Last week, ABC posted a series of six Agents of SHIELD webisodes online as a way of mitigating season four’s second hiatus. The main draw is that it centers around everyone’s second-favorite MCU speedster: Yo-Yo. After featuring her in a bunch of fun action sequences this season, it seems fitting that Yo-Yo be given a story of her own.
The basic premise is that, between Seasons 3 and 4, Yo-Yo signed the Sokovia accords and then went on an unsanctioned mission to kill the man who murdered her cousin. A man by the name of Victor. Why is it unsanctioned? Because bureaucracy.
What ties this into the larger narrative of Season 4 is the brief appearance of the Watch Dogs, who happen to be clients of Victor. He’s selling them that old blue laser thing from Season 1. Remember that? They had that ending cap scene where Phil vaporized Garrett? Good times.
Anyway, Yo-Yo gets captured after she confronts Victor, and Daisy busts into the room to save her. Yo-Yo decides not to kill Victor because that’d be murder, but then he dies anyway because one of his own men accidentally vaporizes him with said blue laser. Then we zip back to Present Day, and Daisy hacks into Jeffrey’s computer to delete the GPS record of Yo-Yo ever being in that building.
And the rest is kinda fun. The strongest parts are, without a doubt, when she’s interacting with the main cast. But other than that everything just sort of happens with very little weight to it.
We get some fun insight into how absurdly ineffective SHIELD can actually be with a direct callout to the U.N. May chews Yo-Yo out, not quite for lying and sneaking around but more because she is terrible at it. Mack shows up and is adorable, as per usual. And also Yo-Yo distracts Simmons with the idea of moving in together with Fitz just so she can steal intel. As we saw in the Season 4 Premiere, they did in fact move in together.
As for why that needed to be a plot point here, I have no idea. I just assumed they’d decided to do it without outside interference, but that’s far too normal.
Oh, and also Phil is there. Moving his stuff out of the Director’s office and carrying his “good luck charm” axe over his shoulder like a lumberjack. He even gives Yo-Yo Peggy Carter’s old commemorative SHIELD membership pog! Or, coin. Honestly, it looked like a “collector’s” silver dollar you see on infomercials. Which would make sense, to be honest.
Phil’s not the kind of guy to just give original memorabilia away! The fact that he’s a huge nerd about old spy stuff is part of what makes him work.
In the end, though, that pog-thing changes hands from Yo-Yo to Daisy, signifying that she’s not giving something up by rejoining SHIELD, but rather that she’s gaining a team.
Which is a nice sentiment, but that sort of recontextualizes the entire mini-series. Instead of a Yo-Yo story—this tale didn’t really do all that much with her—it becomes a gap-filler for Daisy. As in, hey, here’s why she’s cool with being an agent of SHIELD again.
A fancy coin-pog-thing once owned by the late Peggy Carter. Don’t get me wrong, any mention of Peggy Carter is appreciated! But, honestly, the biggest question I had on my mind after watching Slingshot was this:
Why did they make this? Sure, it’s fine, and ad-free, but…why?
Maybe they had some extra money in the budget and thought it’d be fun to do. And if that’s the reason, then…I can’t really disagree.
It was probably fun to make.
