Previously on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the Clairvoyant arranged for Skye to get shot in the chest so Coulson would be forced to save her life with the same alien goop Nick Fury used to save Coulson’s life, which, when coupled with the Captain America: The Winter Solider trailers, led Coulson to believe maybe going off-book w/r/t S.H.I.E.L.D. protocol was going to be the legit heroic thing to do. He recruited Skye to help him because they share an emotional bond, and also they share Kree blood. Agent May, who apparently knew Coulson’s secret all along, overheard their covert tag-team shenanigans and promptly reported them to someone over an encrypted phone she keeps stashed in her locker.
Coulson has had it up to here with the Clairvoyant, so he calls the S.H.I.E.L.D. big guns to the bus to propose a new plan. Agent Victoria Hand is there, towering over everyone. Power suit. Pink stripe in her hair. The whole deal. Also Sitwell and Blake. Coulson wants to narrow down the list of 17 Clairvoyant suspects (all of whom tested positive for telepathy at some point) to three suspects and send three teams after each one of them, operating on a second-by-second basis so as to bamboozle their seer powers. All he needs is a super genius agent who is skilled in pattern recognition and also is his secret best friend who doesn’t trust S.H.I.E.L.D. anymore either.
Hand is like, “Too bad you don’t have an agent like that.” And Coulson is all, “Except for I totally do because – surprise! – Skye is getting a badge!” Skye is so happy. Ward, not so much, because he looooves her and doesn’t want her to get hurt again.
Skye starts to get suspicious when Fitz and Simmons request another gallon of her blood for research. They explain, quietly, that they want to send it off to some of their science friends for analyzing because the alien goop that saved Skye’s life has the potential to save zillions of other lives. The problem is that Coulson doesn’t want them to do it.
Skye: If Coulson said don’t do it, it’s because he has important reasons. We should absolutely obey his orders. Simmons: Wait, what? Skye: We need to follow the rules. Simmons: Sorry, are we role-playing right now? Are you doing me and I’m meant to be doing you? Fitz: Heh. You two doing each other. How crazy would that be. Skye/Simmons: [Exchange a look.] Simmons: You hate rules. Skye: Maybe I want to be a good girl for a little while. Simmons: Well, maybe I want to be a bad girl, then. Skye: Well, maybe you should. Simmons: Well, maybe I will. Fitz: What … is happening right now?May overhears this little exchange and advises Fitz and Simmons to consult her if: a) anything weird does turn up re: Skye’s alien blood, and 2) if she and Coulson start acting cagey. She says she can “help.” She doesn’t do the air quotes, but they’re implied.
It has not been a very good year for Mike “Deathlok” Peterson. Injected with super-serum that nearly caused his brain to blow up. Almost killed. Recruited to S.H.I.E.L.D. Almost killed again. Recruited by the Clairvoyant. Burned up. Lost leg. Lost son. Cryogenically frozen. New robot leg. New robot eyeballs. Enslaved by the Clairvoyant. So when he gets a package at his apartment, he knows it’s not a birthday cake. It’s a gift from his omniscient captor: a mechanical sleeve for his arm that launches rockets and makes his eyeballs glow red. The Clairvoyant is finally ready to meet him in person.
Agent Hand has no interest in sitting around on the bus waiting for the action to start, so she heads back to the Hub to “coordinate” the “backup teams.” But really, there’s no action to be had anywhere. Trip and Ward come up empty-handed at their location, and so do Garrett and Coulson. May and Nash crash the nursing home where their catatonic oracle is supposed to be, but he’s gone. You know who is there, though? Deathlok. (“Mike Peterson is dead!” he wails.) He beats the biff out of Nash and even uses his fancy new rocket launcher arm to do collateral damage, but not before Nash manages to lodge a tracker bullet in his robot body with Fitz’s newest toy gun.
Hand is livid when Nash arrives at the Hub in critical condition. She shouts about how “unexpected” and “awful” and “alarming” it is that they were outmaneuvered by this guy, this Clairvoyant, this male dude, again. Simmons decides to stay at the Hub to analyze Skye’s blood and Mike Peterson’s exoskeleton, and so Fitz sets up a secure comm link so they can geek out over an encrypted line even when they’re apart.
Using Fitz’s satellite gun technology, Coulson and Garrett track down Deathlok. They follow him into a warehouse and into a basement, but it’s not him they find down there. It’s the guy from the nursing home, the one Ward and Nash were after. He’s in a wheel chair, surrounded by computer monitors, through which he communicates that he’s the Clairvoyant and he’s surrendering. But he doesn’t stop with his confession; he tells Coulson he knows that him and Skye are trying to unlock the mystery of what happened to them when they died, but that there’s a force that’s six steps ahead of them, and it’s coming to take Skye and find out her secret and kill her dead. On and on he drones until Ward just pulls out his gun and shoots him right in the face. A guy in a wheelchair! Right in the face! For talking shit about Skye! Even Coulson is like, “Geeeeezus, dude!”
Back on the bus, Ward is in plane jail. When Skye comes to see him, he says he doesn’t regret his decision to off that guy and he’ll do the same thing to any other paralyzed people who give him computer-lip about her. But Skye and Coulson aren’t convinced he really was the Clairvoyant. In fact, all the stuff he knew about them, it didn’t seem like magic; it seemed like the kind of thing in their S.H.I.E.L.D. psych evaluations, which means the call is coming from inside the house.
Right around the time Skye and Coulson get hit with that truth bomb, Fitz discovers the hidden phone in May’s locker. He destroys it on Skye’s orders and as soon as May realizes it, she gets into an almost shoot-out with her team. Coulson is hollering at Ward to tell him if he shot the elderly guy because he’s a hotheaded dick or because the Clairvoyant told him to! He’s shouting at May to tell him who she’s really working for! Guns are pointing in all directions! And then, the plane just whips itself around in midair.
May is like, “Clearly, that’s not me since I’m out here and that thing is happening inside the cockpit.”
Inside the cockpit? No one, ’cause the plane is being controlled from the Hub, by Agent Victoria Hand! “When that plane touches down,” she says, “take down everyone on board, except Agent Coulson. He’s mine.”
We’ve been kind of having this conversation about Hand all season, right? We were all leaning toward her being the Clairvoyant. In the comic books, she does work for Norman Osborn’s dark Avengers, whom she believes are the actual answer for world peace. She’s Machiavellian and she makes the tough calls and she’s got no moony-eyed delusions about being one of the guys who wears a white hat. So it’s not really a surprise that she’s being tapped as the Big Bad of this season. But I do think it’s interesting that they’ve chosen not to reveal her lesbianism on the show so far. I wonder if it was a very conscious decision not to make a villain out of the first LGBT character in the Marvel cinematic universe. If so, they’re going to continue to keep a lid on her canon sexuality, or this is a bluff and she’s only a decoy. In the long-run, she did end up working for Captain America, so who knows?
Hey, and speaking of Captain America: This week’s S.H.I.E.L.D. closes with a clip from The Winter Solider. What does it mean? Gods willing, an AOS cameo from ScarJo herself.
What do you think about the reveal that Agent Hand is the Big Bad?
