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This week’s episode of Agents
of S.H.I.E.L.D., “Melinda,” gives us a far more detailed understanding of
the origin of “The Cavalry” than we ever expected to get. As a matter of fact, the connections between
the Bahrain incident and the present-day events on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
are surprisingly deep—and very much appreciated. One of the biggest challenges I can see in an
episode like this which puts the primary emphasis on filling in a character’s
back story as that it can break the rhythm of the season-long plot by taking
the focus off of current events.
However, the use of the flashbacks in this episode (and in the
Bobbi-centric episode, “One Door Closes,” 2x15) feels very natural to the
plot. In this episode in particular the
flashbacks feel like bad memories of one character dredged up by the current
events she is experiencing—memories simultaneously being shared with another
character by a third character.
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Appropriately, two of
the three plots in this episode focus on May.
In the present, we learn that May chose to accept Gonzales’ offer of a
seat on his board, and that he is going to place her in command of the Playground—a
position May hopes to use to convince Coulson to turn himself in. Weaver, Morse, and Gonzales tell May that
Coulson was in the middle of a major operation called “Theta Protocol.” This catches her off-guard, though she
quickly recovers and plays it off with an “Any Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. has
secrets.” However, this is a much larger
secret than May was perhaps expecting Coulson to keep from her. This secret involves clandestine meetings all
around the globe, major construction projects, and even meetings with her
ex-husband Andrew Garner, who happens to be a psychologist with a history with
S.H.I.E.L.D. Any of these facts could
have a logical explanation, of course—Coulson may be meeting people around the
world in an attempt to recruit more former S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, he could be
working on a new base to expand S.H.I.E.L.D., he could be meeting with Andrew
for his own benefit. However, taken
together, the members of the “Real S.H.I.E.L.D.” believe that Coulson has been
attempting to recruit gifted individuals—a very likely scenario. The construction project(s) (for which he
bought “100 bunk beds”) is to build a new base which will house all of his
superhuman recruits. And if he’s going
to be recruiting powered people, then he’s definitely going to need a talented
psychologist with experience in the field to evaluate his recruits and
determine their psychological fitness for duty.
All of this is extremely concerning—made all the more so by May’s
previous experience with a gifted individual, the second the primary plot of
the episode.
The episode begins
with a flashback to seven years ago when May and Andrew were still married and
even thinking about starting a family—putting the trauma of the little girl
into heartbreaking perspective. Coulson
arrives with a mission and takes May to meet up with the STRIKE team which will
be accompanying them. The mission turns
out to be a woman who may have super strength.
The team goes to Bahrain, Coulson approaches the target, and things
almost immediately go south. When the
militia takes a little girl hostage, May takes it a little too personally. The woman, Eva, demonstrates her superhuman
strength by throwing a table across the block, using the distraction to escape
into a militia compound. When the STRIKE
team is taken captive immediately upon breaching the compound, May enters to
get the girl out and subdue Eva.
Everyone in the compound has a blank expression and tells her that they
“want her pain.” At this point the
assumption is that Eva has super strength as well as the ability to feed on the
negative emotions of those around her—I was even wondering if she became
stronger the more fear she sucked out of people! Of course, we quickly discovered the problem
with this theory.
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May fights her way
through the compound until she reaches Eva.
She tries negotiating with Eva at first, but when that proves fruitless
she switches to plan B: beat (kill?) Eva
and free everyone from her control. May
fights Eva, who effortlessly throws her across the room a couple times. A few of the militia thugs attack her as
well, and May defeats them, though she takes a bullet in her leg for her
troubles. Finally May succeeds in
impaling Eva through the chest with a lamp, killing her and supposedly freeing
everyone from her spell. However, it is
only at this point that she realizes who has truly been controlling
everyone: the little girl, who is Eva’s
daughter, Katya. The mother has
superhuman strength, but she was not the one feeding off of people’s fear. The shot with the girl walking toward May
with her arm outstretched, asking to hold her hand, looks like something out of
a horror movie like The Ring: You
know that you really shouldn’t touch this kid, but you are thrown off-guard by
the fact that it’s just a scared little kid who is confused and sad and who
just lost her mother. May backs away
from the girl until her hand touches the gun, and she finally shoots the girl
when she won’t back away. The sheer
devastation in May’s face when she’s sitting on the floor cradling the girl is
very impressive acting, especially since we see so little expression from May most
of the time.
