Tag:

Mockingbird

Who You Really Are: Agents of Shield Gets Lady Sif Back, Minus Her Memory

by Hutch Morzaria March 13, 2015

written by Hutch Morzaria

I look at Who You Really Are, the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode where Lady Sif washes up in Portugal with no memory, chasing a Kree warrior called Vin-Tak, while Skye tries to keep her new powers hidden from everyone except Fitz.

I was really looking forward to this one and came away a bit disappointed. Sif is always badass and there are some fun moments for comic fans, but it felt like filler to me, built around a reveal that could have happened last week and a Kree explanation I’m not sure the show needed.

Hmmm, I have to be honest, I was really looking forward to Who You Really Are. Unlike some other reviewers I really enjoyed last week’s episode, and Lady Sif is always badass and cool, so a Sif episode straight after it should have been a treat. But I came away somewhat disappointed, because this one felt like nothing more than filler to me. The whole reveal of what Skye can do could have been done last week, and while the Kree explanation was OK… it was also somewhat unnecessary, I felt? I might be being too judgmental, so let’s go through the recap and see how we all feel by the end.

We start with Lady Sif coming out of the surf in black leather looking for “Kava” (I actually thought she said coffee the first time I heard it!) and it seems she’s lost her memory. Back at HQ, May and Skye are doing some hard core fighting, but Skye is holding back, and while May thinks it has something to do with Tripp’s death, we all know she’s really worried about what might happen if she loses control. It’s the same fear she was bottling up all through the return from the mid-season break, and Fitz pops up to reinforce it for us, so you can see May starting to wonder a little bit about what’s going on. Elsewhere Hunter and Bobbi are having some “relaxation” time together and Hunter tells her Coulson has offered him a permanent spot on the team. Coulson also offers Mac a bigger field role where he can make better use of his strengths, and even though Mac says he isn’t a huge fan of violence, Coulson manages to talk him round.

Portugal, a fanboy and a brawl on the boardwalk

The team head to Portugal, where Sif is still waiting for Kava, and Coulson has to tell her he isn’t Kava but a friend who can help. There are some cute bits that play on her memory loss, like May mentioning Thor and Sif smiling without knowing why, and her still knowing all the things she learned as a child even though everything recent is gone. Coulson gets out his digital photos of all the good times they had together (ever the fanboy) and she decides to trust him, even though he’s not Kava. Then Skye finds a video on Twitter of Sif in a pretty epic boardwalk brawl with a man who can actually hold his own against her. If she travelled across the universe to find this guy, he must be dangerous.

He’s wielding some sort of small hammer-like tool and uses it to zap her in the chest, she strikes him with her sword, there’s liquid and sparks everywhere, and he throws her into the water. That truncheon put me straight in mind of Ronan’s big hammer in Guardians of the Galaxy last summer, and that’s no accident, because it turns out this guy is Kree too. We then jump to him at a hospital demanding their supplies, and when a nurse tries to stop him he zaps her as well and turns blue. The team track him there from the pier and Bobbi and Skye go in to confront him. Bobbi gets beaten quite soundly, which leaves Skye on her own holding a gun on him, and then the whole room starts to shake and the gun literally falls apart in her hands (quite cool how they did that, I have to say). Before anything else can happen a shelf falls on her and knocks her out, and he gets away.

Secrets, a net and a Kree called Vin-Tak

Back together, the team work out that the man is a Kree, and Sif says a Kree on Earth is up to no good. Skye and Fitz meet to talk about what happened and she says she wants to tell Coulson, but Fitz tells her to wait until they know more. Hunter walks in on their private conversation, though it’s not clear how much he actually heard. And speaking of secret conversations, Bobbi and Mac are having one of their own about bringing Hunter in on their plans, and Mac is adamant that isn’t an option. They make a point of saying their plans aren’t meant to harm SHIELD, have nothing to do with HYDRA, and that “after they pull the trigger” they hope to be friends with SHIELD again. It’s all a little bit too cloak and dagger and it feels forced, to be honest.

