What I’m Watching: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Season Premiere)

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D: Season 5, Episodes 1 and 2 “Orientation, Parts One and Two” (B-)

I almost missed this two-hour premiere, and I’m surprised that ABC decided to debut this season on a Friday night at the beginning of December, hardly a plum launching pad. If there’s only thing that I might have hoped for in the aftermath of the Framework and all the body-switching that occurred in the run-up to the show’s immersion in its fabricated world, it would be to return to regular antics of inhumans on Earth and this group that defends them from public opinion and other nefarious forces that might threaten everyone on the planet. Instead, we’ve fast-forwarded to the future, where Earth is a sliver of debris floating in space and all our characters have to get used to a society where humans bow down to the Kree for scraps of food and other privileges. A lot of this two-hour episode was exposition to determine just where they are and if there’s any hope of getting back, and the only glimmer of anything optimistic is that, for some reason, Fitz didn’t get taken and might be working on some plan to bring them home. The other good news is that they still have their powers, and as long as they make the right friends, like Pruitt Taylor Vince’s Grill and Eve Harlow’s Tess, they can stay alive long enough to figure out how to save the human race or at least what’s left of it. Who knows what fate Simmons has set herself up for, and I worry that it might be too late to depend on her for an enterprising solution like turning off the tech and rebooting it like she did with the ship. I did enjoy a few of the episode’s comic moments, like Mack comparing their situation to a horror movie where they split up and his decision to speak Spanish to Yo-Yo when he realized their captors spoke English. Let’s hope for a bit more direction and some semblance of an eventual return to how things used to be in the episodes to come.