Week 98: What If..., Identity and Change

What If…: I loved this! The storytelling is brisk, the action is entertaining, the performances are really good (apparently Elizabeth Henstridge was recovering from a cold while filming and they just left her voice that way), the music is haunting, and the ideas are really clever. (A new "Agents of Hydra" title card! Alexander Pierce High School! ICERs are deliberately painful and near-lethal! The hair department gave Leo Fitz a fashy!) Even the routine scenes that always appear in this sort of story, like Daisy Johnson improvising badly in the morning after waking up Grant Ward and Jemma Simmons failing to convince Phil Coulson while planting a seed of doubt, worked well because of the specificity of the details. This is the kind of story that you can only tell years into a television series; it just wouldn't work in the first season because we don't know these people very well yet. I'm so glad that this isn't one episode; giving it a run of multiple episodes should give the story some room to build on its ideas, assuming that it doesn't run out of them too early.

I'm even glad to have Brett Dalton back. His natural charisma was wasted on years of Jerkass Ward, but he's warmer and more sensitive in this version of the character, if a bit self-involved as a boyfriend. I don't love the feeling that Johnson *must* have a boyfriend and that it *must* be either Ward or Lincoln Campbell, but that's TV I guess. If Ward's as selfless as he seems this time, I wonder about the wisdom of telling him the truth about the simulation and his death in the show's world. Would you tell him? He might be so eager to stop Hydra's evildoing that he'd help Johnson and Simmons deactivate the simulation… or he might refuse to end his virtual life without a real identity to live onward and thus turn against them. It's an interesting philosophical dilemma.

Speaking of philosophical dilemmas, I'm not going to harp on the show's ongoing failure to realize that S.H.I.E.L.D. is just as bad as Hydra for what feels like the dozenth time. But I do appreciate that the show is at least dealing head-on with how bad authoritarian control is and how easily America can give in to it (especially in the post-9/11, let's-trade-freedom-for-security mindset as recently discussed; one terrorist incident occurs and suddenly we're all just fine with letting authorities do anything they please). And hey, if nothing else, it feels like sweet vindication to watch the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents be on the receiving end of their brand of heavy-handed authoritarian policies for once. (8/10)

Multiple websites claim that there was a tribute to the newly-deceased Bill Paxton at the end, but I watched twice and didn't see it. Do you see it? Was it removed when the show migrated to streaming? I wonder why.

Identity and Change: I laughed out loud when I discovered that Fitz is just as terrible of a boyfriend to Aida as he is to Simmons. He demands private information from her, breaks into her secret files, undermines her authority and reputation, refuses to take no for an answer, and insists that his actions are justified because he's in love. With this episode, it seems clear to me that on some level, the writers understand what a crappy person Fitz is, since "Nazi Fitz" says things that are nearly identical to what normal Fitz has said, such as being willing to go across the universe for his love (a statement that makes no more sense in this virtual world than it did in the normal world pre-Maveth). I have hated Fitz since early in the series, so I'm very impressed with the writers' choice to base so much of this storyline on him being an evil little weasel of a man in any world. The other characters still don't get it (Simmons insists Fitz would never kill an innocent woman -- girl, he risked Hive exterminating the human race just to save your ass), and I doubt that the adoring Fitz fans in the viewing audience were ready to get it, but at least the writers have finally shown that they get it.

I would love the episode for its use of Nazi Fitz alone, but there's other good material here too. I really liked the manipulation of Johnson by Alphonso Mackenzie in the interrogation scene; the twist sneaked up on me successfully. I don't buy Mackenzie's young kid being such a tech genius, and the timing is off with some of the child actor's line readings, but the relationship between them is still warm and I believed the horror that he was barely containing for her sake. I liked the confrontation on Holden Radcliffe's private island, with Aida seeming to take pleasure in following her programming in letter but not in spirit, though I object to Agnes Kitsworth existing merely to be killed to advance the stories of two men. How did Simmons get her voice back? (8/10)