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“T.R.A.C.K.S.”: the obligatory Joss Whedon train
episode. It’s actually a lot more than
just a train heist episode, but that’s where the episode starts. And this is also when the series starts to
connect the episodes together more closely into a single long plot of Coulson’s
fight against Ian Quinn and Centipede.
The small vignettes with the members of the team and mystery-like nature
of the episode make it pretty fun and a nice change of pace from the rest of
the series.
Reminder: All Retro-Reviews contain potential spoilers for all of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. seasons 1 and 2.
The episode starts off
right where the last one left off, with Coulson hunting down Ian Quinn, who is
now known to be working for the Clairvoyant.
Skye manages to track down a shipping invoice for a shipment of an
unknown package to Quinn from a small company called Cybertek. The shipment is being made by rail across
Italy to avoid suspicion and throw S.H.I.E.L.D. off the track, but Coulson
sends his team onto the train undercover to follow the package in the hopes
that it will lead them to Quinn. The
team sets up: May climbs onto the roof
of the train, Ward dresses as a conductor, Fitz and Skye set up their comm.
system, and Coulson and Simmons use special dirt to track the Cybertek team’s
movements. Oh, and Stan Lee shows up to
make his cameo (is anyone else disappointed he didn’t show up in season 2?). However, Cybertek “makes” the team and they
are forced to improvise. This is when
the episode starts using one of the more fun structures—and I as far as I can
remember this is the only time that we’ve actually seen it used on Agents of
S.H.I.E.L.D.
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The second iteration
shows Ward’s perspective of those same events.
He changes into a conductor’s uniform and is tricked into helping a
passenger with her bag, and the passenger tries to shoot him. Ward fights the woman and an accomplice off,
escapes from the room, and goes to the car where Simmons and Coulson had
been. He warns Simmons and tells her to
go to the baggage car with Fitz and Skye before going after Coulson. He is followed by the Cybertek team, runs
into Coulson, they jump off the train, and the grenade goes off as before. However, following the grenade, Ward and
Coulson escape from the men sent after them by ducking into a vineyard. They find a truck that was “fortuitously”
hotwired and is running, and they drive the truck back to the Bus. I think one of the best parts of the episode
is Ward and Coulson playing off each other.
Ward is serious and intense, while Coulson is making wisecracks, and it
really works seeing them together. Ward
tries to get the holo-table to work, but he and Coulson can barely make it do
anything—which is easily the funniest scene of the episode. Coulson contacts his Italian contact, Russo,
and sends him their coordinates. Russo
arrives, but before he gets more than 2 sentences out, May kills him and tells
them that they are leaving in five minutes.
This segues into the
story of May’s part. May is on top of
the train, using her special goggles to watch the Cybertek team leave their
dining car. However, she is unable to
call it in, and one of the guys starts shooting at her. He misses, and she is able to get away using a
small parachute. She finds Ward and
Coulson knocked out by the grenade and actually starts to panic when she thinks
that Coulson is dead (not Ward). She
quickly realizes that they are still alive and goes off to get
transportation. After hotwiring the
truck, she gets captured by Russo, who takes her to a mysterious hideout where
he hangs her by a rope from the ceiling and prepares to kill her, explaining
that he has been receiving bribes from Cybertek in exchange for ensuring safe
passage for their deliveries across Italy.
He stabs her in the shoulder, and her only response is a feral grin—at
which point he turns away from her (I don’t know about you, but I’d probably shoot
the psycho chick, not turn away from her!).
While his back is turned, she pulls herself up so she can reach the
knife with her tied-up hands, pulls out the knife, uses it to cut herself down,
kills one of the guys, and chases after Russo, who had escaped. She follows him to the Bus, where she throws
her knife to kill him before he can shoot Ward and Coulson.
The scene with Coulson
patching up May in the lab is very touching, especially after the last episode,
“Seeds” (1x12), filled in some of their history together. I don’t think we can extrapolate from their
interaction in “T.R.A.C.K.S.” that they were ever in a relationship, but they
are certainly close friends. When May is
withdrawing after this particularly stressful mission and trying to stitch
herself up, she does not want Ward to comfort her or help her. However, Coulson is able to break through to
her. Surprisingly, I think May is the
character who gets the most development in this episode. She shows off both how tough she is and how
she relates to the other characters—she cares more about Coulson (her
ex-handler) than about Ward (the guy she’s sleeping with).
