[CaptainCrunch]

Ok, before I'm going to go anywhere with the spoiler tags, I'm going to say one thing

mother$$$$$$

Spoiler!

Shield has always managed to skirt the darkness while at its heart trying to keep things a little light. At the darkest moments in this series you can always count on a phrase or statement out of nowhere that lets you breath and laugh at the absurdity of the situation. And absurdity isn't a bad term. We're talking about a spy agency that's dealt with Nazi's, mutants, evil alien super beings, a virtual world and a love sick robot and the end of the world.

But through all of it, they have these pure moments where you just have to laugh. They teased us with that tonight with the whole Deke in love with Daisy and Lemon stories, but this thing got dark in a hurry.

And those bastards swerved us, they swerved us hard.

Death seems to be a fact of life in this show as well, and this episode had it all including the slaughter of a terrified and misguided young girl.

WTF you say, just wait its coming, and they managed to make a monster really sympathetic and at the same time through us a massive curveball.

I also want to remind anyone that reads this, and I hope there are a few of you left, that each season of Shield has had a theme, sacrifice, choices, vengeance among other ones, but the overlying theme this year has been the question of inevitability, that no matter what your choices are your on a path.

When I look at the darkness of this season, its amazing how they paced it so it almost has become another unseen character in the show. Yo Yo loses her arms. Fitz uses his evil doppilganger and tortures his friends, Coulson slowly dying from the Tahiti project, it was almost like they were pacing this as the gradually deepening pool, and tonight you took that step and suddenly found yourself immersed in the darkness.

Basically we have seen the evolution of Daisy as the new leader of Shield has she has effectively sidelined Coulson in the hopes of avoiding the inevitable time loop and his death which Yo yo has said can't be stopped and shouldn't be stopped. But splitting up the team and leaving Coulson behind with Talbot and Mack and Robyn has its own problems and Shield once again teased us with that death that we really don't want.

Poor Talbot is completely broken and brain washed and his mission was to snatch Robyn the poor girl who's power is that she can see parts of the future. But during his snatch he's confronted by Coulson who tries to help Talbot to shake his programming, in the end we see the scene where Coulson orders Talbot to point the gun at him and only a last minute icer shot prevents Coulson from dying.

Meanwhile poor Simmons and Fitz are trying to repair the infusion device for Ruby and Strucker and Ruby takes extra ordinary pleasure in torturing Simmons by throwing her weapon at Gemma's head.

As I stated last week, Ruby is very much a monster, but she's like Frankenstein, a victim of her creator General Hale who's been driven by birth to beat her hero and be the leader of Hydra. As such Ruby can't help herself, there's really not a good bone in her body, mainly because he was raised that way.

Meanwhile Daisy and her team manage to snatch General Hale who's seen that her daughter is going to merge with the Gravitonium with the two now insane entities in it, and surrenders to try to save her daughter.

This leads to the confrontation where Ruby is infused with 8% of the Gravitonium and she becomes incredibly powerful and unbalanced and accidentally kills Strucker by crushing his head which is gruesome.

The climax of the episode is Daisy and Hale trying to help Ruby who is basically begging for help, and is tortured by the voices in her head. The acting by Dove Cameron has been top notch as she's played Ruby with a combination of menace and vulnerability. But it gets more jarring as just as Hale and Daisy seem to be getting through to Ruby, Yo Yo shows up and kills her in a fairly gruesome manner and we watch poor Ruby as she slowly bleeds to death.

So there's curve ball number two. The first one not really surprising as far as another tease of Coulson's death. However they've been hinting that Ruby was going to be the destroyer of world and I predicted that she would become Graviton. But as Ruby died and basically released her energy, Yo Yo stated that she'd saved the world.

In episode 18.

However I don't believe it, I don't believe that they're going to allow Earths inevitable fate to be altered and the time loop disrupted that easily, To me this now shifts things back to Daisy becoming the destroyer of worlds.

Hale herself disappears and the next scene that we see is her with the alien being willing to disclose the location of the Gravitonium and the Shield base, and the shocked and shattered Hale who has just lost her daughter states that she doesn't care if they kill Shield, so Hale has gone from being the reluctant antagonist to a vessel for vengeance.

Shocking and dark, and with 4 episodes left, I don't believe by any stretch that the world is safe.

Random thoughts

1) The camera work really added to the tension of the episode with a reliance on reactions. The interactions between Fitz and Simmons. The drawing in on Ruby during her insanity moments were shocking and jarring and really put this episode over the top

2) The action choreography and especially the fight scenes in my mind are the best in TV. The fight between Sky and May when they invade the base was so incredibly well done and viceral.

3) Poor Deke he continues to be the foil of humor especially with his feelings towards Daisy. During the briefing when Mack asks him if he's wearing body spray was such a random locker room moment and well done. The story of courting in the future where you leave a lemon on a girls bed was well done, and Mack and Coulson's reaction to it was hilarious.

4) Phil wanting to continue the conversation with May where she said she loved him and her unwillingness summed up the awkwardness of their relationship where she storms off and Phil mutters "Good talk Phil"

5) Struckers head being crushed and poor Ruby's head nearly being cut off by Yo Yo were far more grotesque then most deaths except for poor Aida's death last year, but they were actually incredibly necessary to the story line.

6) Hales instant surrender so she could rush to her daughters rescue showed that she's almost an unwilling enemy, but I think that's changed.

7) When the Graviton exploded out of Ruby, where did it go, I think they emphasized it too much to just be a nice special effect.

8) Is there a link up coming with the next Avengers movie?