Week 100: Farewell Cruel World!

This isn't a bad episode, just a hollow one, consisting almost entirely of plot now that the explosion of ideas from the Framework story have run their course. The one notable new idea here, that some characters would resist returning to the waking world and that one would outright refuse, was clever and well handled, especially when the visual glitches proved to Alphonse Mackenzie that he was in a simulation. I'd have appreciated a line of dialogue acknowledging that Daisy Johnson could simply force him through the hole and chooses not to violate his will.

The rest of the episode is underwhelming, particularly the showdown between Jemma Simmons and Alistair Fitz, which should have been more of a debate of principles about what's best for Leo Fitz, or at least a truly bitter confrontation since Simmons knows how evil Alistair is, but instead is mostly just there to advance the plot. (For once, the bad guy gets fridged to motivate a hero. That's a new one.) Holden Radcliffe pretending to swap allegiances is nothing new since we've seen him do it before, and I'm glad that the show didn't dwell on it.

So the problem with Aida getting a fleshy body is because she'll have free will to murder the heroes in the Framework. This is idiotic. She already had a human that would have done it for her, Anton Ivanov, and it wouldn't take her long to find a random person on the street who would be willing to press a kill switch in exchange for a briefcase of cash or something. There are lots of ways that a killer robot could exterminate these people; necessitating a "human" body is nonsense. (4/10)

Quick thought: Upon waking up in reality, Phil Coulson beheads the Aida LMD, presumably to protect the team but not-so-subtly because he wants her dead. But it turns out to be too late, because Aida has already finished the transfer into her new body. Would it have been more interesting if Aida's consciousness transfer had only been possible as some kind of fail-safe in her programming, like she had a pod that automatically transferred her mind into a new robot body in case of death and this time she swapped out the standby robot replacement for a new fleshy body? Written that way, she could have been acting so evil this whole time because she wanted S.H.I.E.L.D. to murder her, and it would be Coulson's vengeful bloodlust that finally allowed her to triumph. Maybe that's too complicated, but it would add a moral dimension to the conflict that's missing.