Agents of SHIELD Season 5 Episode 5 Review: Rewind

This Agents of SHIELD review contains spoilers.

Agents of SHIELD Season 5 Episode 5

When Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD premiered for its fifth season, you could hear fandom crying, “Hey, were is Fitz?!” After all, all of the agents, including Fitz’s beloved Simmons, were shunted into the far future to face down a dystopian Kree nightmare. But Fitz’s absence was obvious and palpable and you just knew there was going to be one hell of an explanation to exactly where Fitz was while his friends struggled to survive against Kree slave masters and a creepy blue chick with deadly balls.

Well, this week’s episode answers those questions as Agents of SHIELD mines its now rich history to deliver an absolutely killer episode that answers all our Fitz related questions. The episode entitled “Rewind” does just that as we are taken back to that fateful moment where the agents are abducted from the diner.

There, we learn more about that strange bald dude that keeps spare sets of skin lying around. Remember him? Yeah, not only does that guy have some altruistic motives, he also has some importance to Marvel Comics history. We’ll get to that in a moment.

As for Fitz, if you’ll remember, Fitz and the other agents were wanted because an LMD of Daisy shot General Talbot in the head. Right before they went to the diner on that fateful day, Coulson and company knew they would soon be arrested. Of course, they couldn’t have known that they would be abducted and sent to the future by a third party.

All but Fitz that is. Fitz is not taken by that bald guy or his crew, but he is arrested by the US government for the shooting of Talbot and the murder of Jeff Mace. Remember, Fitz killed Mace in the Framework, and the brilliant scientist is not over the guilt of his evil turn in that artificial reality.

But in this reality, Fitz is obsessed with finding Simmons and the rest of his friends. Let’s take a moment to doff our caps to Agents of SHIELD. It seems that every season, there is a central storyline of Fitz and Simmons being separated. So far, they have been separated by HYDRA, by light years of space, and by Fitz’s severe head injury.

Now, they are separated by time, but even though the series continuously travels down this road, it hasn’t gotten old yet. This speaks to the absolute compelling nature of the love between Fitz and Simmons. No matter what, their love endures. It’s all very Amy and Rory Pond- even the accents are right, but you have to be impressed that the series keeps this well-traveled story road smooth and never dull

Anyway, while in prison, Fitz works on finding his friends. He also sends out a message to an old friend via letters to a British football magazine. That old friend happens to be Agent Hunter who makes his triumphant return this week to bust Fitz out of prison and helps him find the missing agents. I would totally watch a weekly Hunter and Fitz buddy comedy every week because those two are a hoot and a half.

Together, they track the van that was used to abduct Fitz’s SHIELD pals and discovers that the aforementioned bald dude was a centuries old Recorder sent by an alien race to observe humanity. You have to believe that this is the Lee and Kirby created Recorder, a character introduced in the late Silver Age in the pages of Thor (we’ll get to him in our Marvel Moments).

On the run, Hunter, Fitz, and the Recorder find another old friend, the little Inhuman girl named Robin from a few seasons back. If you remember, Robin’s father had the Inhuman power to see the moment of a person’s death. Daisy saved Robin, but we never learn what her powers were. This week, we discover that Robin is a precog and knows that Daisy will destroy the Earth. With Robin’s help, Fitz is able to bust back into the same military instillation he bused out of earlier in the episode and put himself in a cryogenic freeze. So now you know how Fitz shows up on the future and man, was it a fun journey to get there.

It is also so good to see Hunter again. Since ABC passed on picking up Marvel’s Most Wanted, the series that was supposed to star Bobbi Morse and Lance Hunter, Hunter’s absence (not to mention Bobbi’s) has been an unscratched Marvel itch for well over a year now. Of course, Adrianne Palicki has been killing it on The Orville, but we haven’t had our Nick Blood fix in a long time.

We do get an update on Bobbi and Hunter’s on again off again relationship, and it seems like it is mostly on (or maybe not, like all things involving the love between Hunter and Morse, it’s all kind of confusing). Plus, Agents of SHIELD finds a purpose for Hunter and Morse again as Hunter agrees to help guard Robin after Fitz goes into his cryo-freeze. I’m guessing we won’t see Bobbi and Hunter anytime soon, but it’s nice to know they are still fighting the good fight in the MCU.

But we are left with tons of questions when Fitz wakes up to the future (with all of his friends’ signature weapons). Fitz is with the Recorder in the future, but what is his plan to get his friends back home? Why did the Recorder send the agents to that particular time and if the agents do return home, how will they prevent Daisy from becoming the Destroyer of Worlds?

We have all these answers to look forward to in the New Year as this week’s Agents of SHIELD closes out 2017 for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We saw Spider-Man’s Homecoming, the return of the Guardians of the Galaxy, Ragnarok unleashed, the coming of Iron Fist and the Defenders along with Frank Castle kicking some major ass, and lots of Inhumans wandering around Hawaii. There were ups and downs, but with Fitz’s tale finally told, we end Marvel’s 2017 on a very high note.

Marvel Moments

The first Recorder first appeared in Thor #132 (1966) and was created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. The Recorders are a series of androids built by an alien race known as the Rigellians. The Recorder are built to record (duh) important events in the galaxy for their Rigellian masters to analyze. The first Recorder was sent with Thor when the God of Thunder first explored another dimension known as the Black Galaxy and when the Recorder was to have its memory wiped, Thor convinced the aliens that the android was not sentient and should be left alone.  With the spacefaring action of Thor Ragnarok and the introduction of the Recorder, it seems like the MCU is getting tons of mileage of Thor’s late Silver Age cosmic adventures. Which is a very good thing because those cosmic Kirby joints are some of the most trippy and imaginative books of the 1960s.