The last couple scenes
from the flashback sequence show the impact that this event had on May. She starts withdrawing from Andrew. She puts in for a transfer from operations to
administration, and we see her settling in to the same cubicle doing the same
sort of paperwork she was doing when Coulson approached her in the Agents of
S.H.I.E.L.D. pilot episode last season.
I really liked the
flashbacks and how well connected they were to the other plots going on in this
episode. We see a couple of the
S.H.I.E.L.D. agents comment that “The Cavalry really did arrive” and that it
was her because she took down a room full of guys. We see her progress from a tender woman
before this mission into the detached, cool operator we know her as in this
show. We also know now why Fury expected
Coulson to approach May for his team and why she is so fiercely loyal to
him: He was her handler, she was his specialist,
so they worked together very closely—essentially their relationship is about as
close as that of Ward and Garrett from season 1. In all of these things they did a very good
job of showing how May became the agent that we know and love. However, one aspect of her character
pre-Bahrain which this episode really did not explore was her sense of
humor. In the episode “Repairs” (1x09),
Coulson tells Skye that before Bahrain—“before ‘the Cavalry’”—May actually had
a very good sense of humor and would pull pranks on people all the time. We don’t really see that—or even a hint of
it—in this episode. I realize that they
couldn’t include everything, but if they had more time it would have been nice
to see how she had a sense of humor before this incident.
The third plot in this
episode is largely unconnected to the May plots—at least until the end, when
all of the little connections that we present all along became suddenly clear. This plot focuses on Skye and her
experimentation with her powers under Jiaying’s tutelage. They start off at the overlook where Jiaying
explains that she believes that Skye can hear and amplify the vibrations within
different objects. As an example,
Jiaying gives her a rock and instructs her to try to hear the rock’s
vibration. Instead, Skye hears the
mountain, and uses her powers to amplify the mountain’s vibration, causing an
avalanche (sadly, she didn’t turn the entire mountain to rubble!). Next, Jiaying had Skye use her powers to play
cups of water, one of the more beautiful uses of Skye’s power that we’ve seen
so far. Along the way, Lincoln pops in
and lets Skye know just how rare it is for Jiaying to be someone’s Guide: she is in charge of Lai Shi, and since he’s
been there she hasn’t taken anyone to Guide and train.
As Skye was playing
the cups, she must have turned the vibrations up too far, because the cups all
shattered. The ensuing exchange between
Skye and Jiaying was absolutely fascinating for the insight it gave into both
of their characters—possibly one of the best scenes this season. Skye was terrified that she would be cast out
by the Inhumans since she’s been cast out every other place she’s thought of as
home—even S.H.I.E.L.D. seemingly turned on her after her powers manifested. Jiaying’s expression through the entire
conversation is a mixture between anger at those people who would throw away
her daughter, horror at everything Skye had endured, and perhaps even guilt
that she had not tried harder to find Skye, all covered over as she tried to
maintain a level of detachment. I loved
the acting all through that scene, especially Jiaying’s response to Skye’s
admissions, and then Skye’s shock at discovering that Jiaying is her mother.
Jiaying’s reveal to
Skye of the Inhumans’ strict policies regarding those who skip the vetting
process before transformation dovetails very nicely with the shocking reveal in
the flashback plot. Jiaying tells Skye
that they have to keep their relationship a secret because if it were
discovered then the Inhuman leadership may think that Jiaying is playing
favorites by not having Skye dealt with according to the strict rules that she
herself laid down after the Bahrain incident seven years ago. Yes, Jiaying just said that May fought a pair
of Inhumans. The mother, Eva, was an
Inhuman gifted with incredible strength.
However, she wanted her daughter Katya to go through the Mist despite
Jiaying’s rejection of her as both too young and possessing a degree of
darkness within her which made it inadvisable.