The team realise the Kree is in a town in Portugal called Chaves, which means keys in English, and it ties right back into the whole obelisk story. Skye says she’d rather sit this one out because she’s “banged up” after her last encounter, but both Sif and May look a little suspicious and wonder what’s really going on. They capture the Kree with an electronic net and bring him in to question him, and that’s where he tells them his name is Vin-Tak and that he’s actually there to help. His truncheon can restore memories as well as zap people, and the moment he gets his hands back on it he gives Sif hers back.

The Kree explanation, and Skye goes full Quake

Then we get the Kree explanation. They used terrigenesis on a whole bunch of planets to make soldiers for a war they were losing, and while it didn’t work on most of them, on Earth it did, and it created what Vin-Tak calls abominations. He came because he saw the program had started again, and he’s worried the current Kree empire would start it all over, enslaving humans to do their bidding. When the team look in the crate he pulled out of the cave there are enough diviners to make an army, and while we know one has been destroyed, there are still five left. It’s useful to know, and it’s the first time the show has confirmed Hala as the Kree home world, but I keep coming back to the feeling that none of it needed a whole episode.

Lady Sif raises her sword in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Who You Really Are

Vin-Tak says they have to find the diviners and destroy the abominations straight away, and when the talk turns to the event that changed Raina, he and Sif get suspicious the second they learn Skye was there. Scared, Skye starts to rumble the room a bit and again nobody notices, which is really odd, I’d like to think someone would at least take note that the room was starting to tremble again. Then the drama escalates, Skye goes full on Quake and the entire HQ shakes. Coulson turns to her and asks what’s doing this, and he already knows the answer, the look on his face was this torturous sadness because he knows how badly this is going to turn out for her. Skye tells him it’s her, the windows behind her shatter, and May and Coulson are immediately at her side with their guns pointed at Sif and Vin-Tak.

An icer, a Destroyer gun and a trip back to Asgard

Sif and Vin-Tak want to take Skye away, but the team manage to distract them long enough for her to get out. Fitz knocks Vin-Tak down with a big gun (how do you slow down a Kree? Simple, use Coulson’s Destroyer gun) and Bobbi turns his own truncheon on him to wipe his memory. Meanwhile Sif breaks into the cell where Skye is hiding, but Skye shoots herself with one of the icers, and that’s what makes Sif realise she isn’t evil. Coulson finds them and explains that Skye would rather hurt herself than bring harm to any of them, and that she can be trusted with her powers. I did like that the gun falling apart earlier and the shattering windows show her powers aren’t really about earth at all, it’s shockwaves and vibrations, which is a nice touch if you know where Daisy Johnson ends up in the comics.

Sif takes Vin-Tak back to Asgard and it’s assumed he’ll be sent home minus his memory, which is quite a pity as he was only trying to do the right thing, and now he won’t know that or anything else either! Sif tells Coulson that Asgard is significantly more advanced than Earth when it comes to science (I’m glad they say science and not magic) and warns him there are tides in the universe you can’t swim against. That line made me think straight away of the Rising Tide, the hacker group Skye used to work with back in season one, and I’m not sure if it’s a hint they’re coming back or just a little Easter egg about her past. Coulson also points out that the city is underwater, so even though there are more diviners out there they can’t be used, which had me asking why exactly they can’t be used underwater?

Everybody finding out who everybody is

Back at HQ everyone is cleaning up and they all lay into Fitz for not telling them. Mac says they need to be protected from Skye, she overhears it, and she shuts herself away in isolation for the moment. Simmons, meanwhile, has made the icers stronger with a higher concentration of dendrotoxin, which could be really dangerous for whoever’s on the other end, and sadly she sees that as necessary for dealing with the Inhumans. Later Mac is working on something when Hunter confronts him about the whole secret with Bobbi, and Mac gets him into a choke hold and knocks him out, which was a side of the big guy I hadn’t seen before. So this was an episode about people finding out who each other really are, not just Sif and Skye, with the discord between Fitz and Simmons carrying on and the Mac, Bobbi and Hunter love triangle really coming to the fore.

