I just finished a massive binge rewatch of the whole of
Agents of SHIELD, culminating in my first-time viewing of most of season 7. (I watched the first two and a half episodes on the ABC streaming site, but it was glitchy and I gave up when it overheated and shut down my laptop.) It would've been a more ideal experience if I could've rewatched the relevant MCU movies in the first three seasons, as well as
Agent Carter, but I managed without them.
The final season was pretty good, better than the sixth. They did some fun nostalgia bits -- I loved the vintage title cards, the black-and-white noir episode, the 1970s main title sequence and theme arrangement, etc. (though the '80s Deke-Mack episode went a bit overboard on the pop culture smorgasbord). The premise didn't make much sense -- the Chronicoms originally wanted time travel to prevent their homeworld's destruction, but suddenly they wanted to take over Earth instead, and surely there were better ways to take over Earth in the past than just a laser focus on destroying SHIELD. But it was just an excuse for a fun trip down memory lane and a nice chance to put a bow on elements from the series's past, like Jiaying and John Garrett.
The MVP of the season may well have been Joel Stoffer as Enoch. He was a terrific character, funny yet poignant. And Sousa was a pretty good addition to the team; it's cool that they found a way to salvage him from the
Agent Carter cast.
The emphasis on how the characters weren't the same people anymore was pretty good, but there were parts that didn't seem to work. The controversy over Coulson's LMD status was handled unevenly; everyone pretty much seemed to stop worrying about it after a couple of weeks, and Coulson went inconsistently from just being okay with it to being suddenly angsty about it in the time loop episode to deciding a couple of episodes later that he liked who he was now. Also, turning May into an empath was an odd choice. When we saw her emotionally dead and then had a panic attack in Area 51, at first I thought it was PTSD from being killed and then battling Izel's people, but it was just this inexplicable new superpower. That was kind of weak. Although I liked how her empathic power paid off in the finale.
Incidentally, I found it inconsistent that Mack was perfectly okay accepting the reality of the duplicate Flint that the monolith created from Mack and Yo-Yo's secondhand memories of the kid, yet resisted the reality of the LMD Coulson created from his actual brain scan. The idea that Flint's existence is permanent is kind of weird too. He's enrolled at the academy now? If he's a monolith construct, then shouldn't he disintegrate if struck hard enough, like the original constructs? Not very good if he's training for combat. (Sarge was unkillable, but I presume that's because of the monster inhabiting the Coulson construct.)
The corridors of the Chronicom ship looked very familiar to me, like they were repurposed from some other show's or movie's sets. But in that interview posted several pages back, the producers said the corridor sets were their own. Weird. Maybe just the rows of wall lights that looked so familiar to me were recycled.
Honestly, I'm just going with the theory that Seasons 1-4 take place in the mainline MCU. Then their return from 2091 put them in another universe. One where Doctor Strange is dead and The Snap never took place. They remained there until the events of the Season 6 finale saw them go on their Time War Cruise into yet another universe. Fitz remained behind to tether the gang to the Seasons 5.5-6 timeline, which they then returned to in the series finale.
Back in the mainline MCU, SHIELD collapsed following the death of Director Mace, the attempt on Talbot's life and the disappearance of most of the surviving agents. Talbot survived, but is still in Hale's custody. However, he never becomes Graviton since it was the team's actions that ironically put him on that path in the first place. Therefore MCU Robin's visions weren't about saving the MCU's Earth. They were about the Earth the team eventually found themselves on (Well, after God knows how many time loops resulting in God knows how many additional timelines).
I think this may be the most reasonable explanation. If anything, it could be said that the timeline split when Robin got her Inhuman power, because she was receiving information from the future that caused the divergence. Or at least it occurred when the Monolith reached back from the future to yank the team out of time.
The alternative possibility is that both seasons 6 and 7 happened in the post-Snap world (since there's no ignoring the references to Thanos's invasion in season 5), but the team just got lucky and avoided any losses (except maybe the Koenigs, who didn't appear in season 6). I find it plausible that in the first year after the Snap, people might be trying to ignore it and pretend life was going on as normal, and it took a few more years for the lasting despair seen in
Endgame to set in.
However, the problem with this theory is that it puts the team in c. 2020 with the knowledge of how to travel through time and the resources to pull it off, so they should've been able to undo the Snap years before the Avengers did. That's probably the best argument in favor of them being in an alternate timeline.
Still, either way, I'm glad that at the end, the show did align with the
Endgame alternate-timelines model instead of the usual, nonsensical "overwriting history" model that they seemed to be leaning toward at the start of the season.
As for The Confederacy? Maybe they're still out there. Or maybe Captain Marvel stopped them. Who knows?
The Confederacy didn't want to conquer or destroy Earth, just get gravitonium and Inhumans from Hale and go on their way. In the original timeline, maybe they just succeeded in that.
Are we sure Deke wasn't created by the creation monolith the same way Sarge and Flint were? He appeared right before the 'Fear dimension' became a thing and it makes more sense than the time monolith somehow pulling him in too.
I believe we saw him materialize using the same visual effect used for the team's return from the future, rather than the slower effect used for the assembly of a monolith construct.
Hey, how come May could beat up Enoch when she woke up at the start of the season, but the whole team together couldn't do it in the time loop?
In the former instance, Enoch was trying to avoid hurting May, so he was holding himself back. In the latter, he was programmed to prevent Jemma from regaining her memories at any cost, so he went all-out.
EDIT: Incidentally, one thing I discovered in my binge rewatch is that Glenn Talbot had a much larger footprint on the series than I remembered. I'd thought that he'd been absent for a while before returning in season 5, but he was one of the most prominent recurring characters from late season 1 onward. And he had a pretty amazing character arc, going from an antagonist to a grudging ally to a friend, and finally a tragic villain. He went from a joke character to a very moving one.