Eva stole a batch of Terrigen Crystals, used it on Katya, and fell in
with the militia in Bahrain. In telling
the story, Jiaying betrays an enormous sense of guilt for not having dealt with
Eva and Katya herself: Because of her
inaction May had to go in and stop Katya, traumatizing her (May) in the
process. Consequently, Jiaying
instituted strict protocols for dealing with an Inhuman who transforms outside
of the norm—protocols which she is now breaking (to an unrevealed extent) in
the cases of Skye and Raina. And if the
Inhuman Elders find out that one of those involved is Jiaying’s daughter, they
will put an end to it: “Our people know too
well what a woman will do for her daughter.”
This is an absolutely fascinating look into the Inhuman culture—I can’t
wait for them to explore it more! Knowing
that S.H.I.E.L.D. has dealt with an Inhuman before does make me wonder how many
of the gifted individuals on S.H.I.E.L.D.’s List are Inhumans. I would suspect that very few are; the
Inhumans appear to do a good job of maintaining their secrecy.
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| Image Courtesy www.comicbook.com |
We also see the next
stage in Raina’s journey: Gordon has
decided to become her Guide to help her understand her gift and learn to see
her beauty. Their journeys seem to be
very much in parallel: both of their
transformations involved physical changes (no eyes, thorns). Both of them had a very difficult time
adjusting to the isolation imposed by their gifts. And yet, as we discover at the end of the episode,
both of them have gifts beneath the surface that are incredibly useful and
beautiful. Gordon can teleport anywhere
at will. Raina can actually see the
future: she sees a vision of Skye and
Cal having dinner, laughing, and happy, with a bouquet of daisies
(appropriately) on the table. Wow! I love how they are really playing Skye and
Raina off of each other through this whole story arc: at first we see some parallels, but then they
both go through Terrigenesis together, and now they are both trying to deal
with the consequences and understand their gifts, even though neither of them
is very accepting of the change at first.
I love that Raina’s gift is revealed to be clairvoyance, especially
after she was working for Garrett out of hope that he would be a true
Clairvoyant last season.
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| Image Courtesy www.comicbook.com |
That dinner scene
shows real personal growth for Skye:
even though the last time they spoke she and Cal did not get along in
any way, shape, or form, she was willing to sit with him and have dinner. Cal himself is far less insane in that
scene—I wonder if this is a hint at what he was like before losing his family
and before becoming the proto-Mr.-Hyde.
Kyle MacLachlan’s Cal is suddenly a very sympathetic character after
losing his family, piecing his wife together, experimenting on himself to give
himself super strength to protect his family, and spending close to 24 years
searching for his daughter.
The post-credits scene
for this episode is a fun bit that sets up the next episode: Fitz manages to open Fury’s Toolbox in a
public restroom and uses it to contact Coulson and Hunter via Coulson’s
tablet. Fitz knows that he is being
followed, and asks Coulson and Hunter to walk him through losing a tail so they
can meet up. Presumably the next episode
will follow Fitz losing the tail and joining up with Coulson and his team. I’m very curious how this will connect with
May’s and Simmons’ mistrust of Coulson and his Theta Protocol, especially after
how suspicious May is of him now that she knows he was lying.
Overall, this was an
awesome episode. I loved the pieces that
they filled in with May’s back story, and how closely it is tied with the
Inhumans and the Avengers Initiative. I
didn’t have any complaints with the acting or special effects anywhere in the
episode. I can’t wait to see where this
thing is going from here, and how the S.H.I.E.L.D.-vs.-S.H.I.E.L.D. and
Inhumans plots are going to tie-in with Avengers: Age of Ultron.
What were your
favorite parts of this episode? What are
you looking forward to next week?
This Friday I'm going to go through what we know of the MCU timeline, and specifically what we've been able to fill in from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and in particular this episode. Before that, however, I'm going to look at the heroes in the MCU, how they have been "depowered" from their comic book counterparts, and why that might be.
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Actually, what everyone tells May is not that they want her fear, but that they want her pain.
ReplyDeleteThank you... I corrected it.
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