Agents of SHIELD season 7 reflections 1
Aug. 28th, 2020 10:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urth posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
tori_reviewsSo I've kind of fallen down a fic semi-writing rabbit hole the last few days which is putting my focus off continuing the AoS wrapup reviews. But I will be back with WatX next week. For now:
Agents of SHIELD season 7: a failure of motivation
I've talked before about how I often don't get around to doing season/series wrap-up posts and through this I'm reflecting on why that is. If a show ends well then I tend to think it speaks for itself and doesn't need me to do a ton of reflection on how it was done; and if it ends badly my reserves of angry energy don't sustain for long. The embers will definitely remain and I'll always remember that yeah that ended badly (BSG I'm looking at you), but I lose a little steam on wanting to keep complaining about it. Maybe I also think that bad speaks for itself, so what I can bring is my anger and that fades.
But I'm not past it yet, there were a lot of aspects of the finale, season, series, that I took issue with and haven't fully explored yet, so here we go with some more.
First of all, I need to make one thing abundantly clear: time travel was the wrong idea for a season long arc. For one, this show sucks at time travel, always has, always will. Time travel as a plot device might be considered a high wire walk, it's impressive if done well but one step out of line and it will fall and fall hard. There are things you can do to give yourself some more wiggle room; for example, Endgame made it fun and found character beats that could only happen through time travel. This has a few moments of that, but it goes on too long to sustain what goodwill it gets.
While we're on the subject of Endgame, it is also part of a final adventure story, but through those character moments it stops and reflects on how far the characters have come, it embraces the history relevant to the story and characters, and celebrates what has come before. In that, AoS fails spectacularly. This story doesn't reflect on the characters, through Daniel it actively tears down the established history of the story's universe, doesn't take us back to the beginning of anything (except maybe in the first couple episodes), or allow the characters the demonstrate their growth.
Because it's not about the characters we've known for the previous 4-6 seasons. That isn't Coulson, it's Coulsoid; that isn't May, they hollowed out her personality and replaced it with plot convenient empathy powers; that isn't Jemma, she's lived for years away from the group and we don't get to know about any of it until the end (and neither does she fully, which is at least as bad); same goes for Fitz when he shows up except he does remember so is even more different than she is; that isn't Daniel as we knew him on Agent Carter, not only because it's been several years since we last saw him but this show took away his defining plot from the previous show; on the rare occasion they do run into versions of people from their past it's not actually the people they knew, partly because it's from a time in their history we don't know them, and because this is ultimately an alternate universe.
Now, while I think this season would have been vastly improved by doing better character work, I don't want to ignore the fact that the plot is also a terrible idea executed badly. It didn't have to be either of those things, but it was and is. Even though the season does start its plot off in the first episode; it ends up feeling like it takes forever to get going. Because we're restarting in each new time period and there's no connective plot or character work that is building on what came before or illustrating where we know things end. So when the plot simplifies to some degree by sticking to a narrower band of time, it almost feels like we've joined a different show; the same things were happening in this other show, but the point was the focus on how badly our characters' lives could be screwed up by all this messing around in time. But that turn is completely undone by the end deciding that these are separate universes and they can just go back to their own where none of this happened.
Speaking of the multi-verse, it makes me even more confused by what Sybil even wants. I will never understand how stopping SHIELD matters once the Chronicoms have time travel and can just go back and save their own world. This is worse that Star Trek 09 in this regard and that was bad to start with; at least the Romulans were people with feelings and blind spots; yes it would have made more sense once they were 100 years in the past to go to the Romulans of that time, with their advanced ship and much greater knowledge of Starfleet and the Federation and make a big move with backing. But I can see how Nero might have wanted to be in charge of his revenge rather than relying on the Senate and military of the time who could have gotten in his way, and he wanted that revenge to be as personal as possible.
Here the Chronicoms start out wanting to make as small a change as possible that will remove SHIELD from the playing field in the future (apparently there's no ripple effect of the changing timeline along the way, just suddenly no more SHIELD in the future). Then at some point they decide to make bigger and bigger changes (even if in doing so they make SHIELD bigger than it would have been at the time), then basically don't care, in fact start offering to build a whole new world from the one we knew. I understand the escalation argument, but what is the ultimate goal? Do they want to concur Earth? What's so special about Earth if they could go anywhere? Last season they were after the knowledge of time travel and maybe the monoliths, but once they have time travel they can scoop up the monoliths from the past and still go anywhere.
