I’m old enough to remember when having a favorite season of a television program would have been quite strange. Before the advent of long form story telling season may have been good or bad but that rarely became favorites.

I watched all seven seasons of ABC’s Agents of SHIELD(henceforth known as AoS) during its original broadcast run and now as an unwinding before bed I am re-watching them in order from Netflix. There is no doubt in my mind, Season 4 is my favorite of the seven.

Split between two storylines, the front half centered on the Ghost Rider with the second half focused on rogue Life Model Decoys (LMDs) and the virtual world of the ‘framework’ the two halves are united by the ancient, magical, and corrupting book The Darkhold.

The Ghost Rider is fun, told well, and takes a different spin on the character than the original source but without violating the spirit of the Ghost Rider. The twist revealing the eventual ‘big bad’ was a well-played but for me the season really exploded with the ‘Framework’, the twists and turns of the artificial Intelligence ADIA and the sheer fun of watching actors and characters we had known for three and half season suddenly get to play vastly different colors and personalities.

While Mallory Jansen has been brought in during season four to play ADIA she was hands down the MVP for playing a wide range of characters during the season. She played ADIA, the LMB and rogue artificial intelligence with an evil and yet tragic motivation, Agnes the artistic human that ADIA was modeled upon, Madame Hydra, the supreme leader of Hydra in the virtual world of the Framework, and various shadings of all of these characters from the flat affectation of ADIA when she was little more than a robot to Agnes a frightened woman facing her own mortality.

Continuing storylines can make it difficult to jump into a series these days if you haven’t watched from the start but I do think season four of AoS can be enjoyed without having the watch the previous three, though of course it works much better if you have.