Agents of SHIELD season 7, episode 7 review: The Totally Excellent Adventures of Mack and The D

“The Totally Excellent Adventures of Mack and The D” saw the gang go to the ’80s as Agents of SHIELD season 7 hit new highs.

Agents of SHIELD season 7, episode 7, “The Totally Excellent Adventures of Mack and The D” was a wild 1980s adventure for Mack (Henry Simmons) and Deke (Jeff Ward).

Last week on the Marvel TV series, in the Bicentennial-set “Adapt or Die,” SHIELD managed to stop the Chronicoms from taking over SHIELD from the inside in stealing the memories of SHIELD agents, and the Coulson LMD (Clark Gregg) blew himself up to destroy the Hunters.

Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) let an important family secret slip, and after helping them escape from the Lighthouse, Mack lost his parents after they were revealed to be Chronicom imposters.

While grieving these losses, Mack and Deke were caught outside Zephyr One when it made an unscheduled leap into the future, stranding them while their teammates shot back into the future.

Awesome ’80s… but humanity’s still the same

Apparently the Zephyr made a pit stop in 1982 when Deke and Mack disembarked, so they didn’t spent the whole six years stranded in River’s End in upstate New York. But they did spend nearly two years, and it wasn’t an easy ride at first.

After angrily shoving Deke away, Mack fell into a huge year-long depression while grieving over his parents and the loss of the team (including Yo-Yo), spending his days listlessly building model cars, drinking beer and watching TV while brooding on the couch or in his recliner.

Meanwhile, Deke brings groceries by every so often and tries to be there for his buddy Alfie, whether it’s the version he knew or the 10-year-old alternate version being raised by his uncle.

Enter the Deke Squad

Meanwhile, Deke, being Deke and with all the well-intentioned flamboyance that entails, has been building a cover band called the Deke Squad, who are currently rocking out at the local bar while claiming to have written songs that haven’t came out yet.

Once Mack finally feels up to being around people again, he catches one of their shows at the bar, and Deke does his best to talk him into joining the team that he’s forming – once Project Insight fell apart, apparently so did SHIELD operations at the Lighthouse, so Deke’s been trying to turn the band into more than just a cover group in forming them into cookie-dough agents.

At first Mack’s obviously reluctant to rejoin SHIELD activity, even if they do equally-as-obviously need a leader, but the arrival of head Chronicom Sibyl the Predictor (Tamara Taylor) in skeletal robot form changes things.

Humans vs robots

A tense shootout then develops along the shadowy hallways after the sketchy drummer from Deke’s band fell victim to a bloody death by disembowelment via a robot’s circular saw hand.

Along the way, Mack regains his confidence and he and Deke rekindle their friendship after yelling at each other a few times, each member of the ragtag team proves their worth, and Sibyl’s army of skeletal Hunters is defeated….for the most part.

Summary

One remaining Hunter escaped with the Time Drive, which looks reminiscent of a much more important and very similar glowy sky-blue box in the Cosmic Cube. That Time Drive was then delivered to a still-alive Inhuman Nathaniel Malick, who is in cahoots with Sibyl.

Meanwhile, sometime in 1984 (20 months after they vanished), the Zephyr stops again as May (Ming-Na Wen) and Yo-Yo (Natalia Cordova-Buckley) are sent on an extraction mission to recover Mack and Deke, as well as Coulson’s hard drive. By this point the Deke Squad – brains Roxy, demolition expert Olga, and tech guys Tommy and Ronnie Chang – are all fully-fledged SHIELD agents, as much as they can be given the circumstances.

“The Totally Excellent Adventures of Mack and The D” was a blast from the past that hit all the right notes….and judging from the teaser trailer for the next episode, Nathaniel isn’t the only former villain making a re-appearance.

It was also the first truly standalone episode since the groundbreaking “4,722 Hours” (3.05), which itself was a flashback episode being told in the present. The director for both episodes was Jesse Bochco, which is cool.

SHIELD shrapnel

• Shoutouts from this episode, though most of these technically came out after this episode was set, include Back to the Future, The A-Team, Terminator and the MacGyver episode “The Human Factor” (2.01). The title comes from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, of course, and there were likely other callbacks I didn’t quite catch.
• Mack builds a model of Lola!!! And the A-Team van, and the red car from Starsky and Hutch. 
• Could Olga have been a washout from the Black Widow program who somehow survived the training anyway? And could she have been Nat’s mom? Probably not, but it’s fun to think so.
• Songs the Deke Squad claimed they’d written include Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” and The Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian.”
• Technically this whole episode was again a flashback, as Deke was being interrogated in the 1984 present by May.
• One of the neon signs in the arcade/workroom is a swordfish, and the consciousnesses of Coulson and Sibyl inhabiting hard drives and TV screens is a cool callback to Dr. Zola’s appearance in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. #ItsAllConnected
• Daisy is apparently still in a coma, so this was Chloe Bennet’s first episode of the series to be absent, which now means all main cast members have missed at least one episode.

Agents of SHIELD season 7 episode 8, “After, Before,” will air on ABC on Wednesday, July 15 at 10 p.m. ET. Haven you been enjoying Agents of SHIELD season 7? Let us know in the comments below!