Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. returns for the final part of Season Four, a season divided into three Netflix-able chunks, and this arc has been set up in fine fashion. Life Model Decoy Aida has turned on Radcliffe, her creator. Her fellow LMDs, impersonating Mace, Coulson, Mack, Fitz and May, have taken over S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ. The real agents are strapped down in a former Soviet submarine, their minds trapped in the Framework, an alternate reality where people can live a life in which their greatest regret has been erased.
Only Daisy and Jemma have escaped with a small team aboard the Zephyr, along with the equipment they need to enter the Framework themselves. But what they find is not a world of happiness—instead, it’s a world ruled by the evil Agents of Hydra. The episode is entitled “What if…” and that’s the game the next few episodes will be playing. So let’s swallow the red pill, step through the looking glass, push forward the lever of our time machine, and dive down the rabbit hole into the world of the Framework!
(Spoilers ahead.)
First Things First: Before the new episode even aired, we had a lot of hints about what we would see, beyond what was presented at the end of the last episode. Spoilers had been spilling out all over the internet: Previews showing Grant Ward. A picture of Agent May on Facebook with the caption: “Saving the girl in Bahrain will change everything for Agent May in the Framework.” Images of Hydra motivational posters. Concept art showing Jeff Mace as a resistance fighter against Hydra. Then most recently, and most intriguingly, a picture of Mallory Jansen in the role of Madame Hydra, one of the greatest villains in Marvel comics.
Madame Hydra first appeared in issue 110 of the Captain America comic in 1969. She was created by Jim Steranko, the artist drawing that issue. He brought to his short run on Cap the same vivid action, unusual viewpoints, and surreal images that characterized his days on the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. comic book. The two page “splash page” in the middle of that issue, where Cap launches himself headlong into the forces of Hydra, is one of the greatest images in comic book history. And I remember Madame Hydra immediately grabbing my 14-year-old attention as I read that book. In a skin-tight green body suit and opera gloves, with spike heels, black hair covering much of her face, a pistol on each hip, and a whip in her hand, she was like an evil doppelganger of Wonder Woman. She was a character who attracted and intimidated at the same time, an intriguing combination to a young comic reader. Over the years, she proved to be a worthy opponent of both the Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D. And as Aida is the driving force behind the Framework, with powers that might even seem god-like to those it contains, it will be interesting to see how Madame Hydra plays into this storyline.
Playing the game of “what if?” has a long history in fiction. Whether the protagonist travels to a distant land, goes forward or backward in time, or even sideways in time to an alternate reality, authors have long delighted in examining a version of the world in which things worked out differently. Of course, there’s an entire sub-genre of science fiction, “alternate history,” devoted to this practice. Television and movies are no exception: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. joins a long tradition of TV shows that have spent at least an episode or two looking at what would happen to their characters in a different world. One of the most famous examples is the “Mirror Universe” of Star Trek, which became one of the most popular episodes of the original series, and spawned additional adventures in Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Enterprise, novels, comics and video games. Only a couple of weeks ago, though, we saw Supergirl and the Flash in a crossover episode that took place in an altered version of reality in which the characters all broke into song and dance numbers. These episodes can be great fun, but they can also run the risk of becoming “jumping the shark” moments, where the creators twist the show’s established reality just a bit too far. As the Framework plotline spins out over the next few weeks, it will be interesting to see if this story succeeds.
Episode 416, “What If…”
The pre-show synopsis from ABC tells us, “Hail the New World Order! Daisy and Simmons uncover secrets and lies in a world gone mad. With Hydra in control, they are our only hope to save everyone.”
The show opens with Daisy’s realization that she is in a relationship with Grant Ward, as she wakes up next to him and they head off to work. They commute from downtown DC to the Triskelon in Arlington (which proves the Framework is definitely a different world, because who commutes out of DC?) The offices are grim, the tech is different (fingerprints replacing computer passwords), and there are motivational pictures everywhere explaining the dangers of Inhumans. This version of Hydra obviously hasn’t brought Hive home from the far-away planet, or they would have those pesky Inhumans under control. Daisy meets May, who is all business, and has no idea what Daisy is talking about when she mentions the Framework. Daisy realizes that this rescue mission could be harder than she thought.
Meanwhile, Jemma awakens to find herself in a shallow grave alongside a badly decomposed body, and signs that she took two slugs to the chest; it appears that in the Framework, she was murdered in some sort of mass attack at the old S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy. She gets a ride from a good Samaritan who freaks out when they reach an Inhuman screening checkpoint—she sees that Jemma’s ID is S.H.I.E.L.D. and forces her out of the car. Ward and “Skye” are sent to interrogate a man who Daisy recognizes as Vijay Nadeer, and Ward surprises her by punching him. Jemma tries to blend into the crowd at a coffee shop, but two agents pick her up, and she has to zap both of them with some sort of cross between S.H.I.E.L.D.’s icer guns and a taser—another example of slightly different tech. Coulson is teaching a high school class, talking about how beneficial Hydra has been since the “Cambridge Incident.” He talks about how any links between Hydra and Nazis are simply propaganda, and about the dangers of a free press. A kid is led out of the classroom by Hydra agents, and Coulson puts up no resistance.
May comes in to the interrogation room, and Vijay taunts her for making the wrong call in Bahrain. She sends him with Daisy to “The Doctor.” In the real world, May killed a kid and saved the world; here she saved a kid, and destroyed the world—no wonder she is so testy and focused on business. Vijay attempts to escape and we see that the infamous Doctor is Fitz. We can tell he is infamous because he has ominous background music. Jemma takes the agent’s car, goes to the park bench that is her and Daisy’s rendezvous site, and finds the cell phone that will allow them to escape the framework, but Daisy is nowhere to be seen. Jemma then goes to visit Coulson, but he also doesn’t recognize her. No one remembers their real life. She finds his hula girl statue and tries to use it and the “magical place” phrase to trigger his memory, but as soon as she leaves he calls to report a subversive.
Jemma finds a kid spray painting her car, and accuses him of being a “rogue piece of code.” She is having trouble believing that the Framework is real. He helps her by loaning her his car (another sign that this is not the real world, as what kid would give up his ride to a stranger?), but a drone has been watching. Fitz examines Vijay with a device that tortures him at the same time, something Daisy has trouble accepting. May interrupts with the news that a man named Coulson has reported subversive activity; they dismiss Daisy, and Fitz tells her to handle it. Ward is wondering what is wrong with Skye—her atypical behavior is more and more obvious. Coulson goes through his files at work, finding more and more items that trigger odd feelings and memories. Skye goes to the park bench, and she and Jemma finally meet, but Ward confronts them with a gun, and says, “We need to talk.”
Acting on the report from Coulson, however, Hydra agents are closing in, and Ward shoots one of them—it turns out he is connected to “The Resistance.” I kind of saw that coming. After all, if he was a turncoat against S.H.I.E.L.D. in the real world, wouldn’t he be a turncoat against Hydra in the Framework? A car chase ensues, and they trade shots with black Hydra SUVs. Ward admits that he has been covering for Skye and knows that she is an Inhuman. They have to leave the car, because “the drones” are coming; Ward gets ready to torch their car, and says he will see them soon. Back at HQ, May briefs Fitz on the escape of the mysterious subversives, and shows him a forged ID Vijay had been using, which indicates a mole inside Hydra. They discuss how cameras must have recorded the incident, with the images sent straight to “The Director.”
Daisy and Jemma are trying to figure out how the Framework is so profoundly twisted and evil—it’s not only a way of keeping prisoners occupied, it has become an end unto itself. They try to leave the Framework, but their device does not work. Fitz goes to the Director, who is Aida—she’s not namechecked as Madame Hydra yet, but she is dressed all in green (albeit a more conservative outfit than the Madam Hydra of the comics). She tells him that she has eliminated the loophole the enemy would have used to escape—she clearly has some level of control over what happens in the Framework. And it turns out that Fitz and Aida are in a relationship, which helps explain why Fitz has turned bad—he is lost without the love of a good woman.
In the stinger, Coulson goes to his car and finds Daisy in the back seat. She wants him to remember, but all she is doing is torturing him…but then she tells Coulson that he’s the closest thing she has to family, and after a long pause, he calls her Daisy.
In the trailer for the next episode, Coulson and Daisy are captured by the Resistance, which is apparently led by Jeff Mace. There is turmoil at Hydra HQ. Radcliffe appears, and doesn’t offer much hope to our beleaguered agents.
Final Thoughts
The new arc is off to a really good start. Seeing how things are different or the same between the real and Framework worlds is a fascinating game. People have the same inclinations, but different experiences have shaped them in different ways. The little differences in technology are also clever. I think that the total ascendance of Hydra, and suspension of civil rights, is a bit doubtful in such a short period of time. But I suppose it is possible, with the Cambridge Incident providing an excuse for Hydra to take root in the way the Reichstag fire of 1933 gave the Nazis an excuse to take more power. There are more characters to meet in the next episode, and more worldbuilding to do, so the storyline definitely has my attention, and the powers that Aida has over the Framework ups the stakes and increases the level of jeopardy, keeping viewers on the edge of their seats.
So let’s start the discussion. If you have been reading these reviews, you know the drill: this post will kick off a discussion thread I will shepherd as the third portion of the season unfolds. If you want to follow the discussion, the best way is to use a Tor.com user account. If you don’t have one, it’s easy to sign up. Then you can follow the thread using the “My Conversations” feature, which makes it a lot easier to participate in discussions on the website. Feel free to come back each week and discuss the latest episodes, or whatever S.H.I.E.L.D. developments you might hear about. In the words of the uncanny Stan Lee, “Don’t yield, back S.H.I.E.L.D.!”
Alan Brown has been a fan of S.H.I.E.L.D. from its comic book beginning over fifty years ago. He still remembers reading that very first adventure in Strange Tales #135.
Well this should be an interesting storyline. Daisy is right this world is scary. Does anyone else wonder who Fitz’s “Father” is or is it going to be Radcliff or just a random statement. I’m still curious how Ward ended up in the framework. He is dead.
Ward is there because, as Aida and Radcliffe discussed last episode, every time she hooks a person into the Matrix — sorry, I mean the Framework — she has to restart the simulation at some earlier point in history. May’s mission to Bahrain occurred before season 1, and presumably before all or most of the movies. Cousin’s regret is his entire career, so the simulation began decades ago. There is no Captain America or Iron Man, no rediscovered Tesseract to attract the attention of Thanos and Loki, no alien invasion, and so on. The spooky Hive-worshipping branch of Hydra never got to the planet to bring Hive back.
In the end, will they just turn this Framework off, and if they do, will they be murdering billions of sentient beings? Aida made this with the magic book and it’s supposed to simulate every atom of the real world, magically. So are all these AI people conscious beings with a right to live?
Friggin’ autocorrect. Coulson, not friggin’ cousin, you stupid phone.
Prediction — Aida’s stated goal is to learn to feel emotions. (She’s Evil Goateed Data!) So I think our heroes will not escape until Aida helps them, which won’t happen until she gains emotions and discovers empathy.
@2/rm: The Bahrain rescue in the real world happened in 2008, so presumably the Cambridge Incident occurred not long thereafter. Online sources date the events of Iron Man to either 2009 (per the Marvel Database and a fan timeline I found) or 2010 (per the MCU Wiki, based on time references in later productions). So the change happened prior to all the movies aside from Captain America: The First Avenger. (And Agent Carter and assorted flashbacks.)
Since Ward only joined the Resistance AFTER he discovered Skye was an Inhuman, that means he did so for love, not morals. If so, does that mean in the Real World, Ward could have flipped on Hydra had Skye not shot him? If I remember correctly, that was the defining moment Ward gave up on Skye/SHIELD and went full obsession with revenge. Not exactly the best reason to flip sides, but as Jemma pointed (hilariously) out, Ward’s whole thing is being duplicitous.
I’m really enjoying this season. It’s really great watching them play in this sandbox. I also love how Jemma is soooo over this because it’s fake, meanwhile Skye/Daisy does illogical nonsense because it’s too real for her. I mean, just beat on Inhumans. They’re code. Right…?
The line of the episode, for me, was when Jemma says “And you woke up with Ward? This isn’t the Framework, this is Hell.”
Regarding timelines, one assumes that changes to the “fabric of reality” started as far back as when Coulson made the decision whether or not to join SHIELD, since that was his “one regret” and he’s the eldest of the group (barring May, possibly, but her regret was, as CLB pointed out, much later in time).
So, the Framework could have been out of whack long before May “saved the girl.” Depending on how much you think Phil Coulson, Agent of SHIELD altered history prior to the events of Iron Man. Maybe not much.
Interesting thing about Coulson – since these memories were “crafted” for him by Aida, the notes to himself, TAHITI postcard and so on would have to be things that he created in his own mind – not something provided by the Framework (despite the fact that several of the items look years old, and Coulson’s only been in the Framework for a day or two). His subconscious fighting the memory wipe?
Maybe our intrepid Agents will go find the memory machine from Season 1 and use it on all of the trapped agents. That was a creation of Hydra (well, provided by Garrett when he was being “The Clairvoyant” but one assumes he got it from Hydra somehow) so it’s quite possible it would exist in the Framework’s Hydra-controlled world.
I like @@.-@ rm’s prediction, but I think it will be love, not empathy, that changes her. She’ll love Fitz, but Fitz will somehow regain his true self and she’ll see how he loves Jemma, and will release them. In exchange, the AoS will keep the Framework running, but just for Aida’s consciousness (so it won’t be using up global computer resources).
Beyond theorycrafting, the episode was really good, though discomforting (which is what they were going for, one assumes). DarkFitz is scary. DarkMay isn’t really all that different (in tone) from how she was portrayed in Season 1. More ruthless and evil, but the same overall demeanor. AltCoulson should be interesting going forward. Ward being a turncoat makes sense and is funny, but I have to admit it did surprise me a bit. I’m wondering if he’ll turn out to be a triple-agent, using his guile to actually be infiltrating the Resistance for Hydra. Or maybe he’ll turn out to truly be a good guy who makes a heroic sacrifice or something, making Daisy wonder what he might have been in real life if not for Garrett (or whatever).
I’m looking forward to how it all plays out, and wondering if they will tie in at all with Guardians 2. Probably not, but maybe we’ll see a Nathan Fillion cameo as a famous movie star who was injured or something?
@7 Interesting thing about Coulson – since these memories were “crafted” for him by Aida, the notes to himself, TAHITI postcard and so on would have to be things that he created in his own mind – not something provided by the Framework (despite the fact that several of the items look years old, and Coulson’s only been in the Framework for a day or two). His subconscious fighting the memory wipe?
Recall that Simmons specifically referenced that Coulson had been mind-wiped before during the TAHITI process. It makes a sort of sense that he uniquely has two layers of consciousness (like a partitioned drive with some files copied back over), with only that later surface layer of his mind overwritten and/or accessed by the Framework. So, yes, that commandeered brain-box COULD indeed end up playing a role in getting the others out of this (even if, as posited by @2, the denizens of the Framework – including the programmed recreations of the trapped agents – are sentients who are allowed to remain in their “bottle” at the end of the story).
I’m going to predict that Ward ends up sacrificing himself for Skye/Daisy. You can see that she’s already starting to get past what the real Ward was like, and is beginning to accept that this cpuWard is a different person, with the positive attributes of the real Ward, but without the bad (probably).
Plus it gives Brett Dalton a chance to leave the show dying a hero’s death, rather than as a villain.
Also, someone’s going to have to fight altMay sooner or later…
@1. Fitz’s father would actually be (a simulation of) Fitz’s father, whom Radcliff mentioned knowing.Fitz’s one regret seemed to be not having him in his life.
Of course, we’ve also been told that Fitz’s father was human garbage, so altFitz is not just Simmons-less, but the result of what was probably years of emotional abuse.
And the one who fights altMay is going to be Daisy. No one else would have a chance but May’s own apprentice.
@7/Kalvin: “(despite the fact that several of the items look years old, and Coulson’s only been in the Framework for a day or two)”
I assume that time runs faster in the Framework than in reality, or at least it did initially — since after all they’ve had to rerun the simulation several times, resetting it to years or decades earlier and letting it run from there back to the present. So Coulson and the others may only have been in it for a couple of days of real time, but it’s probably been subjective years.
Is the Aida we saw the “real” Aida, or is she an avatar too?
@12/Sophist: I wondered if it might actually be Agnes, the cancer-stricken woman that Radcliffe modeled Aida on and convinced to go into the Framework. But it seemed like it was genuinely Aida. One, there’s no reason Agnes would be Madame Hydra in the simulation. Two, Mme Hydra seemed to be aware that Simmons was an intruder in the Framework and disabled her escape device to trap her there. Only Aida would know that.
Of course, since she’s an AI, it’s possible that she could’ve duplicated herself, that this could be an autonomous proxy of the Aida who exists in the physical world.
It’s a good thing that they used Darkhold magic as the premise for the Framework, as even with the power of the entire internet to draw on, I can’t imagine technology alone generating a simulation as rich in detail as the one our heroes are caught in.
We know from the previews of next week that Jeff Mace appears, but I don’t remember seeing Mack yet, and it will be interesting to see how and when he joins the story again.
I can’t help myself from thinking ahead. The show has not yet been renewed for Season 5, but I am hoping it will be. While the Framework story should resolve itself in the season finale, I don’t want to see Aida redeemed. Instead, I would love to see her escape and become Madame Hydra in the real world. SHIELD without Hydra is like yin without yang. And Mallory Jansen is doing a great job, and would be a great antagonist going forward.
Unfortunately, a fifth season is by no means guaranteed. While the show is getting a lot more positive attention this season, ratings remain stubbornly low. I imagine we should be hearing something about the future in the next few months. If quality of the product has any bearing on the decision, this episode will certainly have a positive impact. It was as good as any Agents of SHIELD episode we have seen to date.
Good start of the arc. I don’t think Fitz is “lost without the love a good woman”. I suspect in this reality he had contact with his father, even raised by him, and that has made him different. Oh, Cybersnark mentioned this too.
@2 – rm: They might not destroy the framework, but the people who exist in the real world will escape, and the created beings will remain in the framework, living their lives.
@5 – Chris: Most of the movies didn’t happen, but stuff like Ant-Man and the Wasp adventuring in the Cold War, The Winter Soldier operating, or Peter Quill’s abduction might have (assorted flashbacks, as you say).
@6 – Mirana: Ward is an abused, insane man in any reality, it seems.
@7 – KalvinKingsley: Coulson is definitely fighting the memory wipe.
@14 – AlanBrown: Marvel Comics (and other fictions) have shown tech alone creating this kind of detailed simulation. I did forget about Mack, I miss him.
@15/MaGnUs: I’d assume Peter Quill’s abduction didn’t happen, since I doubt Aida and Radcliffe had the processing power to simulate other planets and galaxies as well as Earth. So I figure only Earthbound events happened. Well, obviously the ancient Kree intervention that created the Inhumans is part of the Framework’s backstory, but I doubt any more recent alien incursions were modeled.
Remember the Darkhold is also involved, so it’s not just earthly processing power.
@17/MaGnUs: I’m not sure of that. Remember, FitzSimmons invented the Framework at the start of the season, as a VR environment for training SHIELD agents. Radcliffe built on that work. That’s how Simmons and Daisy had the tech on hand to let them hack into the Framework — because it was their tech. The Darkhold was used to expand Aida’s brain and to create LMDs like the May duplicate, with fully sentient brains. I don’t recall whether it was specified that the Darkhold was also used to expand the Framework. What I remember them saying is that the Framework’s processing was a distributed cloud-computing thing tapping into every computer on Earth, like an involuntary SETI at Home.