And with the multi-verse, what are the stakes? Some people would ask that in the sense that if there are infinite alternate realities what are the stakes if they fail in the one; but that's not how I mean it. What is the future FitzSimmons are working to prevent happening? We don't hear anything about what happened back on Earth after they left, and we never see anything past that point. Setting aside that it still could be a time loop, in which case the pair of them are stupid for not just going and collecting Kora (yes I finally realized I was misspelling it), did the Chronicoms 'originally' win? If they did, why do they need to go back and stop SHIELD from being an obstacle?
While it would have been very Terminator, here's one option for what they could have said. That the defenders of Earth, including parts of SHIELD, did continue to fight on and had more of less won the fight against the Chronicoms; then Sybil and the last of the Hunters used some prototype time travel tech (which works on somewhat different principles than what FitzSimmons have been working on, hence no need for time rock) to flee into the past. They then know that Chronica 2 is still out there, and maybe they are in communication with them, or maybe their idea of time travel says they shouldn't contact the homeworld this far back (or maybe they're just unstuck in time); but for this clan of survivors they intend to concur Earth, so the opposition won't be around to stop the Chronicoms when they arrive when the invaders first did in the future.
You see how the villains have a motivation in that idea? See how it establishes stakes for our team; they're almost certainly all dead in that future, but also they could end up creating a worse future where Earth doesn't ultimately win the fight. See how FitzSimmons then really are laying it all on the line, because they could have found some safe place out in space with Alya, but they have the power to change everything before it goes so bad, so they have the responsibility to try.
To go perhaps even more Terminator; why did the show reject an idea that had to considered, that the Chronicoms are specifically targeting the pasts of these characters? To keep them from being born, or joining SHIELD, or surviving to be relevant in the future. All of these characters have some pretty big gaps in what we know about their pasts that could be explored, and this angle would have made the danger and plot focused on the characters rather than seemingly arbitrary.
Or they could have made it an asset race through history, Simmons and Enoch have a list of people that can help them in the fight for the future and they're actively working on that instead of leaving it to random chance that they stumble across Kora; and because they want to preserve as much of the timeline as possible they most go to try and save people who would die soon anyway; but the Chronicoms are working at cross-purposes is some way, and things come to a head in the finale where all the resources than have been gathered become important to being able to win.
This could have included a lot of effort to save their own dead teammates; thus allowing us to revisit familiar points in the show's history and get old characters back. You want to find the right love interest for Daisy in the past, that's a better way to do it (maybe FitzSimmons worked out a way to save Lincoln and contain Hive, maybe they even need Hive for some reason; or we could go for Daisy/Trip); and this lets us leave Daniel with Peggy where he belongs, so it sounds like a great idea.
The show toyed with a lot of these ideas, but because it becomes clear fairly early that there aren't going to be any real consequences it's all rendered hollow. And because this show has never been terribly interested in what happens after the plot fighting is done, I couldn't even expect much in the way of personal consequences for the characters when things went to a dark place. How is Mack changed by having to kill robot versions of his parents? At least he gets an episode of feeling bad about things while stuck in the 80s. How is Daisy affected by her mother's death? Why don't we see what FitzSimmons see of the future back on Earth and how that motivates their actions? And I'm not going to even get into May (this time).
As you can tell, what I think this series needed above anything (at least plot-wise) was a clear mission for both the SHIELD team and the Chronicoms. Without knowing what the Chronicoms actually want nothing they do can make any sense; if they want to concur the world in the past, why aren't they assassinating world leaders? If they want to be stealthy about what they change, why do they conclude that's the better way to unravel the past? What plan are they trading in when they go for more direct changes, but still why not go all the way? What are their numbers? What are their resources? What does it take to kill them if they can actually just download themselves onto a hard drive? We spend a fair amount of time with the villains at times throughout the season, but do we have any idea what they want to achieve? And for the 50th time, why not just go save Chronica 2?
