'Agents of SHIELD' Season 7 Episode 5: Simmons is hiding a big secret and fans are dying to figure it out
Spoilers for 'Agents of SHIELD' Season 7 Episode 5 'A Trout in the Milk'
With 'Agents of SHIELD' Season 7 barrelling through time, a number of questions have arisen about the team and especially about Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge). Simmons has been acting a bit odd recently and in Episode 5 'A Trout in the Milk', the mystery gets a whole lot murkier. In the episode, we see a strange glowing spot on the back of Simmons' neck and she also has a conversation with Enoch (Joel Stoffer) about how her memory is slipping. So far, Simmons has been the calm and collected guide leading the team through time but it looks like she's definitely harboring a secret and the fans are going crazy trying to guess what that might be.
"WHAT THE F*** IS HAPPENING WITH JEMMA?" a fan asked on the episode's Reddit discussion page, jumping right to the problem. Another fan suggested, "The stuff in the back of Jemma glows like centipede serum, maybe it’s some form of that?"
"Wonder if Simmons is actually a chronicom on the side of the chronicoms, which is how they’ve been a step ahead," yet another fan speculated. There has been a theory among the fans since the start of the season that Simmons might be an LMD like Coulson (Clark Gregg) so her being a Chronicom isn't too much of a stretch. However, there are problems with this theory as well.
"But then she also has emotions," one fan pointed out. "Is that device sustaining her life and contains all the info that she needs but because she has a mortal finite human brain, she's being overwhelmed?"
We saw this difference in an earlier episode when Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen), who is now an empath, could read Simmons' emotions but not Coulson's. Plus, we've also seen Simmons detonate an EMP that knocked out both a Chronicom and Coulson but did not appear to affect her.
"Simmons has had an entirely subdued personality this season, but if they uploaded her personality and memories into a Chronicom body (which as mentioned by Coulson is synthetic and organic) then it would make sense for her to still feel emotions on an organic level that May could sense," a fan suggested, though that doesn't explain the EMP.
Whatever the truth behind Simmons' strange behavior is, we'll just have to wait and find out.
'Agents of SHIELD' Season 7 airs Wednesdays at 10 pm ET on ABC.