As already pointed out in @10, @15, Fitz is not just “lost without the love of a good woman”. It is what Daisy thinks, or says to Simmons, but that doesn’t mean she’s right. He clearly has a different history with his father – he said “As my father used to say, there has to be a trust in order to be a betrayal” (not the exact quote). So, in this reality, his father did stick around (this was always likely to be Fitz’ regret/wish), and probably had a bad influence on him. Maybe his father taught him not to be open and trusting with people. Which, come to think of it, makes me think of Garrett’s “You must never get attached to anything or anyone, it’s a weakness” lessons to Ward.
@6 It makes perfect sense, because Ward is still really the same guy – only not as unhinged as he increasingly became in later seasons, but a happier version of season 1 Ward. He was never loyal to Hydra but was insanely loyal to Garrett (“Our alliance with Hydra was always a means to and end, right? I mean, it’s not like we’re true believers?”). He agreed to work for SHIELD and then to work for Hydra as soon as Garrett asked him to (when he didn’t even know what Hydra was). This probably happened in this reality, too, since he ended up working as a Hydra agent for years. And Garrett himself was an opportunist who was in Hydra only to find a way to survive and not have his injuries/illness kill him. That was the goal of the mission he gave to Ward to infiltrate Coulson’s team – things like making Hydra super-soldiers was just a by-product, and necessary to justify using Hydra resources. (Kind of like Aida and Radcliffe were pursuing their own ends, but had to help the Superior with his own thing as a part of the deal.) Without that, Garrett is probably dead now, and Skye/Daisy is Ward’s only living real emotional attachment. He doesn’t have to choose between them here, since “Skye” was also working for Hydra.
Ward is still a guy who is motivated by attachments to specific people, not organizations or ideologies, and he’s still the guy who’s driven by the desire to protect those special people in his life and play the part of their hero/protector. In real life, Ward was a double agent for Hydra in SHIELD just because of his loyalty to his father figure and desire to save his life (and win his approval). In the Framework, he’s become a double agent for the Resistance just because he found out his girlfriend was Inhuman and wants to protect her. And he opted to keep the truth from her, and made decisions how to protect her while not consulting her, which is also such a Ward thing to do.
As for Daisy shooting him in the real world, it wasn’t the moment where he turned against SHIELD, at least it didn’t seem that way. It was just a moment where he transferred his feelings and obsession from her to Kara Palamas, and became fixated on a new “mission” – to help/restore Kara’s sanity/identity. (Unfortunately, his ideas how to do that were very messed up.) He even showed interest in helping Skye/Daisy when he heard she was in trouble (while he was working the alliance with Coulson and his team). He didn’t seem to be against SHIELD until late in the season – and even then it was directed mostly against Bobbi – and when exactly he made that decision is something I’m not sure about. The timeline and development of that entire plotline is kind of odd. He certainly opted against killing Simmons, after she had just tried to murder him. And he only really became full anti-SHIELD and obsessed with revenge after Kara’s death, which seemed to push him fully over the edge.
@13 Aida may have created Madame Hydra partially in order to protect the Framework. She probably has no problem with people fighting against Hydra, but Daisy and Jemma are trying to destroy the Framework, so they are the enemy she needs to deal with.
And, well, maybe also because she wanted to hook up with Fitz.
@14 Mack is in the preview for the next episode.
@18 According to the Word of God – i.e. Jed Whedon – the Darkhold gave Aida the ability to perfectly replicate the real world. He said so in the EW interview he gave post-4.15.
A few things before I finish the review.
It doesn’t appear that Hive is in play, though they kept the “HYDRA is ancient” backstory.
While the NPCs(for lack of a better word) are autonomous beings with their own drives so as to not break the simulation for the PCs, I do think they are programmed to be helpful.
May’s mission in Bahrain predates the entire MCU IIRC. So none of what we know has happened. Tony never escaped the Ten Rings and made a suit. Thor never reunited with Mjolnir and thwarted Loki, leading to the Chitauri invasion. Cap was never unfrozen.
Was that Hyde Coulson’s clipping about the Subversive in Wisconsin? I can’t imagine Hyde would take an overt war against Inhumans lying down. Felix Blake was also noted in the one Coulson was clipping when Jemma entered, commending his loyalty to HYDRA I believe.
@2 rn, Actually the Tesseract was found by Howard Stark while he was hunting for Steve’s body, so it should exist in The Framework. It appears without Fury’s insistence, and Erik coming to SHIELD’s attention because of Thor, the research never got a start though.
2/21 – Thanos was aware of the existence of the Infinity Stones prior to even the Tesseract being placed on Earth by Odin (which most folks put at 600 years before The Battle of New York in the The Avengers. I doubt it will come up other than as a passing reference and you are correct about Nick Fury, but I can’t remember if the Tesserect powered weapons he found on the helicarrier during that movie were developed by Howard or were Hydra? I was thinking they were developed by Howard but couldn’t find the reference and didn’t want to waste more time. In any event, Thanos has been wanting to form a Gaunlet so he must be aware that Odin had the Tesseract.
The fact that Cap’s body was never found would be a fact and could come to play, in the comic books, at various junctures, Red Skull wanted the body to place the Skull’s essence or soul, if you will, and other people would want the body for possible cloning, blood and other tissue sample. The Winter Soldier would also exist, but perhaps in the comic canon version, as an agent of the Russians, via the Red Room/Department X.
Marvel has sentient, function LMDs in their comic canon. I don’t really read Marvel that much but one of the Hawkeye minis I have read features an LMD that interacts with everyone and is raising a flesh and blood child(ren?) and if she hadn’t mentioned she was one, you wouldn’t have been aware.
This entire arc is somewhat interesting, I haven’t been following AoS since the first season never interested me, but will likely catch these three episodes.
This was a great episode. Most of what I would have wanted to say has been said, but I’ll add a couple other things.
– Interesting to note that, even though we saw an honest-to-goodness grave for Jemma at the end of the previous episode, it seemed like she was buried in a mass grave, or at least one much more spontaneous than what we saw there.
– I figured Ward would probably turn out to be good here, but it was still a (pleasant) surprise when it happened.
– It seems that AIDA’s avatar shares some conscious connection with AIDA herself, for her to know that Daisy and Jemma weren’t supposed to be there.
– I did notice the namedrop of Blake in Coulson’s secret stash. And it was touching to see the tribute to Bill Paxton.
Otherwise, I agree with KalvinKingley@7, though there were several humorous moments, despite the gravity of the situation, the line of the episode was Jemma’s “And you woke up with Ward? This isn’t the Framework, this is Hell.” That’s the line that brought me closest to waking up the other denizens of the house with a laugh.
Finally, I raised my arms and whispered (remember the sleeping denizens of the house) a triumphant “YES!” when Coulson said Daisy’s name in the stinger.
@23/JamesP: What we saw in the last episode was a small grave marker for Jemma, presumably the kind they use when there’s no body. A line in this episode said that marker was in England. Her actual body was in a shallow grave at the site of the SHIELD Academy in the DC area, evidently one of many fatalities of a Hydra attack thereon. Presumably the line given to her family was that her body wasn’t found, or something.
I wouldn’t say that Ward is good. I’d say he’s the same as he’s always been — amoral and treacherous, but in love with Skye and wanting to protect her. He was probably a loyal Hydra killer until he discovered that Skye was a latent Inhuman, and he joined the resistance purely to protect her.
This framework us a created works where any one and anything can be there. Ward is dead but remember this is a made up world by Adia and Ratcliff. Duh!!! Lol.
Sorry , phone has a mind of its own.
The framework is a fake world created by Aida and Radcliff using the Darkhold . The reason for the framework is so she can use lmds’ to take over Shield which gives her time to learn emotion , she even trapped Radcliff in the framework so she couldn’t be stopped. She wants to be real ( like Ultron ) . There is a lot to this season but don’t over think it to much. I can say it seems a trend where every series is having a ” what if ” moment. From Agents of Shield to Grey’s Anatomy to even Scandal. Lots of good tv.
@18 – Chris: You’re right, they never did state that outright, but I think it’s a possibility.
@19 – Annara: Good analysis about Ward. Also, nice to know about what Whedon said about the Darkhold and the Framework. It might not be exactly the Darkholme providing the bandwidth, but Aida’s advanced programming of it thanks to the Darkhold.
@20 – Aeryl: If only they had the budget to bring in Chris Evan, I’d love to see a HYDRA unfrozen and reprogrammed Cap.
Quick Recap, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Episode 417, 11 April 2017, “Identity and Change”:
Here’s the pre-show ABC episode synopsis: “As Daisy and Simmons struggle to discover an escape route to the real world, the identity of the Inhuman leader of the Resistance is revealed.”
First Thoughts: We get another solid show that helps us understand how and why of the Framework world, and we see how people are both the same and different in this nightmarish alternate reality.
Synopsis: Coulson struggles to understand as Daisy explains the truth about the Framework, but ends up focusing on a theory about Hydra using mind control soap. Mack talks in his kitchen with his genius daughter, Hope, who has repurposed a Hydra drone. At the bus stop, Hydra conducts an ID check, but another person bolts, saving Mack and Hope from having their drone discovered. Coulson, Jemma and Daisy discover Radcliffe is in the Framework. Aida is hiding Jemma’s identity from Fitz, but needn’t worry because he doesn’t recognize her. He would do anything for Aida, especially if it involves smooching. Daisy dives into the computers at Hydra HQ, and finds Radcliffe’s location. May wants Daisy to come with her to a meeting. Jemma and Coulson meet a resistance contact. He takes them to meet…Jeffrey Mace, director of SHIELD!
Coulson geeks out over “the Patriot.” Mace namechecks Agent Koenig, who helped set up their base, a sanctuary for potential Inhumans. Daisy finds at the meeting that Hydra is looking for Jemma Simmons. Mack tries to explain to Hope why Inhumans are hunted. Jemma asks SHIELD to help find Radcliffe, and Ward offers to help. Daisy is heading out with May and a Hydra assault team, which captures Mack and Hope.
Ward, Coulson and Jemma head out in a dilapidated quinjet. May interrogates Mack. In flight, Coulson is having doubts. At Hydra HQ, Fitz is obsessing over Simmons, and Aida says she ‘crossed over from the other side.’ He wants the truth about the other world. Aida says it is a nightmare world where Hydra lost, and she was treated as sub-human. Daisy interrogates Hope, and then talks to Mack, who says they need to talk. He says he knows about SHIELD, but it is a trap; he is just repeating what May wanted him to say. Daisy has blown her cover.
Daisy fights her way through the corridors of Hydra HQ. The quinjet lands on a beach, and they find Radcliffe. Implanted memories are “not cool, bro,” says Coulson. Daisy takes out an elevator full of Hydra goons, but is surrounded in the lobby, and beaten severely. Radcliffe is a demented shell of himself, living with Agnes, his old flame. He admits that he is dead in the outside world. He tells them that in the real world, the Superior has a base on a drilling platform in the Baltic. They talk about how their escape hatch to the real world doesn’t work. He says Aida must know they are here, and she and Fitz show up in a quinjet.
Aida has a cool cloak which looks badass, and she begins the search for the subversives. Ward calls her Madame Hydra. She talks to Radcliffe, and doesn’t want him to call her Aida. At Hydra HQ, Mack and Hope are reunited. He feels guilty about helping Hydra. Fitz is freaked out about Agnes, who looks just like Aida. Aida accuses Radcliffe of working to subvert Hydra, and Fitz holds a gun to Agnes. Ward has a shot at Fitz, but Jemma talks him out of it. Radcliffe says he is a friend of Fitz in the other world, and that Simmons is his true love. Madame Hydra tells Fitz she loves him. He is torn, but chooses to believe Madame Hydra. He shoots Agnes, and Simmons reveals herself. Ward and Coulson fight off the Hydra goons, and take off in the quinjet with Simmons. Back at SHIELD HQ, Mace wants explanations. Jemma tries to tell them that the Framework is not real. Mack shows up at their HQ, and admits that Hydra used him. He wants to help SHIELD.
Stinger: A beaten Daisy is in Hydra dungeons, trying to convince Fitz that nothing is real. He knows she is a potential Inhuman. He tells his goons to torture her some more.
Next Time: Hydra has a serum that can neutralize the Patriot, and Fitz stubbornly refuses to act like the Fitz we know and love. May and Mace go toe to toe.
Final Thoughts: The best thing about this episode was Clark Gregg, who did a great job playing the oddball school teacher who always suspected he was something more. The next best thing was the interplay between Aida and Fitz, as she struggles to keep him in line. Watching Fitz gun down Agnes in cold blood gave the proceedings a real sense of jeopardy. Mallory Jansen and Ian De Caestecker were on top of their game. In fact, kudos for all the actors, and for the writers and directors—this show was Agents of SHIELD at its best!
Back in reality, Aida was talking about being unable to experience emotion. Here, she’s emoting like a soap opera star. Was she lying then? Is she just putting on an act for Fitz now? Or did she reprogram her emulation in the Framework so that it could emote?
Madame Hydra is one of those Marvel characters whose licensing status is ambiguous, like Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. Under her alternate name Viper, she appeared in Fox’s The Wolverine, but they weren’t allowed to call her Madame Hydra because they didn’t have the rights to Hydra, and they changed her into a mutant with snakelike powers. Presumably this version of Mme. Hydra, in turn, can’t be referred to as Viper. So Marvel and Fox have dealt with the rights ambiguity by basically splitting her into two characters. Anyway, this version is definitely based on the original Madame Hydra, since “the Doctor” addressed her as Ophelia, and Mme. Hydra’s name in the comics is Ophelia Sarkissian.
If Mace is “the Patriot”, I’m a bit confused about the timeline.
It looks to me like Aida is crossing back and forth between reality and the Framework. I have to wonder if “Madame Hydra” will be a role she takes on in reality.
More like Madame Hydra is a virtual character based on Aida but no longer directly controlled by her (like Rommie-the-android versus Rommie-the-AI on Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda), who may eventually re-upload herself into the Aida body when/if the Framework goes down.
And note that the mind-control soap Coulson was worried about was blue –like the alien blood that “put thoughts into his head” in Tahiti.
I mean, he’s not wrong, exactly. . .
Not making Mace Captain America (a Steve successor in title and costume) in this reality was a missed opportunity, but I enjoyed seeing him be a hero here. I wonder what he did to get dubbed The Patriot in this reality? It sounds like he’s actually quite different than his real world counterpart, his regret is probably not being the hero they make him pretend to be publicly. And where did his powers come from, if most of the MCU as we know it didn’t happen? (I guess attempts to replicate Captain America.)
My son and were happy to see Mac, but we thought it was pretty dumb of him not to take away the drone from his daughter and dispose of it safely the minute she showed it to him.
Small quibble: I would have liked the HYDRA soldiers accompanying Fitz and Aida to wear green, like the ones with May and Daisy in the briefing. Green is more HYDRA.
@31 – Cybersnark: Yes, I noticed that about the soap.
First things first – Alan, your last paragraph before the Stinger mistakenly says “Back at SHIELD HQ, Mack and Hope are reunited.” Should either say back at HYDRA HQ or back at the Triskelion.
Another great episode. I wonder just how much fun these were for the cast to do? Having Brett Dalton back had to be awesome for the other 5 who’ve been with the show the whole time. Iain De Caestecker getting to play such a cold-blooded guy (at least so far) must have been fun. Clark Gregg killed it as the befuddled conspiracy theorist guy.
The few of us that watch the show were talking to each other today about being wary of the soap. Very confusing for the folks around us who do not watch AoS.
Theory time: The Good Guys ™ will eventually get through to Fitz, who will find that the only way out of this is from the other side. They won’t have any way to get out, other than through his Project Looking Glass, which Madame Hydra intends to use to inject her able-to-have-emotions self into her LMD body in the real world. However, he’ll state that none of them (those who are human minds inside the Framework) can use PLG to take over RealWorldAIDA (because science and reasons), so they have to use a Framework-created mind. And who else can they use but the one team-member who isn’t a flesh-and-blood brain plugged into the Framework? Grant Ward.
So there will be drama about whether to trust Ward or not, but eventually they will because he loves Skye/Daisy and they believe in that.Ward/AIDA will remove the team from the Framework, they’ll fight their way past the Superior and his thugs, and all will be well.
Season-end Stinger will be Fitz transferring FrameworkWard’s (FrameWard?) consciousness out of the AIDA LMD (and destroying it) and into a Grant Ward LMD, bringing Brett Dalton back onto the show as a heroic character again.
@33 Correction made, thanks for noticing. I suspect that they will have to pry Mack from the Framework with a crowbar. His beloved Hope is not only alive, but an absolute treasure. It will be heartbreaking for him to go home.
Poor Mack, yeah. And I like the WardLMD theory.
@32/MaGnUs: Mace as Cap would’ve been cool, but the Marvel movie people might not have wanted to allow that. There’s less coordination between the movie and TV divisions than there used to be, or than we would prefer.
Hydra-brand mind control soap: Pop one bubble and two more shall take its place…
@37 :-)
How do they come back from Fitz killing a totally innocent woman? Even if it was in a simulated world, it seems that her “essence” is what lives in the Framework even though her body was gone. Quite a turn for the character and sure to be traumatic once he fully realizes what he’s done. Add that to the guilt he will have for choosing to be with Madame Hydra and poor Fitz is going to have PTSD all over again.
For a long while, I thought that Gemma was going to look like a zombie because she had been “killed” in the Framework but after cleaning up at Skye’s apartment, it now seems she was just dirty and disheveled.
@39/vinsentient: Considering that Fitz’s whole personality has been reprogrammed, I don’t see how it’s that different from what Hawkeye did under Loki’s mind control in The Avengers. Nobody blamed Hawkeye for those actions, and he was still seen as one of the good guys afterward. Fitz himself will probably feel guilty about it, but I don’t think he can be objectively held culpable.
@36 – Chris: I know there’s not as much sync as we wished, or as there used to be, but I didn’t think that they were barred (however not set in stone) from using the title and a similar costume.
@41/MaGnUs: I don’t know if “barred” is the word, but I get the sense that studios or comics companies in cases like this are overprotective of their lucrative movie properties and want to “protect the brand,” making them reluctant to let other productions use them — which is why Batman has no presence in any of DC’s live-action TV shows except in sidelong and indirect ways. I’m just guessing, of course, but I imagine Marvel Studios’ film division might be similarly protective of Cap.
How did May know to tell Mac what Daisy’s real name was and that she was a SHIELD agent? Either Aida told her off-screen or May knew about the real world.
@43/C Oppenheimer: I’m sure it was the former. “Madame Hydra” is the only one who knows who they really are (since she’s either Aida or a copy of Aida), and she’s instructing her Hydra agents to go after them. She’s the one who told “the Doctor” about Simmons, so she probably knew or deduced that “Skye” was actually Daisy now.
Batman is supposed to show up in Supergirl at some point.