There’s plenty for comic fans to chew on too. Vin-Tak doesn’t seem to be based on a specific Kree from the comics, but his name follows the usual Kree pattern (Mar-Vell, Yon-Rogg and the rest) and the idea of violent Kree splinter groups is well established. His seek-and-capture mission makes him feel more like a Pursuer than an Accuser like Ronan. And the Kava and Chaves thing was fun once it clicked, Kava turning out to be the Kree word for keys, which leads them to Chaves, the Portuguese word for keys. Sif smiling at Thor’s name without knowing why is a nod to their on-and-off romance in the comics as well, and to the one plenty of us have been hoping for in the films.

But even with all that, for me it ended up a bit flat, with a lot of telling and not much showing. Was there anything earth shattering presented in this episode? I really don’t think we learnt anything new, or at least nothing of significance, and while it seems like lots happened, it all revolved around something that could have been done in the previous episode.

OK so if you’ve stayed with me till now, what do you think? Was Who You Really Are a simple filler like I said at the start, or did the Kree backstory make it worth it for you? And should Skye have told Coulson the truth straight away instead of leaving Fitz to keep her secret? Tell me in the comments.

March 13, 2015 2 comments

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

by Hutch Morzaria December 4, 2014

written by Hutch Morzaria

I look at …Ye Who Enter Here, the ninth episode of Agents of SHIELD season 2 and the last stop before the winter finale, where Coulson splits the team between the hidden city and a rescue mission for Raina, Skye gets her first proper conversation with Raina about her past, and Mack finds out what’s waiting at the bottom of the hole.

I loved that the show didn’t drag its feet with the alien city this time, and while the Skye fight and the closing HYDRA order didn’t do much for me, I thought it was another really good episode that gets us one step closer to finding out who Skye really is.

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.

Coulson and Bobbi on the old city walls looking for the hidden city in Agents of SHIELD Ye Who Enter Here

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.

December 4, 2014 2 comments

Marvel Television

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

by Hutch Morzaria November 20, 2014

written by Hutch Morzaria

I look at The Things We Bury, the eighth episode of Agents of SHIELD season 2, where Whitehall’s Nazi past finally gets told, Agent Carter turns up in the 1945 flashbacks, Ward goes home to settle things with his brother, and Coulson sends the team on a strange watch-and-button mission to find the alien city.

I found it hard going the first time and much better the second, and I think the end-of-episode twists, the Ward and Skye’s dad pairing and Kyle MacLachlan’s scene-stealing turn make it well worth watching twice.

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.

November 20, 2014 4 comments

Raina across the dinner table from Coulson in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. A Hen in the Wolf House

Marvel Television

A Hen in the Wolf House: A Deadly Wedding and a HYDRA Mole Hunt

by Hutch Morzaria October 24, 2014

written by Hutch Morzaria

I look at A Hen in the Wolf House, episode five of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season two, where Simmons’s cover inside HYDRA starts to crack, Raina tries to bargain with Coulson over dinner and Skye finally gets some answers about her dad and Coulson’s carvings.

I thought it was back to the season premiere form after a couple of weaker weeks. The countdown in the restaurant had real tension, the tone flowed from comedy to drama and back, and Mockingbird’s arrival was perfect.

The last two episodes of SHIELD have slid a little bit from the opening pair, a little too formulaic, a little heavy in the foreshadowing, and trying a little too hard. So the question going into A Hen in the Wolf House was whether this one would buck the downward trend or give the season the boost back up to how the first two worked. There’s been news that another classic Marvel character is joining the team, which had my hopes up. Still, the continuing bad punmanship in the episode titles has me wondering, because “a hen in the wolf house” is about as subtle as a brick, and you don’t need to be a genius to work out which of our agents is the hen.

