Summary: SHIELD completes the necessary setup for season three in an installment that benefits from a swift and purposeful conclusion to the rescue of Simmons and some compelling character material, but is slightly inhibited by reticence to move forward with certain plotlines.
Recap:
In a prologue set in England, 1839, a group of upper class partygoers draw lots for a mysterious purpose. It’s bad luck for the poor guy, and we soon see what they were drawing lots for – the loser has to step inside a room holding the Kree Monolith…
We then fast forward to the present day, picking up where the premiere left off, where the team races to stop Fitz from suffering the same fate as Simmons. They pull him out just in time as the Monolith liquefies – but Fitz has picked up a valuable clue in some unexplained dust. Some quick analysis shows that the dust is clearly not from Earth, finally giving the team confirmation that the Monolith is a portal to an alien planet, and hinting that Simmons could still be out there.
For some assistance, the team calls on a very old friend – Professor Randolph, the Asgardian from that terrible Thor: The Dark World crossover back in the dark days of early season one. Randolph’s currently chilling in a Norwegian prison, laying low, but the team eventually coerces him into using his Asgardian abilities to bust out of jail. Randolph flies back to SHIELD HQ with the team to check out the Monolith, and quickly deduces that the monolith follows a pattern from another planet. He’s not too willing to help out, however, until he’s shown the ancient parchment Fitz stole last week, when he swiftly changes his mind. Luckily for the team, Randolph’s seen the Hebrew word for death before, carved into the walls of a castle in Gloucestershire, so the team rack up a few more frequent flyer miles by jetting off to England.
Meanwhile in HYDRAland, Ward has been getting his HYDRA reforms well underway, explaining his vaguely Darwinian policy of rooting out the old deadwood to his British (an above-average week for British here) enforcer. Ward’s first mission is to track down a spoiled rich kid on a yacht and kidnap him. At HYDRA HQ, Ward leaves his enforcer to interrogate the kid, but there’s more than meets the eye to this new arrival, who fights back against the enforcer and beats him to within an inch of his life. It’s at that point when Ward emerges, revealing it was all a test of mettle for… Werner von Strucker, son of the dearly departed Baron von Strucker.
At the English castle, the team soon find a secret passage leading to a room with a machine in the middle. Fitz works out that the machine was created to control the Monolith, so the team call Mack and Daisy (who were dealing with psychiatrist’s Andrew’s reticence to accept new members of the Secret Warriors) to bring the Monolith over. When the Monolith is inserted, it does indeed transform into a portal, but the team are only able to get a flare through before the Monolith reforms. Strangely enough, the experience caused Daisy to collapse from some mysterious trauma…
Their first try isn’t a bust though, as Fitz is able to ascertain from Daisy’s collapse that Daisy is able to open the portal and maintain it with her powers. In true Fitz style, he leaps in as soon as Daisy opens it up, and he’s transported to the barren, blue-tinged land that viewers glimpsed at the end of last week (except it’s windier and the field of vision is worse, because drama). Calling for Simmons’ name, Fitz eventually finds her, and is able to bring her back by his fingertips. Simmons is back with the team, and despite some apparent PTSD from her time on the planet, she certainly seems happy to reunite with Fitz.
Parallel to all this, May finally made her return! Turns out she’s not been spending her whole break with Andrew, as we catch up with her playing golf and chopping vegetables with her father. Hunter, however, who asks her to join his vendetta against Ward in a conversation that reveals May is protecting her father after a potentially Ward-related accident, soon interrupts her domestic life. She initially rejects his proposal, but accepts after some urging from her father.
In the episode’s end tag, it all intertwines as Andrew accepts a new student for his class – it’s none other than Werner von Strucker. Looks like Ward’s planning his own infiltration…
Review
For all the bells and whistles of the numerous sub-plots ticking away this episode, ‘Purpose in the Machine’ can be roughly summed up like this: the team looks for Simmons, and gets her back. That might sound like a criticism and an accusation of simplicity, but it’s far from it – that short sentence is exactly why ‘Purpose in the Machine’ works so well. It’s focused, (ahem) purposeful and refreshingly fast-paced, avoiding episode after episode of a potentially dragged out quest to rescue Simmons by simply but effectively putting a stop to the plot here. It’s a decision that sounds rushed on paper, but works much better in execution, primarily because an extended version of Simmons’ jaunt on the alien planet simply wasn’t going to work on a network budget. SHIELD works well within its budgeting constraints here, and it’s arguable that Simmons’ plot will be just as compelling played out on Earth as it would be on the alien planet, as the sparser Earth setting forces SHIELD to adopt an approach that centres around character and her interactions with the central figures of the show over special effects and pure, shallow spectacle.
Stepping back a little to the actual quest for Simmons – the plot leading up to Simmons’ rescue is efficient enough, even if it doesn’t truly spark until the episode’s final act. Even if he debuted in an unfortunate episode, it’s fun to have Professor Randolph back, with Peter MacNicol delivering an engaging performance that ably mixes sleaze with other-worldliness. His presence here actually seems more consistent with the show’s tone than it was in the more grounded first season, and there’s a nice moment of mystery where he declares he hasn’t heard the term ‘Inhuman’ before – but just where, exactly, did he hear it in the first place? Despite the fun of Randolph’s performance, however, the scenes of investigation are reasonably pedestrian, and it was up to the other subplots to keep the momentum until the plot finally struck gold in the final fifteen minutes.
