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| Image Courtesy www.marvel.com |
“The Hub” (1x07) may be
one of the most interesting episodes of this Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
season. We get a peek behind the curtain
into the inner workings of S.H.I.E.L.D. in the form of the Hub and its
commander, Agent Victoria Hand. We watch
from afar as she plans and executes an operation to take out a dangerous group
of Russian separatists, and Coulson’s team plays a key role in the
operation. However, we also see a theme
which has been at play behind the scenes for the whole season to date come out
into the open: Should some information
be kept secret?
The episode begins
with Coulson’s team carrying out a mission to extract a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who
was working undercover in a Russian terrorist cell. The team escapes with the agent and brings
him and his information to the Bus, where Simmons extracts a drive with his
information through his nose. When Fitz
and Skye offer to analyze the information, Coulson tells them that it is
classified at Level 8. Though Fitz and
Simmons accept the explanation immediately, Skye is angry and upset about being
kept in the dark. Clearly her time with
the Rising Tide has given her a strong interest in keeping information in the
open—something which completely contradicts the level of secrecy that
S.H.I.E.L.D. employs.
The team brings Agent
Shaw and his information to the Hub, one of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s major operational
planning and coordinating bases.
However, when Skye comments on how impressive it is, Simmons tells her
it is nothing compared to the Triskelion—S.H.I.E.L.D.’s headquarters, which
plays a major role in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. At the Hub, Coulson, May, and Ward are
briefed on a new mission with Victoria Hand and Jasper Sitwell. As part of the mission, a two-man team will
infiltrate a Russian Separatist base to disable their “Overkill Device,” a
weapon capable of setting off any weapon.
Though May and Ward assume that the two of them are the agents Hand has
in mind, she denies it, stating that one of the agents needs to be capable of
disabling the device in the field without any advance preparation. They are at first confused, but suddenly realize
that she is planning to send Ward in with Fitz.
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Fitz and Ward go in
through the South Ossetia border, where they discover that Ward’s contact in
the area is dead and the mission is nearly blown when the bar owner ties them
up and threatens to execute them.
However, Fitz comes up with a plan to blow out the power with an EMP and
restores it for them. This buys him
enough good will with the bar owner to negotiate their passage across the
border into Russia. Their transport gets
attacked by the Border Patrol shortly after they cross the border, and they are
forced into hiding. After hiding for the
night, they catch a ride into the compound on a Separatist truck, where Ward
subdues the guards and gets the two of them into the building with the device. Fitz disables the device, rigs it into an
improvised handheld weapon, and the two of them knock out the soldiers who come
to investigate and escape from the building.
The mission element of the episode was definitely the most fun and
exciting part, made even more so by Fitz and Ward’s interaction. We really haven’t seen these two characters
together very often, so it is fun to see how a “super spy” like Ward and a tech
geek like Fitz work together to complete a mission. And amazingly both of them make important
contributions to the successful completion of the mission.
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However, back at the
Hub things go much worse for the rest of the team. Skye is reluctant to leave the mission alone
and follow Coulson’s instruction to “trust the system.” She sees all of the troops running around the
base and preparing for their parts in the mission, and does not accept May and
Coulson’s refusal to disclose mission details.
Consequently, she convinces Simmons—who is beside herself with worry over
Fitz—to help her hack into the Hub’s mainframe and find out about the mission. However, Simmons suffers a total meltdown
when Sitwell discovers her trying to plant a flash drive that would allow Skye
to access the Hub mainframe without being caught. Simmons fails at talking her way out and then
at flirting her way out before finally shooting him with the Night-Night Gun as
a last resort. Skye uses her computer to
get into the mainframe, but is distracted by her redacted S.H.I.E.L.D. file and
wastes most of her time trying to find it.