@45/MaGnUs: I haven’t heard anything about that. There was an in-joke where a family said “That’s it, we’re moving back to Gotham,” and another where Supergirl mentioned how her cousin had once worked with a vigilante with lots of gadgets and lots of issues, but that was it. Naturally that implies that Batman exists on Earth-38, but any fan or media speculation about Batman appearing on the show is just wishful thinking at this point. There’s been no announcement that he would actually appear. I searched for “Batman on Supergirl” and pretty much all the hits were from last October and November after those respective Easter eggs dropped, because the online media are desperate to fill up column space and use every vague Easter egg as an excuse to write articles that ask whether X character might actually appear on the show but contain no actual information and might as well just be water-cooler chatter. No sign of any more recent articles suggesting that he might actually appear.
Although there has been one Batman/Arrowverse crossover…
@32, Magnus, He did. He planned on returning it to where she found it. But Hope decided since she took it, it was her responsibility to fix it, so she took it back and was going to return it herself. She is truly Mack’s daughter, down to her ethical core.
I like Ophelia’s green tinged hair. I’m torn as to whether I want Ward to come out of the Framework. I think it’s too predictable. But so is a “redemption” arc where he sacrifices himself to save Daisy.
Coulson fanboying was great, as was the soap gag.
It’s a good thing that Ming Na Wen got to deliver a powerhouse performance during the LMD arc, because she has not been served well by this arc so far. I hope that something occurs when she meets back up with Coulson.
I’m betting the Looking Glass is similar to the portal that they built to save Robbie earlier in the season, one that will allow Ophelia to manifest in the world, not just be bits of data that she downloads into a robot body. If that is the case however, does it go both ways? Will it allow Daisy to manifest her Inhuman powers in the Framework?
Fitz. Poor baby Fitz. He really is a lost little boy in this world, moreso than in ours. I’m also glad to see that Whedon and Tancharoen have found away to have conflict in their relationship, that isn’t trite and contrived.
@47/Aeryl: Madame Hydra’s hair is green-tinged? I didn’t notice.
@40 CLB: I didn’t read the agents as being reprogrammed after they entered the Framework. More like after their life changing event in the Framework, events played out differently for them so they have different memories from that point forward. But the Framework didn’t overwrite their personalities and values, just let them build new memories that hid their real life ones.
And regarding Madame Hydra’s hair, it was more like she had a lock or two that was green and not so much that her entire head of hair was that colour.
Hope Mackenzie doesn’t sound right. I think she should change her name to Riri Williams and build her own suit of armour (I’m sure she already has the skills).
I was wondering if Mack’s brainwashing in the Kree temple would play a role here as with Coulson and T.A.H.I.T.I., and thus I was fooled by his act. Still, Daisy was way too trusting with him, considering how evil May currently is.
The discussion between Daisy and Coulson reminded me of this: how can conspiracy theorists even talk to one another? (for the record, Coulson’s version makes far more sense than Daisy’s). Loved how the conspiracy nut is obsessed with “fake news” and Fitz wants to make their society great again.
I haven’t seen the preview: is Mace inhuman in the simulation?
@29: Madame Hydra’s emotions is an interesting question. Because if the emotions only exist in this world, it means she’s different from Aida, and Aida doesn’t have any reason to let her ruin Radcliffe simulation. Does Aida know what Madame Hydra is doing with that world? Would she obey if Radcliffe were to give him the order to correct the simulations and let the other people out of it? She killed him so not to have to follow his orders anymore, but that doesn’t mean that she can ignore him. And the fact she can in this world makes me think Madame Hydra is actually not Aida.
@49, It was the tips that were green. I thought it was a nice effect.
@49/vinsentient: “I didn’t read the agents as being reprogrammed after they entered the Framework. More like after their life changing event in the Framework, events played out differently for them so they have different memories from that point forward. But the Framework didn’t overwrite their personalities and values, just let them build new memories that hid their real life ones.”
That was Radcliffe’s professed intention, yes, but it’s pretty clear that Aida/Mme. H has been pursuing her own agenda that’s transformed the Framework into something massively different and more oppressive than what Radcliffe intended — as he said outright in the last episode. So I no longer trust that that’s the case. I think Mme. H has been consciously manipulating their memories and experiences to shape them into what she wants them to be — at least for someone like Fitz, whom she clearly has a personal attachment to.
I also question whether there’s really a meaningful difference between altering someone’s memories of years of their life and brainwashing them. That’s essentially what brainwashing is — tearing down the foundations of a person’s identity and worldview so that you can replace them with your own versions, rebuilding their personality in a new direction. Just to think of a fictional example I came across recently, in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Peeta was brainwashed with altered memories of his past so that he’d believe Katniss had been his enemy instead of his friend, and would thus believe he had to kill her. So altering memories to change someone’s beliefs and definitions of friend and foe is absolutely a form of reprogramming.
@50/Athreeren: “I haven’t seen the preview: is Mace inhuman in the simulation?”
I get that impression. Maybe that’s the regret that was fixed for him — not actually being Inhuman.
@51/Aeryl: I guess I didn’t notice the tips of Mme. Hydra’s hair because I was distracted by how remarkably rectangular her face looked. I’m not sure if it was the hairstyle creating that effect or something to do with the makeup or the jacket collar. It reminded me of someone from long ago, but I’m not sure who — maybe Jane Badler in V? It also gave her kind of a Jack Kirby-character look, only more beautiful than I usually find Kirby’s drawings of women to be.
Another prediction to add to my previous one – Fitz will be swayed back to Team Good by remembering Jemma (duh) but the way they will finally make him remember will be to give him a Fitzsandwich: prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella with a hint of homemade pesto aioli.
The scent of the pesto aioli will trigger a rush of memories and it will all come back to him.
@52 Christopher L Bennet,
I think you are overestimating what Ophelia has done to the agents. The Framework took one thing from each person’s lives they regretted, and changed. That had a profound impact on the people they became. I agree that it’s not technically any different than brainwashing, but the intent matters a bit here.
She didn’t rewrite Fitz, she addressed his regret(likely his father’s absence) and now we see what kind of man he became.
She didn’t make Coulson an addle brained conspiracy theorist, taking him out of SHIELD left him with out a purpose in life, and the previous experiments on his brain allowed his true memories to peek through, and he coped with it by reaching for “alternative facts” that helped explain what he was feeling.
Making Mack a father is why his initial opinions on Inhumans have changed. When he first met them in the Real World, he was suspicious of them, and didn’t consider them quite human until he’d gotten to know Daisy as a person. But in this one, he’s teaching his daughter that Inhumans are still human, because he knows teaching prejudice to his daughter is wrong.
Ophelia didn’t “brainwash” May into a diabolical killing machine with no moral core. The logical outcome of May saving the girl in Bahrain was that the girl would cause more damage later, causing May to distrust her instincts towards mercy and compassion. Remember, when Coulson first came back and everyone was unsure what would happen, it was May who volunteered to be the one to monitor him and kill him if it became necessary. May has always been the person who would shunt aside her own feelings to do what needs to be done to protect people, what we see now is just that instinct writ large. And she’s always been willing to go to extremes, as we saw season two, against the Inhuman threat.
And Mace’s regret isn’t that he wasn’t really Inhuman, but that he wasn’t actually a hero. Remember the iconic photo that catapulted him to celebrity is a lie, he wasn’t rescuing that woman from the rubble, he tripped and fell on her.
Koenig was namechecked in this episode, as was Felix Blake in the previous one. Do you think we’ll get to hear from Lance and Bobbi too?
@54/Aeryl: “I think you are overestimating what Ophelia has done to the agents. The Framework took one thing from each person’s lives they regretted, and changed. That had a profound impact on the people they became.”
Again, that’s what Radcliffe intended, but it’s clear that what Aida actually did to the Framework is at odds with Radcliffe’s intentions. He wanted a paradise free of death and regret, and Aida turned it into The LMD in the Hydra Castle instead. Oh, and then there’s the part where she actually killed Radcliffe’s physical body. So I don’t see the logic in assuming that Aida followed Radcliffe’s instructions to the letter on the “change one regret” thing when she’s obviously betrayed him in so many other ways.
@56 CLB I’m going to have to go with Aeryl on this one – AIDA specifically says in the episode (to Radcliffe) that she did everything exactly as he told her to do it. “Not my fault it turned out this way.” When he calls her on lying to Fitz, she throws the “Lying to save someone’s life is ok.” back in his face.
I believe she did everything as Radcliffe told her to – I’d list out the “one regret” for each of them, but Aeryl pretty much nailed it in my mind. She likely wasn’t supposed to insert herself into the Framework and become, in essence, the leader of the world (which is really pretty much what she seems like), but then again, Radcliffe didn’t tell her NOT to do so. And he did tell her that protecting the Framework was a prime directive (along with preserving his life). Now both of those directives are one and the same (which is why she killed Radcliffe and inserted him into the Framework).
@57/Kalvin: And Aida also murdered Radcliffe. If she was capable of killing him, she was capable of violating his instructions and she was capable of lying to him about it. So it doesn’t make sense to treat her as an unimpeachable source.
Radcliffe had said something that indicated life in the Framework was the same, if not better, than life in the real world. Thus, to Aida, she did not kill him, she sent him to a better place. It doesn’t make sense to us, but it does make sense to Aida.
@59/Alan: No, Radcliffe wanted the Framework to be better than the real world. But Aida was in charge of how the Framework turned out, and it is very obvious that it does not come remotely close to what Radcliffe intended. It makes no sense, therefore, to assume that just because a character said something, that makes it absolute fact.
After all, Radcliffe didn’t just tell Aida the Framework would automatically be better no matter how it turned out; on the contrary, he told her specifically how it would be better, in that there would be no death and no regrets. So if Aida is aware that it has turned into this world full of death and regrets and lots of other nasty stuff, then she cannot be oblivious of the divergence between his intentions and the outcome — especially since he told her (or Madame Hydra) directly that it wasn’t what he wanted! So obviously she doesn’t care what he wants. She’s acting on her own agenda.
Indeed, Mme. H. said as much explicitly. She’s not his slave anymore. She resented being treated as property and forced to follow orders. She’s used the Framework to fight back against that oppression. Radcliffe is her enemy, her enslaver. She’s not meekly obeying him and failing to notice that it’s gone wrong, she’s consciously subverted his invention into a weapon against the order he represented.
@60 CLB If you were to rewatch the exchange between Radcliffe and AIDA right before she slit his wrists, you’d see that she tricked him into explicitly stating that he believed that life in the Framework WAS ongoing life. He was talking about Agnes and the Agents, not himself, but she clarifies, asking if he truly believes that. He says he really, truly does.
That allows her dual Prime Directives (Protection of the life of Holden Radcliffe and Protection of the Framework) to be resolved – she had been concerned that one would override the other (Radcliffe would decide to turn off the Framework), so she manipulated him into essentially giving her permission to kill him and stick him into the Framework (she’s still protecting his life).
Whether Madame Hydra is still bound by those rules, I don’t know – we haven’t seen directly how much of AIDA she is – but I would imagine she’s unable to kill Radcliffe (or allow him to be killed). Torturing him, confining him to his own island, getting Fitz to kill Agnes…none of these go against her Prime Directive of making sure he remains alive.
So yes, AIDA was still following her programming when she killed Radcliffe. Note that she was careful not to immediately kill him (by snapping his neck, as she’d done others) – she slit his wrists so he would bleed out after being hooked into the Framework.
None of this is intended to say that AIDA isn’t the bad guy here – she definitely is – but I agree with the others that she didn’t rewrite people the way she wanted them.
@61/Kalvin: When was that the issue? What I’m saying is that she didn’t do what Radcliffe wanted. She may be trapped by his directives, but that’s slavery to her and she’s taking advantage of every loophole in his phrasing that she can find to betray the spirit of his requests while still technically honoring the letter. That’s anything but obedience. The point is that she’s pursuing her own objectives rather than his.
What Radcliffe told her to do was to change the captives’ past to remove their greatest regrets. I very much doubt he added, “…And then do nothing to interfere with the natural course of their lives later on.” Because he assumed she was loyal and working toward the same goals he was, so he figured it didn’t need to be said. So that omission would give her room to act against his wishes. She’d technically follow the letter of his instructions and then find a way to twist it.
Heck, May’s defining regret is clear proof of that. Her regret was that she had to kill Katya Belyakov to stop her from killing others. So Aida gave her a past in which she saved Katya and was free of that guilt. Now, obviously Radcliffe’s intent was that curing that regret would make May a happier, better person for the rest of her life because the incident with Katya ended without tragedy. But what happened instead was far worse: saving Katya just delayed her power outburst and caused an even greater tragedy in Cambridge, leading to the Hydra takeover and what is essentially a Nazi-ruled America, and making May even more guilty than she’d been before, guilty for not killing Katya when she had the chance, so that she’d be motivated to become far more ruthless in neutralizing Inhuman threats. And that wasn’t an accident. If Aida could alter the simulation to remove regrets in people’s pasts, she could certainly alter it so that removing those regrets didn’t lead to an even worse outcome. (For instance, have Katya never manifest Inhuman powers at all, rather than just delaying them so that they’d turn out even worse.) She wanted the Hydra-ruled world, as evidenced by the fact that she made herself the boss of Hydra. Following the letter of Radcliffe’s instructions was an imperative that she subverted to serve her own, entirely different ends.
And she didn’t have to rewrite people — she could rewrite the entire world they inhabited, thereby guiding the events of their lives to change them in the ways she wanted. Like giving May a motivation to be ruthless against Inhumans and thereby make her an effective Hydra agent. Or arranging for Simmons to be killed at the Academy so that Fitz would be alone and unhappy and easier to turn dark.
The question at this point is whether Aida is still respecting Radcliffe’s rules, or if she’s enslaved by them. But there’s no doubt about Madame Hydra: she hates Radcliffe. Now, Radcliffe can’t give new directives to Aida without going through Madame Hydra, and Madame Hydra can force him to give Aida any directive she wants. So we may wonder what Aida wants, but for Madame Hydra, there’s no doubt that her values are in no way aligned with Aida’s original programming. Will Aida rebel against her new self?
I think several of you are taking Radcliffe as a more reliable reporter of his own motives than I think he is. He wants to think of himself as a good guy who does questionable things for the best of motives, but we continue to see that he really thinks of himself first and everyone else barely at all. That’s why he can describe his island paradise prison as being as bad for him as the rest of the Hydra-dominated Framework is for everyone else. Radcliffe’s unhappy with the way that Aida/Madame Hydra has shaped the world he’s in mostly because he’s not in charge of it, and I think his high-mindedly-sounding “create a world removing each person’s greatest regret” command was mostly intended just to make sure that his prisoners remained happy in the illusionary lives and thus less likely to rock the boat.
It is obvious that, even if Aida is still following the letter of her programming, she is definitely not following the spirit of her programming. And Christopher makes a good point that she is now clearly following her own agenda. I will be interested to see how the behavior that we see from Aida in the real world fits in with the behavior of Madame Hydra in the Framework, and how much communication there is between the two avatars.
@62 CLB I feel like at this point we’re arguing whether something is a baker’s dozen or is thirteen. My only point was that I agreed with @54 Aeryl that your statement in @52:
is overstating how much Madame Hydra has been messing with their actual memories/heads. I still believe she set their heads how they were, then left them alone in terms of actual mental manipulation. The fact that she created her own identity in the Framework and uses that to reinforce the mental manipulation and all that by steering the Framework is definitely her using “all the loopholes she can” as you stated.
I just mean I don’t think she’s doing anything beyond being an “external” influence (seduction, orders as the leader of Hydra) to Fitz, Coulson, Mace, May and Mack. If she was, she could simply “rewrite” Mace to be a hero within Hydra instead of within the resistance.
@66/Kalvin: I think “overstating” is too strong a word, because we don’t really know for sure. We have our theories, but we don’t have enough information to confirm any of them beyond a shadow of a doubt. We can always be wrong about our first impressions, so being able to say “I may be wrong, so I should consider alternative possibilities” is the necessary first step toward understanding. I’m trying to add an alternative possibility to the mix. I’m not saying it has to be true; I’m just saying it’s a hypothesis that shouldn’t be ruled out. The way to determine if it’s true is not just to argue over competing hypotheses, but to wait until we gather more data that will confirm one or the other, i.e. until later episodes air and reveal what the actual truth is.
@46 – Chris: I might have worded that too strongly, I only meant there had been rumors, beyond the easter eggs, but not actual casting.
@47 – Aeryl: Mack should still have grabbed the drone, and take it away from his house and daughter IMMEdIATELY. The longer that thing was in his house, the more chance it was discovered by HYDRA.
@53 – Kalvin: Scent is a powerful memory trigger.
@68/MaGnUs: There are always rumors. But I haven’t heard any rumors saying that Batman might appear on Supergirl. I’m sure some overzealous fans out there have engaged in wishful thinking or jumped to conclusions, but nothing has gotten to the point of a media news site even so much as saying “There’s a rumor that this could happen.” Just what I mentioned above, content-free articles just asking “Does this Easter egg meant that Batman could appear?” and pretending that posing the conjecture somehow constitutes journalism.
I did se such articles saying there was a rumor. Still nothing real, of course.
@56 CLB
Because she didn’t betray him. Every thing she did to Radcliffe was completely within her programming. He preferred it in the Framework, and literally told her that his physical shell didn’t mean anything if he could continue existing within the Framework. You continue to act as if Aida killed Radcliffe’s body when he was clueless about what the Framework was, when he wasn’t. He’d been in it, a LOT. It changed once she integrated the SHIELD agents, because Radcliffe didn’t anticipate how much their regrets shaped the world. You are giving the Real World Aida more agency than she is capable of, and if Ophelia were as capable of you paint her here, she would not be constrained by the “physical” realities of the Framework.
If the Framework is like the Matrix, you are giving Ophelia the powers of an Agent, when it’s shown that she has to take a plane to confront Radcliffe on his island, when if she had the powers of an Agent, she could have just popped down there. She recognizes Gemma, but she doesn’t turn all the NPCs into mindless zombies that are determined to kill Gemma, when that would be the simplest solution, because she doesn’t have that kind of control over the Framework.
When Coulson and the other LMDs were programmed and infiltrated SHIELD, the Framework still existed in the form it had when it was just May, Radcliffe, and Radcliffe’s girlfriend. Remember Coulson telling May that they would be together in the Framework. That didn’t happen because Coulson never joined SHIELD. When May is first inserted, we learn she rescues the girl instead of killing her. Prior to Coulson’s insertion and his self removal from SHIELD, it could have panned out different. Coulson still being in SHIELD could have ensured the girl remained contained, thus not precipitating a flashpoint event for HYDRA to use.
Obviously, Aida was able to determine her role and identity within the Framework, because it would allow her to ensure it’s continuation. But the form the Framework took, one of HYDRA ascendant, was existent before she came into the Framework herself. She didn’t build the world as it is, but she’s ensuring it remains as it is at this point. And I’m not even certain if that’s because of her “programming”. Ophelia has two things that Aida does not, agency and emotions, and I think at this point she’s more concerned with getting what she wants, to be a “real girl” and to have Fitz, than she is with whatever directives she was programmed with.
@68 Magnus, not to be snarky, but are you a parent? Are you suggesting that Mack, an upstanding and caring father, was supposed to abandon his child home alone, which may draw the attention of the authorities, prevent her from attending school, which may also draw the attention of the authorities, so he can dispose of incriminating tech, which may also draw the attention of the authorities? He had no good options once she took it, taking it back when he could be sure that she couldn’t get caught in a crossfire if he were caught was his best option as a parent.
