With "Leap" we finally get some answers! They're strange and out of left field, and they don't have as much impact as the creative team seems to intend. But they're answers!
Why don't they have much impact? Because they basically revolved around a race of bodiless aliens we've never seen or heard of before. Or maybe Ghost Rider was one of the same aliens who either possessed a human body or became trapped in it. I don’t remember much about Ghost Rider and the whole dimension thing involving him. Curse you, season and eight month hiatus!
We also find out what the Gravitonium and last season's Fear Dimension had to do with what's going on. Sort of.
"Leap" starts where last episode left off, with Melinda admitting she shot Sarge. And the medics taking Sarge away. Where Jemma and Fitz discover Sarge is still alive, and he quickly heals.
Meanwhile, Melinda tells everyone she doesn't remember anything since she left the party, including shooting Sarge. And it's not clear why Melinda (who is actually Izel: hang on) shot Sarge in the first place. To convince him he wasn't human and could survive mortal wounds?
A game of hide and seek begins, as Izel reveals her ability to turn into a ghost and jump into the bodies of Piper and then Deke. There's some lip service to how Fitz and Deke still aren't on the same page even though they're grandfather and grandchild due to all the timey-wimey shenanigans.
Mack finally locks everyone in a room, and they realize Izel can't access the memories of whoever she's possessing. They question each other on personal stuff, and once they confirm Daisy and Yo-yo are unpossessed, Mack locks them up to keep Izel from accessing them and their super powers. Why a window would stop her, much less how Mack would know it, isn't clear. At one point the team notes they don't know what Izel is doing, so how can Mack know locking up Daisy and Yo-yo in line-of-sight of the team will stop Izel from getting to them.
Izel reveals herself and makes some threatening noises. She finally jumps into Davis and makes him leap to his death, and then possesses Mack, makes him put his gun to his own head to stop the others from following, and leaves.
Mack/Izel goes to the Gravitonium storage room, and we find out she needs Mack's voice print as Director to enter the storage room. Meanwhile, Sarge has escaped, knocked out Jemma, and confronts Izel telling her e's been dreaming of some faceless woman. Izel explains what Fitz has already mostly worked out: the energy of the monoliths survived even after the monoliths were destroyed. They created an almost-"new" Coulson on a distant planet in the past, and he's been drawn to Izel ever since. The memories Sarge has of his family are just residue memories from the Coulson body he occupies.
Sarge and Izel come from a dimension of bodiless beings, and after Sarge was released, Izel somehow created her own body to go after him. Now she wants Sarge at her side so they can release the rest of their people, who will have bodies in the Shrike bird-creatures. Sarge doesn't believe any of this, so Izel leaves with the Gravitonium. She jumps into Yo-yo's body and demands they release her or she'll cut everyone's throats at superspeed. Mack gives in but insists on going with her. As they board the Zephyr, Melinda tells Daisy Mack has made the right call and he's trusting the rest of them to rescue him and stop Izel.
In the closing tag, a recaptured Sarge is pacing his cell and insisting what Izel told him isn't true. While his body starts to go wavy the same way Izel's did.
There's no sign of Snowflake and Pax.
"Leap" was okay. It's a little surprising that after six years, the team has neither any means of finding aliens, preventing powers like possession, or countermeasures against Yo-yo's powers.
Fitz mumbles something about how he's smarter than his future/past self. And as I noted, Deke is still trying to prove himself to his grandfather.
"Leap" is basically a bottle show. All of the action takes place inside of the Lighthouse, and the cast are the main stars plus Karolina Wydra as Izel, plus the usual bunch of background S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. Davis is presumably dead for good from his two-story fall. One of those dramatic falls people either walk away from or break their necks, depending on how dramatically important they are to the plot. In this case it's broken-neck time.
The danger of a body-hopping Izel, along up with dark corridors and lots of shadows, is duly played up. It's pretty hard for anyone, much less an experienced director like Garry A. Brown, to go wrong with that kind of Thing-like suspense. There are little bits of characterization: Melinda reveals she figured Mack and Yo-yo were going off to have sex and blurts it out in her usual blunt style. Daisy gets a "moment" with Davis' corpse, and Briana Venskus is suitably teary as Piper mourning over the death of her partner/never-to-be soulmate.
Overall, "Leap" kept the momentum going and provided a few answers. The gap in seasons makes the whole Fear Dimension/Ghost Rider thing seem rather distant, so the big reveals don't have the impact that was presumably intended. There are three more episodes to go, and as ABC has announced, the next season will be the last. It's hard to imagine Team S.H.I.E.L.D. stopping a body-hopping, incorporeal-when-she-does-it alien from opening a gateway to her own dimension and bringing the rest of her people race into the real world. But no doubt Fitz-Simmons will technobabble a way to stop them. And then we'll go into the seventh season next year, which will probably tie in a few loose/unexplored ends from this season and the previous ones to generate another season-long story arc or two.
And that's the problem with season six, if you consider it a problem. It seems... insular. The team is dealing with issues they've faced in the past, and it's all very naval-gazing. The alternative is the creative team coming up with brand new plots just to go out in another season. So damned if they do, damned if they don't. I liked Team Sarge, Sarge himself, and the threat of a new alien female menace and her horde of bird-creatures. But now Team Sarge has been either killed or flushed down the memory-hole, we find out Sarge is a recreation of Coulson, and Izel is tied in with Ghost Rider and his other-dimensional origins. So it's gone from the relatively bright and shiny new, to a rehash of the old stuff.
But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?
Written by Gislef on Jul 20, 2019
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