Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Know Your Onions Review

AOS "Know Your Onions"

Still in 1931, the Agents are afforded opportunities for more period dress (this time for Simmons and Yo-Yo), and Coulson the chance to cut a Dillinger-esque figure with a tommy gun. This is all before another time window shifts everyone forward in time - by the looks of it, the next episode takes place in the 1950s. By only sticking in the same year for two episodes, the structure of the season comes into clearer focus, and lends things a *gasp* episodic quality?

Two of the major engines of this episode are the ongoing moral dilemma of saving Hydra to preserve the future, and on the comic relief side, letting Patton Oswalt loose with the kind of vintage lingo that gives the episode its title. When Oswalt's Ernest Koenig says that S.H.I.E.L.D.'s world of super soldier serum and advanced robotics is like "something out of the funny papers", the writers run the danger of being too cute.

Energized from the twist at the end of the premiere, the team must protect Wilfred "Freddy" Malick, even though he and his son will grow up to be Neo-Nazi tyrants. At the eleventh hour, Daisy breaks ranks and manipulates an impressionable Deke to "take the shot" and kill young Freddy. Deke channels Draco Malfoy and shrinks from the task, and afterward this mutinous episode is forgotten, so it feels extremely shoe-horned in... but I sympathize with writer Craig Titley. There needed to be some direct reckoning with the cognitive dissonance of the team's distasteful duty to protect Hydra's origin story. So it's good drama artificially wedged in the episode, but artificially wedged in nonetheless. It would have been wise to pull back on the schematic plotting and make this moment of high drama the emotional centerpiece of the episode.

The action centerpiece of the episode, on the other hand, is Enoch's fight with a semi-recovered Melinda May. This unlikely pairing is enhanced by a quirk of May's recovery giving her the same clipped voice patterns of a Chronicom.

The major canon connection is the mention of the super soldier serum's development by Abraham Erskine, and administration to Hydra's Johann Schmidt. These respectively, of course, are Stanley Tucci and Hugo Weaving's characters from Captain America: The First Avenger.

"Know Your Onions" features a typical episode's balance of humor and action, so when it goes very dramatic, that feels out of place without further development. 6/10.