Agents of SHIELD season 7, episode 9 review: As I Have Always Been

Agents of SHIELD season 7’s latest offering, “As I Have Always Been”, was a heartfelt time-warped adventure. Spoilers follow because otherwise there would be no review this week.

Agents of SHIELD season 7, episode 9, “As I Have Always Been,” was a wild, heartbreaking ride, combining elements of Groundhog Day, The Good Place and Final Destination into one of the most impactful closing scenes ever.

But first, how did this episode, written by Drew Z Greenberg and directed by Elizabeth Henstridge, reach its starting point with Daisy (Chloe Bennet) waking up inside a cryochamber?

In “After, Before,” May (Ming-Na Wen) and Yo-Yo (Natalia Cordova-Buckley) went on a mission to 1983 Afterlife to see if Jiaying (Dichen Lachman) could restore Yo-Yo’s Inhuman abilities. Indirectly, she is successful at this task, and the SHIELD duo make it back to the malfunctioning Zephyr One before it makes its final jump.

Unfortunately, Afterlife is taken over by Nathaniel Malick (Thomas E Sullivan) and Daisy’s older sister Korra, who plan to unleash anarchy upon the world.

Even more unfortunately, the team’s only plan to fix the time drive (Yo-Yo using her speed to yank out a part) doesn’t work, and everyone made preparations for a potential leap into oblivion.

Summary

Due to the unusual nature of this episode’s structure, there is no way the typical three-subject format of these reviews will work for “As I Have Always Been,” and spoilers will follow, so stop reading now if you haven’t seen it yet.

Caught in a time storm by a jump within a jump, the team finds themselves in the Quantum Realm (#ItsAllConnected within the MCU, after all), swirling around an open drain, which if they fell into presumably they would shrink to the size of an atom for all eternity.

At the outset, the team is 94 kilometers from oblivion, there are fires sprouting everywhere onboard, Yo-Yo gets trapped inside the docked Quinjet, thus stranded from the rest of the team, and there’s repeated pandemonium until the Zephyr glitches and resets itself again, each time drawing steadily closer to the drain.

Gradually, Daisy and the Coulson LMD (Clark Gregg) piece together that they keep their short-term memories of their attempts to escape, at the cost of losing distance for each jump. They then discover that Simmons (Henstridge) has a brain implant (Diana) that is blocking her memories, and that removing it is their only hope.

Several attempts prove that someone onboard carefully orchestrated a murder to prevent Fitz’s (Iain De Caestecker) location from being known (because otherwise Sybil’s Chronicoms would be able to steal that information thanks to the events of 6.06, “Inescapable“), and then further jumps confirm the culprit was Enoch (Joel Stoffer), who did it unwillingly because he was programmed by FitzSimmons to do so if such a situation ever arose.

More time jumps provide space for Coulson to rant in angry Season 1 style about how frustrating it is to be a machine, trying to figure out how much of himself is even human, and the pain and frustration of watching his friends die repeatedly, while he helplessly watches.

Yet more jumps let the time-displaced Sousa (Enver Gjokaj) reveal that he has a crush on Daisy because she reminds him of Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell).

Finally, the puzzle pieces fit together enough that a brain surgery on Simmons removes the implant, which leads to an onslaught of awful memories and the knowledge that enoch must be murdered in order for the rest of them to survive.

In an extremely moving closing scene, which former Bam Smack Pow co-expert Erik Swann thinks might be among the series’ best ever, Enoch commits suicide, echoing his decision in the real timeline (from 5.10, “Past Life”) which sent the team back from the future into the current alternate timeline.

https://twitter.com/AgentsofSHIELD/status/1286131904312299520

While he slowly powers down for the final time, Enoch, Coulson and Daisy ponder friendship, loneliness, grief, the meaning of existence and the inevitability of death, with Daisy reminding him that he was a good friend to all the team, not just his best friend Fitz. “As I have always been,” Enoch nods before passes away.

His sacrifice is not in vain – Mack hollers from the control room that they escaped successfully – but in the real world at Afterlife, Nathaniel is teaching Korra how to control her powers, using the exact same methods and dialogue that Jiaying used with Skye in “Melinda” (2.17).

Analysis

This episode deserves all the lemons. It was brilliant and followed perfectly the episodes that led up to it, at nearly every point echoing something that came before for longtime viewers on this crazy journey these characters have taken.

While the action will likely ramp up again in next week’s episode as the series rockets towards its for-real-this-time conclusion, “As I Have Always Been” showed yet again that the core of this show (and the MCU as a whole) has been in the relationships between characters, and how the minute decisions we make can have lasting consequences.

This tweet from Henstridge sums up the fans’ reaction to the series as well.

https://twitter.com/Lil_Henstridge/status/1151892902655737856

SHIELD shrapnel

• On overhearing the phrase “the system is overloaded,” Sousa says, “Please tell me that’s 21st-century slang for ‘working normally’.”
• If this isn’t Agents of SHIELD in a nutshell: After a brief kiss, Daisy goes, “That was nice. Now let’s trap a space robot.”
• Speaking of which – Sousa explaining the reasoning for his crush was incredibly awkward, and while understandable under the circumstances, feels weird and gross, like Steve Rogers dating Sharon Carter after being dethawed.
• The Zephyr jumped 23 times that viewers saw, and even repeated the title card (futuristic Season 5 version) for good measure. That was very clever. Overall, they jumped at least 119 times, though since Daisy didn’t power Coulson up again every time, the exact count is unknown.
• Whatever Simmons remembered…something horrible happened.
• Among Enoch’s final words, he revealed that this was the team’s final mission together.
• Enoch’s goodbye scene was just as beautiful and hard to watch as Coulson’s before his death, or when Bobbi and Hunter went off the grid, or when Hunter said goodbye to Fitz after breaking him out of prison.

Agents of SHIELD season 7, episode 10, “Stolen,” will air on ABC on Wednesday, July 29, at 10 p.m. ET.

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