IN REVIEW: AGENTS OF SHIELD (S7 – E2) – Know your Onions

Synopsis: With the identity of the timeline-unraveling “thread” revealed, the team’s mission to protect him at all costs leads each agent to question their own values. Is preserving the future of the world as they know it worth the destruction they could prevent?

The Story

Having learned that the Chronicom’s are targeting Wilfred ‘Freddy’ Malick the future founder of HYDRA. Coulson, Daisy, and Simmons struggle to come to terms with the fact that they have to protect him in order to maintain the timeline. Elsewhere Deke and Mack are working to fulfill their mission to protect Freddy from the Cronicom thread, but Mack who doesn’t know about Freddy’s true identity senses that the young bootlegger is hiding something.

Back on the ship. Enoch is having to deal with Agent May who has awoken from the stasis that Simmons left her on.

The Acting

Ming-Na Wen puts in a solid performance as Agent May, who is trying to figure out what has happened to her as well as why she hasn’t been involved in the mission. The scenes she has with Joel Stoffer’s Enoch are brilliant fun to watch. Especially the scene where he tries to subdue her with the sedative.

I also thought that Patton Oswalt was brilliant as Ernest Hazard Koenig who is helping Coulson and the team was brilliant. I especially enjoyed the scene where he boards the Zephyr and is understandably blown away by all the technology. His reaction to Enoch was particularly fun as was his scene with Enoch at the close of the episode, which could well be a teaser for the Koenig and Enoch show. There is potential for a great double act here.

Overall

While not quite as strong as last week’s episode. This week’s show does a pretty decent job of driving the story forward insofar as it could have been. I enjoyed the scenes with Mack, Deke, and Freddy. In particular, the scene where Deke shows just how much of a fish out of  water he is when it comes to speaking in a style that is more in line with a person from the 1930s. This is particularly funny when the three of them are in the car trying to outrun the Police.

We also get treated to a pretty decent fight scene as Agent May tries to join the mission, but has to get through Enoch first.

Overall. A pretty good episode.