The show ended up just going around in circles with the SHIELD team too. Making their mission a vague sense of stopping whatever the Chronicoms are trying to do, would have also been helped by knowing what the Chronicoms were trying to do. Why go to all the trouble to have debates about whether to preserve or change the timeline if the show was just going to walk that back anyway and have it not matter. Why not let them take the gloves off and fight for an actual mission and forget about the timeline (though they should avoid screwing these people over to get what they want). Or make them fight to preserve the timeline to a specific point because if things change too much they won't be able to what they most need to (apparently pick up Kora, not that anyone knows that). Maybe Jaiying met Kora's father during their capture in WW2, so removing Hydra from the equation before Whitehall can capture them would screw up the plan. Maybe they can have an adventure in the 50s because that's around the time Kora was born and allowing the Chronicoms to screw up the world at that point would also ruin the plan. Maybe the Insight kill list also included a lot of Inhumans at Afterlife and Daisy knows enough of them to see the connection (and it would make sense; since after all, in the hypothetical 'original future' timeline I suggested, SHIELD would have been able to call on their Inhuman allies who wouldn't exist if the timeline was changed in that way (not that the show has seemed to remember there are other Inhumans for a few seasons now, so specifically Daisy and Yoyo wouldn't be a factor if they take out Jaiying).
In the last part of this review series I mentioned that I don't understand how production on this season worked. In episodic television, part of the struggle is that you can't go back and edit prior things to reflect later decisions for plot lines. But I don't see why that needed to be the case with this season of the series. Having filmed well in advance they could have at least done some pickups and reshoots to smooth over some bumps with the plot. Why does the series spend half the season forcing SHIELD to fight with one hand behind their back trying to avoid changing the timeline? It could be explained, but it isn't, when Enoch has to know (and Simmons should) what the plan actually is and how time travel is going to work in this case; and since the end reveals that it doesn't matter because they're going to jump across universes back to the point they left, why does the story waste so much time by not clearly establishing the ground rules.
Here's what I kind of think should have happened (this is rough, but I'll give it a go); the Chronicoms traveled back to a specific time, but their time travel did work off the monolith (which is the answer they would have found in Simmons' mind for how time travel can work) and they only had one piece of it that's large enough after bombing Temple. The early episodes of the season are based around stopping the Chronicoms from getting their hands on the time monolith in the past and trying to figure out what their ultimate goal is; along with some dealing with people of the period they're in. These Chronicoms also don't have space travel, so they're trying to either create it or at least a way of contacting Chronica 2. Maybe the Chronicoms even approach the team and say 'hey let us go save our planet and we'll leave you alone' but for some reason I would need to explain, the team don't agree because they can see it won't really happen that way; maybe they even try and jump back to the future and find that it's worse than before (because the team wasn't there to lead the resistance as they had been), or even just that something had happened to Fitz and Alya (you know, a cost for trying to meddle this big), so they have to go back into the past and find another solution.
Then, at some point, there could have been a full crossover with Agent Carter. Show what happened after the final episode; bring in Howard Stark and have some callback to how Coulson's character began in the MCU with Tony; show SHIELD as it was still growing, with Peggy and Daniel leading it. If they want to establish that an alternate timeline is being created, dig Steve out of the ice early (don't know if Chris Evans would have been up for it, but it's an idea); hell, compared to what we got, just go the full Mary Sue route and pair up Steve/Daisy just so long as you leave me with Peggy/Daniel (you could even get an ultimate irony bit with this Steve saying something like 'you've got a good life going on here, I think I'm going to have to let you go and live it,' basically learning the lesson fuck you Steve Rogers of Endgame didn't get.
And on another side, you can bring in the Inhumans; our team realize that they can't win this on their own go and recruit in Afterlife. Maybe Kora was always a backup plan but Team FitzSimmons had hoped to avoid it and spare Daisy from learning about Kora. But there would be something brilliant about the message if in this timeline SHIELD and the Inhumans became friends instead of enemies; and our team could reflect on how they can't change their own past, but they can learn from it help make some better futures. Have Jaiying still die to make it reasonable that Kora would agree to go back with Daisy and the team and defeat the Chronicoms in that reality.
Now if only I could find a way to work Sif in and get her to offer Philinda commentary (because she definitely ships it).
Oh, maybe when they go back to the future Sif has come to help; maybe Fitz was working on contacting her during these other adventures, to be the heavy in case they didn't bring back Kora. Again, having callbacks to what the team has done before this and make this seem more like a final battle that everything has been leading towards (because it definitely doesn't feel that way now).
