"Inescapable" is quite the episode of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. For one thing, it gives us some personal stakes. Yes, there have been some personal stakes of a sort with Melinda and Sarge/Coulson. But the two of them together was a bit late to the party, and it's hard to sort out how much of it is Melinda feeling sorry for a dying Coulson, and them having some kind of romantic bond that didn't manifest until the last couple of seasons.
Other personal relationships have come and gone. Mack and YoYo float through a limbo, Agent Keller is dead meat on a stick, Daisy and whoever she's been involved with have left the building, and Bobbi and Lance are off to that aborted spinoff in the sky.
On the other hand, Fitz-Simmons have been at the core of the show since day one. Before Bobbi, before Mack, before Lance, before Lincoln, before Deke. Their up-and-down relationship has come and gone, and they've been separated and reunited and separated again. But it's always been there, and we've had two good actors--Iain De Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge--to portray the two characters.
So finally, we get an episode that addresses many of their issues. I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense: does seeing their past really address their issues? They get together, snap at each other, meet each other's dark selves, and then get together again. Many couples have counselling: Fitz-Simmons are locked in a mind prison together. And their subconsciouses want to kill the other person, because it wouldn't be an ABC show without Drama!
The ground rules are set up pretty quickly. Fitz and Jemma find themselves in a plain white chamber. Altarah (Sherri Saum) pops in to explain that they're in a mind prison where anything they can imagine manifests, and Fitz needs to get to work on time travel. Jemma complains that it's a violation of their minds, Altarah disappears, and Enoch mutters a few words about how the process is dangerous.
Then Jemma reverts to her younger self (Ava Mireille) and runs off to hide in her bedroom. She says that she hides her own bad memories in a music box, they go back to the white chamber, Fitz manages to get Jemma to revert back to her adult self, and then we get the funeral for Fitz that we never saw. I fast-forward through the Previouslies, and am a little vague on the details. Rather than find a wiki or check my stepson's past recaps, let me try and piece it together. The Fitz that died is his future self, and he died sacrificing himself so that the others could return from the Earth-gets-destroyed future. And the Fitz we're seeing now hasn't made it to the future yet so he's really a version from earlier in the future-dead-Fitz's timeline. And so future-Fitz and present-Jemma got married, but that didn't happen to present-Fitz yet.
It's all very timey-wimey, and that's how the episode presents it. Even writer DJ Doyle gaslights it once or twice by having Fitz say that time travel can do nasty things. The causality issues are pretty quickly brushed over this week. For instance, since they can't change the future that means present-Fitz now knows that he's going to die down the road, and Jemma has pretty graphic memories of it, and she's been through his funeral once already.
And then Fitz's darker self from the Framework, Leopold, arrives along with a squad of faceless goons. Jemma's bad memories break out in the form of a Samara/Ring-style humanoid, who I assume is played by Elizabeth Henstridge as well. She starts dissecting Fitz with a bone knife, while Leopold straps Jemma into a memory-draining machine and tortures her.
Jemma and Fitz do a lot of running at this point, and we do get a couple of scenes of them jumping into their memories of their time at the S.H.I.E.L.D. academy. And meeting Coulson. Everyone but Deke shows up in the memories, too. The whole Sarge/Coulson thing goes on hiatus this week.
In the end, Jemma and Fitz kinda/sorta think with one mind, and realize that they have friends as well as each other. Memory-Mack blasts Jemma-Creature and frees Fitz, and Memory-Daisy shows up to kick Leopold and his goon squad's butts and free Jemma. Which raises the question of if they consider Coulson and Melinda and YoYo "friends". But I suppose they each summoned the closest friend they have, and Memory-Mack and Memory-Daisy do pretty well on their own. At least, Memory-Mack does until Jemma-Creature leaps on him and starts chewing his neck.
Then Fitz and Jemma end up in a containment pod and argue about how they've screwed up each other's lives, and how they both have savior complexes. It ends up with one of those hate-turns-to-love arguments. In the funniest scene of the episode, Leopold and Jemma-Creature have been circling the containment pod. When Jemma and Fitz make up, the two memory fragments make out, much to Fitz's disgust and Jemma's bemusement. ("I didn't know you liked that." "I didn't know you do that.")
In the real world, the Chronicom cerebral-fusion process has been threatening Fitz's and Jemma's lives or at least their mental functions. Enoch (Joel Stoffer) objects, Altarah tells him to bite it, Malachi (Christopher James Baker) makes a couple of threatening comments, and basically the actor picks up one more paycheck. Jemma and Fitz appear back in the chamber, Altarah tells them they've wasted five minutes and to get on with the time travel, then she collapses and we cut to the real world. Jemma and Fitz wake up, and Enoch reveals that he "killed" his fellow Chronicoms and they teleport away. And as they do so, Jemma tells Fitz that he's a grandfather. Isn't he just a father? Did Deke have a child and I missed it?
In the ending scene, we check in in on the main plot. Daisy tells Mack that Jemma and Fitz are still out there, Mack bets $100 that Fitz-Simmons have already escaped, and then tells Daisy that the same creatures that wiped out the Chronicom homeworld are on Earth.
"Inescapable" doesn't go for the surrealism too much even though it's supposedly a mish-mash of memory and imagination. Although 7-year-old Jemma's bedroom and her storybook (complete with animal versions of her space team) are cute. De Caestecker still does a good job as the evil Leopold, and Henstridge is good as both herself and the Jemma-Creature in the few scenes where she has some dialogue and Henstridge gets to do some acting before a stuntwoman takes over for the fighting.
The episode explores their issues. Which is the kind of thing that has been put on the back burner for a season or so. It doesn't change anything: Fitz-Simmons were in love with each other and mostly reunited before the episode began, and they end it in love and are reunited with each other at the end. But it's good to have an episode that gives them a chance to shine without world-destroying bird parasites and the Sarge/Coulson and Melinda/Sarge/Coulson and Mack/YoYo issues. It's like the creative team remembered that Fitz-Simmons are a core part of the show and the two of them together have been off-screen for far too long.
But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?
Written by Gislef on Jun 22, 2019
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