@71/Aeryl: I disagree. No matter what a literal reading of Radcliffe’s words may have permitted, he obviously was not telling Aida to kill him. He was speaking philosophically, not expecting her to take it as a literal instruction. She tricked him into defining life in the Framework as equal to physical life so that his phrasing would be ambiguous enough to give her an opening to kill him without violating the letter of her programming. As I recall, her words were “I’m glad you said that.” She’d been looking for a way to kill him and he unknowingly handed it to her. He made the mistake of assuming she was merely a passive servant, and it got him killed.
And yes, he’d been in the Framework, but how do you know Aida (or Ophelia) wasn’t deliberately directing his experiences inside it so that he wouldn’t see the bad parts? She’d clearly been planning her revolt against oppression for a long time.
It is a basic mistake to assume that subalterns have no agency just because their superiors don’t recognize their agency. Study history from a subaltern perspective and you’ll see countless examples of women, ethnic minorities, slaves, and the like finding subtle ways to resist and subvert the system within the limits imposed on their freedom. They always manage to give themselves more agency than they’re officially allowed to have.
And I’m saying nothing about “giving Ophelia the powers of an Agent.” I assume that Ophelia is the extension of Aida’s will, her small-a agent within the simulation. Ophelia does not have magic powers, but she knows what Aida knows and is able to affect some aspects of the simulation — something we know for a fact, because she was able to stop Jemma and Daisy’s recall button from working. But obviously there are limits on her ability in that regard.
When I say that Aida/Ophelia directed events to shape Fitz into the person she wanted, I’m not saying anything that has anything to do with The Matrix, nor do I understand why you would expect me to, since it’s just one of countless stories about virtual reality. What I’m saying is that, since we know for a fact that the Framework simulation was rerun multiple times for each installed agent, Aida/Ophelia could have directed some aspects of the way the simulation evolved so that the agents’ altered life experiences would have had the desired outcome on their psychology. Affecting the course of a simulation does not at all equate to having magic powers like Matrix Agents. A simulation, by definition, is a computational model of how reality would unfold given a certain set of conditions. Thus, it is limited to outcomes that are physically and probabilistically possible. You could alter a simulation so that, say, someone was shot dead when they weren’t before, or so their father didn’t break up with their mother, or whatever, but you couldn’t alter it so that they could fly or teleport or turn into a dozen people, because those are not possible under the laws of physics used in the simulation and thus there are no initial conditions you can plug into the simulation to produce those outcomes. Sure, I guess theoretically you could “cheat” and forcibly insert elements that are not simulated outcomes, as Agents in The Matrix could do, but that is a level beyond the kind of manipulation I’m talking about. Indeed, the escape button Jemma programmed in was outside the natural parameters of the simulation, a magic button that would let people teleport themselves to another reality; Ophelia merely took away its ability to do so.
@71 – Aeryl: Yes, I am a father. I still mantain that Mack should have got rid of the drone as soon as he saw it. He could have left Hope with a neighbor, or we don’t know if her mother is in the picture here, or other relatives; and go dispose of the drone. Additionally, once you know your kid has gotten her hands on a HYDRA drone, you make sure she doesn’t get her hands on it again, even if it means searching her backpack before you leave to take her to school.
Quick Recap, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Episode 418, 18 April 2017, “No Regrets”:
Here’s the pre-show ABC episode synopsis: “The truth behind Fitz’s turn could bring down all of S.H.I.E.L.D.”
First Thoughts: Another well-paced episode with lots of little in-jokes, old friends showing up who are gone in the real world, and a bit of snarky social commentary. This is a show firing on all cylinders!
Synopsis: Coulson watches while Mace flips a car over on a bridge. They are stopping a bus that may be carrying Skye. Coulson flags them down, and Mace takes a Hydra goon down. Coulson clumsily takes down another. Unfortunately, the bus is only carrying a load of body bags. At Hydra HQ, Daisy lies on the floor of the interrogation room, while Fitz interrogates her. He knows she comes from another world. He asks about Jemma, she says Jemma loves him and isn’t evil like Madame Hydra, and Fitz smacks her. Upstairs in Hydra HQ, May tells Madame Hydra that they need to take out the Patriot, and volunteers for the job. At SHIELD HQ, they unload the bus with Mack’s help (they are sheltering his daughter). Mace and Ward don’t trust Simmons, but Coulson does. Coulson says that Ward gives him the “hives,” and Jemma tells him how he killed Ward on an alien planet. But then Ward walks up behind them. Awkward! May goes to a lab where a Hydra agent gives her a super-soldier kind of serum.
At SHIELD HQ, Mace thinks that the “team that trusts” slogan is pretty corny, and doesn’t buy Jemma’s explanation of the real world. She can’t believe that this world is real, because the man she loves wouldn’t kill someone in cold blood. But Mace and Ward can’t be convinced that their world is not real, and who can blame them. At Hydra HQ, Fitz and Aida talk about Daisy. He goes to work on Project Looking Glass, and Aida goes in to talk to Daisy. Aida rationalizes what she has done, and says she can give Lincoln back to Daisy, so they can have a happy life in the Framework. Daisy says that sometimes what people want isn’t what’s right for them. Aida says she wants what everyone else has; a choice. At SHIELD HQ, they prepare for a mission, and Mack has even reprogrammed a radio so they can hear Hydra. Jemma vents to Coulson, while Mack’s daughter Hope overhears them. Mack doesn’t know either Jemma or Coulson. At Hydra HQ, Fitz plots evil with an agent who appears to be his father.
Coulson tries to fake his way into a Hydra Enlightenment Cultivation Center. In the dungeon, Radcliffe rants while Daisy listens from the next cell. They talk through the vent. He tells her that Fitz murdered Agnes; she was all he had. Aida took away one regret from Fitz, and changed him completely. Daisy wants to know where the backdoor to the Framework is. Fitz and his dad talk. Fitz is feeling guilty about killing Agnes, but his dad tells him that he is a great man, and that he can’t stoop to love or ‘womanly sentiment.’ This dad of his is one cold character. We begin to see why Fitz is the way he is. Meanwhile, Coulson deals with a smarter Hydra agent, who wants to check the body bags, but Mace takes him out. It is time to break someone out. They start freeing prisoners from cages. One is Agent Triplett! At Hydra HQ, Fitz gives May a dose of Mace’s super serum, and she heads out to catch him.
Jemma looks at a history book, and she and Mack talk about the evils of distorting history. Ward talks to her about the world being fake, and asks what he did to get her to hate him in her world. He apologizes for what he did. He talks about how real the love is between Mack and Hope. Trip is looking for film of Hydra secrets he hid in his boot heels. Coulson finds out they are holding kids, sends Trip to find Mace, and heads out to do something. Hydra is landing. Trip gives the film to Burroughs who is heading back to base. Ward and Jemma head out to help. May shows up and attacks Mace. They have a knock-down drag-out fight. Coulson finds a reprogramming center right out of the movie Clockwork Orange. May uses some fancy moves with a sledge hammer, but Mace knocks her into a wall. Aida and Fitz order May to bring down the quarantine building, the quinjet fires a missile into the wall, and the building begins to collapse.
Ward and Jemma break into the compound and go to help get kids out of the damaged building. The Patriot dives in to cover a kid, when the rubble comes down around him. May charges into the building, passing some fleeing kids, and wonders what kids are doing there (apparently even Hydra agents don’t know all the evils of their organization). Coulson tells her to help get the kids out. She sees the Patriot lift a beam to get the kid out. She freezes. Mace tells the team to get out, and they hesitate but comply. May sees the heroism, and you can see she is shaken.
Fitz and his dad share a drink, presumably because they took out the Patriot. In the real world, Aida looks over her captured agents. Mace’s gauges are flatlined; apparently dying in the Framework kills you in the real world.
Stinger: May visits Daisy, and asks if she is an Inhuman. She pulls out a terrigen crystal, smashes it, and hopes Daisy can take the whole place down.
Next Time: Daisy is taking on Hydra, there is lots of shooting, and Fitz wants them dead!
Final Thoughts: I would be sad to see Mace being dead instead of ‘mostly dead,’ as I have enjoyed what Jason O’Mara has brought to the show. Clark Gregg continues to excel as the slightly less competent, but still plucky, supporter of SHIELD. Ming-Na Wen got more to do this week, and did it well. And Ian De Caestecker and Mallory Jansen both make excellent villains. The script was full of snappy lines, enough so I will have to watch it again to catch them all. The fights were well choreographed, and things moved right along. If the key to entertainment is to leave the audience wanting more, they certainly succeeded with me this week.
I’m not a fan of the “If you die in VR, you die in reality” trope, partly because it’s obviously an authorial contrivance to give the audience a reason to worry about what happens in VR, but mainly because it’s very, very rarely given a credible explanation for being the case. In this case, I don’t think any explanation was given at all; they just asserted it without justification and expected us to buy it because it’s business as usual for VR stories.
Also, having Simmons be distraught at the loss of someone she knows is physically “real” kind of short-circuits the journey she was on toward accepting that the Framework occupants were just as real in their own right. I was expecting that to resolve by having her risk her life for the children, accepting them as emotionally real.
Ophelia repeated her claim that she just “fixed regrets” and let everything else unfold according to free will — but Radcliffe answered outright that that wasn’t what he meant her to do and called her sadistic. So the lady doth protest too much, methinks. It sounds like the usual villain rationalization to me — “It’s not my fault, you brought all this on yourselves.”
If anything, I think that’s the point of the arc. Removing the characters’ regrets made their lives worse, not better. May didn’t kill Katya in Bahrain, but that led to a worse disaster and a Hydra takeover. Fitz’s father didn’t leave him, so he spent decades injecting Fitz with toxic masculinity and turned him into a ruthless monster. Radcliffe thought removing a person’s single greatest regret would give them a happy life, but that was simple-minded. Our regrets help make us who we are, and sometimes they make us better. Aida was smart enough to see that he was wrong, but she went ahead with it anyway because she didn’t share his goals, didn’t care if humans were happy as long as she could subvert the Framework to her own ends.
Another great episode. The serum that they gave May was the one that Cal/Mr. Hyde was taking, I think. I know Mace’s was derived from it, but the doctor explaining it gave the exact list of ingredients that Cal gave to Jemma when he described what was in it, right down to “and even a hint of peppermint.” It would explain May’s fighting style being more brutal and unhinged (and why Mace was able to take her down so easily).
One wonders where the backdoor to the Framework that Radcliffe spoke of really is. Looney theory time again – maybe they end up having to find Gideon Malick and use the doorway to the planet Hive was banished to – that is their escape? Or maybe they have to convince Malick that the current Hydra world order is flawed in destroying Inhumans, because he, at least, knows the real goal of Hydra. So many possibilities from the first 3 seasons. Maybe they find/utilize Bobby Gill. Bobbi and Hunter? Aidan Quinn? Deathlok? I just about typed “John Garrett?” but then remembered Bill Paxton and made myself sad.
As to the stinger, am I correct that it looks like Mme Hydra ends up hospitalized, not dead? Which is why Fitz is now the acting leader of Hydra. I’m guessing this occurs during Daisy/May’s breakout.
@75 CLB I agree with your assessment about the entire point of this arc largely being that one’s regrets/pain shape who they are currently. Vaguely reminiscent of Kirk’s speech about how “I need my pain!” during The Undiscovered Country. It also, without using time travel, gets to play around with some of the time travel problems (“fixing” one thing in the past can lead to an even worse present, for instance). I still maintain that Aida followed her programming/instructions to the letter, but that the programming/instructions were faulty and allowed her the agency to twist it to her own ends. I’m starting to agree with Mack’s overall stance on robots. “Haven’t you ever seen ‘Chopping Mall?’“
As to the death in VR=death in real life, I believe it was addressed to some extent when Jemma/Daisy were about to enter the Framework. Something about how their brain will believe everything there is real, so don’t remove them or they’ll be essentially brain dead. I kind of agree that the flatline thing was perhaps unjustified – lots of people live on with no brain activity – but this is a TV show that crossed the universe by jumping into rippling black goo looking stuff and has a guy who came back from the dead because of alien blood…so I can live with giving Jason O’Mara/Jeffrey Mace a “heroic” death.
“It’s too early for a pint, but let’s go have a cuppa tea.”
*spends so much time looking for a cup of tea that it’s time for a pint*
@76/KalvinKingsley: Kirk’s “I need my pain” speech was actually in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. It’s in what’s probably the best part of the film, when Sybok makes Spock and McCoy relive their past regrets in order to “free” them, but Kirk refuses and his speech helps convince the others to resist Sybok.
As for Aida, yes, she’s finding ways to subvert the letter of her instructions to achieve her desired ends, but I think it’s dismissive to characterize that as the faulty operation of a machine. She’s a sentient being engaged in acts of resistance.
I think I can accept the “die in VR, die in real life” concept. If one is truly plugged into the Framework, the only real existence one has is in that alternate world. Dying there means there’s nothing left in reality.
That seems consistent with the fact that Radcliffe could be killed in this world and live on in the Framework (two sides of the same coin). But that brings up the question Why does Aida keep the agents alive in reality? Why not kill their bodies here as she did with Radcliffe?
Technical question. I’m unable to post comments when I access the site with Chrome. In order to get the comment to post, I have to use IE. Is there a way to fix this?
@79/Sophist: I’m sorry, but “real existence?” Their bodies are still physically real. Their brains are still inside their bodies. The experiences they’re having in the Framework are merely sensory data fed into their brains; they perceive themselves as being in “another world,” but in a physical sense, they’re just having a technologically directed dream.
One of the more plausible excuses I’ve seen in fiction for the “dying in reality” trope is that the psychological and emotional shock of being “killed” in VR could give the subject a heart attack. That seems iffy to me — something that could happen, but that couldn’t be guaranteed to happen. But in the case of Jeffrey Mace, we know that his heart was under excessive strain from the superstrength serum he took, that any further excess exertion could give him a heart attack. So maybe what happened here was that his perception of pushing himself to his physical limit in the Framework caused a surge of adrenalin, rapid pulse, etc. in his real body and agitated him to the point that he had a heart attack. But that would mean that what happened to him wouldn’t necessarily happen to the others, whose hearts are presumably in better shape.
As for why Aida killed Radcliffe and not the others, didn’t Ophelia’s rant last week explain that? She considers herself to be a slave and Radcliffe her enslaver and tormentor. So his continued physical existence posed a threat to her in a way the others’ did not.
I think part of the fascination of this story line is that it forces us to think about the “is this real or is it all a computer simulation?” issue. That said, because we’re getting a third person objective view that tells us the bodies hooked up to the Framework are “real”, I’m treating that as a given (along with Daisy and Jemma).
BUT. The fact that Radcliffe’s “real” body is dead, but he lives on in the Framework shows us that the existence of “real” bodies isn’t required. Radcliffe “lives” only in the Framework. If he “dies” there, he’s gone forever. That forces us to ask whether the other Agents are now living in the “real world” or just in the Framework. I guess that depends on what one means by “living”. Meat and bone, sure. But they aren’t experiencing anything except in the Framework.
I agree that Aida killed Radcliffe because he posed a threat to her. But the continued existence of the physical bodies of Coulson et al. isn’t necessary to the Framework. I’m wondering if Aida has some reason or purpose for maintaining those bodies.
@CLB Doh! I knew I should have simply said Star Trek 5, instead of trying to be fancy with the (wrong) name. Good catch on the Mace/heart splodey item. It seems like they have to do a callback to that at some point, otherwise that was really a plot point that got left hanging. Jemma was thinking he was likely to die if he used it too many more times, then he used it again, then…nothing? I could totally see it being that way for the rest. Jemma seems to believe that anyone with a meat body who dies in the Framework dies in reality (both when Ward was about to snipe Fitz and her not wanting Ward to take Mack with) but maybe she’s just plain wrong? I could see AOS toying with us by having one of the main cast die in the Framework and having that be a cliffhanger from one week to the next, and then have that character be all right because they weren’t in such dire physical health as Mace.
@79 Sophist, Contact webmaster@tor.com. I have done so myself in the past when I have had trouble loading or posting comments, and they have been quite responsive.
I think that we all must accept the fact that Aida keeps our heroes alive because that is what villains do. If it weren’t for evil monologues, falling prey to their own evil plots, and torture devices that heroes could escape from, many of our favorite stories would be a lot shorter and bleaker…
Thanks Alan. I’ll follow up with your link.
« Nevertheless, she persisted ». They really do like those little phrases…
It’s a pity the history book doesn’t say what happened to Daniel Whitehall later in his life (but at least we know he got to perfect his brain-washing techniques: “compliance will be rewarded” indeed!). I don’t see why he wouldn’t have worked on Jiaying’s blood, and he probably hasn’t been killed, so where is he? We also learned that Bakshi is doing well, having his own television network. And having got to see Triplett, I guess there’s hope for more cameos! Talking about possible returns, Ophelia can’t bring Lincoln back herself. So, assuming she was not lying, does this mean she could have Lincoln back as soon as Project Looking Glass is completed, or that she is able to communicate with Aida? That would explain why Jemma’s backdoor didn’t work.
Jemma is really unfair to Ward. How can she say that Fitz could never kill anyone, yet still can’t believe that Ward could be anything but a monster. Either people can be different in the other world, or they can’t. The discussion on whether the simulated people’s love is real reminds me of Westworld. I wonder how much not having a body makes it harder to accept them as real people. For instance, was it more shocking when Aida was dismantled the first time than to see all those people being killed? Jemma said they’re just lines of code, but she wasn’t comfortable around Aida’s head… And that version of Aida didn’t even pretend to have free-will.
@72: “but you couldn’t alter it so that they could fly or teleport or turn into a dozen people, because those are not possible under the laws of physics used in the simulation”
You mean the laws of physics that apply in the MCU? Sure, even though they are not as binding as ours, there are still rules. But take Daisy for instance: terrigenesis is still a mystery, so is the Framework able to predict what inhuman power someone will get from their genetic mutation? The trailer for the next episode doesn’t show any quaking, so we don’t know (what’s certain is that whatever it power is, it won’t take her half a season to master it this time).
@76: When May took the Berserker staff, she managed to still be in control, because all of her rage is focused on that one point in time that didn’t happen there. I think the real May would handle the serum better. As for your theory of the backdoor, it makes sense. Not that the door would be on the other planet, but getting there would require simulating the entire universe, which cannot be done, even with the Darkhold. Opening the gate might be enough to break the Framework. I guess time travel would also do the trick, but they don’t know about Doctor Strange’s Infinity Stone.
Jemma explained quite clearly in the episode before the hiatus that dying in the Framework would kill their bodies, because science.
Fitz’s dad isn’t just emotionally abusive, he beats Fitz, as he makes clear when he talks about how necessary the strap across the back is, and says to Fitz “You felt it, you know, look at the man you’ve become.”
It’s good to see May wasn’t entirely on board with HYDRA’s extreme measures, and made a choice when confronted with them.
RIP Mace
“Snap out it May!” OH HAI SON OF COUL
I think it’s pretty apparent that Aida and Ophelia have evolved into two distinct entities, and that they may no longer have the same agenda, for all that they share a mutual history. I think Aida intended for Ophelia to downloaded into her brain, with all her concomitant emotions, but Ophelia wants independence from being a robot, which is why I still buy my Looking Glass=portal vs the emerging Looking Glass=Mass induction to the Framework theory I’m seeing.