Of course in this version of the season I'd leave out the loss of May's personality; though I might not entirely leave out the plot convenient empathy powers. They would still be plot convenient but I would turn them from predominantly about receiving emotions and give her more ability to project them (I think that's what happened in the finale, but they never set it up and if she's lacking her own emotions how does she project them?) and that being part of how she's able to convince all these people to work together with their crazy story about robots from the future. This would also have been a fascinating revision to her character as she's spent so long hiding her emotions to not be able to stop people from knowing them, especially under circumstances like this where she wants to be as calm and still as possible when she's shook up inside.
(...Actually, now that I'm on the subject, if the show had set up that May could project emotions, that could have been used to explain why she lost touch with them and how she gets them back. Her power was always both receiving and projecting, but May's instinct on getting powers that let people know what she was feeling was to not feel anything (doesn't make a ton of sense, but it's a rough draft idea). Then as her powers became more integrated with her thoughts and feelings, she had to learn how to let herself and then others in on what she was feeling. Which of course would have meant letting May have an arc at dealing with these powers, which we couldn't have apparently.)
(Also, if there was ever a clear example of why I can't structure anything ahead of time, that was probably it. Peak behind the curtain, I actually had started my problems of s7 post right as I was finishing the finale re-review; and taking some of the same ideas I had gone a different way with how they would come to a climax. This is why I do reviews stream of consciousness and why fic never gets done because I can't just jump forward to another point in the outline because I don't trust that I'd ever even get to that point with how off course things can go.)
And I definitely wouldn't end my hypothetical plotline with Coulsoid driving off alone (unless they'd also done the paradox avoiding Coulson swap and the point was Coulsoid saw everyone else happy including the real Coulson and now Coulsoid's got to go out into the world and find another path for himself; that ending is a bit Doctor Who but it might work better here if done properly); but I think I've made my stance on that part of the crappy ending clear (meaning with AoS, you want my thoughts on Journey's End they're not hard to find either).
...So this part has gone a little off the rails with me trying to invent off the cuff better versions of the season than we got. But I did address the lack of motivation which is one of the big problems this season had (plot-wise the biggest); maybe next time I'll get around to addressing some of the other failures of the season.
Agents of SHIELD season 7: a failure of motivation
I've talked before about how I often don't get around to doing season/series wrap-up posts and through this I'm reflecting on why that is. If a show ends well then I tend to think it speaks for itself and doesn't need me to do a ton of reflection on how it was done; and if it ends badly my reserves of angry energy don't sustain for long. The embers will definitely remain and I'll always remember that yeah that ended badly (BSG I'm looking at you), but I lose a little steam on wanting to keep complaining about it. Maybe I also think that bad speaks for itself, so what I can bring is my anger and that fades.
But I'm not past it yet, there were a lot of aspects of the finale, season, series, that I took issue with and haven't fully explored yet, so here we go with some more.
First of all, I need to make one thing abundantly clear: time travel was the wrong idea for a season long arc. For one, this show sucks at time travel, always has, always will. Time travel as a plot device might be considered a high wire walk, it's impressive if done well but one step out of line and it will fall and fall hard. There are things you can do to give yourself some more wiggle room; for example, Endgame made it fun and found character beats that could only happen through time travel. This has a few moments of that, but it goes on too long to sustain what goodwill it gets.
While we're on the subject of Endgame, it is also part of a final adventure story, but through those character moments it stops and reflects on how far the characters have come, it embraces the history relevant to the story and characters, and celebrates what has come before. In that, AoS fails spectacularly. This story doesn't reflect on the characters, through Daniel it actively tears down the established history of the story's universe, doesn't take us back to the beginning of anything (except maybe in the first couple episodes), or allow the characters the demonstrate their growth.
Because it's not about the characters we've known for the previous 4-6 seasons. That isn't Coulson, it's Coulsoid; that isn't May, they hollowed out her personality and replaced it with plot convenient empathy powers; that isn't Jemma, she's lived for years away from the group and we don't get to know about any of it until the end (and neither does she fully, which is at least as bad); same goes for Fitz when he shows up except he does remember so is even more different than she is; that isn't Daniel as we knew him on Agent Carter, not only because it's been several years since we last saw him but this show took away his defining plot from the previous show; on the rare occasion they do run into versions of people from their past it's not actually the people they knew, partly because it's from a time in their history we don't know them, and because this is ultimately an alternate universe.
