Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. roars back with a surprise villain and a great Terminator joke
What should the punishment be for unleashing a malevolent artificial intelligence upon the world? Yo-Yo has a clear answer: Dr. Radcliffe should be forced to rewatch the entire Terminator series. Not a bad rule when you’re just trying to make a friend realize he should’ve known that building a smarter-than-human robot would turn out badly. But it’s not all smiles and getting to see Arnold wield a pump-action shotgun with one hand; Mack is thinking about the harsh consequences of such a penalty. “Even Salvation?” he asks her, incredulously. She sniffs. “He brought this on himself.”
It’s one of the best jokes of the episode, but the exchange also unwittingly points to the true villain revealed in “Broken Promises,” one who remains hidden in plain sight. And no, it’s not the life model decoy of Melinda May, despite the faux agent being the most overt threat and clearest representative of the “LMD” designation assigned to the newest arc of Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. As is shown during the final act, the person secretly pulling the strings throughout this entire adventure is Dr. Holden Radcliffe, good-natured scientist and routine comic relief. It feels like a long con, but really, it’s relatively recent: Radcliffe only got a glimpse of the Darkhold a couple episodes ago, so his realization that it held the key to immortality only spurred on this turn of events by accident. He didn’t plan to kidnap a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and threaten the lives of everyone around him; it just turned out that way.
What makes the twist so strong is how this has been set up from the very beginning with his character. Think back to the first time we met Radcliffe—he was the head of an underground society dedicated to human enhancement via biotechnology. In fact, we assumed he was a villain at first, and his initial behavior suggested that assumption wasn’t far off. Fitz and Simmons first found him at the transhuman club, the architect behind surgery intended to…improve humanity. What could improve people more than eternal life? Even his creation of Aida now appears in retrospect like an obvious next step in trying to evolve humanity to a place where it could live forever. He wanted to create an android that could pass for human; think about the possible reasons behind such a move. Radcliffe has been an excellent addition to the team and a delightful comic foil, but he’s always had interests that don’t align with the team. Plus, he’s gifted with the standard-issue messiah complex: Much as with his transhumanist movement, Radcliffe thinks he’s doing the right thing, but that others are too small-minded to understand the importance of his mission. It’s like Yo-Yo says in this installment: “Smart people are stupid.”
Still, Radcliffe’s not stupid when it comes to programming Aida to mimic human emotions. Everything she does suggests a computer that has attained sentience, from the emotional confrontation with Fitz to the exchange with Coulson. It’s a brilliant ploy, hiding his own machinations behind the veil of a robot come to life, and that calculation is never more obvious than when Mack is talking. He’s a dedicated skeptic who even made certain “death by robot” was in his insurance; that kind of suspicion only lends credence to Radcliffe’s subterfuge. It also leads to the best running gag of the episode, Mack’s continual pop-cultural references of movies starring machines that turn against their human creators. Short Circuit, The Lawnmower Man, Maximum Overdrive…hell, even the low-budget charmer Chopping Mall gets a shout-out this week, proof that Yo-Yo found a Wikipedia page dedicated to evil robots and that Mack enjoys a good trashy Roger Corman film. The subterfuge works because this is a world in which Ultron almost killed off human life, so the expectation of a nefarious A.I. already carries a lot of weight. Plus, Aida gentle behavior with May implied a sense of moral obligation; it’s only after the reveal it was all programmed that it retroactively becomes a show of emotion, rather than the real thing.