Agents of SHIELD season 7, episode 2 review: Know Your Onions

What happened in Agents of SHIELD season 7 episode 2, “Know Your Onions”?

Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD season 7 episode 2, titled “Know Your Onions,” stayed in 1931 New York City following the revelations from “The New Deal.”

The SHIELD team traveled back in time to catch Malachi’s (Christopher James Baker) Chronicoms (Cylon-like aliens), keep them from overruling the planet and recovering Fury’s Toolbox. While Daisy “Quake” Johnson (Chloe Bennet) and Deke Shaw (Jeff Ward) both loved the novelty of briefly living in the 1930s, SHIELD Director Alphonso “Mack” MacKenzie (Henry Simmons) was understandably less than thrilled with doing the same.

Back on the now-TARDIS-like Zephyr One, Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) crafted an upgraded set of prosthetic arms for Elena “Yo-Yo” Rodriguez (Natalia Cordova-Buckley), while Chronicom ally Enoch (Joel Stoffer) played nurse for a recovering Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen)…who is an even more unruly patient than even Skye was back in season 2.

While successfully preventing the Chronicoms from assassinating Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt at a party, the team was unable to prevent a mysterious woman from being shot, and learned that teenage bartender Freddy Malick has been given a vial of something (GH-325?) that will lead to his son Gideon (Powers Boothe) founding HYDRA in the future.

Thus, Freddy was actually the intended target.

Riding the rails

However, they escape successfully, and Deke and Mack are tasked as bodyguards as they drop off Freddy’s bootlegging stash. After some argument, they go with him as he hops a boxcar to take a five hundred or so mile journey to the rondezvous point.

Along the way, they try to reason with him, learn more about his background, while Freddy teases Deke about being a less-than-successful inventor, based on the inability of his walkie-talkie to work properly.

Speakeasy shenanigans

Back at the speakeasy, Daisy and the Coulson LMD (Clark Gregg) call in Simmons and Yo-yo for backup help in dealing with the mysterious woman who was shot, where they uncover another vial of a mysterious formula.

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Simmons being Simmons, she applies some biochemistry wizardry and makes a colossal discovery: This greenish liquid is part of Dr. Abraham Erskine’s original Super Soldier formula destined to be given to Johann Schmidt, the Red Skull himself.

Also, the Chronicoms show up and raid the speakeasy, failing to find anything in part due to Ernest Koenig’s (Patton Oswalt) bravado.

Mental repairs are a function of time it seems

Back on the Zephyr One, Enoch tries to nurse a very awake May without much success. After a fairly vicious fight in the cargo hold (hearkening back to Season 1 scuffles on the Bus), the arrival of the Coulson LMD seems to calm her down, and she allows herself to be sedated again, though she is acting strangely numb and emotionless, even for her.

Out in the field for her first mission since the shrike, Yo-yo freezes in an important moment, which led to a heart-to-heart talk with Daisy, who everyone still sees as the group’s true leader. Yo-yo suspects it’s a shrike-related symptom, though this theory remains to be proven.

Meanwhile, in the face of conflicting orders, Deke struggles with the potential butterfly effects (and the morality) of shooting an evildoer before they cause irreparable further harm to others in the future.

Summary

The result of all this is that the team prevents the Chronicoms from assassinating Freddy, and he escapes safely, which will ensure HYDRA will form and the SSR/SHIELD will be formed in response. Freddy also shot Ernest, though not fatally, beginning his life trajectory.

When the Zephyr shoots into the future, Enoch misses the bus at the last second, staying trapped in 1931, where he becomes Ernest’s new bartender, and teaches him a good deal about robotics.

Agents of SHIELD season 7 episode 2, “Know Your Onions,” was a typical second episode in that it mostly served as filler to really get the characters into position for their first main action of the story. But it fulfilled that job admirably, deepening the insight particularly of nagging timeline questions we didn’t realize existed.

SHIELD shrapnel

• “You died, Agent May. Simmons revived you after a considerable amount of time, and now you are in the year 1931.” “I’m hungry.”
• Freddy’s wealthy father went bankrupt during Black Tuesday and committed suicide shortly thereafter. Sadly, this did happen.
• “I’m a biochemist, not a bird” and “I’m a doctor, not a dame” – two Jemma Simmons lines that have a definite Lola Bunny “Don’t ever call me doll” vibe.
• The episode title, a slang term meaning “very knowledgeable”, is used twice, first referring to Simmons’ science skills, secondly to Enoch’s ability to make drinks.
• Ernest is flabbergasted when he sees the Zephyr, assuming they’re Martians. He also knows the fairly new term for “electric men,” “robots.” (First used in the 1920 play “RUR.”) Simmons also accidentally lets slip that World War II will happen, which also blows his mind.
• I don’t think we learned what happened to the mysterious woman, though it’s possibly I missed that detail.
• The Koenig siblings viewers know are Ernest’s grandkids, which explains a lot about them.

The action continues with Agents of SHIELD season 7 episode 3, “Alien Commies from the Future,” will air on ABC on Wednesday, June 10 at 10 p.m. ET.