Now, while I think this season would have been vastly improved by doing better character work, I don't want to ignore the fact that the plot is also a terrible idea executed badly. It didn't have to be either of those things, but it was and is. Even though the season does start its plot off in the first episode; it ends up feeling like it takes forever to get going. Because we're restarting in each new time period and there's no connective plot or character work that is building on what came before or illustrating where we know things end. So when the plot simplifies to some degree by sticking to a narrower band of time, it almost feels like we've joined a different show; the same things were happening in this other show, but the point was the focus on how badly our characters' lives could be screwed up by all this messing around in time. But that turn is completely undone by the end deciding that these are separate universes and they can just go back to their own where none of this happened.
Speaking of the multi-verse, it makes me even more confused by what Sybil even wants. I will never understand how stopping SHIELD matters once the Chronicoms have time travel and can just go back and save their own world. This is worse that Star Trek 09 in this regard and that was bad to start with; at least the Romulans were people with feelings and blind spots; yes it would have made more sense once they were 100 years in the past to go to the Romulans of that time, with their advanced ship and much greater knowledge of Starfleet and the Federation and make a big move with backing. But I can see how Nero might have wanted to be in charge of his revenge rather than relying on the Senate and military of the time who could have gotten in his way, and he wanted that revenge to be as personal as possible.
Here the Chronicoms start out wanting to make as small a change as possible that will remove SHIELD from the playing field in the future (apparently there's no ripple effect of the changing timeline along the way, just suddenly no more SHIELD in the future). Then at some point they decide to make bigger and bigger changes (even if in doing so they make SHIELD bigger than it would have been at the time), then basically don't care, in fact start offering to build a whole new world from the one we knew. I understand the escalation argument, but what is the ultimate goal? Do they want to concur Earth? What's so special about Earth if they could go anywhere? Last season they were after the knowledge of time travel and maybe the monoliths, but once they have time travel they can scoop up the monoliths from the past and still go anywhere.
And with the multi-verse, what are the stakes? Some people would ask that in the sense that if there are infinite alternate realities what are the stakes if they fail in the one; but that's not how I mean it. What is the future FitzSimmons are working to prevent happening? We don't hear anything about what happened back on Earth after they left, and we never see anything past that point. Setting aside that it still could be a time loop, in which case the pair of them are stupid for not just going and collecting Kora (yes I finally realized I was misspelling it), did the Chronicoms 'originally' win? If they did, why do they need to go back and stop SHIELD from being an obstacle?
While it would have been very Terminator, here's one option for what they could have said. That the defenders of Earth, including parts of SHIELD, did continue to fight on and had more of less won the fight against the Chronicoms; then Sybil and the last of the Hunters used some prototype time travel tech (which works on somewhat different principles than what FitzSimmons have been working on, hence no need for time rock) to flee into the past. They then know that Chronica 2 is still out there, and maybe they are in communication with them, or maybe their idea of time travel says they shouldn't contact the homeworld this far back (or maybe they're just unstuck in time); but for this clan of survivors they intend to concur Earth, so the opposition won't be around to stop the Chronicoms when they arrive when the invaders first did in the future.
You see how the villains have a motivation in that idea? See how it establishes stakes for our team; they're almost certainly all dead in that future, but also they could end up creating a worse future where Earth doesn't ultimately win the fight. See how FitzSimmons then really are laying it all on the line, because they could have found some safe place out in space with Alya, but they have the power to change everything before it goes so bad, so they have the responsibility to try.
To go perhaps even more Terminator; why did the show reject an idea that had to considered, that the Chronicoms are specifically targeting the pasts of these characters? To keep them from being born, or joining SHIELD, or surviving to be relevant in the future. All of these characters have some pretty big gaps in what we know about their pasts that could be explored, and this angle would have made the danger and plot focused on the characters rather than seemingly arbitrary.
Or they could have made it an asset race through history, Simmons and Enoch have a list of people that can help them in the fight for the future and they're actively working on that instead of leaving it to random chance that they stumble across Kora; and because they want to preserve as much of the timeline as possible they most go to try and save people who would die soon anyway; but the Chronicoms are working at cross-purposes is some way, and things come to a head in the finale where all the resources than have been gathered become important to being able to win.
