Exclusive Clip: Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. Teases Epic Time-Jump Mission

It's time to bounce back — and forward.

Ahead of the premiere of the next episode of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., ABC and Marvel Television have shared with Looper an exclusive sneak-peek clip from the upcoming chapter — and boy, will fans want to sink their teeth into this.

Set to hit TV screens on Wednesday, July 15, the eighth episode of season 7 (entitled "After, Before") finds the team faced with a problem that's intensifying to the point of potential catastrophe: The time drive on the airborne command plane Zephyr One is malfunctioning, and the team has lost complete control of it. As Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) explains in the clip, that means the "Zephyr will collapse into a space-time singularity in two days — or, relatively speaking, 20 minutes." The jumps between time — and the time that the team spends in a given time period — are "getting exponentially shorter." Jemma tells the team that if those gaps keep getting smaller, things will "metaphorically" sink — resulting in a jump within a jump, an action of which not even Jemma knows the consequences.

Essentially, if Team S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn't figure out how to resolve this problem by the end of the next episode of the series, they could be forever doomed. 

Of course, these are the Agents we're talking about — super-tough, super-smart, and super-determined to find a way to save themselves and the universe as they know it. In the exclusive clip shared with Looper, former Chronicom anthropologist Enoch Coltrane (Joel Stoffer) explains the situation, stating that the team can't simply reach the fuel cell regulator to disconnect it: "The field is cycling at a rate of 49 pulses per second, and it appears to disintegrate anything it touches."

Then, Daniel Sousa (Enver Gjokaj) chimes in with a plan: "We need to find a way to slow down those pulses." That'd be well and good, but Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen) proposes and even better idea — an epic time-jump mission in which the team moves fast enough to pass between the pulses.

Sounds thrilling, no? Time travel is a staple of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s seventh and final season, and as the series nears its ultimate conclusion, the stakes are growing in tandem with the action, tension, and adventure. Will the team be able to time-jump between the pulses of the field more quickly than they are shooting out? Will disaster strike at the worst of times? There's no telling just yet — but we do know that one member of the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. team could be the hero of the entire mission: Yo-Yo. 

The synopsis for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 7, episode 8 notes that Elena "Yo-Yo" Rodriguez (Natalia Cordova-Buckley) may be the "only hope" that the team has to avoid metaphorical sinkage — the jump within another jump. However, if Yo-Yo is to come to the rescue and prevent a space-time-continuum meltdown, she has to stare down an obstacle of her own: revisiting "part of her past long hidden away" to "enlist the help of an old adversary." Dun dun duuun!

An epic mission and a likely emotional secondary plot await Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. fans. Tune into the next episode of the series — written by James C. Oliver and Sharla Oliver, and directed by Eli Gonda — on Wednesday, July 15 at 10 PM on ABC. If you miss the episode as it airs live, you can stream it the following day on video on demand or on Hulu.