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| Image Courtesy www.marvel.com |
After last episode took
a brief detour as the team helped out Sif the Bounty Hunter, “End of the
Beginning” (1x16) sees the series start going full-throttle toward the dramatic
conclusion, starting with this episode, which serves as a major lead-in to Captain
America: The Winter Soldier. This
one is easily the most exciting episode to-date as new alliances are being
forged, guest characters from all over S.H.I.E.L.D.’s involvement in the MCU
stop by, and the team is torn apart by the betrayal of one of their own. I remember watching this episode when it
first aired last year and being insanely pumped to watch Winter Soldier
and then come back for “Turn, Turn, Turn.”
And it’s the same this time around, too (even though this time the movie
that comes between the two episodes is Ant-Man!).
Reminder: Retro-Reviews include spoilers for all of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. seasons 1 and 2.
The episode begins
with Garrett and Triplett entering a safehouse and talking about their
plans. Garrett has the idea that maybe
they need to check through the Index—specifically those crossed off the
Index—and look into anyone who claimed to possess psychic abilities. However, their safehouse is not safe for
long, as Mike comes breaking through the door to attack them. Trip shoots him a couple times with a rifle
that shoots taser rounds, followed up with an ICER to the head, but none of it
has any lasting effect on him. Mike
pulls off the taser and jumps through the ceiling to escape. In rewatching the season, I am very impressed
with Garrett’s plan: He comes up with
the idea to look into Index rejects (after having set up Nash as his fall guy)
and then sends Deathlok after himself and Trip.
This simultaneously “confirms” that they are on the right track, throws
suspicion off himself, and makes him instrumental in Coulson’s efforts to track
down the Clairvoyant. It must be pretty
confusing to be heading up a manhunt for himself!
The episode cuts right
to the Bus landing on an aircraft carrier (so which one is this? It can’t be the original helicarrier; Fury
squirreled that away after New York. So
is this the Iliad, Gonzales’ carrier in season 2? Considering how expensive those things are, I
can’t imagine S.H.I.E.L.D. having more than 1 conventional carrier to go with
their original helicarrier and the INSIGHT carriers they are currently
building. But what do I know; they’ve
got flying aircraft carriers!). Five
agents get on the plane: Sitwell, Blake
(from the Marvel One-Shot Item 47), Hand, Garrett, and Trip. As soon as they are all aboard, they take off
and climb to 50,000 feet in the hopes that if the Clairvoyant really is
psychic, he will have a harder time reading their thoughts (spoiler alert: he hears every word they say). Coulson and Garrett explain their theory and
their plan to interview the possible candidates to find the Clairvoyant. However, carrying out the plan requires them
to take advantage of a certain trainee’s pattern recognition abilities.
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| Image Courtesy www.facebook.com/AgentsofShield |
This gives us one of
the more touching moments in season 1 as Skye is given her S.H.I.E.L.D. badge
and accepted as a full agent. The whole team
is excited for her (even May smiles), along with the special guests, though
Hand seems slightly unimpressed. Skye
gives a really believable performance with how excited she is to finally be a
part of S.H.I.E.L.D., despite her past slip-ups. Now she finally has a place to belong with
S.H.I.E.L.D., something she really hasn’t had in the past. This leads to an interesting conversation
between her and Garrett as she is giving him his assignment for the mission. He tells her about all his injuries sustained
on the job and compliments her on having survived 2 gut shots—they’re “the
worst.” He also comments that she has
had a serious impact on Ward: he’s gone
from fighting “against” to fighting “for” something (meaning her). Then before leaving he also tells her “I’m a
SHIELD agent… just like you,” but he says it in such a way that it just sounds
creepy now that we know him to actually be a Hydra mole. In retrospect, I’m surprised I didn’t ask the
question before: “what was Ward fighting
against before Skye?” That’s another one
of those little foreshadowings that we can pick up now that we know what’s happening.
Unfortunately, Agent
Sitwell is unable to join them on their mission because he has orders to report
to the set of Captain America: The Winter Soldier—I mean, the Lemurian
Star (but it’s really the same thing).
Skye sends out three teams to investigate three of the potential Clairvoyant
candidates. Though Garrett and Coulson
run into a potential ambush and Ward and Trip walk into a strangely-deserted
prison office, the real action happens at an assisted living facility where May
and Blake are looking into a man named Thomas Nash. Blake gets attacked by Deathlok while May is
discovering that Nash was never at the facility to begin with. Blake manages to shoot Deathlok with a tagged
round, though he is quickly subdued and stomped, leaving him in critical
condition. At the same time, Deathlok
shows off his newest upgrade, an arm-mounted missile launcher which connects in
with his eye implant and gives it targeting capabilities. I’ve really enjoyed Mike Peterson’s story arc
over the first season. At this point in
time he is being forced to hurt and kill people in the service of Centipede
(Hydra), and hates himself for it. With
tears in his eyes, he tells Blake that “Mike Peterson is dead”—all that remains
is Deathlok.