This could have included a lot of effort to save their own dead teammates; thus allowing us to revisit familiar points in the show's history and get old characters back. You want to find the right love interest for Daisy in the past, that's a better way to do it (maybe FitzSimmons worked out a way to save Lincoln and contain Hive, maybe they even need Hive for some reason; or we could go for Daisy/Trip); and this lets us leave Daniel with Peggy where he belongs, so it sounds like a great idea.
The show toyed with a lot of these ideas, but because it becomes clear fairly early that there aren't going to be any real consequences it's all rendered hollow. And because this show has never been terribly interested in what happens after the plot fighting is done, I couldn't even expect much in the way of personal consequences for the characters when things went to a dark place. How is Mack changed by having to kill robot versions of his parents? At least he gets an episode of feeling bad about things while stuck in the 80s. How is Daisy affected by her mother's death? Why don't we see what FitzSimmons see of the future back on Earth and how that motivates their actions? And I'm not going to even get into May (this time).
As you can tell, what I think this series needed above anything (at least plot-wise) was a clear mission for both the SHIELD team and the Chronicoms. Without knowing what the Chronicoms actually want nothing they do can make any sense; if they want to concur the world in the past, why aren't they assassinating world leaders? If they want to be stealthy about what they change, why do they conclude that's the better way to unravel the past? What plan are they trading in when they go for more direct changes, but still why not go all the way? What are their numbers? What are their resources? What does it take to kill them if they can actually just download themselves onto a hard drive? We spend a fair amount of time with the villains at times throughout the season, but do we have any idea what they want to achieve? And for the 50th time, why not just go save Chronica 2?
The show ended up just going around in circles with the SHIELD team too. Making their mission a vague sense of stopping whatever the Chronicoms are trying to do, would have also been helped by knowing what the Chronicoms were trying to do. Why go to all the trouble to have debates about whether to preserve or change the timeline if the show was just going to walk that back anyway and have it not matter. Why not let them take the gloves off and fight for an actual mission and forget about the timeline (though they should avoid screwing these people over to get what they want). Or make them fight to preserve the timeline to a specific point because if things change too much they won't be able to what they most need to (apparently pick up Kora, not that anyone knows that). Maybe Jaiying met Kora's father during their capture in WW2, so removing Hydra from the equation before Whitehall can capture them would screw up the plan. Maybe they can have an adventure in the 50s because that's around the time Kora was born and allowing the Chronicoms to screw up the world at that point would also ruin the plan. Maybe the Insight kill list also included a lot of Inhumans at Afterlife and Daisy knows enough of them to see the connection (and it would make sense; since after all, in the hypothetical 'original future' timeline I suggested, SHIELD would have been able to call on their Inhuman allies who wouldn't exist if the timeline was changed in that way (not that the show has seemed to remember there are other Inhumans for a few seasons now, so specifically Daisy and Yoyo wouldn't be a factor if they take out Jaiying).
In the last part of this review series I mentioned that I don't understand how production on this season worked. In episodic television, part of the struggle is that you can't go back and edit prior things to reflect later decisions for plot lines. But I don't see why that needed to be the case with this season of the series. Having filmed well in advance they could have at least done some pickups and reshoots to smooth over some bumps with the plot. Why does the series spend half the season forcing SHIELD to fight with one hand behind their back trying to avoid changing the timeline? It could be explained, but it isn't, when Enoch has to know (and Simmons should) what the plan actually is and how time travel is going to work in this case; and since the end reveals that it doesn't matter because they're going to jump across universes back to the point they left, why does the story waste so much time by not clearly establishing the ground rules.
Here's what I kind of think should have happened (this is rough, but I'll give it a go); the Chronicoms traveled back to a specific time, but their time travel did work off the monolith (which is the answer they would have found in Simmons' mind for how time travel can work) and they only had one piece of it that's large enough after bombing Temple. The early episodes of the season are based around stopping the Chronicoms from getting their hands on the time monolith in the past and trying to figure out what their ultimate goal is; along with some dealing with people of the period they're in. These Chronicoms also don't have space travel, so they're trying to either create it or at least a way of contacting Chronica 2. Maybe the Chronicoms even approach the team and say 'hey let us go save our planet and we'll leave you alone' but for some reason I would need to explain, the team don't agree because they can see it won't really happen that way; maybe they even try and jump back to the future and find that it's worse than before (because the team wasn't there to lead the resistance as they had been), or even just that something had happened to Fitz and Alya (you know, a cost for trying to meddle this big), so they have to go back into the past and find another solution.
