The fourth season of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was one of their best with the second half being absolutely phenomenal. As in seriously, it ended as quite the must-watch season for me but it's admittedly hard to convince people to slug through the first three seasons to get to that one.
And that season ended with many of our heroes somehow in space, which is a heck of a setup given the largely terrestrial nature of the group. The fifth season pursues that adventure and takes is above and beyond as the agents are well out of their league in terms of what they have to face.
This season remained fairly interesting given the complete change in setting for the team. As always I wish that it had more connections to the larger MCU. Then again, the drastic change in setting was probably part of an effort to completely side-step MCU continuity. It's not a perfect excuse but it works well enough.
Synopsis: Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is an American television series created by Joss Whedon, Jed Whedon, and Maurissa Tancharoen for ABC. For the most part the show remains part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).
The season begins with Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen), Daisy Johnson (Chloe Bennet), Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), Mack MacKenzie (Henry Simmons), and Yo-Yo Rodriguez (Natalia Cordova-Buckley) waking up on a space station of some sort. They had been taken at a diner at the end of the fourth season and were transported here via a monolith - everyone except Leo Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) for some reason.
The space station is called the Lighthouse and in time the team discovers that they haven't just teleported into space but have jumped forward in time. And in this future, the Earth has largely been destroyed after some cataclysmic event but the details of this incident aren't too clear. Meanwhile the Lighthouse is run by the Kree with all the humans essentially prisoners. They had been deliberately brought here to somehow save humanity as part of some sort of a prophecy - at least that's what a few of the inhabitants believe.
What I Liked: The whole space setting was an unexpected shift, what more bringing in an interstellar race like the Kree into the story. I'm not sure if I totally buy into the Kree decidings to guard the remnants of humanity in this manner, but it was still interesting to have them in the story. It's always nice to sort of further flesh out the television universe with comic book races like the Kree. Will we get the Skrulls in the future?
This season again followed the sort of two-arc format of the fourth season. Thus getting back to "Earth" may have been an epic story in itself but it's just one half of the season journey. And our sort of linking character for the two arcs ended up being the spunky Deke (Jeff Ward), who has apparently become a regular cast member in the coming sixth season. But back on point, dividing the season into two big chunks seems to be working pretty well for them.
Oh, and we have to take a moment to celebrate how awesome the character arc for Leo Fitz was. Seriously, they came up with some great stuff for him - I guess they realized how truly awesome he was after the fourth season.
What Could Have Been Better: The space arc was a little weak since we had all the questions about the who the "Destroyer of Worlds" was and how the Earth got ruined. That sort of got answered later on but the bigger question of what got the Kree to set up shop here felt a little flimsy. And with it so central to the whole story, it just felt odd not to explain that better, at least in my opinion.
The second half of the season had some nice tie-ins to events in past seasons, most notably remnants of HYDRA still active in the world. I was a little surprised by the mix of characters brought into the mix of things, including convincing the likes of Adrian Pasdar to reprise his role as Glenn Talbot in a very significant way. This is more than a cameo and it's quite critical to the larger story.
And of course it felt like a missed opportunity not to better connect to the events of Avengers: Infinity War because they were SO CLOSE when you really think about it.
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