TV REVIEWS: FTN Reviews Agents Of Shield Season 04 Episode 03: Uprising

After an unfortunate break due to the election debate, Shield returned, but with mixed results. Powerful themes were thrown out, but not all of them stuck.

“Uprising”, which ironically enough was the arc name for when Hydra was revealed after Winter Soldier, featured a massive blackout in several cities all over the world that seemingly was perpetrated by Inhumans. Coulson and team were dispatched to investigate and learn the truth. What made this very personal was that Yo-Yo was in one of the blacked out cities, and thus they wanted to rescue her as well as figure out what was going on.

In truth, triggered blackouts is one of the biggest threats our world faces. If electronics are taken out, a lot of things don’t work, and Shield did a good job showing that. However, they didn’t do a good job of showing the chaos that would happen in this. We only saw one case of “looting” and ransacking, and the rest had to be imagined via dialogue from the teams. I feel this should’ve been better in detail, especially when LA was hit, as that town surely would’ve gone to pieces more as the hours went on.

What was good though was that the ones behind it, the Watch Dogs, were hunting Inhumans, and apparently had the Registration List that detailed where they would be, thus how they would basically find Yo-Yo early on. This was a fear that many heroes had when the Superhero Registration Act was proposed in the Civil War comic, what happens is someone unauthorized got the list? Now we know. And it’ll be interesting to see what happens with this storyline.

I do wish the resolution was that simple, after all, this was widespread, I feel we should’ve gotten more looks at the other cities being saved, but I guess time wouldn’t allow it.

Speaking of saved, May is alive! While brief, her sickness being more or less diagnosed, and her getting saved…after being killed…was cool. But, we don’t know still why the ghosts have that effect on people, and we all knew May wouldn’t die like this, so it felt a bit hollow.

Which brings us to Robbie and Daisy, who were in LA when the blackout hit. On one hand, we did get more insight into who Robbie Reyes is, and how his uncle may be tied into everything. But, the “Gabe Ultimatum” didn’t really fly with me. And the whole “I keep him sane”, yet him not knowing what he does at night kind of felt conflicting. Although, this does set up for next weeks episode which will no doubt be…*puts on shades*…heated.

The big reveal though was that this situation caused Mace to come out and bring Shield back into the limelight. Which is a big set considering what happened after season 01 with Shield and Hydra. Hopefully the “announcement” won’t go unchallenged in the large scale. Especially with the other big reveal that a senator is helping the Watch Dogs because the Terrigen killed her brother.

All in all, “Uprising” was a decent episode, and it did tie up a few storylines, but it came at a cost of others. And topics that should’ve been talked about more, were left in the back. Hopefully next week will be more up to snuff.