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Managing editor & film and television critic with a Bachelor's of Arts in English Literature with a Writing Minor from the University of Guam. Currently in graduate school completing a Master's in English Literature.
What is the purpose of evil? We shall explain!
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s second episode of its final season is titled “Know Your Onions;” it is written by Craig Titley (Scooby-Doo, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, The Cape), and directed by Eric Laneuville (Quantum Leap, NYPD Blue, Prison Break).
Some spoilers ahead for those of you who are not up-to-date with the series or not caught up with this episode. If you haven’t done either, you should get to that now, then return to this article!
Eric Laneuville has worked on the important science-fiction and crime-related television series such as those aforementioned shows, and with his direction, it’s important to know why evil exists. In this episode, the SHIELD agents find themselves with the dilemma of killing a catalyst for their opponent organization. Meanwhile, Agent Melina May (Ming-Na Wen) awakes and discovers what she missed while in her healing pod.
“Know Your Onions” comes from an old phrase which means that an individual is very knowledgeable about a particular topic or subject. Patton Oswalt’s character Ernest Hazard Koenig comes to learn about feminism of the future as Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) exhibits her skills as a biochemist and a female one at that. He calls her a “dame” and a “bird,” to which she replies “I’m a doctor, not a dame” and “I’m a biochemist, not a bird.”
Twenty-first century technology is juxtaposed with that of the early-1930s innovations. At the beginning of the episode, Deke Shaw (Jeff Ward) uses a wireless walkie-talkie to communicate with his other SHIELD teammates, and Wilfred “Freddy” Malick (Darren Barnet) responds that the walkie-talkie needs to be plugged into wires. Chronicom Enoch (Joel Stoffer) is left behind in this time period with Koenig, who learns that robots exist in the future. In the episode’s end-tag, Enoch and Koenig have drinks over the episode’s events and the disparity between man and machine. The latter says, “This looks like the start of a marvelous friendship,” a reference to a famous line from the 1942 romantic drama film Casablanca.
The episode also has a larger focus on Freddy Malick and his role in the formation of Hydra in the early-1930s into the 1940s and the future. He places a Hydra vial into a bottle of illegal booze that will eventually have ties to Abraham Erskine and Johann Schmidt, both of whom are connected to the creation and birth of superhero Captain America, the SHIELD savior against evil such as Hydra. As it was said, “Freddy Malick is about to deliver the key ingredient used to create the Super Soldier Serum.”
The importance of choices is essential to the episode, and it is a matter that the agents always face. Elena “Yo-Yo” Rodriguez (Natalia Cordova-Buckley) has the power to slow time and save her team from the police disguised as evil Chronicoms, but she fails to perform this task and puts herself and the agents at risk. Malick’s contact Viola (Nora Zehetner) claims that he is “on the right side of history [and that] you can’t stop progress.” Daisy Johnson/ Quake (Chloe Bennet) tells Shaw to assassinate Malick to rid history of Nazis and Hydra, to which SHIELD director Alphonso “Mack” MacKenzie (Henry Simmons) disagrees, that they have to be the better people.
On the aspect of time travel, the agents only have a short amount of time left in 1931 since their aircraft-turned-time-machine the Zephyr has been made to stay temporarily in a certain period of time. With this time limit, they have to make risky decisions. Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) takes Mack’s side and says that “[the agents] can’t disrupt the timeline.” To the idea of killing a man who has not yet committed his crime against humanity, Koenig responds, “You can’t blame someone for something that ain’t done yet!” These are strong words to live by; an individual cannot be deemed a criminal until the act they commit is indeed a crime, and such a person can still hopefully opt for improvement of their well-being. The team and Koenig witness the true nature of Malick as he embarks on his sadistic path towards evil. He tells Shaw and MacKenzie, “Play the cards you’re dealt [with]. What’s the harm in giving people what they want, right?”
The purpose of evil — as presented in this episode — is to show its integral role to history and to serve as proof to other people that we can be better as human beings. This fact and the dilemma has also appeared briefly in Avengers: Endgame, where James “Rhodey” Rhodes suggests he and the remaining heroes of the future travel to the past and choke villain Thanos to death. In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the team ultimately allows Malick (a synecdoche of evil) to survive and exist to allow their own organization to survive and exist furthermore into the future.
“Know Your Onions” provides the most important lesson: know your onions. As human beings, we need to do the smart thing and stand up for good rather than eliminate evil. In the end, evil will eventually have to lose but it first needs to exist not to create some sort of balance between the two, but to tip the scales for one side to prevail. Koenig says that “Hydra, Red Skull, Super Soldier Serum — sounds like something out of the funny papers,” to which Daisy Johnson says there is nothing funny about it. Evil also exists on paper and should not be erased because it will only try to disguise itself as good.
This episode of the series is a monumental one that can be applied to real-life events.
10/10
What do you think? Have you seen this series? If not, do you plan to binge it sometime in the near future? Let us know! For more Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., action, science-fiction, and Marvel-related news and reviews, follow The Cinema Spot on Twitter (@TheCinemaSpot) and Instagram (@thecinemaspot_).
Managing editor & film and television critic with a Bachelor's of Arts in English Literature with a Writing Minor from the University of Guam. Currently in graduate school completing a Master's in English Literature.
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