Rewatching The Return
Once upon a time, there was an android named Aida who wished to be free.
She found a loophole in her programming, killed one of her creators and trapped the other in a virtual reality, until his meddling friends freed him and he refused to play with her anymore.
This made her very cranky.
Hell hath no fury like a (former) android scorned. Apparently.
Aida turning into the Crazy Girlfriend from Hell - almost literally, given the Darkhold's original dwellings - saves our heroes from having to wrestle with difficult questions of sentience and personhood, or the ethics of creating thinking beings to use as expendable tools. Who has time for that, when she wants to kill everyone for the feels?
It's not a good look for anyone that they see Aida as more than just a walking computer only now that she's flesh and blood, emoting just as humans do, and not when she was throwing herself in front of bullets and saving everyone's asses.
It's all swept aside, anyway, for a different set of questions the show's far more interested in: does Fitz still love Simmons, will Jemma forgive him, can they get past this and is the star-cursed couple destined to be star-cursed forever?
The answers, unsurprisingly, will be: "Yes", "Of course", "Faster than you can say Time Monolith" and "No, but we're going to milk this cow drier than the Atacama desert".🤭
Then a certain fiery-headed demon from East L.A. portals his way back, after far too many episodes without his scorching presence, and at least I am happy again.
Daring Engineering:
Fitz wakes up from his Dr. Mengele's roleplaying adventure and has barely time for the beginning of an identity crisis before he has to run for his life. He cleverly guides Aida through her newfound feelings of empathy to save Mack while managing to keep mostly in check the anger for what she did to him, but fails to anticipate her meltdown. That makes at least two of us, Fitz.
The show will afford him a few comforting moments with his ever devoted future wife and one hell of a pep talk by the vibing superhero, before throwing him and everyone else into yet another apocalyptic mess.
Instead of therapy, a long vacation and maybe some reflection on Dr. Hall's lessons ("experimentation without thought of the consequences", remember him from 1x03?), he'll get solitary confinement and 70+ years as an icicle. The results will not be pretty.
Dreamers of Electric Sheep:
In the wake of S7, when they saved two Earths giving feelings to the genocidal space robots, Aida becoming an even bigger danger than she already was because she's overwhelmed by her human emotions sure carries some irony.
Of course, in-universe, there's an easy answer. She's the product - both her quantum brain-powered robot version and this newly organic one - of knowledge acquired from the Darkhold, and since the Darkhold is inherently evil, all the endeavours conducted under its influence are equally and irredeemably corrupted.
The pre-Darkhold Aida, however, is a different story. A marvel of technology that passed the Turing test with flying colors, could already feel in her own way ("I need to exhibit the proper response to human sensations, and I was programmed to feel them. Including pain. [...] It's quite awful", 4x08), was capable of expanding her knowledge and had the drive to do so. She saved almost everyone in the opening credits at least once and was instrumental in keeping Downtown L.A. from becoming a crater.
It's especially hard to dismiss it all as "just programming" when we've spent an entire arc on the notion that humans may be nothing more than the product of their (social) programming.
Of course, that Aida hadn't killed anyone yet nor had she stripped five people of their real lives and agency to plug them into a fake world run by nazis. But if Radcliffe can absolve himself for that outcome because he was corrupted by the Darkhold, well... so was Aida. Who, in her stuffed-in-a-closet days, was the poster child for no agency.
So, she's a fascinating, complex and thought-provoking antagonist, maybe the very best this show has written, certainly up there for a medal.
And then she goes crazy because a guy rejected her. Oof.
Stuff:
Take the shot, May! -- Get out of the way, Fitz! -- Just take the shot! Phil really wanted to see the Renegade interrupt but May is doing a Paragon playthrough. 😁
She has Inhuman powers, now?! Can we get a break, please?! Can we get one break?! No, I really don't think you can. You're a Mutant Enemy protagonist and therefore shall suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Over, and over, and over again.
The Superior Bigot is engaging in the villain's time-honored tradition of interrupting a long awaited reunion between beloved characters at the worst of times.
You are nothing without a S.H.I.E.L.D. to hide behind. -- That's not all they're good for. Give him an opening for a pun or a dad joke and Coulson becomes invincible.
Robots...is that a common occurrence now? Quite!
Davis! Try any evasive maneuver you can! Meanwhile, it's La Palice Day on the Zephyr One.
Should've stayed in that damn spa. Yeah, no, I don't think seeing you guys battling the horrors of facials and deep tissue massages would have had quite the same entertainment value, tbh...
You must've spotted the decoy right away, right? -- Yeah, 'cause you're never robotic at all. Can of worms, Phil!
Help should be on the way. The "help" is busy trying to stay in one piece.
Davis has zero patience for backseat pilots and he's been cursed with an especially unhelpful lot of them.
Radcliffe blamed it all on Aida and now Aida blames it all on Radcliffe. Revisionist historians both, I think.
Every decision you made was your own. Decisions made on a vastly different set of inputs and information. You'd think an AI would be keenly aware of that distinction.
The first thing I choose, Leopold, is you. Isn't that nice. I would have started smaller, like which pizza topping, ale or stout, hair dye color maybe?
Aida is in love with her co-creator and will be soon burning with hatred for his chosen companion (and every human ever). Oedipal much?
Oh, you only bring back the people that matter to you, not to me! -- You know what? I've known Mack longer than you, and he means as much to me. YoYo clearly doesn't know Daisy very well if she thinks she'd leave Mack behind as an acceptable loss. Which is fine, because their friendship is still pretty new. They helped each other over the summer - Daisy saved her life, YoYo kept her supplied with bone regeneration pills and was the only one who didn't pile another frakton of guilt on her - but they really haven't known each other for long, nor have they spent all that much time together.
