Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Just Answered A Lot of Big Season 5 Questions
This new sci-fi setting for S.H.I.E.L.D. opened up a bevy of questions concerning the Agents’ true purpose in the future. A group calling themselves the True Believers claimed that there is a prophecy that Coulson and his team are meant to save humanity. What is this prophecy and where did it come from? Furthermore, who kidnapped the Agents and sent them to the future? Most importantly, why wasn’t Fitz captured along with his fellow Agents?
Fitz shockingly appeared in the future at the end of last week’s episode, and in this week’s episode “Rewind”, fans get the download on what became of Fitz when he was left behind in time and how he was able to get to the future. Several of the season’s biggest questions were answered.
FITZ: LEFT BEHIND, DOING TIME
When Fitz was left behind in the diner after his friends were taken, he lost two minutes of time and memory before military troops swarmed the diner and took him into custody for the attack on General Talbot by the Life Model Decoy of Daisy Johnson (the military refuse to believe that it was an LMD and not the real Daisy Johnson). Fitz underwent repeated interrogation and was held for over 6 months in a military blacksite prison called Blue Raven Ridge. Eventually, the military, headed by a woman named Hale, came to accept that Fitz had no knowledge of where the other Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. disappeared to and accepted his offer to help them figure out what happened and where they went.
After 6 months, Fitz still had no concrete answers as to what happened besides the most ludicrous (and correct) scenario: they were abducted by aliens. While Fitz worked, he only asked for books, paper, pens, and a television so he could watch soccer. Occasionally, Fitz asked that his fan letters to his favorite soccer zine Ballbuster Hooligans be mailed for him. The military suspected the fan letters were secret codes but were unable to crack them. It turns out they were indeed secret codes meant for one man in particular: former S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Lance Hunter, who surreptitiously appeared at the blacksite posing as Fitz’s attorney. Hunter immediately breaks Fitz out of the prison and, using stolen surveillance footage from the night of the diner abduction, they figure out where the Tall Bald Man who oversaw Coulson and the others’ kidnapping lives.
For those wondering about Hunter’s better half, Agent Bobbi ‘Mockingbird’ Morse, she and Hunter are still together as a couple, but stay physically apart as much as possible to keep their relationship intact. This arrangement makes perfect sense knowing those two.
THE S.H.I.E.L.D. PROPHECY
Confronting the Tall Bald Man in his home, with its walls covered with alien writing and a child’s drawings pinned to his refrigerator door, Fitz and Hunter discover the mystery man’s true name and nature. He goes by the name Epoch, and he is also an alien, but not a Kree like most fans assumed. Nor is he a Watcher, though he seems to serve a similar purpose. Epoch is a sentient Chronicom from a planet in the Cignus constellation. Epoch describes himself as a kind of anthropologist who came to Earth 30,000 years ago to observe and record humanity’s evolution.
Epoch revealed he kidnapped Coulson and the others and sent them to the year 2091. All of it was to fulfill a prophecy. The seer is a young Inhuman girl named Robin Hinton, who has ties to Daisy Johnson. In season 3, Daisy met Robin’s father Charles, who was an Inhuman with the power to see people’s deaths by touching them. Charles was a pawn of HYDRA and after they killed him, Daisy became the benefactor of Robin and her mother Ashley. Daisy made sure they had the funds to move away to safety and begin a new life, though Robin’s mind was fragmented from enduring Terrigenesis at such a young age.
Fitz, Hunter, and Epoch met with Robin and Ashley in the same park Daisy last saw them in. There, they saw one of Robin’s drawings, which is how she communicates her prophecies: this was a drawing of Quake destroying the world and S.H.I.E.L.D. saving it. All of them escaped when the military came to the park to apprehend them. Thanks to Epoch, they were brought to a secret place that answered another huge question about the future.
THE SECRET OF THE LIGHTHOUSE
The Lighthouse, as in the space station of the future, was actually a lighthouse on the shore of Lake Ontario. Beneath the lighthouse is a massive underground facility. Epoch doesn’t know how deep the base goes nor how long it has been there. Like Epoch himself, the Lighthouse exists in response to an extinction level event on Earth. Fitz, Hunter, Polly, Robin, and Epoch take refuge in the underground fortress that would become humanity’s salvation over 70 years in the future.
From the Lighthouse, Fitz and Hunter drew up their plan to get Fitz to the future. It would require the pod that carried Epoch when he came to Earth, which is held in the same blacksite that Fitz was a prisoner in. After breaking back into the blacksite, Fitz and Hunter discover not just Epoch’s pod, but all of the S.H.I.E.L.D. technology confiscated by the military, including Zephyr-One. They escape Blue Raven Ridge on board Zephyr-One with the stolen tech.
HOW DID FITZ GET TO THE FUTURE?
Epoch’s pod is actually a cryo-freeze chamber, meaning Fitz would be frozen in stasis and take ‘the long way’ to the future. Fitz stored the S.H.I.E.L.D. tech and weapons he would need in the future inside secret compartments in the Lighthouse. He also left Robin the postcard where he wrote ‘Working on it – Fitz‘ which Daisy and Jemma discovered soon after they arrived in the future. Most importantly for Fitz, Robin answered the question that haunted him: Why was he left behind? Robin’s response: “Because you have to save them.”
Fitz is frozen in the cryo-pod, complete with a Han Solo frozen in carbonite reference from The Empire Strikes Back. Epoch summoned his Chronicom vessel and transported Fitz there, where he and Epoch waited safely 365 million miles away from Earth, quite far enough away where the ship couldn’t be affected by Earth’s destruction. Finally, in 2091, Epoch awakened Fitz after his friends arrived in the future and began to prepare him for what he would encounter in the Lighthouse, specifically the Kree and the group of alien gangsters who gather in the Lighthouse to bid on Inhumans engaged in gladiatorial combat.
Fitz was the character most tortured by his time in the Framework as one of the leaders of HYDRA and the darkness he discovered about himself therein. Being the one chosen to save his friends helps redeem him in his own mind and gives Fitz a newfound sense of purpose and self-worth.
We already know from last week’s end of episode tag that after infiltrating the Lighthouse incognito, Fitz has revealed his presence to the Kree and to Jemma.Now, the complete Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. team are together in the future and can commit all of their combined skills and brainpower to cracking the next biggest questions: how to save Earth from being destroyed and how to get back home to 2018?
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. returns on Friday, January 5 @ 9pm ET on ABC.
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