Then, at some point, there could have been a full crossover with Agent Carter. Show what happened after the final episode; bring in Howard Stark and have some callback to how Coulson's character began in the MCU with Tony; show SHIELD as it was still growing, with Peggy and Daniel leading it. If they want to establish that an alternate timeline is being created, dig Steve out of the ice early (don't know if Chris Evans would have been up for it, but it's an idea); hell, compared to what we got, just go the full Mary Sue route and pair up Steve/Daisy just so long as you leave me with Peggy/Daniel (you could even get an ultimate irony bit with this Steve saying something like 'you've got a good life going on here, I think I'm going to have to let you go and live it,' basically learning the lesson fuck you Steve Rogers of Endgame didn't get.
And on another side, you can bring in the Inhumans; our team realize that they can't win this on their own go and recruit in Afterlife. Maybe Kora was always a backup plan but Team FitzSimmons had hoped to avoid it and spare Daisy from learning about Kora. But there would be something brilliant about the message if in this timeline SHIELD and the Inhumans became friends instead of enemies; and our team could reflect on how they can't change their own past, but they can learn from it help make some better futures. Have Jaiying still die to make it reasonable that Kora would agree to go back with Daisy and the team and defeat the Chronicoms in that reality.
Now if only I could find a way to work Sif in and get her to offer Philinda commentary (because she definitely ships it).
Oh, maybe when they go back to the future Sif has come to help; maybe Fitz was working on contacting her during these other adventures, to be the heavy in case they didn't bring back Kora. Again, having callbacks to what the team has done before this and make this seem more like a final battle that everything has been leading towards (because it definitely doesn't feel that way now).
Of course in this version of the season I'd leave out the loss of May's personality; though I might not entirely leave out the plot convenient empathy powers. They would still be plot convenient but I would turn them from predominantly about receiving emotions and give her more ability to project them (I think that's what happened in the finale, but they never set it up and if she's lacking her own emotions how does she project them?) and that being part of how she's able to convince all these people to work together with their crazy story about robots from the future. This would also have been a fascinating revision to her character as she's spent so long hiding her emotions to not be able to stop people from knowing them, especially under circumstances like this where she wants to be as calm and still as possible when she's shook up inside.
(...Actually, now that I'm on the subject, if the show had set up that May could project emotions, that could have been used to explain why she lost touch with them and how she gets them back. Her power was always both receiving and projecting, but May's instinct on getting powers that let people know what she was feeling was to not feel anything (doesn't make a ton of sense, but it's a rough draft idea). Then as her powers became more integrated with her thoughts and feelings, she had to learn how to let herself and then others in on what she was feeling. Which of course would have meant letting May have an arc at dealing with these powers, which we couldn't have apparently.)
(Also, if there was ever a clear example of why I can't structure anything ahead of time, that was probably it. Peak behind the curtain, I actually had started my problems of s7 post right as I was finishing the finale re-review; and taking some of the same ideas I had gone a different way with how they would come to a climax. This is why I do reviews stream of consciousness and why fic never gets done because I can't just jump forward to another point in the outline because I don't trust that I'd ever even get to that point with how off course things can go.)
And I definitely wouldn't end my hypothetical plotline with Coulsoid driving off alone (unless they'd also done the paradox avoiding Coulson swap and the point was Coulsoid saw everyone else happy including the real Coulson and now Coulsoid's got to go out into the world and find another path for himself; that ending is a bit Doctor Who but it might work better here if done properly); but I think I've made my stance on that part of the crappy ending clear (meaning with AoS, you want my thoughts on Journey's End they're not hard to find either).
...So this part has gone a little off the rails with me trying to invent off the cuff better versions of the season than we got. But I did address the lack of motivation which is one of the big problems this season had (plot-wise the biggest); maybe next time I'll get around to addressing some of the other failures of the season.