Those aforementioned final minutes are enough to make up for every moment that SHIELD slipped into a lower gear this episode, thankfully. Simmons’ rescue scene that essentially amounted to two people stumbling about in an alien blizzard – but, no question about it, this was a genuine nail-biter of a scene, and it’s extremely impressive just how much tension SHIELD managed to wring out of a scene with that pretty uninspiring description. It even managed to sell a shameless fake-out as Simmons appeared to lose grasp of Fitz and make it feel genuinely real, which is a testament to the way the acting and direction managed to make this scene a truly thrilling against-the-clock thriller with hardly any proper action or sense of threat in the scene. Admittedly, now it’s up to how SHIELD handles Simmons and the fallout of her trip to the alien planet to ensure that these scenes remain as thrilling and cathartic in retrospect, but right now it’s one hell of a way to wrap up the arc with considerable panache.
Ward’s HYDRA was one of the more left-field twists at the end of last season, but the plotline seems to be shaping up well here. There’s a sense of freeness to both the character and Brett Dalton’s performance here – now he’s been separated from any link back to his former humanity, Dalton is free to play Ward as a gleefully ruthless kingpin who’s at home with the criminals of HYDRA. While there was certainly intrigue to the conciliatory Ward we saw at the top of last season, this episode clearly and definitively showed that the character is just more fun when he’s allowed to be an out-and-out bad guy, and Dalton’s more relaxed and enjoyable performance here reflects that. The show was guilty of sparsely using Ward during the back half of last season, but the HYDRA arc seems to be a really interesting place to take the character, casting him as the mentor to Werner von Strucker in a twisted mirror of his own mentor/mentee relationship with Garrett, and there’s an awful lot of ways SHIELD could capitalise on this symmetry in the future. The inclusion of Baron von Strucker’s kid as Ward’s protégée is also a nice touch – an organic and logical connection to the movies that could potentially allow for SHIELD to make amends for the slightly offhand treatment of Strucker Sr. in Age of Ultron by creating a younger legacy character of sorts. Okay, it’s unlikely von Strucker Jr. will be popping up in the movies any time soon, but it’s a choice that continues to cement the show’s place in the cinematic universe in a way that benefits SHIELD directly.
May’s plotline here isn’t quite as intriguing, but credit must be given to the writers for trying something a little different with the character. The introduction of May’s father is a strong one, with James Hong delivering an endearingly wise performance that overcomes the constant, gratuitous stream of
references to May’s mother that he’s saddled with, and the attempts to flesh out May’s backstory to some extent are successful enough, if not overly revelatory (May used to be an ice skater, so there’s that). What May’s plotline does stylishly deliver is a brisk but effective character study of a woman who physically cannot escape the paranoid, hyper-alert mindset of a spy yet constantly attempts to do so, coming to the realisation that settled and domestic life simply can’t happen for her; even as she tries to chop vegetables and settle into a normal life, May seems more like her father’s bodyguard than his loyal daughter. It’s a strong bit of character work that needs the space that ‘Purpose in the Machine’ allows it to breathe and develop – certainly, if May had been re-introduced in the season premiere, there would have been very little room for a character study with anything near the depth we get here.
As for Hunter’s (and now May’s, too) attempt to take down Ward? ‘Purpose in the Machine’ treads water a little on that front, with a frustrating lack of progress made here, so the jury’s still certainly out on a subplot that could develop into the exciting undercover saga of infiltration that last year’s brief Simmons-in-HYDRA arc never was, or it could simply become a drag that feels overly tangential to the rest of the Inhuman-focused plotlines. Time will tell on this one, it would seem, but it’s enhanced a little by the end tag scene that reveals von Strucker has been planted inside psychiatrist Andrew’s class, presumably to worm his way inside Andrew’s circle for information on SHIELD. What SHIELD has now is an intriguing little game of two organisations desperately trying to out-manoeuvre and second-guess one another, employing tactics the other, even unintentionally, then emulates. Bringing the separate ATCU into the equation does threaten to create a tangled web of deception and intrigue that could become too convoluted to enjoy, especially if the ATCU plot begins to intertwine with HYDRA, but the bubbling thread of conspiracy and undercover intrigue has the potential to become a quietly thrilling counterpart to the more bombastic Inhuman storylines.
‘Purpose in the Machine’, despite its flaws, is an impressive sign of how far SHIELD has come. It’s a thoroughly entertaining slice of serialised television that seamlessly merges the innate weirdness of comic book ideas such as the Monolith with thoughtful, well-acted character material while advancing almost every plotline forward a little. SHIELD might not have the flashy, intermittent brilliance of other comic book shows, but it’s chugging along nicely at an impressively consistent standard.
Odds & Ends
- First named mention of the Secret Warriors! The writers weren’t kidding when they talked about a ‘slow burn’ approach to the Secret Warriors – Joey isn’t even in this episode, and there’s a distinct feeling through Daisy and Andrew’s scenes that SHIELD will be taking the slow road on this one.
- MCU mention: Professor Randolph mentions cities falling out of the sky, once again referencing Age of Ultron.
- Simmons wakes up with a start brandishing a knife after being rescued, so I’m guessing she will not be rating the alien planet particularly high on Trip Advisor.
- Norwegian prisons look bizarrely comfortable. Even the prisons in Scandinavia are nice.
- Nada on Lincoln, Lash or the ATCU this week, even if the quest to find Simmons tangentially links into the Inhuman story. From next week’s promo, it seems as if we’re delving back into the more directly Inhuman focused stories with an episode that focuses heavily on Lincoln. Joy.
- Bobbi finally acknowledges that SHIELD’s obsessive stamping of their insignia on cars was a bad idea, and it appears they’ve gotten rid of it. There’s still logos on the jets, though.
- Randolph calls Bobbi ‘Amazon woman’, and I bet Adrienne Palicki winced when she read that line in the script.