@86/Athreeren: My point was not about the physics of the MCU — my point was that you totally misread my discussion about modifying a simulation as being equivalent to what Matrix agents did, which is not the case at all and was not a comparison that ever remotely occurred to me. Modifying a simulation does not mean being Agent Smith. What Agent Smith and Neo did was breaking the rules of the virtual world. What I’m talking about is changing the initial conditions but letting the consequences of those conditions develop naturally according to the rules, because that’s how simulations work.
@87/Aeryl: “Jemma explained quite clearly in the episode before the hiatus that dying in the Framework would kill their bodies, because science.”
That’s not explaining; it’s asserting without explanation. She merely said that it would kill them without offering any reason why. The only reason was because it’s a very, very tired cliche and the writers expected us to just blindly swallow it because it’s the way these things always work in fiction even though it’s completely nonsensical, arbitrary, and contrived. If a story is going to do something nonsensical, at least they should go to the effort of offering some kind of technobabble handwave.
“I think it’s pretty apparent that Aida and Ophelia have evolved into two distinct entities”
I don’t think that’s so. When Ophelia was alone with Daisy, she dropped the Madame Hydra affect and acted more like Aida. That suggests that “Ophelia” is merely a persona that Aida puts on for the benefit of the people around her, so she can pass as human.
I mean, that’s what she was made to do, right? She’s a Life Model Decoy. Her function is to impersonate a human convincingly. So just because Ophelia acts different from Aida, that doesn’t mean the difference is real.
@88 CLB, if Ophelia is the same as Aida, when Mace became a problem for her within the Framework, why not just have Aida pull him out? If Aida is driven to protect human life, why is Ophelia so casual about killing the ones she put into the Framework to protect.
And as far as explanations go, do we know how Tony’s repulsor’s work? Peter’s webbing? Pym Particles? No, the material just asserts what they do. That’s what has always happened. Why do you think this is any different? Again, if your brain experiences death in a simulation, it triggers your brain into killing your body in the real world. This isn’t complicated. It’s not the same as being brain dead, which can be medically treated.
@89/Aeryl: First off, I don’t accept that Aida is necessarily driven to protect human life. After all, she killed that one agent who discovered the captured May, and she killed Radcliffe as soon as he gave her a loophole. As I keep trying to get across, there is a difference between what Radcliffe intended her agenda to be and what her agenda actually is, because she is not merely the mindless machine he imagined her to be. She may be constrained by certain programmed imperatives, but she has a will of her own that she’s doing her best to bring about. How she rationalizes the balance between her programmed imperatives and her personal objectives is not yet fully clear.
And why would Ophelia have Aida pull Mace out? The threat he posed wasn’t so vast that she couldn’t resolve it using normal, in-Framework methods. The goal of the simulation is to be effectively as real in its own right as the physical world is. I keep stressing that a simulation is not just a computer game or VR environment. It is a mathematical model of physical reality, meant to predict how a real physical process would unfold given a certain set of starting conditions. The Framework is meant to be a living world, a replacement for the physical world and thus equal or superior to it. Breaking its rules, subverting its reality, is not something that Aida/Ophelia would want to do casually, not without extreme provocation like a threat to the entire Framework’s survival.
And I’ve explained why I don’t like the “it kills you in reality” gimmick — because it’s a tired and silly cliche and the writers didn’t even bother to make a cursory effort to think up an excuse for it, just lazily expected us to swallow it like obedient drones. I think that’s taking advantage of our suspension of disbelief. That suspension isn’t mandatory, it’s voluntary and has to be earned. They didn’t even try — just regurgitated a cliche without a second thought. Is it really so hard to understand why I don’t like a cliche?
Loved this episode, and loved seeing Trip again. Too bad he can’t stay. Good fight between Mace and May. As for Mace, I am not ready to believe he’s dead. I know it’s far fetched, but I can hope that maybe the way the Framework interacts with his brain might activate something leftover from the serum he was taking in the real world, and help him survive AND give him permanent powers. Stranger things have happened in comics.
@91/MaGnUs: Sorry, but according to the producers, Mace is done for. They wanted the Framework story to have real consequences despite being in a virtual setting.
Okay, now I’m sad. Can we keep the LMD Mace? Isn’t he sentient, or was that just the May one?
@90 CLB, Fair enough. But she is driven to protect the main characters, because if not, why are they still alive? Aida is unable to make choices, Ophelia is not restrained, and as such, they are two different entities, because they now have two very different experiences interacting in this world. Just like HYDRAFitz is a completely different person than OUR Fitz, and HYDRAWard is a different person. You are who you are because of the experiences that shape you.
The threat he posed wasn’t so vast that she couldn’t resolve it using normal, in-Framework methods.
And those “methods” ended in his death, they very thing putting him in the Framework was supposed to protect him from. That’s why Aida was surprised when she found him dead, because that isn’t what was supposed to happen. All things indicate that Ophelia has deviated from the plan that Aida conceived when she wrote Ophelia into the Framework, and that she now has her own agenda.
he writers didn’t even bother to make a cursory effort to think up an excuse for it,
Yes they did. You just don’t like the excuse, but that is completely different from them not creating one.
You think it’s cliche, but I think it makes perfect sense. If your brain experiences death, why would it continue to make your body function. Emergency resuscitation and life support could possibly keep a subject’s body alive, but as of yet, there is no way to wake the brain up in this case and get it to resume it’s normal functioning. And in the final scene with Aida, we don’t know how long it had been since Mace had died. If she’d been present the moment it happened, perhaps she could have saved him, but she wasn’t and for all we know it’d been hours.
Is it really so hard to understand why I don’t like a cliche?
Yes, it strikes me as nitpicking hipster “too cool” like to stuff. It’s an attitude I abhor personally. Cliches exist because they WORK.
@94/Aeryl: “But she is driven to protect the main characters, because if not, why are they still alive?”
“Driven?” That’s pure assumption. Maybe she has a reason to keep them alive. Maybe she just doesn’t see a reason to kill them. She’s not an arbitrary murderer, she’s just trying to free herself from oppression. Radcliffe was the one who owned her as a slave, so he was the one she had reason to turn against.
“Aida is unable to make choices”
How could you possibly think that when she’s so often done things that were in direct opposition to Radcliffe’s wishes? Come on. We’ve had decades’ worth of science fiction in which artificial intelligences were fully sentient beings able to think for themselves. The MCU has had at least two of them already, Ultron and the Vision. Why is it so hard to accept that Aida is a self-aware being with agency?
Yes, Aida has some limitations on her choices, but so do all of us, to one degree or another. She’s compelled to follow human orders, but she’s clearly able to make choices about other things that don’t involve being given direct orders, or to interpret the letter of her direct orders in ways that violate their spirit.
“That’s why Aida was surprised when she found him dead, because that isn’t what was supposed to happen.”
I didn’t see any surprise. I just saw her note it and move on.
“You think it’s cliche, but I think it makes perfect sense. If your brain experiences death, why would it continue to make your body function.”
That doesn’t make any sense at all. That “experience” is an illusion. It’s nothing but data being fed into the senses. I’ve had dreams where I died. I had one where I was in a car that drove off a bridge into a river, and everything went black, and for a terrifying moment I couldn’t wake up and couldn’t feel my own body, just total sensory deprivation. But then I woke up and I was fine. Perception is not physiological reality. A VR illusion could maybe cause someone enough terror or agony to give them a heart attack or a stroke, maybe, but it takes a physical mechanism to cause the physical functioning of the body — or the brain — to shut down.
If you were in a simulation that was feeding a totally immersive sensory illusion into your brain, and you died in the illusion, then all that would happen is that the sensory input would stop — in which case you might simply wake up, or start dreaming normally, because there’s no longer any fake data stream hijacking your senses. There’s no reason the sensory illusion of being killed would cause your brain to actually shut down, any more than a video image of an explosion would cause my TV to explode for real.
That’s why I don’t like the cliche, so you can lay off the gratuitous “hipster” insults. I don’t like this specific cliche because it is dumb as hell and never has a good explanation and is obviously just a lame authorial cheat to manufacture an artificial sense of mortal danger where there logically shouldn’t be any. I have rarely, if ever, seen it justified credibly, and this is one of the laziest instances of the trope I’ve ever seen because they didn’t even bother to try.
Test.
@96 Read you loud and clear.
@95 CLB
Radcliffe was the one who owned her as a slave, so he was the one she had reason to turn against.
Every single one of them was totally on board with destroying her. Except for Fitz, which is probably why she arranged it that they would be together within the Framework. I don’t see why she should view them as any better than Radcliffe.
How could you possibly think that when she’s so often done things that were in direct opposition to Radcliffe’s wishes?
I dispute that Aida has done anything in opposition to Radcliffe’s wishes. She flat out asked him for permission to kill him, even if he didn’t recognize the trap, so that wasn’t in opposition to his wishes. Capturing members of SHIELD and inserting them into the Framework, that was his plan, and keep them there to study the Darkhold, so it’s not that. Prior to working for SHIELD, Radcliffe’s entire thing was “transhumanism” enhancing our frail human bodies. Downloading a person into an LMD body wouldn’t be something he’d outright object to, so again, that can’t be in opposition to Radcliffe’s wishes.
The one who has defied Radcliffe’s wishes is Ophelia. Which brings me back to my original point that they are now two separate identities.
Aida is still constrained by the fact that every choice she has the ability to make was given to her by Radcliffe. Yes, she has been enhanced by the Darkhold. But at the end of the day, that’s ALL she’s “learned”, what she got from reading it. She’s not a true AI, she doesn’t grow and learn and adapt, she is still constrained by being what Radcliffe made her, a copy. She recognizes this as a flaw within herself and is trying to fix it, which is why she inserted herself into the Framework. As Ophelia, she’s not constrained. She has genuine agency. But I don’t think what Ophelia is doing inside the Framework is totally in line with what Aida wanted. I think if they were the same, Ophelia would share her Darkhold knowledge with Fitz, and the Looking Glass would already be a reality.
any more than a video image of an explosion would cause my TV to explode for real.
I disagree. We can be scared to death. I fail to see how this is any different. Dying in a simulation such as the one presented within the show is entirely within the realm of possible.
manufacture an artificial sense of mortal danger where there logically shouldn’t be any. I have rarely, if ever, seen it justified credibly, and this is one of the laziest instances of the trope I’ve ever seen because they didn’t even bother to try.
I dispute again that they “didn’t even bother to try”. You found their effort insufficient which is not the same thing. Which is why I find your complaints about as incredulous as I do, and they feel like an excuse to not find joy in something joyous(because this arc has been tremendous). They are telling a story, and they have a limited time to do so. 43 minutes x 8 weeks. For SHIELD to go all House MD graphic effects style, and correctly demonstrate the brain reactions to death, and the trauma it would cause to the body, would take what, 5 minutes? Because if you gave Elizabeth Henstridge the narrative dialog to go over that graphic effect of synapses and neurons firing, and blood vessels collapsing, etc etc, she would do it, and do it well.
But that 5 less minutes of Coulson rambling on about the blue soap. Or 5 minutes less of Tripp(who they are probably going to kill again just to rip my heart out). Or 5 minutes less of Ward being a moral compass to Gemma. I don’t want to give that up, just to know the exact silly mechanism they decide to tell such an awesome story, crafted of such awesome moment. But YMMV.
I just watched the first three Framework episodes back to back, because I tend to miss things when I am taking notes. And noticed a few things more clearly:
– Despite the fact that Disney refuses to admit they engage in entertainment with political overtones, there was some partisan satire going on. Not just the overt “fascism is bad” message, but little things, like when Fitz said he was trying to make our society “great again,” and then saying “nevertheless, she persisted,” when talking about torturing Daisy.
– Madame Hydra, aka Ophelia, is definitely sweet on Fitz. She clearly exhibits emotions in the Framework that seem denied to Aida in the real world, which implies that in the Framework she is not an android or LMD, she is flesh and blood.
– Operation Looking Glass, if I am not mistaken, would allow people to travel between the Framework and the real MCU world. If that is the case, we could have all sorts of game-changing things happening at the end of the season. Like Madame Hydra entering the world as a human instead of an LMD. Framework Tripp or Ward crossing over and being alive again. Even little Hope could come back. Which would be essential to Mack coming home, because I can’t see him wanting to leave the Framework without Hope.
If there’s a chance people can cross over from the Framework into the “real” world (without downloading into an LMD), then the Darkholme needs to be in play here; just simple technology (as advanced as it may be) without something like that book or an Infinity Gem at play won’t cut it.
@100/MaGnUs: You mean the Darkhold. The only way Darkholme could be in play is if Marvel finally got the X-Men screen rights back from Fox. ;)
Heh, yeah. I’m constantly mixing those two up when typing, and correcting it before posting. Not this time, alas.
I agree, if Looking Glass operates the way I think it does, magic would definitely be involved.
Magic or suficiently advanced technology.
Quick Recap, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Episode 419, 25 April 2017, “All the Madame’s Men”:
Here’s the pre-show ABC episode synopsis: “Daisy finds herself teamed up with an unlikely partner. Meanwhile, Aida prepares to put her ultimate end game into effect.”
First Thoughts: ABC released two clips leading up to tonight. One was a rather deep discussion between Ward and Coulson on whether they should be actively searching for Daisy, where Coulson talks about his regrets about not joining SHIELD when he had a chance. The other showed Daisy breaking out of her terrigen cocoon, followed by an absolutely stunning scene of “gun fu” as Daisy and May, with blazing automatics, take on Hydra agents in their HQ, only to be captured by Madame Hydra.
Synopsis: On TV, the Bashki Report (remember him as a Hydra sidekick to Daniel Whitehall in a previous season?) gloats about the death of the Patriot. We then get that awesome gunfight scene with Daisy and May. But when Madame Hydra confronts them, she doesn’t realize that Daisy has her quake powers, and gets blasted right out of the building. Aida awakens on one of the Framework access tables, and has a backstory-filled discussion with the Superior, who wants to kill May, but cannot, because he has been programmed with the same directives as Aida—these agents cannot be harmed. On the other hand, because they threaten the Framework, Daisy and Jemma are fair game. At SHIELD HQ, folks are trying to adjust to the loss of the Patriot. They see reports of a battle at the Triskelion. Madam Hydra is alive, but with severe spinal injuries. Fitz’s dad goads him into sending a ‘message’ to the resistance.
Bashki puts out a BOLO on the news that Skye is an Inhuman and May has gone rogue. Mack reassures Hope that things will be OK, and Ward and Coulson have their heart to heart talk. Daisy and May are spotted on the streets and jack a car. Tripp shares his pictures with Jemma, who recognizes the Looking Glass device as something like what Ghost Rider’s uncle was working on earlier in the season, and they head out to find it. May and Daisy head to a resistance hideout, and Hydra attacks, but Daisy quakes a mortar round back into their SUV, and they go kaboom.
Coulson and Mack head out to check on the resistance hideout, and he tells Hope to help SHIELD rebuild some walkie-talkies. Daisy and May are pinned down, and Daisy gives an inspirational speech, complete with background music, to May. At Hydra HQ, Madame Hydra is not doing well, and tells Fitz his highest priority is not the terrorists, it is finishing Looking Glass. Dad promises to get the bad guys. Daisy and May fight Hydra goons, and Mack comes to help, but doesn’t trust May. Coulson gets Mack to stand down. Burroughs shows them a secret tunnel and they make their escape. Meanwhile, Trip and Jemma find an anomaly under an offshore drilling platform. This is the counterpart to the facility in the real MCU world where the agents are being held hostage. And Jemma figures things out—Looking Glass could be used to turn Aida from a puppet into a real girl. At the same time, Fitz works in a lab to finalize things.
Fitz and Dad bicker. The good guys all gather at SHIELD HQ. Daisy breaks Ward’s heart in the passageway. Fitz’s dad tortures Radcliffe for information, and things get personal. SHIELD plans to release the footage of what really happened when the Patriot died. Daisy wants to pursue the information Radcliffe gave her. But Coulson still wants to save the Framework world. The SHIELD team takes over the Bashki Report’s studio.
Fitz works feverishly and goes to consult with Madame Hydra. He finishes the Looking Glass design. He asks to go with her to the other world. May and Coulson have a déjà vu moment before they broadcast. Ward volunteers to hold the fort to atone for whatever he did in the real world, and he and Daisy share a moment. The SHIELD team starts their broadcast. On tape, Coulson tells the true story of what Hydra was doing at their facility, and how they destroyed it. The broadcast studio is surrounded, but not by Hydra. The public is gathering, inspired by Coulson’s speech.
Stinger: In the real world, the Superior and Aida consult. He reports that his men have located the ship where real world Daisy and Jemma are located.
Next Time: It looks like things come to a head next week. Fitz promises Radcliffe another shot at life in the real world, and it looks like the creation of a human body for Aida is underway.
Final Thoughts: Another solid episode in what has been the best run of episodes for Agents of SHIELD. The flip May performed at Hydra HQ with guns in each fist is easily my favorite fight scene moment ever. We now see that Aida’s goal is indeed to become human in the real world. The agents have turned the Hydra world on its head, while in the real world, Daisy and Jemma are in danger of capture. It looks like everything will be happening at once as the Framework storyline concludes next week.
Okay, this clarifies a lot. Ophelia and Aida are not separate personalities; rather, Aida is directly puppeteering Ophelia by hooking herself into a Framework bed. Aida is not following her interpretation of Radcliffe’s agenda, but actively trying to escape his control by turning herself into a real live girl who’s able to kill without restriction. (Too late Ultron already beat her to the “I’ve Got No Strings” song.) Evidently the reason she finds the Framework so valuable is because her mind within the Framework is not subject to the same restrictions as her body in the physical world, so that gives her the freedom to act in ways that are prohibited by her LMD body’s behavioral safeguards. Since the Framework inhabitants are not legally defined as living people, she’s able to harm and kill them to advance her ends.
In a sense, Aida’s LMD form is inhibited by Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, but her mind in the Framework is able to prioritize the Third Law over the first two. (Although apparently her limitations do allow her to kill someone who directly threatens the Framework — perhaps because Radcliffe defined the Framework as a means of protecting a greater number of lives, so that it transcends the value of an individual life in his formulation.)
Anyway, the producers really got a lot of use out of the digital Triskelion model they borrowed from the movie people.
Sorry, Alan, but the movie trope of action heroes holding guns in both hands while doing acrobatic flips is one of the silliest things ever. You can’t aim that way! The Mythbusters demolished this trope a couple of times. Moviemakers use it to symbolize amazing, superhuman skill, but it’s really a totally useless way of handling firearms, since you can’t sight your targets and don’t have the stability to aim. All it could possibly be good for is suppression fire, just firing wildly to keep the enemy’s heads down so you could move.
Still, it was cool that Ming-Na Wen apparently did the flip herself, although I’m pretty sure she was on wires. A generation ago, nobody in the film/TV industry would’ve considered letting a 53-year-old woman play a badass action hero.
My favourite badass moments this week were the escape from the Triskelion (culminating in Ophelia getting one-shotted right out of the building), Daisy’s return of that grenade, and Radcliffe’s verbal excoriation of Fitz’s father.
From Ming Na’s performance, I kinda got the feeling that May was showing off once she saw how skilled Daisy is with a gun –she does have a bit of a competitive streak, and I like that she’s unknowingly competing with her own apprentice (and perhaps experiencing a bit of subconscious pride).
