“No Regrets” is episode eighteen of season four of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
In the previous episode, “Identity and Change”, Agent May used Mack as a dupe (as he didn’t remember his real life) to get Daisy/Skye to confess who she really was (Mack later turned up at S.H.I.E.L.D. saying he wanted to help; was he keeping quiet about his past?). Now she’s being held by HYDRA, and by a rather unpleasant Fitz. Fitz shot Agnes and has tortured Radcliffe, all due to Aida’s influence – and Simmons is very distressed by what a monster Fitz, as ‘The Doctor,’ has turned out to be. Mace is not happy because Ward had a chance to kill Fitz before he shot Agnes, and Simmons told him not to take the shot, because Fitz would never kill an innocent woman.
Simmons didn’t know that Aida was Madam Hydra either. Aida seems to have a massive grudge against everything in the real world, especially Radcliffe for treating her like a thing. She only actually seems to care about Fitz. Aida also wants to invade the real world in a pre-emptive strike, as she says that they are going to invade HYDRA’s world and, in a world where S.H.I.E.L.D. won, she was enslaved. she’s been painting a rather unpleasant picture of the real world – and painting the HYDRA-controlled Framework as a paradise in comparison. As well as being real also.
This episode opens with Mace and Coulson staging an accident in order to get a HYDRA prison bus to stop. The bus is heading to a HYDRA enlightenment cultivation centre. Coulson asks if they are going to rescue Daisy, but Mace has someone else in mind – an agent who was caught whilst getting information on a new HYDRA weapon that’s under development, one that will apparently wipe out Inhumans. Could this be the Looking Glass program that Fitz is working on for Aida? Daisy would be a nice extra, but the only thing on the bus in body bags. Fortunately neither the agent nor Daisy are in them. Mace also wants Coulson’s opinion on Simmons, and what she’s keeping secret.
Daisy is still being interrogated by Fitz, the latter parroting the lies that Aida told him, utterly believing that they are true. Fitz is annoyed because no matter how much pain is inflicted on Daisy, she won’t tell the truth. Of course, she is actually telling the truth – but because it’s not the truth that Fitz believes, he thinks it’s a lie. Aida decides to try a different tactic, by offering Daisy Lincoln and a life together with him.
Daisy can’t believe that Fitz has become the way he is, and has a conversation with Radcliffe about it. Radcliffe says that anyone could become that way, given the right – or wrong – conditions. She doesn’t see how changing one regret in a person’s life could change so much, but Radcliffe tells her that even a single sentence can change a life forever. What happened to make Fitz the way he is is revealed.
With the prison bus not holding the person they want, Mace instead plans to infiltrate the re-education centre itself. Simmons decides to tell him the truth, about how nothing in the Framework matters, because it’s not real and nor are most of the people in it. This does not go well. Later, as Simmons watches Mack with his daughter, Hope, it looks as if she is changing her mind on the reality, or unreality, of the bits of code representing people in the Framework.
Aida offers Agent May a new weapon to go after the Patriot with, one that will allow her to go head to head with him. It’s a serum that gives enhanced strength; presumably the same thing that Daisy’s father developed and which Jeffrey Mace uses in the real world (here he would appear to actually be an Inhuman). But are cracks appearing in May’s devotion to HYDRA?
There are faces who are dead in the real world seen in this episode, one who has been dead for some time.