The actor reprised his role as Agent Lance Hunter on Friday’s all-new ep, which saw Fitz making a major move to save the rest of the team.
What the heck, Fitz?
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. made yet another epic move on Friday’s all-new episode, when the brilliant engineer -- after spending the hour tracking down mind-bending answers about his fellow agents’ whereabouts -- decided to cryo-freeze himself for oh, just a few decades, in order to meet up with the rest of the S.H.I.E.L.D. team in the future.
Nick Blood reprised his role as Agent Lance Hunter in the episode, playing a pivotal part in breaking Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) out of the military base where he was being held -- after an ingenious bit of coded correspondence between the two -- and helping him track down the answers that led him to the future. The brotherly dynamic between the two fellow Brits has always been a fan favorite, and it truly got to shine in this episode, as Hunter witnessed Fitz’s evolution from lab rat to full-blown agent.
“He’s gone from a boy to a man, hasn’t he?” Blood recently mused to ET. “He’s matured and he’s decisive, he’s got that little streak in him, and I think Hunter’s probably quite into that, quite happy for him that he’s kind of found his strength.”
The pair spent much of the episode in a “buddy cop” adventure, traveling around in an RV, looking for answers and finally finding some when they encountered the sinister-seeming alien that we saw orchestrate the rest of the team’s trip to the future -- 2091, to be exact -- in the season five premiere. The alien, it turns out, goes by the name Enoch (Joel Stoffer) on Earth, and he explained that his motivations were less about putting the agents in danger and more about fulfilling a prophecy set forth by another character S.H.I.E.L.D. fans will remember: Robin Hinton (Lexy Kolker), who has been blessed (or cursed) with prognostic Inhuman abilities similar to those of her late father.
For Blood, however, the journey was half the fun.
“We spent a lot of time bumming around in an RV with all the crew in the back,” he said of his favorite part of shooting the episode. “I think if you spoke to the director or the DP, or any of the camera guys involved with that, they’ll tell you it was probably less fun for them, sitting in the back. I nearly toppled it at one point, I could have cost them a lot of money in camera equipment. But we survived.”
At episode’s end, Fitz and Enoch arrived at the conclusion that the best way to fulfill Robin’s newest prophecy was for Fitz to freeze himself and head into space with the now-friendly (for the time being, anyway) extraterrestrial -- orchestrating the plan before Hunter had much time to protest.
“I suppose there’s an element of surprise, but I think he’s probably just proud of him,” Blood noted of Hunter’s reaction to Fitz’s determined and possibly dangerous directive. “He wants the best for him, and he knows the only way Fitz is gonna get what he needs and wants is if he takes matters into his own hands. He’s a full supporter of his choices.”
The two said goodbye as Fitz was locked up in the cryo chamber, but quickly broke the emotional moment with a bit of levity. “I love you,” Hunter told Fitz, who went full-Han Solo: “I know.”
“On set when we were doing that, we played around with lots of different things,” Blood recalled of his Princess Leia moment. “That was down to the writer, Craig [Titley], he came up with that moment…. I think in one [take], I kissed the pod that he was in. But that didn’t make the cut. That was lots of fun.”
That may be the last Fitz will ever see of his friend, but will it be for S.H.I.E.L.D. fans as well? Hunter promised Enoch that he and Bobbi Morse (Adrianne Palicki) will watch after Robin and her mother, Polly (Lola Glaudini), on Earth after the two leave -- which sure sounds like it’s leaving the door open. However, Blood swore he’s as in the dark as anyone else about the pair’s possible return. “You’d have to ask someone else that question, I think,” he teased, adding that he knows “absolutely nothing” about where the show’s already-mind-blowing fifth season goes from here.
“You know what it’s like with these Marvel shows,” he said with a laugh, “they don’t even tell us what we’re doing.”
He did have some insight, however, on Hunter’s relationship with Bobbi, after the agent confessed to Fitz that the pair had been talking about getting married again -- while also maintaining their distance: “Together forever, just doing our own thing.”
“Yeah, that’s the way their lives have always been, can’t live with them, can’t live without them,” Blood mused of the pair’s dynamic. “Keeps it exciting, keeps it fun.”
The episode's final scenes revealed that Fitz successfully made it to the future, and we know he eventually gets aboard the Lighthouse, but the outcome of the S.H.I.E.L.D. team’s adventures in the dystopian cosmos remains to be seen. So was Blood at all bummed that he didn’t get to go into space too?
“If I’d actually gotten to go to space, yeah,” he said with a laugh. “But, you know, once you’ve seen one set, you’ve seen them all.”
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. airs Fridays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.
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