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Managing editor & film and television critic with a Bachelor's of Arts in English Literature with a Writing Minor from the University of Guam. Currently in graduate school completing a Master's in English Literature.
“The past is doomed to repeat the present.” Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s fifth episode of its final season is titled “Trout in the Milk;” it is written by Iden Baghdadchi, and directed by Stan Brooks.
Some spoilers ahead for those who are not up-to-date with the series or not caught up with this episode. If you haven’t done either, get to that now, then return to this article!
This week’s episode of the hit Marvel series deviates from the agents’ usual direction of protecting the timeline. The Agents of SHIELD arrive in 1973 New York, where they discover the world is on a different path than the one with which they are familiar. Wilfred “Freddy” Malick (Neal Bledsoe) is in charge of the organization with the help of Chronicoms, collaborating on a plan to eliminate anyone who gets in their way. “Trout in the Milk” relies on nostalgic elements of Marvel properties to a much larger message.
So far, the final season has jumped into odd-numbered decades — 1931, 1955, and now 1973 — with the agents making an unplanned and abrupt jump into 1976, the supposed end of the Vietnam War. The time travel usage of the season has skipped this event as well as World War II, although it seems necessary to do so, as everything concerning these wars could be explained in their immediate environment: the fashion of the current time, the disparity between then-past and future technologies, and other popular cultural scenes.
Remnants of the 1960s living on into the 1970s appear in the episode’s first four minutes: rollerskates and bell-bottoms. The evolution of fashion in the twentieth century is symbolic of its history. The twin towers of the World Trade Center are seen erected in the background as Agents Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen) and Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) are walking in the streets of New York, and it is no coincidence that these two towers were actually opened to the public in the exact year that the agents arrived from the past. Hacker-turned-agent Daisy Johnson/ Quake (Chloe Bennet) uses her laptop computer and mobile phone in front of Daniel Sousa (guest star Enver Gjokaj), who is in awe at what the future has brought. This is juxtaposed with the payphone shown in the end tag of the episode, in which Freddy’s son Nathaniel Malick (Thomas E. Sullivan) makes a call to contact HYDRA leader Daniel Whitehall.
The episode begins with an introductory sequence longer than that of modern-day, which can last only seconds. The beginning credits scene calls on the actors the show by name with lovely 1970s music played in the background. Agent May introduces herself to Rick Stoner (Patrick Warburton) as Chastity McBryde, an actual character from the Marvel comics created by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz. The episode also brings back the classic SHIELD jumpsuits from the Marvel comics.
“Trout in the Milk” gets its episode title from an old-timey figure of speech that Sousa uses as he adapts to a new world, much like Steve Rogers/ Captain America did when he woke up from being frozen for several decades. Speaking of the patriotic superhero, the episode also utilizes the well-known Project Insight algorithm that was present throughout 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier in which Arnim Zola calculates who would be a threat to HYDRA in the future. In this episode, the algorithm is used “fourty years ahead of schedule” and shows Bruce Banner/ Hulk and Victoria Hand as two of many people who would be eliminated. This act of so-called “nationalism” is demonstrated on July 4th, 1976, the United States of America’s bicentennial, and indeed, it is seen as “a new birth for freedom,” as per Rick Stoner.
The episode also highlights the “circumstantial evidence” surrounding time travel and takes major inspiration from the Terminator franchise. The Chronicoms change the timeline in their efforts to destroy SHIELD’s history and put HYDRA in high positions. The agents’ Chronicom ally Enoch (Joel Stoffer) rescues them by giving them a ride to escape from Malick, and he exclaims “Come with me if you want to continue to exist” as an allusion to the famous Arnold Schwarzenegger catchphrase. Deke Shaw (Jeff Ward) contemplates on his next confrontation with Malick, to which his future grandmother and agent Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) tells him, “Wouldn’t it be easier to prevent [your] mistakes through, say, preparation?” Shaw later kills Malick, a decision he would have made previous episodes ago if it weren’t for the intense situation he was in. He also asks Simmons about the whereabouts of his grandfather, but this issue has not been resolved.
To add to this, the Chronicoms measure human behavior and their “fatal flaw” exhibited by Malick and the SHIELD agents in order to determine the outcome of their own actions. Malick tells the team, “The dominos are already falling. [The Chronicoms] were always ten steps ahead, and even if you figure out what’s going on, there’s nothing you can do because the[y] see everything. They see what you’re going to do.” The robot men put an agent’s family at risk amidst the chaos so that if the Chronicoms’ future is erased, the future of the agent (or the organization as a whole) is taken out of history as well.
The episode also pokes fun at the James Bond franchise. Elena “Yo-Yo” Rodriguez (Natalia Cordova-Buckley) and Alphonso “Mack” MacKenzie (Henry Simmons) sneak into their former SHIELD headquarters, the Lighthouse, and they discover that SHIELD members are constructing a rocket with Project Insight embedded into it. Yo-Yo tells Mack, “[Have] you ever seen a James Bond movie, Mack? An underground base full of men in jumpsuits — always a bad deal.”
This fifth episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. reminds its viewers that superhuman abilities do not define the heroic characteristics of an individual. Yo-Yo and Mack discuss this, while Johnson shows Sousa her Inhuman powers, then demonstrating her computer-hacking skills. The episode reintroduces the death algorithm that gets rid of potential threats, a conspiracy of which could terrifyingly translate to real-world scenarios. Times have changed, but some civilizations and their culture have not. As Sousa states, “It seems things just get worse the later in time you go.”
“Trout in the Milk” takes patriotism and nationalism displayed in North America’s major wars of the twentieth century and conveys what life in Western society at this time looked like.
9.5/10
What do you think? Have you seen this series? If not, do you plan to binge it sometime in the near future? Let us know! For more Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., action, science-fiction, and Marvel-related news and reviews, follow The Cinema Spot on Twitter (@TheCinemaSpot) and Instagram (@thecinemaspot_)
Managing editor & film and television critic with a Bachelor's of Arts in English Literature with a Writing Minor from the University of Guam. Currently in graduate school completing a Master's in English Literature.
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