'Agents of SHIELD' Season 7 Episode 10 Review: A devastating story with major twists of the plot and a neck
Spoilers for 'Agents of SHIELD' Season 7 Episode 10 'Stolen'
The final season of 'Agents of SHIELD' is drawing closer to the end. In Season 7 Episode 10 'Stolen', the plot continues to thicken with some truly surprising events. After Enoch (Joel Stoffer) and the team escape from the time storm, the Agents return to 1983 to help Jiaying (Dichen Lachman) face the threat of Nathaniel Malick (Thomas E. Sullivan). Nathaniel's been busy since the last time we saw him, stealing the powers of captured Inhumans to empower his own selected fighters.
Right at the beginning of the episode, Nathaniel recruits a new soldier who is a very familiar name for both agents and fans of the show: John Garrett. Played by James Paxton, the son of Bill Paxton who played the older Garrett in the show's early seasons, Garrett is as cruel as ever and is given the powers of Gordon (Fin Argus) after a recon mission undertaken by Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) and Gordon goes awry.
Coulson does eventually manage to rescue all the captured Inhumans and shoot Jiaying's wayward daughter Kora (Dianne Doan) with an ICER. But as it turns out, this whole capturing Inhumans thing was basically a red herring designed to allow Nathaniel and Garrett to make away with an even more valuable prize (more on that in a bit).
Jiaying and Daisy Johnson (Chloe Bennet) have a pretty touching scene where Daisy tells Jiaying about how her mother hurt her, without revealing that her mother was Jiaying in the future. It's a really sweet moment and it makes us all the more angry that this kind woman was turned into the monster we know by Hydra and their experimentation.
If you're a fan of Jiaying, there's a lot to lose your mind over, including her tragic death. After infiltrating the Lighthouse, Nathaniel attacks Daisy and Jiaying, revealing to the older Inhuman that Daisy is her daughter and that Jiaying would one day be dissected and left for dead, pushing her on the path to militancy.
He also reveals that Jiaying would end up trying to drain Daisy's life-force but as shocked as she is to hear it, Jiaying still steps in to defend Daisy against Nathaniel, using her powers on him. Unfortunately, Nathaniel's quake powers are too much for Jiaying and the villain snaps her neck, seemingly killing her. There's a really interesting moment immediately after Jiaying is killed when Daisy quakes the whole place in an almost 'Dragon Ball Z'-type scene. Unfortunately, we don't see her go full Super Saiyan because Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen) runs in and shoots Nathaniel, who still manages to escape.
It gets worse. While Nathaniel is having his standoff with Daisy and Jiaying, Garrett briefly fights May before teleporting away to grab Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) and hijack the Zephyr. In the final moments of the episode, Nathaniel and Garrett escape on the Zephyr with Simmons as their prisoner and with Deke Shaw (Jeff Ward) hiding on the ship without their knowledge.
After all that drama with the Inhumans and the anarchy, it turns out Nathaniel was still basically doing Sybil's (Tamara Taylor) work for her. Now that they have captured Simmons, they want her to reveal where Leo Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) is so that they can eliminate him once and for all.
'Agents of SHIELD' Season 7 airs Wednesdays at 10 pm ET on ABC.