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“Ragtag,” the episode
right before the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season finale, doesn’t waste any
time. Everything seems to be in
overdrive as they put the pieces into place for the action-packed season
finale. However, even with all of that
there is still time to explore Ward’s back story and learn just what he owes to
Garrett and why he is so loyal to him.
The episode ends with a major cliffhanger as there is no telling which
of the characters is in the most danger.
And at the same time, the villains look to be one step away from
victory.
Reminder: Retro-Reviews contain potential spoilers for all of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. seasons 1 and 2.
The episode is largely
structured as a “flashback episode,” showing several flashbacks of Ward’s
history and using them to illuminate Ward’s actions in the present. It begins with a young Grant Ward (played by Austin
Lyon) being escorted into a visitation room at a juvenile detention facility. There he meets with Garrett, who explains
that the headmaster at Ward’s military school is an old friend of his, and that
he mentioned a young recruit with incredible hand-eye coordination who drove
1000 miles to torch his parents’ house (with his older brother inside). Garrett tells him that his two options are to
either stay in jail, where his parents are pressing charges and his brother is
petitioning for him to be tried as an adult, or to leave with Garrett. Ward agrees to Garrett’s proposal and joins
him in leaving the facility. Garrett
then drops him in the middle of the Wyoming wilderness to fend for himself for
six months with only his dog Buddy for company.
Ward manages to survive by raiding cabins and stealing supplies, including
a shotgun to hunt with. Over time,
Garrett trains Ward to shoot and indoctrinates him into Hydra. I find this whole process fascinating: Garrett mixes punishment, fear, and praise in
such a way that Ward finds himself helpless to do anything but follow him,
seeking out more of the praise which only Garrett has ever given him. In a way, Garrett and Christian (Ward’s older
brother) aren’t very different—they both force Ward to do terrible things and
demean and belittle him; the only difference is that Garrett actually gives
Ward praise on occasion as a reward for good behavior. Understood this way, it’s really not
surprising that Ward is so fiercely loyal to Garrett without caring for Hydra
in the slightest.
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We also get to see a
glimpse into Garrett’s ultimate plan in this episode. He sends Deathlok to Bogota to take out a
major drug lord (with Hydra ties) in the most spectacular way possible—punching
the guy’s head clean off. Though Ward
remarks that he could have done the job without attracting attention, Garrett
tells him that the spectacle was the job: They wanted to draw as much attention as
possible to Deathlok, their “product.”
Garrett is planning to use Quinn as his “front-man” to market their
super-soldiers (aka Project Deathlok) to the U.S. government (possibly to other
governments as well; it’s not really explored).
At the end of the episode, Quinn sits down with two of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff in Washington, DC, and explains to them that a super-soldier can
complete a mission like taking out Osama bin Laden at a fraction of the cost of
traditional Special Forces units. He
then invites them to tour the new Cybertek facility where they are constructing
their units. I actually find this plan
fascinating. Though Garrett never
managed to implement it (he went a little too crazy to carry it out), I suspect
that his goal was never to make money off the soldiers, but rather to place
them within the U.S. military so he could use them to take over. It’s only ever alluded to by Ward in the
season finale—most of this is just my suspicion—and it perfectly in line with
the kind of thing Hydra would do.
Coulson and the team,
meanwhile, work out the connection between Garrett and Cybertek, and decide to
infiltrate Cybertek and use their computer system to activate Skye’s Trojan
horse. Trip also offers to let them use
all of his grandfather’s old Howling Commandos gear—and Coulson geeking out
over all the old spyware was probably the most pure fun in the episode. I like that they’ve taken his trading cards
thing from The Avengers and run with it to such a degree. Considering that one of the show’s target
demographics is “geeks,” Coulson being a geek is a really good decision! Coulson and May attempting to pose as
S.H.I.E.L.D. technicians (mimicking everything Fitz and Simmons say in their
ears) was the funniest moment of the episode—of course, there really weren’t a
lot of those. While in Cybertek, Coulson
and May discover that all of Cybertek’s records are kept on paper, and steal a
file cabinet full of records from Project Deathlok. I actually liked the throwback bit when the
two of them got to the fourth floor:
they are spotted by a guard, and there’s a red phone halfway between
them. The guard runs for the phone while
May flips her way toward him. He picks
up the phone just as she reaches him, and she knocks the phone in the air,
knocks him out, catches the phone, and puts it back on its cradle. That’s the kind of thing that just wouldn’t
fly under normal circumstances, but in an episode where they infiltrate a
completely low-tech company while using spyware out of the 1940s-1950s, it
actually makes perfect sense.
