Friday, April 25, 2014

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. 1.19: "The Only Light in the Darkness"

“You’re safe. I’m still here, I promise. I’m still here with you.”
- Coulson

So we are already seeing ramifications from Ward’s SO (whose name I just now remembered is Garett) setting all the prisoners in the Fridge loose. We see a guy who seems to be able to control energy and electricity. He kills a guy and steals his truck so he can drive to Portland. If they weren’t on different networks I would totally advocate a SHIELD/Grimm crossover. Anyway, it seems we have our external bad guy for the episode. Back at the secret base, Simmons is patching Ward up and he’s feeding the team a version of the truth about what happened. He doesn’t mention Agent Hand and he says that Garrett is now a corpse. When he reveals that prisoners are no longer locked up. Coulson immediately insists Skye do some research and it turns out our electricity stealer is named Marcus Daniels and Coulson knows where he’s going. He wants to take a small team to hunt him down. The rest of the team, including Patton Oswalt’s character is not happy about this. Patton won’t let them leave until they pass the mother of all lie detectors. It’s pretty amusing actually to see the gang answer questions and reveal little bits of information about themselves. Fitz has a thing for Simmons, Ward 2.0 is the grandson of one of the soldiers that fought with Captain America back in the day and if she washed up on a deserted island and found a box, Simmons would find the TARDIS inside. I had to laugh. I loved it!

So everyone but Ward has been cleared and given lanyards so they can move about the base freely. His test is going to be interesting. We get to the question about why he’s there since SHIELD no longer exists and his answers set off the detector. It prompts Patton’s character to pull out a gun and ask a few follow-up questions. Ward finally says that he’s there for Skye and that seems to be enough to earn him a lanyard. Elsewhere on base, Coulson is prepping FitzSimmons and Ward 2.0 for the mission to find Daniels. He explains that they only caught him the last time by overloading him with pure light. May is annoyed that Coulson didn’t ask her to fly the mission and he still gives her the cold shoulder. He tells her to either follow his orders or get out. Something tells me she’s going to ditch the team. Before they leave, Ward tells Fitz to come clean with Simmons about how he feels. Yeah, as much as I want him to, he’s not going to be that confident in himself.

The team gets to Portland and finds the woman that Daniels is obsessed with (Audrey Nathan) just in time to get her away from him. Unfortunately, Daniels was subjected to experiments at the Fridge that made his power stronger. Not something you really want to hear. While Fitz is trying to reconfigure the devices he rigged up to produce pure light, Simmons is talking to Audrey and quickly becomes clear that she fell in love with a SHIELD agent and that agent is one Phil Coulson. Oh and did I mention she’s played by the always lovely Amy Acker? It’s nice to see her not being so crazy for a change. Fitz suggests that Coulson tell Audrey that he’s still alive but Coulson is hesitant to disrupt her grieving/moving on process. It’s clear that he misses her, though. And it sounds like he may have to put Audrey at risk if they want to have any hope of catching Daniels. Since the guy is super obsessed with her, they will lure him out. He never missed a performance or a rehearsal. I read an interview with Amy before this episode aired where she talked about trying to learn to play the cello and how she didn’t really learn much. I find that very interesting because the shots of her actually playing looked damn convincing. The team gets lucky and they manage to make Daniels disintegrate with all the extra energy they’re pouring into him. Coulson even gets to comfort Audrey as she regains consciousness. His one little moment of being with her again. It was so very sweet.

While the team is having success in the outside world, things are getting super sketchy at the secret base. May fixes the fuel line on the Bus and then peaces out on her own. Skye figures out that the lanyards are tracking them in the facility which somehow leads to her wanting to hack NSA satellites. Ward thinks it might be a good idea although I really doubt he thinks that because if she can get a decent enough feed of the Fridge when it was being raided, she might figure him out. He does try to get close to Skye, sort of rushing into a relationship just so he can decrypt the password on the hard drive. I guess he’s kind of happy the rest of the team is gone so he doesn’t actually have to kill them if Skye doesn’t give up the password. I’m still rooting for him to die by the end of the season.

It turns out decrypting said hard drive is going to be even harder because not only does it require a password but it has to be unlocked at specific coordinates. Yikes that’s complicated! Unfortunately, Ward takes an opportunity to kill Patton’s character and stashes him in a closet. He doesn’t count on Skye using the tech in the lanyards to find the dead agent. She realizes that her potential love interest is really Hydra and she panics and freaks out for a few minutes before pulling herself together. She runs into Ward and he lies to her, saying that he got a call from Fitz and that they are needed in Portland. It’s just a ploy to get her on the Bus so he can find a way to get her to take him to the coordinates to decrypt the drive. For her part, Skye acts like nothing is amiss. I have to give her credit she’s good at playing people. Especially since she did earlier in the season as part of Rising Tide. But I can’t imagine what’s going to go down next week. On the flight back to the base, Coulson realizes he needs to forgive May. Well that’s going to be a little tough, Phil, since she’s gone. They get back to the base to find the rest of the team and the Bus missing. Oh boy. Speaking of May, she’s walking along a road in Canada and her mom picks her up. She’s going to see to Agent Maria Hill. I can’t wait to see what she brings to the table, given the last time we saw her she seemed to be gaining employment with Stark Industries.

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