IN REVIEW: AGENTS OF SHIELD (S7 – E4) – Out of the Past

Synopsis: Agent Phil Coulson comes to a realization about the importance of July 22, 1955, in the S.H.I.E.L.D. history books.

The Story

This episode fills us on about an iconic piece of S.H.I.E.L.D. history. The day Agent Souza died. Basically, in order to stop the chronicoms Coulson and the team must somehow do the job by preserving history as much as possible, which proves rather more difficult than they thought. Especially given that it is Wilfred ‘Freddy’ Malick who is the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. in 1955 that also happens to be the Hydra mole that Souza is working to expose. This also means that the chronicoms have to change their tactics as well. Up until now. They have been looking to bump Malick off, but the strategy has changed.

Meanwhile, Agent May is still having problems re assimilating to her team.

Acting

Due to a glitch with the LMD that has replaced the dead Agent Coulson Clark Gregg gets to have fun narrating in the third person as the episode operated like the plot of your typical old Humphrey Bogart detective noir movie. We also got a return performance from Joel Stoffer as Enoch, who is about the most unsympathetic bartender you’ll ever meet. But this episode pretty much belonged to Clark Gregg.

Overall

I loved all the third person stuff with Coulson narrating the events as they happen and commenting on the various different historical happening in S.H.I.E.L.D. I also thought the scene between Yo-Yo and Deke was pretty good where they are in the car expressing their respective views about their mission being too pretty much not disturb the status quo.

I also enjoyed the fact that the episode was entirely in black and white, which worked really well alongside Coulson various comments and stories, that were being related to us in the voice-over segments. It made the episode seem like an old-style Mike Hammer story.

Overall. A fun episode, which offered up a few plot twists, which see the chronicles having to change tac, which was likely to happen eventually. I can’t wait to see how the team get on in the 1970s next week. Hopefully, we’ll get some old 1970s footage of Stan Lee worked into the story somehow.