Ward, Coulson, and May
track down the train, which had stopped in the middle of the Italian
countryside. When they get on board they
find the computers, which had been shot up, and Simmons, who had been knocked
unconscious with the same grenade that had been used on Ward and Coulson. She wakes up dazed and confused and starts
shooting at them with a Night-Night gun, and from there it flashes back to Fitz
and Skye.
While watching the
package on the screen, Skye asks Fitz if he thinks that it’s an 0-8-4, leading
to an interesting conversation about 0-8-4s.
Fitz notes that S.H.I.E.L.D. has encountered 0-8-4s that were weapons,
spacecraft, and energy sources, but that they are all dangerous. I am very curious if we’re going to see any
more of them from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s history.
We’ve seen 0-8-4 weapons (Mjolnir, the Obelisk, and the Peruvian device)
and we’ve seen energy sources (the Tesseract), but we have yet to see an intact
spacecraft (not counting Malekith’s ship).
I’d love to see them investigating a ship that crash-landed on earth at
some point down the line, maybe as part of a storyline introducing S.W.O.R.D.,
S.H.I.E.L.D.’s space counterpart.
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However, Skye and Fitz
are attacked by one of the Cybertek security guys, whom they fend off—though
not without Simmons and the guy getting knocked out with one of the
grenades. They follow Cybertek to a
compound in the country, where they activate a spare tracker. Skye goes inside to make sure Quinn doesn’t
escape, and Fitz stays outside to disable their cars.
While inside the
mansion, Skye finds Mike Peterson, miraculously alive but asleep in a
hyperbaric chamber. Quinn and one of the
security guys find her down there, wake Mike up, and show Skye the device which
Cybertek had delivered. The device turns
out to be a cybernetic leg which attaches to Mike’s stump, deploys, and
calibrates itself in such a way that it can mimic his normal body structure and
gait. Unfortunately, Mike is under the
control of Centipede, and he is unable to help Skye. Instead, he is ordered to attack and kill the
Cybertek team for leading S.H.I.E.L.D. to their compound. I like how they introduce Mike here and make
it clear that he is under Cybertek’s control.
He was not forced to attack S.H.I.E.L.D., but he still had to kill
(relatively-) innocent people despite his own wishes to the contrary. Cybertek has been upgrading him—as Quinn
notes when talking about how much money they’d put into him (“Every piece of
technology in you is top of the line”)—but the procedures do not seem pleasant
as they don’t use anesthetics. Centipede
is controlling him and preventing him from seeing his son. His own desires are completely irrelevant because
he is more machine than anything else now, and someone else is in control. And this comes out in his performance: he doesn’t like what he’s doing, but he feels
powerless to do anything else.
After Mike leaves to
complete his mission, Quinn shoots Skye in the gut a couple times, saying that
he was ordered to do so by the Clairvoyant.
Skye manages to crawl toward the door before passing out from blood
loss. Fortunately, Coulson finds her and
Simmons arrives shortly thereafter to administer first aid. There’s nothing she can do under the
circumstances, so she puts Skye into the hyperbaric chamber, pressurizes it,
and lowers Skye’s body temperature to preserve her a little longer. Skye is still alive, but just barely. Coulson has Quinn in custody, but he is
virtually out of options with Skye’s condition.
Skye’s injury really
helps a couple of the characters to grow.
We see how much Skye means to Coulson in the way that he stands and
stares at her. Simmons’ reaction is the
most touching as she holds it together while with the group but falls apart in
the storage room—where Fitz follows her and holds her while she’s sobbing. Ward’s reaction seems perfectly in-character
at the time (punching the car), but with the benefit of hindsight we realize
exactly whom he is blaming for what happened to Skye. He knows exactly who is responsible because
he is working for the man who was responsible:
John Garrett. And he has really
allowed himself to get invested with Skye, something which is coming back to
bite him now that she is in jeopardy.
Overall, I like the different
structure of the episode and I thought that all of the character development
was well done. Simmons’ speech to
Coulson about how terrible a father he was and all his prostitutes was really
over the top, but it actually worked since she was going for “ridiculous
overacting.” Plus, that gave us our Stan
Lee cameo, so can we complain?
(Probably) Skye’s near-death is
one of the biggest moments of the series—perhaps even bigger than the Hydra
reveal in some respects—and it gets all the build-up and all the reaction that
it deserves. There are a few things that
could have been better, but it’s still a pretty good episode.
What did you think of
“T.R.A.C.K.S.”? What is your favorite
Stan Lee cameo to-date? Are you
disappointed that we didn’t see him in season 2? Let me know in the comments!
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