It’s Simmons, obviously. Ever since she turned up working in a HYDRA lab back in Making Friends and Influencing People I’ve been waiting for the moment her cover blows, and this is the episode where the walls really start closing in. She’s doing dead drops for Coulson, smiling politely at Whitehall and working next to a lab partner who gets a bit too excited about the idea of killing millions of people, and you can see on her face that every day in there costs her something. Which is a lot to carry for a character who spent most of season one being the nice, slightly nervous one in the lab coat.

The other thread that’s been building is Coulson and the carvings. He’s been etching strange symbols into things since he came back, and after the stolen painting business last week it’s clear the same alien writing is turning up everywhere he looks, and he still hasn’t told the team what’s going on with him. I like that the show is letting that sit and fester rather than explaining it straight away, though it does mean there’s a lot of Coulson being cagey with people who deserve better from him. And it’s Skye who’s about to run out of patience with that.

A wedding and a very bad week for Raina

A Hen in the Wolf House starts off strong with a wedding reception that goes horribly, horribly wrong. I’ve been to very few that ended this badly, honest. Ironically it goes disappointingly for HYDRA as well, as their reverse-engineering of what the Obelisk does only killed eight of the guests. Only eight! So disappointing, Whitehall will likely have to call a meeting. Back at SHIELD the dead turn out to be a naval anti-HYDRA team, and Skye notices that Coulson has been etching something suspicious on his desk, the same kind of symbols that were hidden in the painting in Face My Enemy, and starts to question him, but he shuts her down, and May warns him that keeping her in the dark won’t end well.

To be fair, Skye isn’t the whiny kid he hired on a whim anymore, is she? And yes, that’s a very, very good thing for us watching the show. But still, as has been said, death follows her around. Then we shift to Skye’s dad, who’s doing back alley surgery on a thug for a pal of his when Raina turns up and pleads to borrow the Obelisk back to save herself from Whitehall. He freaks out over the fact that she still hasn’t made good on her promise to bring him Skye, almost strangles her, refuses to hand the Obelisk over and sends her back to Whitehall to beg for mercy. It’s a powerful, if brutal, scene to watch, and he’s a long way from the usual Marvel scientist, since he seems to genuinely enjoy the mayhem he causes.

Back at HYDRA we’re treated to a reference to Bessie the Hellcow (a potential ex-wife of Hunter’s? she’d literally qualify as a demonic hellbeast), before Simmons and her lab partner are called up to a meeting with Whitehall, who talks glowingly about his plans for the Obelisk. He asks Simmons for her thoughts on the problem and is pleased with what she tells him, and her creepy lab partner is gleefully happy at the idea that they could kill millions. Yeah, I think Simmons might be thinking about putting in her two weeks notice. And Raina, now highly motivated to save her skin, spots Simmons making a dead drop for SHIELD and arranges an appointment with Coulson, which is about the worst news Simmons could get.

The mole hunt and a two minute countdown

Conversations between Hunter and Skye are the best. We get one this time that takes in the painting, aliens, Coulson, Hunter’s ex (again) and a suggestion to keep digging, and that leads to another session with Ward, funnily enough. She doesn’t believe Raina knows how to find her father, but he does disturb her when she realises Coulson might be going the way of Garrett. So Skye confronts Coulson, and Coulson comes clean, including admitting he’s been monitoring her and that the idea she might be an alien seemed worth checking, to which Skye replies “Well, epic fail!” which made me laugh out loud.

Mirroring all this, a certain Bobbi Morse turns up with Bakshi as part of a HYDRA mole-hunting unit, and she ratchets the tension right up by singling out Simmons. Simmons manages to frame her creepy lab partner instead, and we feel no sympathy for him at all. Nope, none at all. Meanwhile Coulson meets Raina for dinner, with Skye, Hunter and May hiding in the restaurant kitchen listening in, and he doesn’t bend in the slightest when Raina threatens to give Simmons up to HYDRA.

