SHIELD 2.19Phil Coulson tries to pull his original team together to take down the HYDRA base – but can old enmities be overlooked?

Quite a major step up from last week’s episode, this uses Agents of SHIELD a little bit as a dumping ground for some pre-Age of Ultron exposition (we discover how the Avengers learn about the location of the item they’re looking for at the start of the movie), but we do get to see just how far the series has come in the last two years… and it’s nowhere near as far as it should be.

The scene where Ward tries to address “the elephant on the plane” is just a little bit too long. Given the depth of feelings that he creates in everyone with whom he’s travelling on the mission, it’s a little unbelievable that they’d give him as much time to justify himself as they do, and I suspect there are quite a few people who think that Simmons’ plan should have worked. Still, it was good to see the team working together… okay, strike that, it was good to see the team in one place again.

There’s just three episodes left of the season (and the final pair are being aired States-side as a two-hour special), which leaves a lot of things to be sorted, and, to be blunt, some good reasons need to be put forward for the show to continue. It’s been interesting seeing the Inhumans’ entrance into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but when even Joss Whedon seems to be suggesting that this particular TV show doesn’t seem to fit into Marvel’s plans, you have to wonder if a wrap-up of the Inhumans’ arc is on the cards before AoS disappears into the televisual ether…

Verdict: Some enjoyable fight sequences, and character interaction don’t disguise the fact that Agents of SHIELD simply isn’t of the calibre of Daredevil or Agent Carter. 7/10

Paul Simpson

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