemies before they begin, which would thereby negate your very existence. Just another day at the office for the Agents of SHIELD.

There’s a prevailing thought in genre circles that once you introduce time travel, you’ve run out of ideas, and also that once that particular genie is out of the bottle, you negate any sense of stakes in the drama. After all, what does it matter if you don’t save the day in time if you can just hit the rewind button and try again?

The SHIELD writers’ room think they have a way around this – our heroes aren’t so much travelling through time on purpose as they are riding the wake of their Chronicom foes as they take a whistle stop tour through history trying to stop SHIELD from ever being formed. But herein lies the issue.

There’s a lot of philosophical argument as not everyone is on board with the idea of saving Gideon Malick’s ancestor so that HYDRA can form and SHIELD can be formed in response. The arguments in favour state specifically that as that’s what the Chronicoms want it’s bad, and also that they can’t guarantee that by stopping the rise of HYDRA something else worse wouldn’t rise in its place.

This sort of neatly ignores that SHIELD spent most of its existence in this universe as a HYDRA-infiltrated front, and also that the Chronicoms would surely also have thought of this and weighed the odds as being OK. After all, their mission is to eradicate SHIELD, and if there’s a chance that HYDRA being stopped would produce a more monstrous foe, surely they’d be concerned that SHIELD may still rise?

Away from all this, it’s a bit of a nothing episode, as Mack and Deke travel with Freddie to whatever his mysterious destination is, unable to communicate with the rest of the team and so unaware of exactly what the stakes are. Meanwhile the rest of the gang just sort of hang out at the speakeasy, trying to get information from their prisoner and having long-distance conversations with Enoch about May’s being awake and not really seeming herself. In fact, the best bits of the episode are May and Enoch interacting. Oh, and YoYo’s powers seem to be on the fritz, though why is not clear.

Verdict: Feels like it gets so bogged down in the philosophical aspect of whether the characters should or shouldn’t try to change history that it forgets to do much else. 6/10

Greg D. Smith