However, she eventually leaves that aside and returns to the task at
hand: locating the mission file. When
she accesses the mission information, she discovers that there is no extraction
plan for Ward and Fitz, despite Hand and Coulson’s assertions to the
contrary. Coulson finds her at the same
moment, and she accuses him of withholding the information from them. Coulson tells her to “trust the system”
before going off to yell at Hand for keeping that information from him. Hand passes it off as not being a big
deal—Coulson put together numerous similar missions without extraction plans
for Barton and Romanoff. However,
Coulson is upset because he always made sure the two of them knew going in;
Ward and Fitz should have been given the knowledge and allowed to make the
choice themselves. This is the beginning
of Coulson’s season-long arc toward mistrust of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s secrets. As he told May, he appreciates the way that
their team can operate without red tape; S.H.I.E.L.D.’s secrets send people to
their death unknowingly, and keep him from knowing the truth about his
recovery.
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Skye and Simmons
immediately go to May, who agrees to help them extract Ward and Fitz, who by
this time (in episode time) have realized that there is not ex-fil team waiting
to get them out. May tells them that the
three of them in the Bus—four including Coulson, who joins them—can get in and
out without interfering with the rest of the mission forces. The four of them swoop in with the Bus, May
uses two of the Bus engines to knock back the soldiers approaching Ward and
Fitz, and they escape together. I really
liked all of the team interactions, and especially how this episode paired up
Ward with Fitz and Skye with Simmons.
These characters are so completely different that it was interesting to
see them interacting together. It was
also a good call in how it allowed Fitz and Simmons to mature as
characters. Before now they were almost always
paired up together and working together so well that they could finish each
other’s sentences; in this episode we finally get to see them as separate
characters… who still finish their partners’ sentences, something that Skye
calls Simmons out on. We don’t get a lot
of May in this episode, but from her few lines it becomes clear that though she
is loyal to S.H.I.E.L.D. and accepts its secrecy, her loyalty to her teammates
comes first.
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| Image Courtesy www.marvel.com |
Back at the Hub, Hand
is watching the operations room map when Sitwell comes in. She asks if Coulson’s team has cleared the
area, and when he confirms it, she orders the units to clean up the rest of the
operation. This might be the most
enigmatic part of the episode. Hand sent
Ward and Fitz in without an extraction plan, but when Coulson’s team went in to
extract them, she wasn’t surprised—it almost seemed as though she expected it
to happen. On the one hand, I want to
distrust her for not telling anyone the truth about the mission. On the other hand, I think she might just be
good enough to have expected Skye to hack the mission file and push her team to
serve as the extraction plan. She hinted
as much to Sitwell when she said that all of their forces were otherwise
occupied with the mission. But why she
couldn’t have come out and told Coulson that his plane was her extraction plan
for Ward and Fitz is beyond me. Maybe
she couldn’t actually give him orders since the two of them are (possibly) the
same clearance level (8). Maybe it was a
test to see where Coulson’s loyalties lay—to S.H.I.E.L.D. or to his team. Either way, Hand was a very interesting
character, and I was glad to see her appear a few more times over the course of
the season.
The final scene of
note was when Coulson told Skye that he had found the unredacted file. He told her that it concerned the
S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who dropped her off at the orphanage. It did not say anything more—there was no way
of knowing if the agent was her mother or not.
However, this was enough to satisfy Skye at the time; she thanked
Coulson for the information. Of course,
as soon as he left her he went straight to May, who was looking at the paper
copy of the file. Something in the file
had Coulson worried, and we didn’t have long to wait before finding out. Apparently the agent who dropped Skye off was
killed shortly thereafter. In order to
solve the mystery, Coulson and May would need to find out more about how the
agent was killed. Naturally, solving one
mystery only created another—something this show has been frustratingly good at
doing all along! Every mystery solved
only creates more questions:
T.A.H.I.T.I. led to the alien writing, which led to the Kree temple,
which led to the Inhumans, which led to the Kree Doomsday Device… It certainly keeps me coming back for more!
I enjoyed this episode
a lot. I can even see why ScreenRant
would have called this the “Real Pilot”:
it highlighted the “bigness” of S.H.I.E.L.D., showed a mission of which
our team was only a small part, and put the focus squarely on the question of
secrets. However, this episode would
never have stood as a “Pilot”; it relies far too heavily on the character
development which we saw in the first six episodes. Without them, I don’t see it standing well on
its own.
What was your favorite
part of this episode?
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