S5:E04 - Jess and Jared recap and discuss “A Life Earned."
We begin with the Kree taking Daisy's blood. Kasius claims to have saved humanity, and begins to see Jemma and Daisy are connected, and reveals he knows about the prophecy, but thinks the time traveling S.H.I.E.L.D. team are there to help *him*. So he plans to sell Daisy to the highest bidder, and threatens to injure/torture Jemma if she doesn't agree. We go to May working for Grill while the trawler is grounded, and Grill zaps Mack for talking, and then drafts him to be his replacement muscle, perpetuating Mack's cycle of being forced into violence by his circumstances and awful people. Mack, as Black man, has been continually forced into this position, which is incredibly relevant and reflective of the pervasive white supremacist tendencies of our entire society.
Oh, and *Ward* bought Jess a drink from a stand at a mall, and they hung out with Coulson, and they might've gone to the beach...in a dream she had! But back to the episode, at the Kree Inhuman gladiatorial arena Daisy meets a shirtless telepathic Inhuman warrior boy who gives her the lowdown on their future/Kree "grown" synthetic meat, but they can't get to know each other too well before Daisy is told to provide a demonstration for Kasius. Mack and Yo-Yo are going to act as Grill's muscle and Coulson wants to explore the Kree level with May, even though they're going in unaware of what they'll be facing, and May is *kind of* Coulson's muscle, come to think of it. Daisy fights for Kasius to save Jemma from his wrath, and he snubs Lady Basha. Deke is there for his payment, and gets a coin made from a rare metal, and Kasius asks Deke to bring in any more people connected to the prophecy, but there's more than meets the eye. The Inhuman telepathic guy, *maybe* named Ben (we just don't know), knows they're being sold into slavery because of his telepathy, but keeps it to himself, because his family *will* be rewarded for it, and punished if he reveals the truth. Deke lies about where Daisy is, sort of, and Coulson buys it, to a point. Coulson shows Deke the transmission from the surface, and convinces him to help them get there to check it out. Mack and Yo-Yo discuss the limits one is willing to go to in order to survive, and Yo-Yo exposes some of Mack's relative privilege that he has never had to compromise his morality to survive. Sinara took a soldering iron from a dude ominously and mentions to Kasius and Daisy that she saw someone else help Jemma when she healed someone before, and asked who else might be from the prophecy. Daisy tells them a bullshit story about traveling through time from the diner with Jemma alone, and the Inhuman telepath helped coordinate Jemma and Daisy's story.
Sinara is on to them, and Kasius is mad that they can't punish anyone yet. Deke takes Coulson and May to Level 36 and makes good on the promise. The telepath tells Daisy that Kasius hates his life and plans to use Daisy to destroy the station. Coulson, May and Deke get to a lab and see a human baby incubating, and Coulson notes how grimly dystopian it has become, with the Kree sterilizing the humans so they depend on Kree genetic engineering for reproduction. Coulson threatens Deke, through May, to tell him what's going on with Daisy when Kree goons show up and May takes them down, but Deke is injured, and then Sinara shows up as Coulson helps Deke escape. Yo-Yo and Mack bust into Gunner's quarters for Grill, and offer to get rid of the package they had for them, but it was stuff for his child, and Gunner freaks out on Mack and tells him he doesn't deserve to have children, and Mack's heart is broken as he's enraged to the point of beating him senseless. May and Sinara face off in an awesome scene, and then Coulson pops Deke in the face after seeing to his wounds. And Coulson calls Deke out on profiting from other people's suffering, but Deke stands up for himself, and explains some of what he's been through, and that his dad's voice is the one they've heard transmit from the surface, and that all he's done has been to survive. Mack slips Gunner and his wife and kid money to make up for what he'd done, and to get Grill off his case. Mack's position of there always being a moral choice cannot be applied in their current situation, and the differences between his and Yo-Yo's outlooks are accentuated by the facts of life in the dark future they've found themselves in. We discuss a future death spoiler for this season, and how time travel works in S.H.I.E.L.D., and whether or not timelines are erased, or if folks are just moving from one dimension to another? And how does time travel *really* work in Back to the Future? Deke's from another timeline, but he's around, so his history wasn't undone...Hmmm... Mack is worried that he's losing himself, and questions if he was a good father or not, because he was more hurt by losing framework Hope than losing his real world Hope, but Yo-Yo assures him that his love for framework Hope was because he's a great father, not the opposite. Grill tells him he's fitting right in, and it all breaks him. He's emotionally shattered. We digress for a moment to remind you to check out some S.H.I.E.L.D. vets, Blair Underwood on Netflix's Self-Made, and B.J. Britt on Pitch on Hulu, and then recap Kasius trying to sell Daisy to a group of rich bidders, and Fitz wants to bid!
And now more than ever, fuck the police. Now as always, Black Lives Matter. You can visit www.gofundme.com/f/justiceforjacobblake to help with medical expenses and counseling for his family and to help pursue justice.
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