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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.
With the future erased, the minutiae of our every decision will rewrite the course of events to come. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s eighth episode of its final season is titled “After, Before;” it is written by James C. Oliver & Sharla Oliver, and directed by Eli Gonda.
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!
While this is Gonda’s first directorial credit for the series, the Olivers have had their fair share in writing up teleplays over the past several years. “After, Before” follows the SHIELD agents regrouped back in the early-1980s as they search for solutions to their malfunctioning time drive within their aircraft, the Zephyr. Agents Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen) and Elena “Yo-Yo” Rodriguez (Natalia Cordova-Buckley) temporarily depart to ground level to Afterlife — the Inhuman safe haven and home of Daisy Johnson (Chloe Bennet)’s mother Jiaying (Dichen Lachman) — where they learn of ways to regain Yo-Yo’s superhuman speed. This feat results in a “thin plan” where the agents cope with the consequences of past mistakes and their attempts at moving forward.
The primary plot of the episode focuses on May and Yo-Yo, who both seek solace and self-forgiveness. According to Jiaying, the reason behind the women’s hindrances at being the best they can be is psychological effects within themselves. She suggests they undergo an “exploration of emotional past.” She asks, “If there is a chance it could work, don’t you want to take it?” From there, Yo-Yo reveals that she had once failed to save the life of an older relative when she was a child, the “guilt and fear” of which are inhibitions from moving forward — mentally as a human being and physically as an Inhuman. She and May allow these emotions to manifest through spar practice, triggering other past memories in herself.
In this respect, the writing in this episode perfectly demonstrates a passing of the Bechdel Test; Wen and Cordova-Buckley’s characters discuss matters regarding themselves as human beings and what impedes their progress as functional instruments to the team.
Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) has her own moments of healing, beginning when Daniel Sousa (guest star Enver Gjokaj) asks if she has jumped out of airplanes before. She says she has done so twice, the first time of which is a reference to a scene from Season 1 of the series, where she and her then-friend Leo Fitz are drastically dropped from an aircraft and into the vast depths of the ocean by their ally-turned-enemy, leading to Fitz’s brain damage and Simmons’s guilt for this happening. By the end of the episode, she promises she will continue finding her way back to Fitz, which their grandson Deke Shaw (Jeff Ward) discovers.
Simmons also explains what is wrong with the aircraft’s damaged time drive. She says:
We’ve lost control of the time drive. At this rate, the Zephyr will collapse into a time-space singularity in two days, or relatively speaking, twenty minutes. Think of it like a stone skipping the surface of a pond. The jumps and the time we spend in any given time period are geting exponentially shorter. If they keep getting smaller … for us, that means a jump within a jump.
Nathaniel Malick (Thomas E. Sullivan) has now mastered Quake’s Inhuman abilities and soon takes over Afterlife, just after Jiaying and a younger Gordon have escaped. In a Magneto-like manner, he convinces Jiaying’s daughter Kora (Dianne Doan) that her life should matter against the fates of humanity. He tells her:
[The people in charge] tell you you belong so that they could get you to follow their rules, and you are above that now. You are too powerful for that … Who says you have to [control your gift]? Let it out. There is no feeling it.
He also tells Kora — revealed to be Johnson’s older sister — and the captured Inhumans that they must use their abilities to be proletarian-like and “give the world a little something new: anarchy.”
“After, Before” tells an untold tale of Inhumans at Afterlife a few decades before Johnson and SHIELD’s arrival in an earlier season of the series. The lesson to be learned here is that there should be something within ourselves to reach out to in order to reinvigorate. For Simmons, it is hope; for Sousa, it is a life-changing prosthetic appendage; for Chronicom Life Model Decoy Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), it is a new body serving as a vessel for his consciousness; and for Yo-Yo, it is release from her negative energy. She tells SHIELD Director Alphonso “Mack” MacKenzie (Henry Simmons), “I think I’ve always been able to [bounce back]. Now [pessimism]’s just holding myself back.”
This episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. accentuates a return to the show’s Inhuman roots, offering a psychoanalytical theme that helps its characters search for self-restoration in their current time of need. Whereas previous episodes of the season focused on racism, sexism, nostalgia, and more, this week’s story concentrates on the human psyche with great work on the Olivers’ behalf. Developing all of its female characters (most notably May and Yo-Yo), there is also space here to pass the Bechdel Test.
9/10
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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