Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. 1.16: "End of the Beginning"

“I see you’re angry, head clouded with lies. You’ve been betrayed and now you fear what’s about to happen.”
- The Clairvoyant

When last we saw the team, May was spying on Coulson and Skye. Speaking of Skye, she’s being made an actual SHIELD agent. And she’s denying FitzSimmons from doing more studies on her blood. We also see Ward’s SO and Ward 2.0 get to a safe house in Australia only to see Deathlok showing up. Coulson gets a bunch of brass on the Bus and explains they are narrowing the list of possible identities of the Clairvoyant down. They want to use a bunch of agents to hunt down each of the potentials and Skye offers to minimize the chance of the Clairvoyant knowing their plan by giving two man teams limited information going forward. While Coulson and the rest of the team go off to try and find their target, Skye is tasked with digging into the psyche of the Clairvoyant.

Elsewhere, Mike Peterson gets a new piece of his super suit and the Clairvoyant says it is time to meet. Ward and Ward 2.0 get paired up as do Coulson and Ward’s SO. May gets linked up with Agent Blake (Titus Welliver) and they each head off to find their potential baddie. Mike shows up at the assisted living facility where May and Blake are and it looks like Mike kills Blake despite the agent trying to reason with him and use his son as leverage. May gets a call in and the rest of the teams race off to try and intercept Mike but he takes off. Something tells me that he was just a diversion.

Coulson kind of gets chewed out by Agent Hand for the fact that Blake was so severely injured. He’s not dead but in critical condition. The other agents seem to back Coulson’s decision though. And they now think they’ve got a name to put to their Clairvoyant. The man’s name is Tom Nash and he was sort of recruited by the Canadian government looking for psychics. Supposedly he could sometimes predict human behavior. I still have a feeling that he’s not the right guy. I could be wrong but it’s just this weird feeling I’ve got. Simmons gets to go off to the Hub to debrief the rest of the organization on the Deathlok program and Ward 2.0 is staying as well. That’s going to make it harder for her to covertly test Skye’s blood with the super fancy tech at the Hub. Anyway, Coulson quickly figures out that Blake shot at Mike with tracking rounds that Fitz designed so they get Skye working on finding him. They trace him to an abandoned trace track and Skye is relegated to the van. I guess she’s still recovering and also a newbie agent. Don’t want to put her life on the line too soon again.

Sometimes I wonder how competent these guys are. I mean they aren’t very good shots. Anyway, Mike takes out the surveillance which messes with Fitz and his tracker toys. But Skye gets a look at him through infrared and sees just how much has been done to alter him. She’s rather horrified. Ward goes up against Mike and ends up with two agents down. Coulson spots him going into a sub-basement and ends up running into Ward’s SO. Mike gets away but the tracker indicates another person is down there. It looks like maybe Mr. Nash, while waking up from his coma, didn’t recover from his head on collision. It reminds me a little of a recent episode of Intelligence. He’s confined to a chair and uses a computer program to speak

Nash kind of taunts the team, especially Coulson. He says that Coulson couldn’t be read because he was broken. He also says that Skye has something he wants and that Skye will die giving him what he wants. Well maybe he won’t because Ward shoots him. Ward is being transported back to HQ when Skye pops in for a chat to ask why he did it. He said he wanted to protect her and the team. He got emotional and he reacted. Good job, buddy. Elsewhere on the Bus, Fitz is trying to get a secure line to Simmons. Fitz figures out that someone else is tapping the same line. I think May is going to get caught. Skye goes to pay Coulson a visit to chat and he says he thinks Ward killed the wrong person. They suss out that the Clairvoyant has high level SHIELD clearance. They’re being taken down by the inside.

Coulson busts in to the interrogation room and demands to know if someone ordered Ward to kill the Clairvoyant. I’d say he’s acting paranoid but he could be right. We’ve only seen Ward make rational decisions, not emotional ones. Fitz is searching the plane and finds another encrypted line. Of course, May shows up and things get awkward and he takes off all jittery. He runs into Skye and fills her in. So while Fitz goes to cut the hard line, Skye goes to fill in Coulson. Lots of yelling happens and then May goes hunting for Fitz. Guns are pointed at one another and Coulson is getting very paranoid about May. And then the plane starts doing weird things and takes off. We jump to the Hub and find that Agent Hand has taken control of the plane. She wants everyone but Coulson killed when it touches down. Now I have a feeling she might be the Clairvoyant or involved somehow. She has always been so sketchy.

I have to say I wasn’t hugely impressed with this episode since Deathlok is still on the loose and we didn’t get a real ID of the Clairvoyant. I guess we will see how things play out next week. I suppose it is a plus that the show is likely to get a second season so the show can continue to improve.

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