The Things We Bury: Whitehall’s Secret Past and Ward Goes Home

Last episode gave us a lot to chew on. We found out what the map is to (sort of), and we got a hint of fugitive Ward’s next move, which involves his brother, and none of that sounded like it would end well for anybody. Season 2 has been excellent in general so far, so I came into The Things We Bury pretty eager, especially since the trailers hinted we’d get to see more of Agent Carter in the mix (for a peek at her upcoming series, go here). What I didn’t expect was an episode that spends so much of its time looking backwards, at Whitehall in 1945, at Ward’s childhood, at Skye’s family, and asks whether any of these people actually get a second chance or just dig up whatever they buried and make it worse. So, what kind of episode did we get? A dark one, mostly, but a good one.

Whitehall in 1945 and a Woman Who Doesn’t Age

We start in Austria in 1945, where Werner Reinhardt (Whitehall these days) is working on unravelling the secrets of the Obelisk, and he’s doing it the HYDRA way, by handing it to villagers one after another and watching it kill them. Then a Chinese woman picks it up and nothing happens to her. Reinhardt wants to cut her open on the spot, but news arrives that the Red Skull is dead and the war is lost, so he decides he’ll have her dissected later. As it turns out, much, much later. The moment she came on screen I was sure this was the woman Whitehall was talking about when he threatened Raina a few weeks back, and the episode doesn’t make me wait too long to find out I was right, which is a horrible thing to be right about.

Present day, and Skye’s dad is behaving quite affably now he’s sitting across a table from Whitehall instead of strangling Raina. He tells him the ‘Diviner’ (so that’s its real name) is much more than a weapon, and that if one of the ‘special’ people takes it to a certain ‘place’ something very ‘cool’ will happen. I loved how vague he keeps it, like a man who knows exactly what he’s holding over everyone in the room and is enjoying the power. Meanwhile Bobbi is interrogating Bakshi back at the Playground, and a slip of his tongue tells her there’s an important connection between Whitehall and the Red Skull. I didn’t see that one coming at all, and it made Whitehall feel a lot older and a lot more dangerous than the polite man in the suit we’ve been watching since the season started.

Peggy Carter, Old Files and a Trip to Oahu

That sends Bobbi and the team digging through the old SSR vaults, which is one of the nice side effects of SHIELD having been gutted when HYDRA came out of hiding earlier this year: they really are living in the attic of the old organisation now, going through its filing cabinets. And what the files tell them is that somehow old Reinhardt discovered the fountain of youth before he became Whitehall. So, how?? To learn that we go back to 1945 again, to an SSR prison called ‘The Rat’, where Agent Carter gets to tell him he’ll be buried and forgotten there, even though he’s offering up everything he knows about the Obelisk and a meteor that crashed in China with ‘blue angels’ that came with it to conquer Earth. Peggy doesn’t buy a word of it, and honestly why would she. It’s a small part for her but she owns every second of it, and it made me even more keen for her own show.

Back to the episode’s main mission, which is gloriously odd. Coulson, Skye, Fitz and Trip head off to Oahu on the Bus to find the alien city, and the plan involves the frankly absurd-sounding delivery of a watch, a button and a task for Fitz to complete, which is putting together a transceiver in less than six minutes. That’s hard when you only have one good hand. For a while I had no idea what any of it was for, and I think that’s deliberate, because Coulson is keeping his cards close this season and the show likes making us feel like the junior agents who just do what they’re told.

Ward Takes His Brother Back to the Well

Then we have Ward and his brother Christian, and this is the hardest part of the episode to watch. Ward kidnaps Christian and drags him back to the family home to dig up the well, the one Christian made Ward push their younger brother into when they were kids. It’s tense and nasty and it goes on for a while, with Ward calm the whole time in that way that’s scarier than shouting. Besides finding out that Christian did it because their mother was cruel to them and loved the little brother more, we don’t really learn anything. Christian apologises, cries, says the right things. Really, it’s ugly and manipulative on both sides, and I couldn’t tell how much of either of them I was supposed to believe, which after the way Ward fooled everyone last season is probably exactly how the show wants me to feel about him.

