Agents Of SHIELD: "No Regrets"

Patriotism ain't what it used to be. 

Spoilers after the break, because it can't really be avoided.

Ah, Jeffrey Mace, as you so deftly pointed out partway through the episode, we hardly knew ye.

Agents of SHIELD killed off The Patriot, the most expendable member of the cast at this point, via Heroic Virtual Sacrifice. And that's all well and good, but unfortunately, while it was all happening, all I could focus on was trying to remember wherther Mace had been kidnapped and put into the Framework, meaning he was really dead, or if he was just Framework Mace. Because for some reason, the past few episodes haven't really done the thing with Framework Patriot that they did with all the other real world characters - focus on them and why they were different inside the viftual Hydra world.

This is kind of why I wish we had at least some real world scenes (beond the one that closes the episode) alongside the Hydraworld scenes - how much time is passing relatively speaking? Is it 1:1? What's going on in the real world while our entire cast is trapped in the Framework? What's Yo Yo doing?

Anyway, the rest was pretty much perfectly competent plottyplot and developments that are unsurprising, like the conversion of May after apparently being unaware that Hydra brainwashes and murders children by the boatload. And of course, Cyber Fitz is super shitty because of his super shitty Cyber Dad. And even though they lost mace, the episode ends with Daidy getting her powers thanks to May, and getting the knowledge of Radcliffe's secret backdoor, so it looks like we'll be wrapping up HydraTron in a couple more episodes, if upcoming titles have any meaning.