The two minute countdown is effectively suspenseful, especially when May has to physically hold Skye back after Raina mentions her dad. Raina literally begs Coulson to stop the countdown and he stands firm, while back at HYDRA Bobbi keeps terrorising Simmons and really seems to be enjoying herself. Then Raina’s evidence goes up on every HYDRA monitor and Simmons is running for her life with Bakshi and a handful of armed guards behind her. Okay, stop for a moment and think about this, because Coulson just gambled one of his own people on the idea that Raina would blink first. Right, back to the recap.

Enter Mockingbird

Simmons is about to be captured when she’s saved by Bobbi, who by coincidence (okay, not really) is also a SHIELD mole inside HYDRA, and we get a perfect demo of why she’s a relatively big name Marvel hero, Mockingbird, with the batons out and HYDRA guards on the floor. She gets Simmons up to the roof and the two of them escape with the help of Trip and SHIELD’s cloaked Quinjet. Bobbi has also handily grabbed Simmons’s hard drive after their bathroom conversation, so this is a solid win for SHIELD. It’s the first proper look at her in a fight and it’s exactly the kind of comic accurate moment I was hoping for when the casting news broke.

Bobbi Morse on the HYDRA mole hunt in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. A Hen in the Wolf House

Skye’s dad and a map on the wall

Back at the restaurant a now very worried Raina begs for Coulson’s protection, but he tags her with a tracking device instead and demands she tells him where to find Skye’s dad and leads him to Whitehall. Then Coulson and May realise Skye has disappeared. Where is she? Already at her dad’s abandoned hideout, where she finds, with Coulson and the others close behind, the bodies of the two men her father viciously murdered. And watching on a hidden camera, her dad, who clearly doesn’t mind the killing one bit, realises to his own horror that the daughter he’s spent decades trying to get back to now knows he’s a monster.

Skye promises Coulson she’ll do whatever it takes to stop him, as long as Coulson stops hiding things from her, and he finally shows her the carving on his wall. He doesn’t have any idea what it is, and Skye tells him she thinks it’s a map, which is the sort of little cliffhanger I’m happy to be left with. Back at the Playground Simmons gushes over Bobbi, and then Coulson announces that she’s joining the team. Simmons goes to see Fitz, and it’s a strained, awkward reunion, he’s still plenty angry at her for leaving him and she looks guilty enough to know she deserves it.

Mack is pleased that Bobbi has joined the team, and Hunter is a lot less pleased. Why? Remember that she-devil ex-wife he’s been going on about? Yeah, he used to be married to Mockingbird. And worse, she admits she was the one who told Coulson he was worth vouching for, which is a lovely way to land the joke after weeks of Hunter moaning about her. Lastly Skye’s dad shows up at Whitehall’s office, murders a couple of guards and then agrees to ally himself with the HYDRA leader, even offering to teach him how to survive the Obelisk, which he says is called the Diviner in its creators’ native tongue. Why? All to help them kill Coulson (oh, and) “everyone else”.

Back to premiere form

This episode is back to the season premiere form. For the first time in a couple of episodes the action and music weren’t at odds with each other, the situations didn’t feel forced and the suspense was palpable, and the restaurant countdown alone had more tension in it than the last two weeks put together. The tone flowed effortlessly too, with great transitions from comedy to drama to action and back again, so you get Hunter’s ex-wife jokes and Skye’s dad strangling Raina in the same hour and neither feels out of place. Plus, as Mockingbird, Adrianne Palicki was perfect, and her chemistry with the gang already feels natural. Awesome.

So, Bobbi turning out to be SHIELD all along, and Hunter’s ex-wife on top of that, did you see either of those coming, or did the news about Mockingbird joining give it away for you? Tell me in the comments.

October 24, 2014 2 comments