Agents of SHIELD season 5, episode 5 review: Rewind

Fans of Fitz can finally stop boycotting the new season of Agents of SHIELD: their boy is back!

This latest episode of Agents of SHIELD starts back at the beginning of the season with Fitz sitting at the infamous diner before the rest of the gang are spirited away and he is left behind.

Only seconds after the disappearance–which I could probably describe to a sketch artist, I’ve seen it so often–the government buzz-kills the Shield agents were expecting actually do show up and capture the lone Scotsman,  followed closed by interrogating the scientist with a bad cop/other bad cops routines.

Once he convinces his jailers he’s telling the truth, they decide it’s best to have the smartest guy in the room working for them and set Fitz’s considerable brain power to the task of finding his friends and watching soccer…lots of soccer.

The isolation unsurprisingly gets to Fitz and he begins K-Paxing his cell and writing coded messages to Liverpool’s manager, something many fans of the premiership have done, only less “coded” and more “profanity-laced.”

Eventually, his bashing of the side works out and his “attorney” Lance Hunter shows up to defend him and the honor of his favorite sports team (you’ll never walk alone). Yes, that Hunter (hey, where’s Bobby?).

Those expecting a thrilling Matlock-esque scene where Hunter outwits the US government in a dramatic court scene using charm and country wisdom will be disappointed as Hunter quickly blows a hole in the cell wall and the two escape in

a helicopter

an old RV named Rusty.

You know what that means…road trip!

No sleep ‘till, do, do, doot, do, an apocalyptic future!

The two immediately begin tracing the events of the night of the disappearance and find that their friends were taken by a shape-shifting van. Eat your heart out, Mystique.

A beat later Fitz and Hunter come face to face with the man behind the were-van, the mysterious bald stranger from the opening episode who prefers to shower without his skin for that deep-down clean.

The bald man reveals himself as Enoch, a sort of Watcher like being with a convoluted origin that, frankly, I didn’t pay attention to. I’m sure they’ll never mention it again.

After some gun-point diplomacy, he leads our two plucky heroes to Robin, the daughter of an Inhuman prophet we met back in season three, whose touch foretold death. It turns out the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. This young girl has inherited some of daddy’s foresight, and is scribbling away scenes from the future in all the colors of the Crayola rainbow. Like most kids, however, she only does stuff when she wants to, so Fitz and Lance settle in with some cocoa and sleeping bags, presumably to talk about boys and Teen Beat magazine (hey, where’s Bobby?).

After the boys spend an evening talking about love, morality, and how life is just, like, sooo hard and parents just don’t understand, Fitz brings Robin some breakfast. Her powers, like the rest of America, apparently run on Dunkin because his offer of chow convinces her to tell him a secret and offer a new drawing: Fitz wasn’t taken with the others because he has to save them. After careful study, the drawing seems to indicate that…just because your kid has psychic powers, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t suck at art. Hey, can’t win ’em all.

Now that Robin has added Fitz to the prophecy, Enoch is able to offer real assistance in the form of his stolen space pod according to Chromnicom Cosmic Law 327 Section B3, which states, “Once an obstacle for advancement has been present for approximately half an episode, we can solve it and go on.” Unfortunately, getting to the pod requires Fitz and Hunter to break back into the military base they just escaped from, where they are still, one must imagine, cleaning up the remains of a certain

crashed helicopter

incident.

Some ferrets are released, some weapons are recovered, there’s a daring escape. Real cool Agents of Shield stuff (HEY, WHERE’S BOBBY?!).

Having recovered Enoch’s pod, Fitz reveals that he won’t be traveling to the future so much as waiting for it, chilled out in a relaxing, dreamy cryogenic state. While Fitz gets ready for the big chill, Hunter and he share a bro-bonding moment, made all the more intimate thanks to that sleeping bag heart-to-heart scene. Then Fitz is flash frozen for the future, waking up to a patiently waiting Enoch—guy has no life—who welcomes the Scot to the future with talk of a plan and that sweet, sweet bounty hunter mask he wore in the previous episode.

Next: 50 greatest super heroes in comic book history

Next week should bring past and present together, and hopefully give more hints as to how this whole world-getting-destroyed-thing happened. See you then, space friends.