Very good episode last night in terms of pushing the season's plotline forward, addressing a few nagging concerns and some decent action as well. Plus, I'm sort of pleased to see that one or two things I was hoping for/suggesting seem to be coming to pass.
Suffering from a gunshot and the debilitating effects of using her powers, Daisy reaches out to Simmons for help by luring her to a supposedly for sale apartment. There's some nice back and forth between the two, showcasing Gemma's newfound boldness and self confidence from her ordeal on that planet with Hive. And also a much appreciated dressing down of Daisy and her life course as Gemma scolds her by saying Daisy can't simply abandon her friends then come crawling back when she needs help then re-abandon them again. It was mom giving her daughter a stern dose of reality and I wonder if maybe that and Daisy's interaction with Coulson later in the episode is the beginning of her finding herself that sense of belonging she's been looking for since the series began.
We get a fun, though improbable, car chase between Coulson and Mack in Phil's restored vintage vette and Reyes' Charger. I say improbable because we know Coulson's car can fly, though that function is currently disabled, but a supercharged big block Dodge V8 versus that Chevy straight 6 . . . not remotely close. But it was a fun little throwback scene, complete with a run down the LA river to an unexpected conclusion.
And I hadn't thought of it before, but it makes sense that the Rider's car would be indestructible. Duhrr
The Rider captured and Daisy back with the gang for a moment, we finally get a bit of the team up action they've hinted at all off season. Reyes more than holds his own, and we get a scene of him using the flaming chain that was fun to see. I liked that.
We also got lots more of Aida as Holden allows Aida to treat May as a nurse, driving Fitz to near apoplexy as worries May will realize exactly what Aida is. But it's Gemma, near the episode's end, that immediately recognizes not only what Aida is, but Fitz' handiwork in the android's behavior. And happily, she's not pissed off at him which is usually the reaction in standard television fare. That was nice also.
In a way, this was Gemma's episode. We got to see a lot of her functioning with confidence that has developed over her ordeals the last few seasons. She mothers Daisy, acts competently in a gun fight, and shows some clever skills and enjoyment of using her new position within S.H.I.E.L.D to get things done.
We got a bit more background on the DarkHold book that caused the ghosts, Robbie's uncle's role in that mess and learned that the firestarter guy, James, from the Hive storyline is the one feeding info to the Watchdogs, helping them kill Inhumans. Still left to explain is who within the government is working with Senator Nadeer from last week's episode.
We did get a tease for next week's show that has Daisy wearing her gauntlets once again. In this week's show, Simmons chastised Daisy for not using them to protect herself. Daisy responds that they're not exactly unobtrusive to wear, so I'm wondering if we'll see them redesigned at some point to something less obvious. Some of the promo images of Chloe Bennett as Daisy have her wearing tactical black looking gauntlets as part of her uniform. So we'll see.
In this one aspect, I feel sort of pleased that the show's writers are going down one small path I thought they might. Fun to be right once in a while.
And along that line . . . I mentioned something in my discussion of Westworld the other day that apparently I'm not the only one thinking.
I wondered if perhaps the complex/park was off world somehow, and that might explain some of the anomalies we've seen so far. This last episode added a bit of fuel to that in my opinion.
The com center where we see Bernard video chatting with his wife, and other employees engaging in similar conversations -- the difficulty of getting a call out and the quality of the transmission is casually dropped in this scene. With the next level tech on display in the park, it's a bit hard to imagine that a simple cellphone call is a challenge unless the distance is extreme. There's the possibility that the facility is shielded in some way. But I'm still thinking this points to an off world location for Westworld.
The price of admission, so to speak, might be telling too. We hear that guests are paying $40,000 a day to stay/play in the park. Seems a bit extreme to me. There could be some real hyper-inflation in the future. And the park isn't overrun with guests, so a small number of paying customers might need to really dish it out to make the place work. But surely this isn't the only enterprise this Delos corp. is involved in. I'm picturing something like Umbrella from the Resident Evil movie series -- a company with it's fingers in practically everything, but has this park as something special for a perhaps more nefarious purpose in the grand scheme of things. So again, $40,000 per day seems more reasonable if you imagine you've got to send your guests to another planet for their vacation.
Also -- how long is a day in Westworld? Delores is our unofficial time keeper in the series. We know a day begins when we see her wake in bed and then leave her house to go paint by the river . . . Teddy is riding in on the train and so on. We know the day ends when Delores is attacked at her home. But there are other scenarios that are going on that have nothing to do with Delores or Teddy -- the hunt for escaped killers, etc. And we see the park's techs and employees cleaning up after gunfights and other events when there are no guests or hosts around. We see the hosts being debriefed or repaired in the lab area . . . like Maeve the other episode. How is this possible in a 24 hour day?
Again, it just makes me wonder if we're on another planet here. And apparently I'm not the only one thinking this. One of the movie/tv review sites I like to visit had some comments by one of their writers who said that he's seeing chatter about the possibility of Westworld being on another planet. So I'm patting myself on the back here a bit.
And just so I'm not leaving you with my disjointed ramblings, here's a screen cap of Chloe Bennett looking unusually busty and an old pic of Evan Rachel Wood (Delores) from some magazine I had buried in my back up drive from I don't know when:
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