There aren’t many TV shows that could pull an episode like this off. Even the obvious forebears, like the various Star Trek series, would have done so as cheaply as possible, finding some abandoned quarry or quiet forest to shoot in. Simmons’s planet, which was mostly a desert, still felt appreciably alien thanks to moody lighting and foreboding blue camera filters. Her trial to get back home, which viewers knew would end in success, still felt hard-earned, and should powerfully inform her character and the way her team tries to adjust to her presence again.
Aside from the terrific “4,722 Hours,” this season has been building up in other interesting ways. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s first season took place mostly on an airplane, a roving base for the team that could take them to any location in the world but ended up serving as the dull setting for 80 percent of every episode’s action. Now, the show’s expanded cast is scattered across the globe, chasing story threads that occasionally knit together before expanding out again. Fortunately, Agents is laying the foundation for its own stories rather than serving as a larger cog in the Marvel universe. Simmons didn’t visit an alien planet to introduce viewers to a location Thor might visit one day; her tribulations simply existed to deepen her character and tease at some other mysteries.
