Spoilers

“After, Before”

Episode eight of the final season of the Agents of Shield finds the team in major trouble aboard the Zephyr-1 as the time drive was not working properly. It was making jumps in time at a quicker and quicker intervals, leading to the potential of collapsing on them.

Yo Yo’s power becomes a key to fixing the time drive, so Yo Yo and May go on a trip of discovery to try and get Yo Yo’s Inhuman powers back… which meant going to Afterlife to ask for help from Daisy’s mom, Jiaying.

This episode becomes an internal story of Yo Yo, her doubts, her guilt and how she had been holding herself back. The episode uses both Yo Yo and May in a great interaction, but only the way that they could do it.

As Yo Yo was discovering her inner truth, other problems and tidbits popped up for the show.

• Simmons provided Sousa with a new prosthetic leg.
• Coulson was becoming somewhat down on his LMD-ness.
• We find out that Enoch can keep the tempo on drums.
• Daisy is slowly healing from her traumatic situation at Nathaniel’s hands.
• Nathaniel arrived at Afterlife, coming to recruit Kora to his side.
• Kora asked how Nathaniel knew about her and Nathaniel told her it was his new friend, Sibyl.
• Nathaniel and Kora have the Inhumans at Afterlife captive.
• Simmons sends a emotional message to Fitz.
• Yo Yo’s efforts with the time drive did not work and the Zephyr jumped again at the end of the episode.

I chose to only do this one episode for a couple of reasons. The first one was the time available was short, but the main reason was that, in my memory, episode nine of this season may be my favorite episode of the entire seven years, and I wanted to make sure to give that episode its flowers. And since I went ahead and watched “The Totally Excellent Adventures of Mack and The D” with episodes 4,5 & 6, instead of pairing it with this one, that meant I needed to do one by itself.

With Nathaniel and Kora setting themselves up as some “big-bads” for the last few episodes, this was an important episode to connect the series to where it was going.