Which is the point, I suppose, because the episode isn’t done with Ward yet. Later he shows up to talk with Whitehall about rejoining HYDRA to fight SHIELD, you know, as a second chance. Ah, Ward, he’s good, you almost believe him. But then, psycho that he is, it comes out that he’s just murdered his own family, his parents and Christian, and set it up to look like Christian did it and then killed himself. The things we bury indeed. I’d half talked myself into thinking the well scene was Ward trying to heal something, and it turns out it was him getting a confession on the record before he burned the whole lot down.

And then Skye’s dad is brought in to HYDRA and introduced to Ward by a beaming Whitehall, and it’s a beautiful scene, all knowing glances and nasty unspoken stuff underneath, three people who each think they’re using the other two. Ward has just killed his family to get back in the door, Skye’s dad wants his daughter and his revenge, and Whitehall thinks he owns both of them. So, so good. I could happily watch a whole episode of just those three in a room together.

A Watch, a Button and Fitz Is Back

Oh, you actually wanted some action this episode? Really? Okay. The Bus flies on to the Australian Outback and Coulson finally explains what’s going on. Once the radioactive button and the watch get close enough together they hit critical mass and send out a magnetic pulse that takes down the government’s satellite control facility on Oahu. While that station is down, they can use the less secure station out in the Outback to borrow the government’s satellites and scan the planet for the alien city. It’s a properly convoluted heist plan and I enjoyed every bit of how silly it sounds when you say it out loud.

And then there’s the best little moment in the episode. In an awesomely underplayed scene, Fitz suggests that he won’t be able to build the transmitter in time, freaking Coulson out for a minute, then adds… with his bad hand. That’s it, that’s the joke, and it landed perfectly for me because we’ve spent the whole season watching him struggle to finish a sentence. Fitz is officially back! Or at least back enough to tease his boss, which after everything he went through at the bottom of the ocean feels like a big deal.

However, HYDRA, or Skye’s dad anyway, is already there. Trip takes a bad gunshot wound and Skye’s dad, who it turns out really is a doctor, treats him, but he clips one of Trip’s arteries to buy himself time, then gushes about his coming reunion with his daughter before leaving Coulson the medicine needed to save Trip’s life. It’s an awesome exchange between Skye’s surrogate dad and her real one, two men who both think they know what’s best for her, and only one of them is unhinged (most of the time). I’m looking forward to round 2. And… mission success! SHIELD now knows where the alien city is.

Second Chances, Good and Bad

Bobbi’s interrogation ends about as badly as it can. Armed with everything they’ve learned about Whitehall, she makes one last attempt to break Bakshi, threatening to leak it all and credit it to him so HYDRA thinks he talked. Bakshi, however, prefers death to dishonour and goes the old cyanide-capsule-in-the-cheek route, even after they’d checked him for exactly that. Back in the past, after a nifty 44-year time-lapse montage in the Rat, Reinhardt gets rescued by HYDRA agents who tell him they’ve found ‘the woman’. She hasn’t aged a day. So old Reinhardt makes up for lost time and dissects her to earn himself a second chance at life, which is the main theme of this episode explored pretty perversely (not that that’s a bad thing),, and it’s every bit as horrific as I’d feared.

On that theme of second chances, Hunter accuses Bobbi of pushing Bakshi so hard because she was scared he’d let slip her own dirty secrets. Frustrated with her ex’s paranoia, Bobbi asks, “will you never trust me?” He admits that he won’t, but he’ll never stop trying. I guess that’s as close to a declaration of undying love as a spy can expect, since it leads straight to… hot makeup sex!

And one sort of final twist, which was really a confirmation of what I’d already guessed. We get one more trip back in time, 25 years ago, where Skye’s dad comes across his wife’s eviscerated body and swears he’ll do the same to Whitehall and tear him apart. And yes, his wife was the Chinese woman who never aged, Skye’s mom. I’d had a feeling about it since the woman in 1945 picked up the Obelisk and walked away fine, and I’m glad the show didn’t drag it out for another half a season.

This episode was hard viewing at times, at least the first time around, but highly rewarding the second time (so… second chances). The twists at the end weren’t entirely unexpected but they were thrilling anyway, because of how much they add to the characters we’ve been watching all season. And Kyle MacLachlan, wow! He’s been a scene stealer as Skye’s dad, super dark and still somehow engaging every time he’s on screen. Not easy to watch, but well worth it. Watch this episode twice!

Did Ward ever mean any of it at the well, or was getting Christian to confess always part of the plan to frame him? Tell me in the comments.