None of the three
candidates they went after were overly exciting; none are comic book characters
that I could find. However, Noriko Sato,
the candidate that Garrett and Coulson went for, was said to have family ties
to the Yakuza. Considering that Daredevil
introduced Nobu as a member of the Hand/Yakuza, could there be a connection
there? Probably not, but it’s always a
possibility.
Now that S.H.I.E.L.D.
knows Nash to be the target, the team starts digging into his background
further. Skye explains that he was
recruited to a top-secret Canadian “Department H”-type of program which was
trying to find people with the ability to affect others’ actions. Could this be a reference to Alpha Flight,
the official Canadian equivalent of the Avengers? I would love to see season 3 of AoS
explore this a little more, especially now that S.H.I.E.L.D. is expanding
further with the introduction of the Secret Warriors.
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| Image Courtesy www.facebook.com/AgentsofShield |
The team follows
Blake’s tag to an abandoned racetrack with a full tactical team in tow. Fitz uses the Golden Retrievers to locate
Deathlok, giving us a view of all the cybernetics under his skin, including
metal plating over/in place of half his skull.
I actually liked Deathlok’s suit in season 1: it wasn’t very subtle and it looked pretty
bulky, but it was just the first version of his suit; they made substantial
improvements in season 2. They confront
Deathlok, who succeeds in escaping, though not before attacking Ward and taking
out 2 of the tactical team members.
Coulson and Garrett find Nash in a wheelchair in a sub-basement
room. He starts taunting them with what
he is going to do to them—and specifically to Skye to retrieve the GH-325. However, before Coulson can remove him from
the room and take him into custody, Ward shoots him in the heart, killing him.
Coulson puts Ward in
the Cage for transport back to the Triskelion—where Fury agreed to meet him—but
before they get there Coulson and Skye realize that they’ve been played. Skye realizes that everything the Clairvoyant
“saw” came out of their S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel files. This leads to one of the more terrifying (and
awesome) moments when Coulson says, “The Clairvoyant doesn’t have
abilities. He has security clearance. He’s an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” Boom! And
just in time for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, too…
Meanwhile, Fitz
installs an encrypted line so he can talk to Simmons, who stayed at the Hub
with Trip and Hand. She tells him that
there is something big happening at the Hub, but the connection starts cutting
in and out as he discovers another encrypted line with a receiver in the
cockpit. When he tells Skye, she tells
him to cut the line so May can’t call out, leading May to go on the hunt for
him because he cut the line. She doesn’t
find him until he’s locked inside the lab, at which point Skye and Coulson
confront her. While they are trying to
figure out what’s happening, the Bus unexpectedly makes a course correction
which no one on the plane knew about or set.
Coulson demands to know who did it, and it cuts straight to Victoria
Hand in the Situation Room at the Hub ordering her men to take out everyone on
the plane except Coulson—“He’s mine.”
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| Image Courtesy marvel.wikia.com |
This whole episode was
insanely intense and suddenly left us all wondering who we could trust. May was working for someone else and wouldn’t
tell Coulson to whom she was reporting.
And on top of that she shot at Fitz (with an ICER, but still). Ward shot Nash—the “prop”—and Coulson
suspects him of working for someone outside the plane. And on top of that there is a ton of activity
going on at the Hub, and Hand is behind it all.
Is Hand the Clairvoyant, or is there something else going on? I really liked everyone’s acting throughout
the episode, and especially the team as they were all pointing guns at each
other. I think this was probably the
best episode up to that point in the season, though the series has continued
getting progressively better since then.
I also really liked
how this episode tied in with Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Sitwell got the orders to report to the ship
he was on at the beginning of the movie in this episode. Coulson finds out that Fury is back at the
Hub at the end of the episode. And those
are just the two most obvious connections.
The tone of the episode—with S.H.I.E.L.D. agents pointing guns at
S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and not knowing who’s on what side—carries over very well
into the third act of the movie and then into “Turn, Turn, Turn” (1x17), the
next AoS episode. You can see the
movie without having seen AoS, and if you do you will not be lost, but
if you’ve seen this episode then the movie is that much better.
What was your favorite
part of this episode? Whom did you think
May was reporting to when you first saw it?
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