In Review: Agents of Shield (S7 – E8) After, Before

Synopsis: With the Zephyr’s time drive malfunctioning, the team is quite literally hurtling toward disaster and Yo-Yo may be their only hope.

The Story

The team is stuck in 1983 and the Zephyr has literally turned into a time hopper thanks to a malfunctioning component that no one can get to due to the fact that it is behind a spinning thing that is going way to fast and will disintegrate any normal person that touches it. Under normal circumstances, Yo-Yo would be able to sort it, but yo-yo is still without her powers, but that doesn’t mean she can’t get them back.

To that end, Agent May takes Yo-Yo on a trip to visit Daisy’s mother Jiaying who is still alive in 1983 and hasn’t met the Shield agents yet. Jiayling is an expert on Inhumans and likely the only person that can help Yo-Yo. Thankfully Jiayling has a problem with one of her inhuman patients who is out of control and hopes that Yo-Yo’s loss of powers may be key to helping Kora.

The Acting

It was great to see a return for Dichen Lachman as Jiaying and see her character before she went mad and lost her mind. The scenes between Lachman, Ming-Na Wen, and Natalia Cordova-Buckley were great. As were the scenes that Buckley and Na-Wen had where Yo-Yo was fighting May in order to help May better pick up on the feelings that may well be blocking Yo-Yo from using her power. I loved the whole psychology angle of PTSD creating a mental block for someone and the methodology in trying to find out what the block is so you can bypass it.

We also get a nice scene between Elizabeth Henstridge and Enver Gjokaj in which Simmons gives Sousa a new prosthetic leg, which allows for Sousa to apologize for being harsh with her when he questioned whether she was fit to lead the team. It also offered a bit of character growth for Sousa as he adapts to life with a group of people from the future.

Overall

Overall a brilliant character-driven episode, which gave us some really nice scenes for May and Yo-Yo as the two women help each other with their respective issues. Shield’s problems are not entirely over though as they still have to stop Nathaniel Malick from stealing more inhuman abilities, which seems to be his main goal.