Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 4 episode 11 review - All the Comforts of Home

All the comforts of home

Welcome home, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. but there’s never any rest for the wicked, back to work!

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s major strength and major weakness that started about the end of the first block of season 4 is its inability to take a break. All the character introspection you’d get out of everything that’s happened always seems to happen in the middle of something big going down.

One can see the strengths and the weaknesses of this approach. On one hand, a lot of character exposition can get boring and it’s better to have development defined by their and not words. On the other, there’s only so much you can put on a character before you wonder how they haven’t broken.

A primary example of what I mean is Daisy’s reaction when she finds out what Coulson did to her, she gets up and moves forward. This could’ve driven a conflict between her and Coulson but that’s dropped in favour of moving forward.

We got a little bit of setup for this episode back in the first half of the season with the introduction of General Hale and her no-nonsense approach to just about anything. Oh, and you remember Piper? I don’t remember her, was she one of the Zephyr pilots from back in s4? She knows about the LMDs and the Framework so possibly.

So, we’re quickly introduced to Hale’s daughter, Ruby, what seems to be a conventional mother/daughter relationship you realise by episode’s end is actually something far more sinister. I like Ruby, she’s certainly got the skills, and because this show will never not have a big twist in an episode ever now, she cuts off Yo-Yo’s arms. Of course, Yo-Yo is like that in the comics so I suppose we all should’ve seen this coming, though I don’t remember future Yo-Yo having that problem. Her obsession with Daisy is something we’ll probably get to in a later episode

We’re introduced to another chronomicon, he gets killed so don’t even worry about him. It was an ingenious move budget-wise to have their new headquarters be the Lighthouse, allows them to keep using the set they used for the first half of the season, still it’s not that visually interesting but I kinda hope there will be more outdoors stuff.

The return of Deke proves a couple of lighter moments but he doesn’t contribute much to the plot this episode

This episode starts thing off big, with more revelations and next time is the big 100^th episode, and with Hale trying to form her own team, starting with the Absorbing Man, it’s looking to be an interesting one

Rating 7/10