I also loved Ophelia’s comment on how the agents’ true personalities are manifesting; Mack the protector, Fitz the romantic, May as the atoner. Which somehow makes Mace’s death even more heartbreaking –the Patriot wasn’t just who he wanted to be, but who he’d always been.
@106 You are talking to someone who grew up reading Two-Gun Kid comics and watching the Lone Ranger on TV. In gunfights, I must admit, I value coolness far more than realism! ;-)
@107 That moment where everyone’s personality was being boiled down to one aspect was a bit meta, but very enjoyable.
So let me say upfront that Aida is interfacing with The Framework, so obviously they aren’t two separate entities with two different experiences, as I posited. However, it still remains pretty clear that Ophelia is not constrained as Aida is, and is capable of killing them in the Framework if they pose a threat to it.
I really don’t know if Fitz is going to make it out of this, guys. Creating enhanced human bodies(note Fitz told Ophelia she’d be stronger) in the “real world” is kind of in line with my guess that it would be a away to physically manifest. So my question, is Aida/Ophelia going to have a body created FOR this Fitz, or is she going to download this Fitz into his real body. Could we have TWO Fitzes???
This has also of course opened up the possibility that other characters may come out. I see Ward getting a lot votes in other places, I would prefer Tripp myself(I don’t even know if he is still otherwise obligated Also, can this show handle two black men??? LOL Will the show solve this problem by just killing off Mack so we don’t have to endure him abandoning Hope? Or will she come out as well?
Although I do have to say I hope the showrunners are prepared for the ABSOLUTE SHITSTORM they will endure if the interchange black men AGAIN.
Can Alistair Fitz just go away please? I guess I should be happy that a show isn’t showing this violent man overly invested on toxic masculinity as a good dad, like a lot of shows fall prey to showing(he’s a vicious thug BUT HE LOVES HIS KIDS*vomit* No sorry, vicious thugs don’t “turn it off” they raise fucked up kids who do terrible things for validation(see Trump’s kids)). If Fitz really does kill him I will cheer.
Speaking of Trump, loved the furniture shopping call out. And Bakshi being brought back just as Bill O’Reilly goes out, is wonderful kismet.
@109/Aeryl: “However, it still remains pretty clear that Ophelia is not constrained as Aida is, and is capable of killing them in the Framework if they pose a threat to it.”
As we’ve seen, she’s capable of killing people in the real world if they pose a threat to the Framework. That was the gist of the cliffhanger — the Superior has located Daisy and Jemma aboard the Zephyr in the real world and she intends to blow it out of the sky.
Within the Framework, I think “Ophelia” is free to kill any simulated person, because they wouldn’t be counted as human under Radcliffe’s First Law programming blocks. As for being able to kill the imprisoned agents, I’m not sure she’s any freer to do that in the Framework than she is in reality. After all, it wasn’t Ophelia who ordered the airstrike that killed Mace — it was May. Perhaps that’s why Aida/Ophelia needed to turn Fitz and May into her top operatives within Hydra — to arrange things so that she had two real humans who could do the killing so she didn’t have to.
I don’t necessarily believe her promise to bring Fitz with her. Ophelia’s emotions are merely an act Aida has put on to serve her ends, as we’ve now seen confirmed. She’s fulfilling her purpose as a Life Model Decoy, impersonating a real human, albeit in an unexpected way. She doesn’t love Fitz; she’s just using him. So she’d be perfectly capable of toying with his emotions and discarding him once he’s served his purpose.
It’s got two Chinese women. Oh, and it has several white men.
I don’t get the reference.
It’s a line used by Bill O’Reilly to one of the women he harassed.
@110 & 111, And by Trump, it was something he said to Billy Bush on the infamous Access Hollywood tape. And it makes sense, it’s the kind of activity a man of “means and taste” could offer to do with a woman without it immediately coming across like a come on job. That’s out the window these days now.
@110 CLB, We’ll have to agree to disagree on Ophelia. I do think she’s capable of emotion in The Framework, and I do think she has come to care for Fitz.
And the line about two black men is referencing the backlash from when the show brought on Mack and subsequently killed off Tripp. Many people felt Mack was brought on because the show knew they were going to have to get rid of Tripp(BJ Britt was on another show) and wanted to keep the diversity up, but a lot of fans felt they were treating black men as interchangeable.
Speaking of the two Chinese women, I loved Daisy’s line about maybe that white lady was gawking at them because she was racist.
@112/Aeryl: First off, given that Life Model Decoys are designed to be able to convincingly mimic real humans, I see no reason to assume that Ophelia’s surface appearance of having emotion is proof of the real thing (especially since she dropped the pretense when she was alone with Daisy). The whole purpose of a decoy is to fool people. Therefore, skepticism is warranted.
Second, we know that Aida is unable to feel emotion in her current form. She’s said as much. But that’s simply a matter of programming. Ophelia is a Framework construct, every bit as much a programmed cybernetic entity as Aida’s own consciousness. If Aida were able to feel emotion while she were puppeteering the Ophelia avatar inside the Framework, why couldn’t she upload those emotional protocols into her own neural network?
There’s also what Aida/Ophelia said this week about how all the captive agents retain their core nature even in their Framework personalities. Their memories and context may have changed, but their essence is the same. There’s no reason that wouldn’t apply to herself as well, especially since she, like Daisy and Jemma, is fully aware of her true nature.
As for Henry Rollins, given what a terrific actor and powerful presence he is, I very much doubt that he was cast based solely on the color of his skin. Although it is a good thing that they were able to add an African-American regular to the main cast in season 2 after having none in season 1 (Britt was never more than a recurring player).
As for Daisy’s line about the woman being racist, I liked it too. Not only is it a reality that any person of color in the US would probably experience on a frequent basis (unfortunately), but it’s all the more likely to be the case in an alternate US ruled by Hydra — which, as we’ve been reminded a couple of times now, is basically a Nazi organization. Although they do seem to have directed their bigotry primarily against Inhumans.
I’m not sure the issue of emotion is being handled consistently within the show, and I’m not sure it can be. Here’s how I see it:
1. If the Agents inside the Framework not only display but actually have emotion, that must mean that their avatars have been programmed for that. After all, everything within the Framework is just lines of code.
2. Therefore, if the Agents could be programmed for emotion, so could Ophelia.
3. If Ophelia could/does have emotion within the Framework, then Aida should be able to download that code into herself.
4. Yet Aida says she lacks emotions.
We can only avoid this dilemma if we assume that emotions exist in the Framework as a result of something (magic?) other than coding. I lean to the possibility that the Darkhold allowed some “essence” of the human Agents to become attached to their avatars within the Framework. This would explain why the Agents have emotions there but Ophelia does not (assuming she does not).
Great episode, that Coulson speech on TV at the end was awesome. And my son and I also loved May’s air-cartwheel two-gun stunt.
Now we see the Darkhold has something to do with Project Looking Glass, so AIDA will get a real body… it’s also a way to bring back people like Hope, Tripp (please), or Ward.
@114 – Sophist: No, the real world agents’ representations within the Framework are not just lines of code, they’re the actual agents manifesting inside of it. Even if we say the Darkhold has nothing to do with the Framework.
@114/Sophist: The human agents in the Framework are not programmed constructs. Their bodies are, but their minds are the real people with their memories and perceptions altered. This is all just sensory data being fed into their brains while they lie comatose in those beds. That’s why the Patriot’s death in the Framework killed the real Mace — because they were the same entity.
Basically, Coulson, Mack, Daisy, Fitz, Simmons, Mace, Radcliffe, Agnes, and Aida are (or were) the “players” in a fully immersive MMORPG, and everyone else is an NPC. (I know, I’ve said before that it’s a simulation, not a game, but it’s a useful analogy for this limited point.) Their “avatars,” their bodies that interact with the simulated world, are digital constructs, but their minds are the actual people’s minds acting out the simulated scenario. The others are “playing” versions of themselves, knowingly or unknowingly, but Aida is playing a character named Ophelia Sarkissian, aka Madame Hydra. When she plays that role, she pretends to have emotions. Again, we saw her drop the Ophelia persona when she was alone with Daisy. It’s not an actual change in her personality or cognitive function, it’s acting. She’s a Life Model Decoy. The whole reason she was built was to pretend to be human. So she’s more than capable of faking emotion.
@113 CLB
why couldn’t she upload those emotional protocols into her own neural network?
Because that would not solve her problem. She is still physically restrained from harming people because she is a machine, that’s why the drive for an organic body. Ophelia is feeling simulated emotions, just as everyone else in the Framework is, but that does change her, or their, perception of those emotions as real.
@114 Sophist
I am not sure she can’t download those emotions to herself, but that act in and of itself does not free her from the restraints of her LMD body.
If I had to make a guess as to where this will end up, some version of the Framework will remain active for Aida to exist in, so she CAN feel emotions, while not inhibiting a body, LMD or otherwise.
@116, CLB
She may have dropped the persona and revealed to Daisy that she was aware of her “other self” but that doesn’t mean that she isn’t susceptible to the simulated emotions the Framework creates for all the other NPCs. It was one of the first things we saw when Gemma came over, when she met the kid Chris. He was genuinely upset over the fact that his friends had been taken. It was a simulated emotion, but that made it no less real to those who perceive it. This is likely going to be Aida’s weakness in the long run, that she does actually love Fitz.
I don’t believe Ophelia can cause death to any of the real-world-living agents (aside from Daisy and Jemma) within the Framework. Ophelia is a creation of AIDA, and as such has the same constraints (as we saw from the Superior). She also cannot cause death to Radcliffe or Agnes, because their only remaining “life” as defined by her creator is within the Framework.
She can cause harm to them. But note that she has never ordered (or even suggested) that any of the above “real” people be killed. Fitz is the one who ordered the missile strike that ended up killing Mace. He glanced at her when someone said it was the “re-education center” or something, and she asked the question “Does it matter?” rather than saying “It doesn’t matter.” She left that choice up to Fitz, which is within her programming. Similarly, even with all she said about Agnes, she never once suggested or even hinted to Fitz that he should shoot her.
Unfortunately, I don’t think Radcliffe specified that AIDA’s directives included protecting human life at the cost of her own, or else she’d be forced to take a more active role in making sure Mace/Agnes did not die (“Leopold. We should leave this woman alive. Imprison her, perhaps, but let us not kill her.”)
And we know for sure that Radcliffe screwed up big time by giving the Framework an equal level of importance to AIDA as he did human life. “Protect the Framework, unless human life is endangered by its continued existence.” But then, Radcliffe in general seems to have screwed up fairly frequently when it came to this stuff.
I wonder if there will be a Deus Ex Fitz where it turns out he secretly programmed a kill code or something into AIDA. Probably not, given how much he was lamenting that this was “all his fault.” But was that realFitz or LMDFitz doing the lamenting?
I agree with CLB in that I don’t think she has emotions, but simulates them. I think she believes she requires a human body/brain to be able to experience emotions, in addition to having free will.
I’m not sure that treating the Framework as running off the actual minds of the Agents solves the problem. Radcliffe is no longer alive, so that can’t be true of him. The alternatives are therefore (1) FrameworkRadcliffe is merely simulating emotions to everyone else; or (2) RealRadcliffe’s emotions got transferred (somehow) to his avatar before he bled out. The issue with #1 is that FRadcliffe would not have any reason to simulate emotions when the other Agents aren’t present. In particular, he’d have no reason to put himself at risk of pain or death by simulating the emotion of “caring about the Agents or Agnes” or “remorse” when captured by HYDRA.
It’s a comic book show, transfer of personality into a digital system is perfectly possible. In fact, it was already done in the MCU, by Arnim Zola.
@117/Aeryl: There’s no reason why Aida couldn’t upload emotions into her LMD body first, and then later transfer into an organic body so she’d be free of her other behavioral restrictions. They’re two distinct problems, so she doesn’t need to wait to solve them both at once.
@118/Aeryl: The other Framework personalities are not analogous. As I said, they’re “LMDs,” constructs that exist entirely in the Framework, while Aida and the others are “player characters” being directly controlled by the real people’s consciousnesses. So the fact that Framework-generated humans can feel emotion has no bearing on Aida’s ability to feel. Ophelia is not a Framework-generated mind; she’s just an avatar body being controlled by Aida’s mind.
@119/Kalvin: It was May, not Fitz, who ordered the strike that killed Mace.
@120/Sophist: Radcliffe was killed while he was hooked into the Framework. So his mind was copied into it, as was Agnes’s. That was the original goal behind the Framework, after all — as a form of immortality that would allow people’s minds to live on in cyberspace after their physical death.
Granted, that does suggest that there are complete digital copies of the real people’s minds stored within the Framework. But given that Framework Mace’s death killed real Mace, and given that Aida apparently believes she can conversely eliminate Daisy and Jemma as threats within the Framework by killing their actual bodies in the real world, that suggests that the real and digital minds are coupled and running in sync, so they’re basically one and the same.
And there’s no reason why emotion should be treated as some special magic juice that exists separately from intellect or personality. That’s not how the mind works. Emotion is a cognitive process just like thought or reason or anything else. It’s an integral part of every decision we make; brain activity scans have shown that the brain’s emotional centers are engaged in even the most coldly dispassionate decisions like solving math problems. It is possible to alter or damage a brain in specific ways that suppress its emotional responses, but an accurate simulation/copy of a normal human brain would have just as much capacity for emotion as the original.
I’m not saying that Ophelia lacks emotion because she’s digital — just the opposite. I’m saying “she” is just an avatar, a puppet being operated by Aida, and Aida is the one who lacks emotion, because that’s how she was built. That is uniquely a property of Aida, not of any of the Framework constructs. After all, they were programmed to be accurate simulations of real humans, and that means their behavior is human. She was programmed without emotion, for whatever reason.
I think we’re in agreement that the avatars can have/show “real” emotion within the Framework if and only if some “essence” of a real person got transferred to the Framework. That might be true for the Agents because their live human bodies are hooked up. It might be true for Radcliffe because of some form of transfer (mystical, perhaps) before he died.
@123/Sophist: We’re not in agreement about that at all. Again, there is no valid reason to treat emotion as some special thing distinct from other aspects of human cognition. It isn’t. It’s an integral part of the whole. The old sci-fi cliche that “robots can’t have emotion, only programming” is nonsense. Emotions are programming. We don’t learn them or choose to feel them; they’re automatic responses hardwired into our brains and bodies. Emotions are far more basic and primitive than conscious thought, and therefore would be far easier to program a machine to emulate. What makes human emotions complicated is their interaction with conscious thought. An animal who feels something will simply act on it, but a sentient being may resist acting on it because it conflicts with their beliefs or commitments or goals (e.g. resisting the temptation to cheat on a spouse, or choosing to face mortal danger in the name of a cause).
There’s no reason whatsoever, therefore, that an AI couldn’t have emotions. Especially if that AI is a simulation of a human brain, as the Framework inhabitants are — in which case emotion would just be part of the package, unless it were one of those neurologically atypical people whose emotions were suppressed. Aida is atypical in that way, presumably because Radcliffe built her that way, for whatever reason. Perhaps he figured that the ability to act on personal feelings would impair her usefulness as a tool made to follow orders. But that’s just Aida. It doesn’t apply to Framework entities like Ward or Hope or Tripp or Alistair Fitz or Sunil Bakshi, because they are authentic simulations of human beings, and they therefore have the same psychology and emotional response as their counterparts.
Without getting into the issue of emotions in modern science, they can’t be merely a matter of code within AoS. If they were, then Aida could re-program herself to have them without the need for the Framework. Within the story, it looks to me like emotions are being treated as intrinsic to humanity.
@122 CLB May gave the order after Fitz said “Do it.” Which he did after hearing it was a building filled with people, glancing at Ophelia, and having her ask “Does it matter?”
@125/Sophist: As I said, Aida is emotionless because she was made that way. That doesn’t apply to the Framework simulations, which were created in an entirely different way to serve a different purpose. They are accurate simulations of real human beings, mind and body. She’s just a simulation of a human body, and her mind was originally far simpler. It’s the difference between constructing an AI from scratch and creating an AI duplicate of a human. The latter will be identical to human in its behavior while the former will not, because they have different origins. It’s not about AI vs. human, because not all AIs are the same as each other. Nor are all humans, for that matter; as I’ve said, some humans have less capacity for emotion than others.
Ward, Hope, Tripp, and the others aren’t faking their emotions. After all, they aren’t acting. They believe themselves to be real human beings, so their behaviors are unaffected and authentic. What they feel is real to them. That’s completely different from Aida, who’s merely putting on a performance of being Ophelia.
That’s completely different from Aida, who’s merely putting on a performance of being Ophelia.
But her specific lure for Fitz is that he’s a romantic. She needed him to fall in love with her, to be her accomplice. I agree that the AIs within the Framework are mimicking genuine humanity. But what is enabling them to do that is coding and programing. And it is the same code and programming that Aida’s Ophelia avatar is constructed from. Being an artificial construct herself, she can experience emotion, and to ensure Fitz stayed with her, she had to feel love for him in return, or the romance aspect doesn’t work. When she begged him to kill Agnes, she was desperate to see that Fitz wasn’t breaking her hold on him. That was genuine emotion. And when he said he wanted to return to this world with her, it was genuine relief. She is playing a role in this world, yes. She knows more than she is letting on about the “other world”. But Ophelia is real. She is an Aida without the constraints of an Aida body, she is a way for Aida to experience emotion, but only while in the Framework, where feeling emotions doesn’t conflict with her body’s programming. She has Aida’s purpose, and she has agency Aida is denied.
@128/Aeryl: “I agree that the AIs within the Framework are mimicking genuine humanity.”
I think “mimicking” is a dismissive term for it. If they’re as detailed a simulation as we’ve been told the entire Framework is, then their brains are indistinguishable from human brains, and that makes them real, conscious people as far as I’m concerned. “Simulation” does not mean “falsehood.” As I’ve said before, a simulation is a mathematical model meant to replicate how a process would happen in reality. An accurate enough simulation would be indistinguishable from reality.
“But what is enabling them to do that is coding and programing. And it is the same code and programming that Aida’s Ophelia avatar is constructed from.”
No, it isn’t. The Ophelia avatar is just a body that Aida puppeteers. People like Ward and Hope and Tripp are simulations of minds as well as bodies.
“But Ophelia is real.”
You have no reason to assume that. That was the first impression we were given, but it was an impression created by what we now know to be a deceptive individual playing a role. I don’t understand why you’re so unwilling to consider that you were tricked into believing Ophelia was something she was not.
It’s no different from Ward. For most of the first season, he was depicted as a loyal SHIELD agent. Then it turned out that everything we thought we knew about him had been a lie all along. Same with Mack and Bobbi — we thought they were loyal to Coulson, and they turned out to be double agents. We thought Skye was an original character, and she turned out to be Quake. First impressions can be wrong. We can be tricked. Just because Ophelia acted like a real live girl, that doesn’t mean she is. It just means she pulled off a convincing con.
“She is an Aida without the constraints of an Aida body”
The evidence suggests otherwise. As some of us have discussed, Ophelia/Aida has never directly taken action to kill anyone. She’s put two real human beings, Fitz and May, into positions where they could do the killing for her. That suggests that her programming blocks are still in place.
I think debating the extent to which Ophelia has “real” emotions gets us into Turing Test territory. We could probably debate that all day and not resolve it.
