…Ye Who Enter Here: Raina on the Run and a Temple Under the City

One good thing about Agents of SHIELD is that it isn’t afraid to change. In the next to last episode before the winter break (and the start of Marvel’s Agent Carter), …Ye Who Enter Here doesn’t waste any time with the whole hidden city plotline, unlike season 1, which would have strung this out for another six weeks at least. That’s quite refreshing. The carving on the walls (and on skin) from the previous few episodes was necessary, I get that, but it did tend to drag on a bit, and I’m sure you wanted to find out what was going on as much as I did. So this week we finally go to the city, HYDRA follows us there, and a lot of people end up somewhere they really didn’t plan to be.

Where We Left Things: Carvings and a Satellite Heist

Quick catch-up, because the last couple of episodes put a lot of pieces on the board. In The Writing on the Wall, the tattooed man had picked up an artist who was trying to remember how she knew him, and “I do some carving now and then,” he tells her, before taking off his shirt and pulling out a knife, which is about as creepy as this show has ever been. Then in The Things We Bury Coulson’s odd plan finally made sense: once the radioactive button and the watch got close enough to reach critical mass, the magnetic pulse took down the government’s satellite control facility on Oahu, and while that station was down the team used the less secure one in the Australian Outback to borrow the satellites and find the alien city. And it worked. So by the time this episode starts, SHIELD knows where the city is, and so, it turns out, does everybody else.

In …Ye Who Enter Here we get a much more detailed look at what has to be Attilan, or some other Inhuman place from the comics. The show never says the name, but there are enough clues by now: last episode’s ‘blue angels’, and this week Raina talking about the Kree, which ties it straight back to the alien race that created the Inhumans in the comics by experimenting on prehistoric humans. Raina herself is in a bad way. The last time we really saw her she was begging Skye’s dad for the Obelisk and getting nearly strangled for her trouble, then crawling back to Whitehall, and since then she’s had nowhere left to run that HYDRA can’t follow. I don’t think I’ve ever felt sorry for Raina before, but this week I came close.

Raina on the Run from the Woman With May’s Face

We open with Raina having coffee with a friend when she notices she’s being tailed by Melinda May. Except when she gets a proper look, she realises quickly that this isn’t May at all, it’s Agent 33, the SHIELD agent HYDRA brainwashed into compliance a few weeks back, who has kept May’s face from the mask, only half of it now, with the other half gone somewhat reptilian where the tech got damaged. It’s a properly unsettling look and I love that the show didn’t just quietly fix it between episodes. Realising HYDRA has found her, Raina runs from the coffee shop and gets saved by Billy Koenig and a cloaking umbrella, which is exactly the kind of silly SHIELD gadget I want more of, and Koenig is as funny as ever in the bit of screen time he gets.

Meanwhile Coulson has split the team into two groups, one to find the hidden city and destroy it, and the other to save Raina from the clutches of HYDRA. Skye wants to go to the city, of course she does, it’s where all her answers are supposed to be. But Coulson makes her see that Raina will open up to her in a way she never would with anyone else on the team, because Raina has known about Skye’s dad all along and has been dangling that over her for a whole season. Skye agrees, a bit grudgingly, and heads off to get Raina. I liked that Coulson didn’t just order her to go, he’s careful with Skye this season in a way he isn’t with anyone else, and you can see he knows how much the city means to her. The other team gets the heavy hitters, Bobbi and Mack and Fitz and Simmons, and you can tell from the way Coulson talks about the mission that he expects the city to be the dangerous half of the job. He’s right about that, as it turns out, just not in the way anyone expected.

Skye and Raina Finally Talk

When she gets there, Skye is confronted by Agent 33, and we get a fight sequence a lot like the May vs. May fight in Face My Enemy. Skye does quite well too, until she’s eventually knocked out, and then Hunter turns up and knocks out Agent 33 himself. Weirdly, though, the Skye fight didn’t look nearly as realistic as the May vs. May one did. Maybe it’s because we know Skye’s still learning and the choreography has to show that, or maybe it was just shot quicker, but it felt a bit stagey to me where the earlier one felt like two people really trying to hurt each other.

Skye’s interrogation of Raina, on the other hand, actually worked quite well. Mostly that’s because Skye’s own interest in her past and her disgust with the man her father is turn out to be things Raina can actually speak to, so for once the two of them aren’t just circling each other. When Raina works out from their conversation that HYDRA now has the Diviner, she tells Skye why they want her: she can touch it and survive, and it’s only by taking it to the city that her full potential will be unlocked. That’s the most honest Raina has been since we met her, and it’s interesting that it’s Skye she’s honest with.

Raina also tells Skye the stories her grandmother used to tell her about the Kree and their plan to destroy humanity, and that if the unworthy were to enter the temple they would be destroyed! Unfortunately before Skye can warn the other team, the plane is surrounded by four HYDRA Quinjets. Ward, now working for Whitehall, has traced the signal from Raina’s tracker and comes aboard the Bus to collect her, promising the Quinjets won’t attack if they hand over Raina and Skye. Skye realises she’s got no choice and agrees to go with him. Ward and Skye in the same room again is always uncomfortable, and that’s before you remember where he’s taking her.

Mack Goes Down the Hole

While all this is going on, the other team has found a way into the underground temple, but when Fitz sends his flying drones into the hole they lose the signal. Mack, on his first proper field mission I think, goes down to investigate, and when he crouches to look at the drones he touches the ground and something happens. The glowing symbols on the floor spread out, Mack screams in real pain and curls up in a ball, and by the time the team haul him up he’s changed into something else (something Inhuman, perhaps??). He attacks straight away, and easily beats them hand to hand with strength and reflexes nobody should have, until Bobbi finally stuns him into submission and he falls back down the shaft. It’s a nasty moment because Mack had just started to feel like part of the team.

OK, as I said at the start, lots happening in this episode, and if you got up at any point you were going to miss something. I did have a couple of gripes. The sequence where Whitehall tells Agent 33 to destroy the Bus anyway, despite Ward’s promise, was a bit m’eh, it just didn’t feel important enough to end the episode on when we’d just watched Mack get turned into something by an alien temple. And I’m genuinely not sure what’s happened to Mack. Has he become something new, something Inhuman, or is he simply the city’s defences brought to life, using whoever wanders in? Raina’s line about the unworthy makes me lean towards the second one, but I wouldn’t bet on it with this show.

Still, another really good episode, and one that brings us one step closer to the grand reveal as well as explaining who Skye really is. Season 1 would have made us wait until May for half of this. I came out of it wanting the next one straight away, with Skye on her way to meet her dad, Raina in HYDRA’s hands and Mack at the bottom of a hole, and a week feels like a long time to wait. Bring on the winter finale.

What do you think happened to Mack down in the temple, is he something new or just the city defending itself? Tell me in the comments.