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From the files, the
team realizes that Garrett is the first “Deathlok,” and that he has been
working with Cybertek ever since the 1990s.
In a flashback, we learn that Garrett was on a S.H.I.E.L.D. mission when
he was injured. S.H.I.E.L.D. refused to
send a medevac, so he decided that they didn’t care as much for him as he did
for them, and that if he survived he would do everything in his power to
destroy S.H.I.E.L.D. He willed himself
to survive, had Cybertek patch him up, and joined Hydra. I love just how much background we are
getting on the villains. I’m a little
disappointed that we didn’t get it until the very end of the season, but that’s
really to be expected when the true villain’s identity is a huge twist like this. Season 2 kind of did both: it gave us Whitehall right off the bat as a
villain and filled in his back story along the way in the first half, but then
in the second half it didn’t reveal the true villain until just about the
end. However, we did learn a lot more of
Jiaying’s motivations along the way in season 2.
The team manages to
track Garrett and Ward to Havana, and they go to try finding them. Fitz and Simmons locate the Bus on an
airstrip, but are caught by Ward and brought onboard. Fitz sets off a pocket EMP, frying Garrett’s
bio-mechanical components—the only things keeping him alive at this point. Garrett orders Ward to “put down” Fitz and
Simmons (just like he’d ordered him to “put down” Buddy 10 years earlier when
he left for the Academy), which Ward sort-of did by ejecting the pod in which
they had taken refuge over the water.
Meanwhile, Garrett has Raina inject the GH-325 serum derivative she had
concocted into the container of Centipede serum housed within one of his
implants. She does so—meaning there’s
really no chance to replicate it again—and Garrett’s body starts to heal
itself. I actually liked Raina’s scenes
in this episode. When she was talking to
Mike Peterson about her motivation being “people like him,” it suddenly became
clear just what she was doing with Hydra.
She was never a believer in anything other than the Clairvoyant (she
really picked a winner there…); she was only interested in powers—and
specifically what will happen to her when she transforms. Then when she was talking to Ward, she
dropped the crucial information that she has heard stories about Skye’s past,
and that the “monsters” who destroyed the village were actually the baby’s
parents. This explains all the
information that Ward had on Cal in Season 2 (not much) and why he thought he
might have a chance with Skye once she knew the truth.
While all of that is
happening, Coulson, May, Trip, and Skye go to the barbershop which fronts the
abandoned S.H.I.E.L.D. base that Hydra has been using. Though they initially fail to find anything
of note, Trip uses one of his vintage Howling Commandos devices to look behind
the walls and find a hidden room.
Coulson opens it and they enter, only to discover several Centipede
soldiers, one of whom is wielding the Berserker Staff.
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That’s pretty much
where the episode ends: Fitz and Simmons
are trapped in a pod at the bottom of the ocean. Garrett is alive and “feeling the universe”
(and he only gets crazier from there).
Coulson, May, Trip, and Skye walked into a trap and are about to fight a
whole bunch of Centipede super-soldiers.
And Quinn is marketing super-soldiers to the U.S. military, which will
be touring the Cybertek facility where Garrett and Ward and going. The pieces are all in place for an epic
season finale that will answer all our questions.
I really liked this
episode for what it was: a set-up
episode for the season finale. However,
it did more than just set up the finale; it also gave us our only
“villain-centric” episode of the season.
There were other episodes where the villains got a lot of attention, but
this episode is the only one to fully explore Ward’s and Garrett’s motivations
and what made them turn to Hydra in the first place. Garrett is clearly an evil narcissistic
psychopath who doesn’t care about anything except his own survival—using the
GH-325-derived serum on himself when it can’t ever be recreated is proof enough
of that. Ward, on the other hand, is
more sympathetic: his past put him on a
path that had to lead here. There was
very little hope that he would turn out otherwise than what he is—his older
brother and Garrett saw to that.
What was your favorite
part of this episode? Who is your
favorite Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. villain to-date?
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