S07.E09: As I Have Always Been

[paigow]

Sousa was never Mr. Carter...Winter Soldier MCU canon is that Cap rescued her future husband. Sousa was crippled in Bastogne, a place where Cap never went. Sousa would have mentioned being rescued by Cap. So, he is not owed a consolation prize for any Endgame timeline changes.

[Llywela]

26 minutes ago, paigow said:

Sousa was never Mr. Carter...

I don't think anyone here has claimed that he was or should be, have they? I mean, it would be nice to see him get a happy ending, and he and Daisy seem to work together, but I didn't think anyone here had claimed that he was owed her as a consolation prize for anything.

[MisterGlass]

4 hours ago, ParadoxLost said:

My guess would be that this show ends at the pilot. A version of the this team goes on to have new adventures in the adjusted timeline.

I wouldn't like that for this show.  There are shows that are about time travel from beginning to end for which that works.  I can think of three shows in recent history that ended up with a finale reset.  Names and details to follow.

Spoiler

Travelers, Legion, and Dark.  It worked best for Travelers because the whole series was set up as a continuous past/future feedback loop.  It was a disappointing ending for Legion because it short circuited the direction of the show that was set up in Season 2 and because the main characters had been headed somewhere.  It was the only ending possible for Dark, which had pretzeled itself out of anything else, but that meant that the majority of the characters should never have existed and ceased to do so.

It would hurt me if Agents of SHIELD's characters as they are end up never existing.

 

[bethy]

I wouldn’t mind the team not being together if they all still get happy endings in some way. Enoch is right - life is full of saying goodbyes. Not all goodbyes are death or even mean never seeing people again. And they often lead to other good things. 

[Guest]

6 hours ago, Raja said:

I'm going the other way that LMD Coulson does its job and the big "welcome to level 7" secret is a coverup for yet another lie Nick Fury told the Avengers 

Do you mean that the team changes Coulson death in Avengers or that Coulson never really died in Avengers? It’s an interesting idea but I’m not sure that either version would work without creating a lot of plot holes. 

[swanpride]

The whole "this team will end" speech was just about preparing the audience for the show itself to end. It was quite clever to tap into our feeling regarding this fact.

Anyway, I expect that they will spend the next episode righting the timeline regarding Nathaniel and then the last three somehow tying everything up properly.

Also: Has anyone else noticed what the episode could be the basis for a pretty good computer game? One of those point and click adventures, but this time you are on a clock and have to collect information and some information only become available if you do it right on every turn.

[Loandbehold]

8 hours ago, swanpride said:

Also: Has anyone else noticed what the episode could be the basis for a pretty good computer game? One of those point and click adventures, but this time you are on a clock and have to collect information and some information only become available if you do it right on every turn.

That was the plot of a Librarians episode. Plot summary under spoiler bar. 

Spoiler

One character realizes it's basically a video game, and nobody else remembers what happened in the prior iteration. He has to learn from each member of the team what he needs to do to pass the next level, then successfully solves the final puzzle. Except he doesn't survive that one. But, since he set everything right, he wakes up. Not only everyone else has forgotten all that happened, but he did as well. All his character growth from the episode was lost. 

 

[swanpride]

I just realised that the episode is actually less groundhog day and more Edge of Tomorrow / live, die, repeat.

[Tachi Rocinante]

Great episode.  The only thing that bothered me was that after awhile, they should have been sprinting from place to place to save as much time as possible (horny "loop breaks" notwithstanding).

[tennisgurl]

Enoch no! That was so terribly sad, Enoch has been a great character and I hate seeing him go, even if the scene itself was very well done. I really wish that Fitz had been there though, he really was such a good friend to him. 

We finally get a time loop episode, that staple of many a genre show. Groundhog Day, Russian Doll, Edge of Tomorrow, Legends of Tomorrow, the list goes on. It can sometimes be hard to make the time loop story your own, as its a very popular story device, and I thought they did a really great job with it. They focused a lot on character exploration, especially with Daisy and Coulson, and the constant deaths and ticking clock added an extra sense of urgency to the proceedings. 

We finally get Daisy/Sousa confirmed as being a thing! I am totally on board this ship, it also gives me something happy to think about instead of just being really sad about Enoch. As other people have said, I dont really get much of an age difference between Daisy and Sousa (Daisy is presumably in her early thirties, while Sousa is mid thirties) but it probably comes off as him being older due to him being from the past, so dressing in a fashion we associate with older people, even if he is really only a few years older than Daisy considering that time travel is involved. Really, its often kind of hard to get into age differences in relationships when you have stuff like time travel, alternate dimensions, immortality, robots, and other such things involved...

I can imagine that Enoch saying that the team wont survive but they will live was saying that everyone will leave the team to do their own things, and I am alright with that. As long as they get some sort of happy ending, I would be totally fine with a "and the adventure continues" kind of ending. It also read to me as a sort of meta line, reminding people that the show will be ending but that we will always have it and its characters. 

Edited July 27, 2020 by tennisgurl

[Chicago Redshirt]

On 7/25/2020 at 2:34 PM, paigow said:

Sousa was never Mr. Carter...Winter Soldier MCU canon is that Cap rescued her future husband. Sousa was crippled in Bastogne, a place where Cap never went. Sousa would have mentioned being rescued by Cap. So, he is not owed a consolation prize for any Endgame timeline changes.

