Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - Season 7 (2020)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2020
	Creators: Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly)
	Actors: Clark Gregg (Iron Man 1-3, The Avengers), Ming-Na Wen, Chloe Bennet, Elizabeth Henstridge, Henry Simmons
	Country: USA
	Genre: Action, SF
	Conditions of visioning: May-July 2020, VOD, 10" tablet screen.
Synopsis: The Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. have traveled back in time to follow the Cronicoms and stop their plan to conquer Earth.
Review: This final season follows closely in time the sixth one, and I advice you to read my review of that one for a status overview of the series. As I predicted, they use this scheduled last season to call back previous seasons and have old characters return, but in a much better way than I could have anticipated. We get very few returning actors, but many many references to past events and younger versions of characters we know. Indeed if the Agents already tackled Time Travel in the fifth season, they now run another season fully revolving around it. You may think this contradicts the idea that they explore a new movie sub-genre in every season, but in fact in this one they explore one every episode!! And this includes matching style for the title card, story and visual identity (like an episode in Black&White): they go through 40's Noir, 60's Polar, Roswell-time alien invasion, early 80's computer-geek a-la-WarGames, or later 80's disco SF like in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Pretty awesome. This showed me that the cast and crew really enjoyed working on that season and gave all their love to complete it. This team spirit also shows on the interviews you can watch online. Even if this season is not amazing or at the level of some of the others (like season 1 and season 3), it is still very pleasant to watch because of its generosity. As in all the other seasons, the crazy pace (in that case time jumps) slows down mid-season to focus on the principal story and bring it to a close. By the way those time jumps between every episode remind of series like Quantum Leap or Sliders. As I wrote in the review of the previous season, it is appreciable that the end of the series was scheduled so that it could be done properly and even though the ending could have been better, it still had a great feeling of saying goodbye, at least until a rumored series Agents of S.W.O.R.D.? Watch this breakdown on YouTube for more details. A few more lines about why I liked this final season: it is not so much about the crazy story (tending to the eccentricities of a comics book) and the not-so-charismatic enemies, but about the fan service (references to past seasons and to MCU characters and events even though the series is not canon to the MCU) and the related characters like Koenig, Gordon, the Malick family, Jiaying, Enoch, and the fantastic idea to cast James Paxton, son of the regretted Bill Paxton, to play a young version of the character his dad played. So long Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Rating: 6 /10