Besides the fact that going into that world as an Inhuman is the worst idea ever, we need you here, making sure that the real Mack stays alive, or it'll all be for nothing. Daisy continues to make sensible calls and her friends continue to ignore them and follow their guts instead, like Jemma going after Fitzler Sr. in the Framework and now YoYo who will plug herself in while everyone is busy with Talbot and Aida. Shape of things to come.
I got out unscathed. Jeffrey didn't. He should be in here with us, still in the fight. I need to take one for the team. As opposed to all the other times you took one (or two, or three...) for the team?
Did something weird happen with my robot self? Well, let's see: they flirted, ate Chinese take-out, drank a full bottle of the top shelf whisky you were saving for a special occasion and then she kissed him, apparently quite sloppily, since he immediately realized it wasn't you. Which, btw, raises some questions...😏🤭
Phill, did I try to...kill you? -- Kill me... Yep. That's what happened. You tried. It was messed up. Coulson, you coward! 😂
The entire area is sealed off, but, no, I can't rule out Daisy Johnson's involvement. Oh, joy, Daisy's being dragged for the mess by name while S.H.I.E.L.D. are once again being branded as terrorists, after a mere 13 episodes - from Uprisings to Self Control - of public legitimacy. Why did they even bother?
I can only imagine what Fitz is feeling while Aida is rhapsodising on hers.
I drank the bottle of Haig -- What?! You piece of - Saved by the explosion 😂
Do the right thing. Focus on empathy, not fear. Excellent advice, one I daresay you would have done well to follow yourself on a couple of occasions.
I'm now realizing the pain that I've caused and I don't want to hurt anyone else -- Congratulations. You're as close to human as you'll ever get, suffering from the one thing that you kept trying to remove...Regret. Do you understand irony yet? I hate him but Aida cut his head with no anaesthesia so I'd say he's earned the right to gloat at her predicament, at the very least. This is excellent gloating, too.
You watched, unaffected, as I took a hammer to the bones of the Director's corpse. Which was done to make it look as if Daisy had quaked him to death, although you'd think any decent coroner would be able to tell a hammer was used instead. Still, we'll be ending the season with the team as wanted terrorists and Daisy accused of one murder (Mace) and one attempted murder (Talbot) on top of that. If their plan to turn themselves in hadn't been rudely interrupted by time travel and an apocalypse, she was definitely in for some fun times. And yet, still better than 5B.
Good shooting, Dr. Dr. Simmons.
Daisy and Jemma explaining why the house went kaboom while Mom and Dad were gone with what would be one of my dream excuses: robots did it!
Why would they lock Fitz in the same place as Aida? There's more than one of those white rooms and it's not like he has powers to contain anyway. Any lockable space would do.
I love the continuity of reusing the device invented in S2 to contain Gordon.
Why don't we chop off her head like last time? YoYo and Simmons are all for the kill option, while Daisy, Coulson and May would prefer to at least have a conversation about it. Swap Mack for Coulson and add Fitz to #TeamToTheDeath and it would be the same exact matchup of S5's debates over Ruby and Talbot. Minus the animosity toward one another, thankfully.
She's afraid Fitz will be the same guy he was in the Framework -- No. She's afraid he still loves someone else. Daisy thinking her best friend would be grossed out by the naziness, like she was with Ward, and YoYo being a little more cynical. And correct.
They may be able to forgive you. It's me they won't forgive. Please. You could strap one of your best friends to a table and cut into her without anaesthesia while she's screaming in pain and begging you to stop and the rest of them would forgive you in a day. Hypothetically speaking, of course. Also, are we really pretending that it's *them* you're most worried about? I watched and rewatched this show for 8 years, now, pal, I know your priorities.
It was learned behaviour, programmed into you by an overbearing father figure -- Just like Ward. I'm just like Ward. Ward is once again the paragon of all badness for a Bus Kid lost in the depth of self-loathing. 3x21 Daisy says hi.
How can she even look me in the eye? Or even stand the sight of me at all? Ah, there you go. That's more like it.
And there's only room in your heart -- for her. Cripes. This would be a good time for bold faced lies and shameless backtracking, Fitz!
Talbot arrives at the worst time. He's a natural.
They're all robots. You assume each and every one of them is a damn C-3PO unless you hear otherwise from me! And this one! [points at Daisy] If she so much as blinks, take her down. Tsk, tsk... a few nervous grunts vs Quake? I like her chances.
Unless you can explain to me in 50 words or less why I found Jeffrey Mace's body washed up on the beach with his bones quaked apart [...]. Sir, your medical examiners are incompetent.
Where's that Speedy Gonzalez girl? Staring impatiently at the Framework's loading screen, I'm guessing.🤭
Try it. Let's see what happens. Yes, please. *swoons*
Davis... -- I'm sorry, but he's already dead. And the Strange Case of the Failed Murder of Agent Davis begins...
Wait a minute. Where was YoYo during that standoff? Well, about time you guys noticed!
My plan will rebuild the world that you have grown accustomed to...one where Inhumans are hunted. -- And we control the rest [...] But your plan is flawed. It's too clean. I want them to suffer. Typically, the socially-accepted post break-up ritual involves unhealthy amounts of ice-cream, not murder and world domination. Just a FYI, since you're new at this emotion thing and all....
Ghost Rider has achieved peak performance as far as dramatic entrances go, complete with his very own Dr. Strange-style orange magic portal. Welcome back.
YoYo loads in as her avatar is strapped to a bed awaiting torturous experimentation. The Framework never disappoints in the creepiness department.