Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD Season 3, Episode 7 Recap – “Chaos Theory”
I feel as though Ian Malcolm would have a thing or two to say about this week’s Agents of SHIELD episode, mostly because it’s titled “Chaos Theory.” Jurassic Park aside…
Not-So-Short Summary: The flashback to Maui with May and Andrew is a touching moment where they try to work out what they will be when they come back to reality. It turns out SHIELD sent over Jiaying’s things for Andrew to look through; one of her books happened to have some Terrigen Crystal dust in it that Andrew inhaled.
When May returns to SHIELD HQ, she wastes no time in double and triple-checking where Andrew has been, which was within 30 miles of five Inhuman deaths. She bursts in to his offsite reevaluation of Joey to confront him before anyone else around them gets hurt. Naturally, he does the wrong thing and shoots her with an ICER.
Once he gets them to a place without SHIELD, Andrew explains what happened. He says that Lash is his instinct. He has a hunger in him to be around other Inhumans and it’s only sated when he kills them. You can see Andrew slowly becoming more of Lash as the conversation goes on, unhinged and exposed to the darker side of himself.
On the SHIELD/ATCU front, Coulson has a secret meeting with the President and other higher-ups of various organizations to discuss the threat of the Inhumans; he’s posing as an ATCU advisor since SHIELD doesn’t exist at the moment. When his date comes to pick him up, Daisy gets to give Rosalind a tour of SHIELD HQ. They both grimace through the whole thing.
Before they get to the President, Mack shows up with Lincoln, who has intel on Lash. Long story short, everyone realizes that it’s Andrew, because he’s been using Jiaying’s ledger to track down the Inhumans from Afterlife, and hew as the only one with access. And then Lincoln lays down the truth hammer:
Andrew won’t be able to change between Inhuman and human; the day will come when he remains Lash. He’s still in a transition phase.
Coulson shows up to break up the happy party. The ATCU and SHIELD work together to try to bring Andrew in, but naturally it’s loose cannon Lincoln who screws things up and goes in, electricity blazing. Andrew transforms into Lash, all hell breaks loose, bullets don’t work, etc…
Lash strangles Rosalind and drops her over the edge of the…we’ll go with fifth floor. Daisy manages to slow down and cushion Rosalind’s fall, finding new powers she didn’t even know she had.
May talks some sense into Lash to bring him back to Andrew. She then shoots him multiple times; he stumbles back into the Inhuman cell SHIELD has set up and May slams the door shut. Turns out she was shooting to kill, but even in the human-looking form, he’s immune.
In the end, May agrees to put Andrew in that stasis state over at the ATCU until they can perfect their cure.
FitzSimmons: Simmons gives up her cell phone to see if Fitz can’t get any data from it. He finds a lot of stuff, losing it when he finds a cute selfie of Simmons and Will, but being drawn back in when her audio files start to play. Watching him watching a video she took before she found water hits you right in the feels.
Fitz’s big discovery is that the shape of the castle from the medieval flashback/site of the Monolith transportation is the same shape as the NASA badge on Will’s suit in Simmons’ selfie. So what if those medieval people were also behind the NASA program that sent Will there? Conspiracy theories away!
But what’s more important is that Simmons and Fitz are on the same page about their feelings, or so it seems. For now, they’re going to sit on it and just watch the sunrise, a touching suggestion by Fitz.
Post-Credits Stinger: It’s our one and only glimpse of Grant Ward! He’s meeting with Gideon Malick. Malick isn’t sure that Ward is after the right thing; after all, revenge isn’t a grand enough scale. Ward thinks otherwise–as long as he kills Coulson, SHIELD won’t grow back.
Malick gets a phone call; it’s Rosalind. It wasn’t the President they were meeting–she was bringing Coulson to Malick. And it looks like Coulson got nice and cozy with Rosalind after that Lash business.
Badass Moment of the Week: Nothing super outstanding. Lash taking down all of those people was pretty cool, as was the daydream about ripping a glowing hole through Joey before coming back to reality. That one even threw me.
Best One-Liner: “Really gotta commit to that shotgun-axe idea,” Mack mutters after multiple ICERs don’t take down Lash and he’s forced to run away.
I didn’t touch on Bobbi and Hunter because they only had one scene. Bobbi drops the bombshell on Hunter: she wants neither of them to go after Ward. It’s reckless and stupid and one or both of them will end up getting killed. Well, at least one of them has some common sense, and at least Hunter seems to listen to her.
This season of Agents of SHIELD so far is such a roller coaster. That post-credits stinger is definitely one of the more twisted ones this season, packing in quite a few punches in the minute and a half it took. Does anyone else feel like it’s been nonstop?
Next week’s episode looks to ramp up the pace even more, with the post-credits stinger reveal not taking too long to get to Coulson. But you do have to think that it’s Coulson; even when he lets his guard down, he doesn’t really let his guard down.