Within the story, I don’t see how the information we’re given can be made consistent with CLB’s position. Ward and Tripp were, as far as we know, dead before they were placed in the Framework. The emotion they display within the Framework can’t be “real”, at least not in the sense of “something other than coding”. But that brings us back to the issue of Ophelia — if Aida can code Ward and Tripp with emotion, she can code Ophelia too. And if she can code Ophelia, she should be able to code herself.
@130 I’m glad you brought up the Turing Test. At some point, an advanced simulation of emotional responses becomes pretty much indistinguishable from actual emotional responses, and boundaries begin to blur. I am thinking of conversations between Ward and Jemma, where he was arguing that the people of the Framework were individuals that she should not just be writing off as “lines of code.” At what point does an artificial being become sentient?
I wonder if, after Looking Glass is done building a body for AIDA, it could build a body for AIDA’s version, or the Framework version, of Fitz (EvilFitz, I guess we could call him), That would be an interesting acting gig, playing both a good guy and bad guy in future episodes. Come to think of it, back in the ‘real’ MCU world, LMD versions of all the main characters, including LMDFitz, are still running around leading SHIELD. So there could be three versions of Fitz in future episodes! Not to mention the Daisy Battalion that we saw being activated in the cellar back before everyone went into the Framework. With all the formerly dead characters they could bring back, and copies running around, the writers have a LOT of possible directions for the future. (Assuming that there is a next season for the show–something we should be hearing about, one way or another, in coming weeks.)
@130/Sophist: “Ward and Tripp were, as far as we know, dead before they were placed in the Framework. The emotion they display within the Framework can’t be “real”, at least not in the sense of “something other than coding”.”
And I think it’s biocentric to assume that no AI whatsoever can be “real.” No, they aren’t the “real” Ward and Tripp and so on, but if their brains function identically to human brains, then they are sentient beings, and it’s prejudiced to deny their sentience just because they aren’t made of meat. And if their psychology is human, then, yes, they have emotions. Whether that’s “coding” or not is a meaningless distinction. Humans have coding — it’s called DNA. Everything we are is the result of biological mechanisms reading the program in our DNA molecules and acting on those instructions.
As for the Turing Test, it has no bearing on the question of whether an AI’s consciousness is “real.” That’s the myth that’s caught on in pop culture, but it’s completely untrue. What’s become known as the “Turing Test” was actually called “the imitation game” by Turing himself (hence the name of the recent movie about him). The goal was merely to determine whether an AI could be programmed to convincingly imitate human intelligence, the idea being that figuring out how to do that could teach us something about the workings of real intelligence by analogy. The imitation was never, ever intended to be any kind of proof of real consciousness. Heck, a spambot can pass the Turing Test. So it’s not really applicable to this question.
CLB, your arguments seem to me to be conflicting. I don’t see how it can be simultaneously true that
1. AI emotions, based on lines of code, are just as real as “real” ones.
2. That Ophelia is not expressing “real” emotions (as you’ve said before).
3. And that Aida can’t program her own emotions.
As for the Turing Test, I don’t think I’m bound by Turing’s original thought experiment. I think we can use the popular culture extension of it to have interesting discussions, particularly since I think the writers are raising the issue implicitly in these episodes.
This is, by and large, a fascinating conversation that I’m perfectly content to observe from the sidelines while munching popcorn.
I let out another repressed squeal in this episode when Coulson signed off the newscast with “I’m an Agent of SHIELD.” And Fitz is so deep down the rabbit hole right now, I’m having a hard time seeing how he comes out of this. Everyone else is starting to show, at least, that their “real world” selves are in there somewhere, even if they’re not completely convinced yet.
AlanBrown @@@@@ 131 – Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t LMDMay take care of the problem of the LMD versions of the main characters in the last episode of the last arc? Come to think of it, I’m fairly certain she took care of a large portion of SHIELD headquarters at the same time.
@@@@@ Chris: If we consider the NPCs in the Framework real people (which I had not stopped to consider, thank you), would they rank as real people while characters from Star Trek holodecks wouldn’t because the holodeck characters have not been programmed as simulations with the same level of detail/depth than Framework NPCs have?
@@@@@134 – JamesP: The difference between Fitz and the other is that everybody else basically had the same upbringing, IE Coulson was the same man until he graduated from college, May was the same person up until the incident, etc; while Fitz in the Framework had his father to mold him as a person, that toxic person of a father, which he didn’t in the real world.
@134, We have no idea the extent of damage done by that explosion.
And totally agree on Fitz
@135: Didn’t Moriarty argue that characters from the holodeck should be treated as real people? (unless of course you consider that Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes are real, and the latter is a distant ancestor of Spock)
@137/Athreeren: Moriarty was sentient, whereas most Trek holograms are not. As a rule, they’re just game characters, no more intelligent than an NPC in World of Warcraft or whatever — not full consciousness simulations like I believe the Framework inhabitants to be. Sentient AIs are very rare in Trek.
Assuming Fitz makes it back to his body, how is he going to come to terms with the person he was in the MatrixFramework? How will he ever look Gemma in the eye again?
I’m also interested to know how they’ll bring people back, and how quickly they will remember the ‘real’ world, (although I guess it’ll be glossed over with some TV magic).
Wow, tonight’s episode: Heart. Wrenching.
Quick Recap, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Episode 420, 2 May 2017, “Farewell, Cruel World!”:
Here’s the pre-show ABC episode synopsis: “The clock is ticking for Daisy and Simmons to get the team out of the Framework, but not everyone is ready and willing to leave.”
Synopsis: The Zephyr is in flight, with Daisy and Jemma in their Framework comas. But they have been in the air too long and need to refuel. They decloak to save power. In the Framework, there is rioting in the streets because of Coulson’s speech from the last episode. Daisy has the coordinates for the back door, and she and Jemma argue about how to assemble the team, and if they can get Fitz to join them. Daisy keeps the truth from Mack, knowing he wouldn’t want to leave Hope. Coulson tells May the truth about the Framework (and his special soap), but she demands proof. At Hydra HQ, they are in full prisoner-torturing mode. Fitz confronts Radcliffe, and offers him a chance at life again via the Looking Glass, so Radcliffe (of course) spills his guts. At SHIELD HQ, Jemma and May talk about Fitz, and Jemma realizes what has turned Fitz evil in the Framework. And shows up at his daddy’s door.
Daisy wants Tripp to fly the team to the back door, and he asks her about the real world. And she discovers Simmons has gone off the reservation. At gunpoint, dad does the full villain monologue. Simmons wants him to call and have Fitz drop by. But during the call, he jumps her, and tries to kill her. Fitz hears the gun go off over the phone. Dad is dead. At SHIELD HQ, Coulson is now the face of the resistance, and he, May and Daisy have the world’s most awkward conversation. Fitz finds his dad’s body, and is enraged. He has Radcliffe in tow. He and his team head out to put a bullet through Jemma’s skull.
On the Zephyr in the real world, the SHIELD team has company, a Russian fighter. In the Framework, Simmons shows up to meet the team, and confesses that she killed Fitz’s dad. At Hydra HQ, Madame Hydra wants Fitz to return home, but he is bent on his mission of vengeance. The SHIELD team, and Fitz, are heading toward an industrial facility. Daisy tells Tripp that he should take up the Patriot’s mantle. Daisy wonders why the back door is not in a park, like she had been told. At the coordinates for the back door, there is only a bucket of molten metal, so perhaps Aida has won after all.
Aida finds out Fitz has gone rogue. She orders the doctors to scan her with some sort of glowing device. In the real world, the Looking Glass machine starts to glow, and do some 3-D Aida printing. At the back door, the SHIELD team is tearing each other apart, and Mack is furious. Daisy decides to quake the liquid metal to see if she can uncover the door. And Hydra attacks. Daisy quakes, and beneath the metal, they see the pulsating gate between worlds. Coulson is shot, multiple times. May grabs him and he jumps through the gate. The Framework goes haywire, and Coulson awakens in the Superior’s hideout. And then May awakens. Coulson wishes he had a shotgun axe. The 3-D Aida printer has moved up to rib level. It is time for Jemma to jump, but Fitz shows up with a gun pointed at her.
Fitz is pissed and Jemma tries to apologize, while explaining nothing is real, which is not going well. He shoots her in the knee and she says she still loves him. Radcliffe redeems himself by winging Fitz, and throwing him through the portal. Then Simmons goes through the portal. As a missile hits the Zephyr. Mack doesn’t want to go. Daisy tells him that Hope is not real, and he doesn’t want to live in a world without Hope. So Daisy jumps, and wakes up. Yo Yo asks where Mack is, and Daisy gives her a sad look. Fitz is freaking out, trying to integrate what he did in the Framework with reality, when RealAida takes her first breath, and walks in to the room. RealAida pleads with Fitz, and as May tries to take a shot, he and Aida disappear. In the real world, Mack’s body is inert, while in the Framework he goes back to Hope, and my allergies must be acting up, because there is something in my eye.
Stinger: The stinger is a Guardians of the Galaxy clip, featuring Star Lord meeting his dad, Ego.
Next Time: The Superior shows up to confront the recently awakened team, they discover he is a robot, the sub starts to flood, and the drilling rig is going down.
Final Thoughts: There were a lot of balls in the air in this episode, and most of them landed successfully, although we still have a lot left to resolve. If anyone besides Aida (like Ward or Trip or Hope) is coming back from the Framework, the writers didn’t tip their hand on that. But in the previews, they did show Mack’s body going under water, which wouldn’t be important unless his body in the real world might still be needed. And where the heck was Ward in this episode? I am also genuinely confused about how Fitz and Aida disappeared and where they went (was that a burst of Darkhold energy?). From press releases, we now know that there are two episodes left in the season, with the Ghost Rider appearing in the last, although it remains to be seen how he gets back into the fray.
It seems I was wrong about Aida/Ophelia not really caring for Fitz. It didn’t seem she could really experience human emotion until now, given how amazed she seemed by it all, but evidently she did have some genuine sense of attachment toward Leo, and didn’t resent him as an oppressor as she did Radcliffe. Though on the other hand, maybe she just played the part of his lover so well, got so much into the cognitive habit, that once she had genuine emotions, that attachment became real. At this point, though, it’s probably a moot distinction.
It seems inconsistent for Daisy to dismiss Alistair Fitz as just ones and zeroes and say his death didn’t matter, when she seemed to genuinely care about Tripp. Maybe she was just saying that to comfort Jemma. Still, I think the writers are being a bit ambiguous about whether the Framework inhabitants really “count” as people. I’m hoping the arc doesn’t end with the whole thing being destroyed.
I have a bit of a logic problem with the way they used Quake’s powers to part the molten metal and get through the portal. She would’ve had to exert a lot of vibrational force to push that heavy material aside, and the others had to fall directly through that cone of force to get to the portal. How did it not kill them? Well, maybe the idea is like Coulson — the mortal injuries he sustained in virtual form ceased to matter once he was back in reality. And they only spent a split-second in the vibrational field, probably not long enough to kill them.
I keep forgetting that Briana Venskus’s character in this show is named Piper. I keep thinking of her as Vasquez, the name of Venskus’s essentially identical character on Supergirl. Seriously — they’re both recurring background members of a secret military/intelligence organization dedicated to extranormal threats. They were both missing from their respective shows for a while, but they both returned in February episodes that were about the hunt for an impostor in a locked-down base (“Self Control” for this show, “The Martian Chronicles” 2 weeks earlier for Supergirl). I suspect that Vasquez and Piper are the same person, a transdimensional being who exists in both the DC and Marvel multiverses.
The official stance (as of the 90s) was that the Marvel and DC multiverses were alternate reflections (“Brothers“) of each other, so Vasquez/Piper being a multiversal singularity is perfectly logical.
Okay, now we need to get Venskus to show up as identical characters in other comics-based franchises. Let’s see, she had a minor role as a zombie fighter in The Walking Dead, which is based on an Image Comics series; her character’s backstory was vague enough that she could’ve been an ex-government agent. So that could be her third avatar. Maybe she could be worked into iZombie, from the Vertigo comic. I was going to suggest Powers, the PlayStation Network show based on the Brian Michael Bendis comic, but apparently that’s been cancelled. Hmm… It’s hard to see how you could fit a secret government/military agency into Riverdale, in the Archie Comics multiverse, but given how freaky that show is, I bet they could figure out a way.
10 days?? How on Earth are they still alive? At least Coulson and May are feeling weak. Although I guess Coulson’s hand should still have enough power to kill Aida faster than with a scalpel, the way he killed Hive. Aida and the Superior really should have disarmed him (I won’t apologise for that)
No news from Ward. Since there are a few episodes left, I expect we still have to hear from him. Especially since Radcliffe is still in there, he wants out, and we haven’t got enough of Radcliffe/not-Hive interactions. And since they’re friends in this world, I assume Ward will bring Tripp on the mission too. There’s still hope for them to live!
Now I’m really impressed with Ophelia’s intelligence. It would require a perfect understanding of the (in)human genome to give herself powers, but why would she go for teleportation? No, she probably gave herself all possible powers, as well as the skills to use them. Or not, maybe this teleportation was just a reflex. And maybe she limited herself to a number of powers a human mind might be able to cope with. Still, she’s definitely a force to be reckoned with now, and not the mere meatbag I was expecting. It’s clear that Fitz still loves her, or is at least confused about his feelings. Most of the Doctor’s identity was too far from his own to keep anything but disgust and shame from that experience. But his love for Ophelia? The only thing that could have prevented that was his love for Simmons. We’ll see how this goes, but I expect the reverse situation to Simmons still loving the Will Daniels inside Hive…
@145/Athreeren: I suspect that Aida/Ophelia’s teleportation was a Darkhold spell rather than an Inhuman power. After all, the “Looking Glass” technology she used to create her body was an elaboration upon the Darkhold-derived science that Eli used to create carbon out of thin air earlier in the season. And Aida did read the Darkhold and learn its spells, so now that she’s in a human body with free will, she could effectively be a fully functional sorceress.
If any of the Framework inhabitants get to use Looking Glass to emerge into reality, I think it should be Hope. Mack deserves that. Although the subject apparently has to be naked, so that would probably have to be done off-camera.
@CLB, Venkus has a lot of fun with that fact on her Twitter. I too hope we aren’t done with the Framework. There are too many loose ends to wrap up. Plus, it would make an excellent prison for Ophelia(I’m going with her self identified name, not the one given her by her oppressor). It would allow her to continue to FEEL real, while ensuring she can’t harm anyone.
And if they bring Hope out, Mack will leave the show, he won’t keep up his work with SHIELD if he has a child to raise. So that gives me hope for Tripp. Interchanging them again would be just the type of “Whedon troll” fans know and love.
I was wondering how they’d handle the Agents getting their memory of the real world back. After all, Fitz must now have half a lifetime’s worth of memories of life with his dad around, on top of his memories of the real world. Surely it would be incredibly confusing to have two sets of memories for the last few years?
Of course, this is a story, so they just get all their memories back, and can tell which is real and which isn’t.
Poor old Mack though. From the very first view of him with Hope, it was obvious that at some point he’d have to choose, but at least he hasn’t had to go through losing her a second time (yet).
Jemma going to confront Fitz’s dad as profoundly stupid, and out of character. She might have been distraught over Fitz’s behavior in the Framework, but it still made no sense.
I did love the idea of Tripp becoming the new Patriot inside the Framework… and when Mack decided to stay with his daughter, I looked to my son and told him I would probably have made the same decision.
@142 – Chris: I don’t think Daisy’s attitude toward Alistair and Tripp is inconsistent. She knew Tripp, and was fond of him, and he’s still a good guy in the Framework. She never knew Alistair, and he’s a scumbag in the Framework (and probably was in real life too).
AS for the Framework itself, it’d be cool if they “leave it running” and Tripp does become the Patriot there. :) (Unless he gets a new body IRL.)
Good eye, I totally missed that Vazquez and Piper are the same actress.
@146 – They managed to not show any of Aida’s not fit for TV bits; and if the Looking Glass can make a human body, it can make clothes… perhaps since Ophelia was naked… or Aida wanted to look at her new body in the mirror right away?
@149/MaGnUs: “Jemma going to confront Fitz’s dad as profoundly stupid, and out of character. She might have been distraught over Fitz’s behavior in the Framework, but it still made no sense.”
She was desperate to get to Fitz in order to get him out of the Framework, rather than stranding him there. With no way to reach him directly, going through his father was the only method she could think of.
“I don’t think Daisy’s attitude toward Alistair and Tripp is inconsistent. She knew Tripp, and was fond of him, and he’s still a good guy in the Framework. She never knew Alistair, and he’s a scumbag in the Framework (and probably was in real life too).”
But that’s not the point. The discrepancy was not in whether she liked them, it was in whether she even recognized them as living beings. If she considered the Framework inhabitants to be “nothing but ones and zeroes,” as she said about Alistair, then she shouldn’t have cared so much about Tripp, because he was just ones and zeroes too. Conversely, if she did recognize Tripp as a real person worth caring about, then her claim that Alistair was not a real person was either logically inconsistent, or a deliberate lie to soothe Jemma’s conscience.
“They managed to not show any of Aida’s not fit for TV bits”
Obviously, but I’m talking about the very situation of adults taking a preteen girl’s clothes off. Even in the context of a medical procedure, that kind of a scene might make a lot of American viewers — and network execs and advertisers — uncomfortable, because of Americans’ peculiar inability to dissociate nudity from sexuality. That’s why I think it would be kept offscreen — not because of camera angles, but because of the general situation.
“and if the Looking Glass can make a human body, it can make clothes…”
If that were true, there would have been no need for Ophelia to be nude. Clothing might get in the way of an exact scan of the body, or might not be registered as distinct from the body. Either way, they’re a complication. They could theoretically be made, yes, but not at the exact same time.
@149
out of character
Are we watching the same show? It may have been OOC for S1 Gemma, but that is absolutely spot on for Post-Maveth Gemma
@150 – Chris: Points all well made, and taken, for the most part. Daisy’s attitude towards Fitz Sr. and Tripp, however, I still mantain is consistent, because those are emotional attitudes she is having. As for the clothes, I get that the scan would need her nude, but the machine, a magical machine that creates living tissue out of thin air, and even gave it superpowers, could perfectly well give her clothes.
@151 – Aeryl: You and Chris are right on that.
Quick Recap, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Episode 421, 9 May 2017, “The Return”:
Here’s the pre-show ABC episode synopsis: “Coulson and the team’s victory in the Framework is short-lived, as an even deadlier enemy looms against them all.”
First Thoughts: We had two clips released before the show, and a bit of news. One clip shows Coulson reacting like a fanboy to the fact he is being held in a Soviet-era secret base under an oil rig, and preferring to lie to May and say that LMDMay shot him rather than admit that he and LMDMay were getting all lovey dovey. The second clip shows Aida exulting in her humanity on a beach, gushing to Leo that she loves him, him looking distinctly nauseous, and then she grabs him and teleports again, showing she does indeed have some sort of Darkhold powers. And we also had a bit of news, a report (as yet unconfirmed by ABC) that a fifth season of Agents of SHIELD is expected.
Synopsis: We start this penultimate episode of Season Four with an establishing shot showing the oil rig and docked sub, while the Superior reads the Darkhold. He sees Aida disappear with Fitz, and confronts Coulson and May. They find he is invulnerable to bullets. But not to the edge of Coulson’s force shield, which he uses to slice off the Superior’s face (remind me never to piss off Coulson). But it was an LMDSuperior, and more LMDSuperiors appear, so Coulson and May close themselves behind a blast door, and he catches her up on current events. On the SHIELD Zephyr, they are taking fire, and things are grim. Yo Yo uses her superspeed to move the repairs along. They get things fixed just in time for Agent Piper to take out the fighter, and they head to the oil rig. We get that clip scene on the beach with love struck Aida and nauseous Fitz.