We don't really know all the places Cap went.

We have a montage of Cap shutting down Hydra bases, but I think it's fair to say that there were plenty of Cap's actions that were not shown or referred to on-screen during The First Avenger,

Moreover, it was possible that Sousa was one of the faceless and nameless people Cap was shown or alluded to have saved. 

[paigow]

51 minutes ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

We don't really know all the places Cap went.

We have a montage of Cap shutting down Hydra bases, but I think it's fair to say that there were plenty of Cap's actions that were not shown or referred to on-screen during The First Avenger,

Moreover, it was possible that Sousa was one of the faceless and nameless people Cap was shown or alluded to have saved. 

MCU Wikipedia:

During World War II, Sousa joined the 28th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army and served as a reconnaissance scout in the European front. At the Siege of Bastogne during the firefight, he was hit in the femur by shrapnel, necessitating an amputation. For the rest of his life, he walked with a false leg, using a crutch to steady himself but later in life used a wooden cane.

Sousa was never a POW or rescued by Captain America on the battlefield. He got a medevac out of the warzone.

 

 

[swanpride]

We actually don't know that...he could have been a POW at one point and got the injury later on.

[Chicago Redshirt]

13 hours ago, paigow said:

MCU Wikipedia:

During World War II, Sousa joined the 28th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army and served as a reconnaissance scout in the European front. At the Siege of Bastogne during the firefight, he was hit in the femur by shrapnel, necessitating an amputation. For the rest of his life, he walked with a false leg, using a crutch to steady himself but later in life used a wooden cane.

Sousa was never a POW or rescued by Captain America on the battlefield. He got a medevac out of the warzone.

 

 

Yeah, but there's a lot of time between when Captain America was created and the Siege of Bastogne, which apparently was in December 1944.

From the same Wikipedia:

In winter of 1944, Rogers had single-handedly managed to stop a Nazi blockade and saved over six hundred men, including the man who had eventually become Peggy Carter's husband.

If by winter 1944 it means January/February 1944, or even December 1944, there is no inherent reason Sousa could not have been in the Nazi blockade that Cap stopped and then later in December 1944 had the bad luck to have lost his leg in that siege. Admittedly, there's no particular reason to think that Sousa was Peggy's husband, but there's nothing absolutely ruling it out.

[Kel Varnsen]

On 7/25/2020 at 5:21 AM, Llywela said:

There is no way in the world the PTB are going to kill Fitz off-screen (unless Iain wasn't available for this season at all, which we know isn't the case - we will see him before the end). What we saw in this episode was a typical red herring designed to make us worried. I am confident we will see Fitz again - and that he and Simmons will end the show together.

Plus considering that we are in a back to the future time travel scenario I am not sure Fitz being dead even matters (they have a time machine. I mean Doc Brown was dead at the hands of the Libyans until he wasn't.

[Raja]

3 hours ago, Kel Varnsen said:

Plus considering that we are in a back to the future time travel scenario I am not sure Fitz being dead even matters (they have a time machine. I mean Doc Brown was dead at the hands of the Libyans until he wasn't.

A Fitz body, a Gamora body and a an Enoch body have all died and  spare came when a  new timeline was created. 

[swanpride]

Those are not the same characters though. Gamora who never became a Guardian is not the same as a Gamora who was one. A Fitz who never had a mind break is not the same as a Fitz who did. And they can't constantly pick people from the past either, that will cause a wave, not a ripple.

[Raja]

The events generated by Sibyl have taken us beyond any waves or ripples actions as the great tsunami hit and S.H.I.E.L.D. could no more stop her then they could stop an actual natural disaster. The only way to fix that is to find a a time monolith and jump all the way back before the first critical point during Prohibition again.

We may end up the series with a live human Coulson who only knows Melinda May as his ex partner. But that is only different n a scale of years instead of missing  the months that a  a Fitz body from a cutoff time loop experienced.

[swanpride]

I am not too sure about that….It's hard to tell how much damage Nathaniel has done.

[Raja]

18 minutes ago, swanpride said:

I am not too sure about that….It's hard to tell how much damage Nathaniel has done.

Project Insight has already happened. That is what brought out the Winter Soldier and broke S.H.I.E.L.D. 

[swanpride]

Project insight was stopped and S.H.I.E.L.D. has no idea that Hydra was involved. A new take on project insight can still happen again just in time for the Winter Soldier.

[Taryn74]

Best episode of the season so far! Reminded me a lot of the X-Files episode Monday, one of my favorite episodes which also was a series of restarts/repeats with only one person knowing all the details of every repeat and another struggling to remember and fix whatever was going wrong so time could move on. Didn't expect to be so emotional watching Enoch die, but sat here in tears anyway. Love that being Fitz's best friend was such a badge of honor to him that he was mentioning it all the way up unto his end. (Didn't he re-introduce himself to May that way earlier in the season? LOL)

I like the theory upthread that

Spoiler

Jemma's distress during the time she had her memories back was because she remembered that Deke's mom had already been born and Jemma had to "abandon" her child to help the team and never really got to know her as a child or watch her grow up. Damn, what a tough spot to be in.

 

 

Edited December 27, 2020 by Taryn74