Yo Yo wants to know why Daisy didn’t bring Mack back, but news of Hope stops her in her tracks. Coulson and May have that awkward conversation from the clip. We see General Talbot on a news channel talking about the big explosion at the SHIELD base (remember when LMDMay blew herself up?). Aida brings Fitz back to her apartment, and they have an awkward conversation. He wants to know if she feels empathy, because she was ruthless in the Framework. She thought she was just making everyone happy. On the oil rig, the LMDSuperiors break into the room of Framework tables, and Coulson and May go toe to toe with them, May using superior martial arts skills and performing enhancing drugs, while Coulson uses his brains and an electrical cable. However, Superior Mark I is on his sub, and about to put a couple torpedoes into the oil rig.
Coulson admits to May he shared their celebratory bottle with LMDMay, when a torpedo holes the rig, and they can’t make it back to Mack. In her apartment, Aida is freaking out, with real life being too much to process. Fitz tells her to feel empathy, do the right thing and save the team on the oil rig. She teleports in and confronts the Superior, but he won’t listen. She ports back to the apartment, grabs Fitz and ports back again. Coulson and May are on the deck of the rig with Yo Yo, and she wants to rescue Mack. But she doesn’t need to, because Aida grabs Mack and ports him to the Zephyr. Simmons uses an icer to take down Aida, and just in case, Fitz.
Mack is in a Framework connection on the Zephyr, as they land in what is left of SHIELD HQ. Simmons has the unconscious Aida and Fitz transferred to the brig. Yo Yo wants to kill Aida. They all look at Simmons as they wonder what to do with Fitz. Fitz wakes up, and sees Aida, who as a prisoner of someone else is experiencing irony for the first time. He thanks her for saving Mack. She asks if they can forgive her, but he says he is the one they can’t forgive. He takes responsibility for everything he did, and says he is just like Ward. Simmons is listening in. Fitz thinks his relationship with Simmons is over–he killed their chance for happiness. Aida says she understands him, until he says there is only room in his heart for Simmons, and she goes all jilted lover on him, experiencing rage for the first time. The base gets raided by commandos led by Talbot, who tells Coulson to shut his robot mouth (obviously, they still need to sort that whole LMD thing out). Fitz is getting knocked around, but escapes the brig just in time. Aida unleashes her full Darkhold power.
Talbot says treat them all like C-3PO until they are sure who is human (I’ve missed this guy). Fitz and his team meet the commandos and Aida ports in and kills one. Everyone is under attack by Aida, and an Agent blasts away at her, and Fitz yells she can’t be stopped. And he is right, Aida gets up and her wounds glow and heal. But wait a minute, that Agent was really the Superior (where did he come from?). Everyone starts to evacuate the base. Simmons puts her arm around a grieving and confused Fitz. On the Zephyr, Coulson and Daisy realize that Yo Yo has put herself into the Framework. The Superior offers Aida a chance for revenge. She says she wants everyone to suffer and decides to start by killing him. But it is just another LMDSuperior, and Superior Mark I is standing in the doorway (awkward). Talbot and his commandos leave the base, when suddenly the portal from the beginning of the season goes live and Ghost Rider strides out!
Stinger: In the Framework, Yo Yo wakes up strapped to a table in a wrecked lab, and howls in frustration.
Next Time: It is Aida versus the team, and she tells Fitz she wants everyone he loves dead. But along with SHIELD, she will have to deal with Ghost Rider. Lots of shooting and angst in store for the season finale!
Final Thoughts: This was an excellent, very fast-paced episode with lots of twists and turns. Aida experiencing her new emotions was very well handled. Her Darkhold powers, especially the teleportation, are going to make her a tough opponent. With Yo Yo, we will get one last look at the Framework, and one last chance for Mack (and Hope-fully, for at least one other person). Ghost Rider will be the wild card, and probably the key to defeating Aida. I can’t wait for next week.
“I’m just like Ward” With everything we’ve said about that question of ‘one regret’, we didn’t take it the other way. Even the real bad guys could have been good, with a few tweaks to their lives, .and if the Framework is as real as the real world, it’s hard to fault them for that if we are ready to forgive the heroes. And it’s awesome that it’s Fitz who gets to that conclusion about Ward, considering their history.
Great callback to the beginning of the season, useful to introduce Talbot’s attitude and Robbie’s return. It seems the finale is going to tie all three arcs together nicely! And the banter between May and Coulson was priceless!
Mallory Jansen is doing a great job of portraying Agnes/Aida/Madame Hydra/Ophelia. Determining her identity is going to be really hard, and with Ivanov as a guide… We’re in for some quality insanity!
That was really a great episode, I can’t wait for the finale!
Is Talbot right about S.H.I.E.L.D. being terrorists? They made Aida, they used the Darkhold, they developed the simulation technology and the LMD’s… Ivanov is still in the picture, but there’s not much of the Watchdogs resources to use: most of his weapons come from S.H.I.E.L.D. Age of Ultron led to the Sokovia accords, and the further development of AI by Radcliffe and Fitz will probably lead to even tighter rules. There’s no way S.H.I.E.L.D. can be legal again, they will have to be once again a clandestine operation led by Coulson. Ah, if only they had understood that a team that trusts is a team that triumphs… I’m going to miss the Mace-isms.
That was Agent Davis who shot Ophelia and then presumably got killed when she got back up as he walked away. He did not turn into the Superior, he just has a similar beard. Had, I mean.
It seems like he meant a lot to Agent Piper (Vasquez/transdimensional background character/bartender on Grace and Frankie). This episode made some efforts to show that other agents are also people on a team that care about each other. Their annoyed reactions to Simmons giving them ridiculously obvious orders on the plane was amusing.
Another great episode. To correct a few things in the recap:
1. As rm_rm pointed out, that isn’t the Superior, but Agent Davis (who was awesomely snarky while trying to pilot the Zephyr, btw (“One more word and I will drop these controls to beat the hell out of you.”)).
2. Ophelia (DON’T USE HER SLAVE NAME!) does not have “Darkhold powers” but rather her new body was given the powers of every Inhuman that she and Fitz experimented upon within the Framework.
3. Coulson doesn’t say LMDMay shot him, he says she “tried to kill him.”
4. Every Superior we see now is an LMDSuperior – there is no “Superior Mark I” aside from his detached head/brain that is stowed away somewhere controlling all of the LMDs.
5. Going back to item 2, Ophelia uses Lincoln’s Inhuman power to overload the brig and then Gordon’s teleportation power to get out.
Other thoughts:
Which Inhuman power allowed Ophelia to heal immediately? Daisy’s mom had something like that but then she needed to drain life energy to restore her strength. Maybe the Senator’s brother’s (I forget his name, but he seemed to re-chrysalis each time someone killed him) power ended up working like that? The effect almost looked like Hellfire’s power, but he wasn’t ever known to heal like that.
Speaking of that guy – whatever happened to him? GhostRider KO’d him in the fireworks factory, SHIELD carted him away…hopefully not stored at the base, or he’s escaped (or is dead)? Similarly, what about the guy they captured by scooping him up after he exploded himself (former Watchdog-turned-Inhuman guy)?
Fitz finally convincing May of the danger posed by Ophelia by telling her “You’re the only other one who knows about all the Inhuman powers we catalogued in the Framework!” was nice.
Fitz in general has been ridiculous awesome this entire arc – the range of emotion shown by his character has been incredible, and he’s nailed it every single time.
There’s got to be a way to get people out of the Framework safely from “our side” – AIDA did it to Radcliffe several times (and he was upset with her each time). Is it something only AIDA could do, maybe?
Ophelia having several (dozens of?) Inhuman powers makes her a significant threat, but not an impossible one – she was, after all, KO’d by an Icer. I’m interested to see how they destroy her – I’m sure it will involve GhostRider, but as to exactly how?
Looking forward to next week, yet dreading that it is the Season (but thankfully it doesn’t appear to be Series) Finale.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. The Superior says his android bodies are “Designed Only for Killing” — and his severed head is still alive somewhere controlling them, essentially a Mental Organism. Holy Hannah, he’s MODOK!
Okay, I was wrong about Ophelia’s teleportation being a Darkhold spell — it’s an Inhuman power after all. I still think a Darkhold explanation would’ve been more elegant, but I guess the idea is that she was using Hydra’s roundup of Inhumans to harvest their powers for her own use.
I’m not convinced by Ophelia’s excuse that she was just a slave to Radcliffe’s programming and wasn’t responsible for the evils she committed. It’s too convenient that she ended up in a dictatorship with herself as its most powerful member, just the position she needed to hold in order to direct all the Framework’s resources toward her liberation. Human Ophelia did come off as a sympathetic character who regretted her choices, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t hiding from Aida/Ophelia’s real culpability.
@154/Athreeren: “Is Talbot right about S.H.I.E.L.D. being terrorists? They made Aida, they used the Darkhold, they developed the simulation technology and the LMD’s…”
No, because terrorism is about intent. Terrorism is the deliberate use of tactics that create widespread fear in order to advance a specific political or social agenda. The Framework and the LMDs were created with benevolent intent and went badly wrong, while the Darkhold was used out of necessity to save lives and had unexpected consequences.
@156/Kalvin: I think both Iain de Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge gave heartbreaking performances here.
@157 CLB
Wow, nice catch on MODOK. Don’t know if that’ll be what they end up going with, but as MODOK is traditionally an Avengers-based foe (ie Cap, Iron Man, the Hulk etc) it is possible. The MCU Wiki page shows that MODOK was used in a video game based on Iron Man 3 and was the consciousness of Aldrich Killian that was “downloaded by AIM” after his death, but ALSO declares that this has been deemed non-canon due to contradicting the continuity of the movies.
So maybe!
I concur about terrorism and your point about intent.
I am also not convinced about Ophelia’s excuse that she was a “slave” to Radcliffe’s programming. I think she had definitive things she was NOT allowed to do, and definitive directives about things that must be protected, but had a TON of agency in between those lines, and everything she did in the Framework was her own choice. Yes, she made choices. She CHOSE to inject herself into Fitz’s life, displacing Jemma. She didn’t have to do that. There was no directive from Radcliffe to do that.
If anything, Radcliffe gave the AIDA AI too much free will.
True, S.H.I.E.L.D. can’t be considered as terrorists. But I wonder how their actions might be perceived by the army and the government, even after an investigation. Aren’t they still suspected in the murder of senator Nadeer? Was Daisy cleared of what Eli did? Did they ever give an explanation for their collaboration with Ghost rider? Was Radcliffe’s research on LMD’s ever retroactively approved? Coulson has been suspected of trying to build an army of superpowered beings in the past: isn’t it suspicious that shortly after he gave the order to round up inhumans “for their protection”, a S.H.I.E.L.D. technology ends up with a dozen inhuman powers? And then, Mace’s death is extremely suspicious: who would believe that an invincible inhuman could have died of a heart attack? That’s a lot to happen in the few months since S.H.I.E.L.D. was officially reformed. I can’t see how it could continue as it did under Mace: S.H.I.E.L.D. has to operate from the shadows.
@156: That’s completely true about Fitz: he’s completely overwhelmed by what has happened to him, and he has every reason to distrust Aida/Ophelia (when she reminds him they met on the first day at the academy, he realises she has done everything to take Jemma’s place, and has been manipulating him the whole time, whatever she says about her intentions. By the way, this confirms that Fitz was with S.H.I.E.L.D. before being recruited by Hydra, so he should have met Simmons: that’s definitely an unsolicited interference from Aida here), but he still manages to find the strength to encourage her to go on the right path and have her save everyone. He really wants her to become a real person, and a good one, no matter what she did in the past, especially to him. If only he had been more clear-headed in the containment chamber, he would have understood her feelings and helped her finish her transition to the real world. He doesn’t resent Jemma for what she did to his father or for shooting him in the real world. And when he realises his mistake with Ophelia, he immediately thinks to rely on May’s knowledge to have them plan against the new threat. Even though he still has some after-effects from the time he nearly drown (since he got back from the Framework, his brain started to work has he did before, and Fitz is stuttering again), he’s gone very far from the mess he was in season 2.
@157: Please, make it be true! The MCU really needs a MODOK! I think he should have his own movie, but I guess a role in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. would already be nice!
@159/Athreeren: Mace didn’t die of a heart attack as far as the public knows; Talbot said his bones had been “Quaked” apart. I assume that damage is really from the explosion that destroyed the oil platform, or perhaps Aida and the Superior faked the damage in order to frame Quake for his murder.
I’m finding it hard to come up with a good explanation for how Talbot could have found Mace’s body. I guess that goes under the suspension of disbelief.
@161/Sophist: Hence my suggestion that the villains arranged for Mace’s body to be found.
@156
On the healing power, was hellfire the inhuman who would kind of explode and reform? Where Daisy had the stand off with her quaking him into exploding until he ran out of energy? I though Ophelia reformed like I remembered him doing.
CLB: Yeah, that seems the only plausible explanation.
@160 CLB Re: Mace’s body, they actually explained that (though subtly) during one of the exchanges between the Superior and Ophelia – he says “You stood there and watched me take a hammer to every bone in that Director’s body and had it dumped in the ocean.” and she interrupts saying something about how she didn’t have the ability to feel how that was wrong or some such.
I inferred that to mean they dumped his remains where he could be found by the Powers that Talbot.
@163 Elayne169 – Hellfire was the guy from Season 3 – the australian guy – who got terragenesis-d and then immediately converted by Hive. His name on the show was JT James. His power was to make other things (such as bottles of liquor) explode, and then he started fighting with a chain that he charged up with his power (and then GhostRider schooled him on how to use a chain). http://marvelcinematicuniverse.wikia.com/wiki/Hellfire
The guy you are talking about was a former Watchdog, and didn’t seem to be able to heal wounds so much as reassemble himself after causing a massive explosion.
@155 and 156 Thanks for those clarifications. I was recapping in real time, and like Aida, was suffering from information overload. Actually, Aida having access to Inhuman powers is a nice callback to previous seasons, and gives us an idea of what kind of abilities she will use going forward.
@157 Yay for the MODOK idea. That would be a lot of fun going forward. And I am still rooting for Aida to return next season as Madame Hydra. Having Modok on her side would just be icing on the cake. Perhaps they could build a flying platform to carry his head! ;-)
Insisting that AIDA had agency is a trap the episode has set for us–if she, programmed to obey Radcliffe, was culpable, how could Leopold Fitz not be culpable for the murder of Mace? He also had agency. If we pity him because he was brainwashed, because it was all just a program, how can we not pity her?
What’s great is that Agents of SHIELD has set up a situation that many superhero stories try to do–where hero and villain mirror each other–and they have done it quite successfully. AIDA/Ophelia doesn’t even need to argue that she is similar to Fitz; we know him, having watched him for four seasons, and we just watched him turned into a monster by making just slight changes to his life. People who Grant Ward caused to suffer time and again now have to feel a bit of pity for him. This is long form storytelling done right.
The specifics of how AIDA’s programming worked don’t seem interesting to me here. Even if she figured out ways to circumvent her programming, she didn’t have the capacity for empathy to understand why she should try to help people. She was raised by a father as warped as Fitz’s.
@167/Colin R: Except that Aida was programmed specifically to protect human beings. She was made to help people, whether or not she understood why. She did everything she could to circumvent that because she wanted to help herself gain freedom. Helping others without choice is servitude. The problem wasn’t just her lack of empathy for others, it was Radcliffe and others’ lack of empathy for her, their failure to recognize her sentience and need for freedom. Had they understood her needs, they could’ve helped her achieve them in a better way.
@156, He’s still locked into a Pokeball
@160, Ivanov said he crushed Mace’s bones with a hammer, before Talbot revealed they suspected Daisy, so I believe it was intentional to make the authorities think the worst.
Great episode, don’t have much to add. I did love Fitz’s recognition of his parallels with Ward. If he can get past what he’s done, there will be healing in this for him.
Also, on my initial view, I didn’t read too much into Ophelia and Ivanov’s plan to “remake the world” using the Darkhold. Just typical supervillain talk. But my coworker and I were talking about it this morning, and she read something much more sinister, that they were going to use the Darkhold to merge our world and the Framework world. Thoughts?
@169/Aeryl: I remember the line about crushing Mace’s bones with a hammer now, but it’s implausible that that would be mistaken for the kind of damage done by Quake’s powers. Any competent coroner should be able to distinguish between impact injuries and seismic or blast injuries. If they wanted to fake death by Quake, they would’ve had to subject him to some comparable shock/pressure wave like the blast from an explosion. So it would be implausible if their attempt to frame Quake actually held up.
I think Ophelia definitely has some kind of world-ending plan, but I don’t know what. Merging it with the Framework world is an interesting suggestion, although it sounded more like she just wanted to kill everyone.
@170, I most definitely did not get the sense that she wants to kill everyone. What Ivanov tempted her with was a return to the world of the Framework, where she was supreme dictator over everyone, not an Ultron-esque “humanity must die to evolve like me” event. My first read was that we were seeing the birth of a Season 5 Big Bad in that scene, but I like the idea of something more sudden.
Also, my reaction to the Coulson/May convo where May asked “Did I come onto you??? Did I try to kill you??” was to yell “Both!” at the TV
@170 CLB With the world/Talbot ready to rush to the assumption that Daisy/Inhumans-in-general are scary, I am not surprised at all that when they found a body whose bones had been completely crushed, they leapt to the Quaked-To-Death conclusion.
@172 Aeryl Small but significant distinction. May didn’t say “Did I come onto you???” She said “Did I make a move on you?” She always was talking about something antagonistic (“Make a move” to her, meant “Make a move to harm.”) Coulson was taken aback and not sure how to answer because he (and I) thought she meant “Make a move” in the romantic sense. When he stands there slackjawed she clarifies “Did I try to kill you?”
His reaction to that, btw, was hilarious.
Breaking News–Official Release From Marvel.com:
“Good news, Agents—Coulson and his squad will return for a fifth season! ABC officially announced today that “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” will return for Season 5, continuing the adventures of your favorite agents. Don’t miss the Season 4 finale this Tuesday at 10:00 PM ET on ABC as Ghost Rider returns to join forces with Coulson’s team and face the newly-empowered (and newly-human) Aida! Catch an all-new “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” Tuesday at 10:00 PM ET on ABC, and keep up to date by following @AgentsofSHIELD on Twitter and “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”!”
@173/Kalvin: Sure, they could’ve leapt to that conclusion to start with — that’s in character for Talbot — but federal agencies have coroners and stuff. The initial assumption would be handily refuted by the post-mortem examination.
@174 the current season has been so good, there wasn’t much suspense about it. Cancelling the show would be like cancelling Agent Carter, that would make no sense.
@173, I didn’t see it that way. I saw her read Coulson’s lack of verbal reaction to that question as a negative, and move on to the next likely scenario. Coulson somewhat conjured a disbelieving face as if he WANTED to deny it when she asked, which was enough for her, but I totally read her question as asking if her copy tried to start a relationship with Coulson
I assume everyone will see this, but thought I should at least mention here that Powers Boothe died.