I spent a good deal of time after Tuesday’s episode reflecting on what I wanted to write about. This episode continued a few stories from last week and reintroduced some characters we hadn’t seen yet.
The most notable of which were Agent May and Ward. As we’d heard from last week’s episode, May had disappeared and no one knew where she went. This week we discovered she wound up at her father’s place taking care of him after a hit and run accident broke his hip.
It’s worth noting that May’s father was played by James Hong, famed Hollywood actor. You’d probably recognize his voice from movies like Mulan and Kung Fu Panda as well as other famous Hollywood films.
The problem with May being with her father is she’s still paranoid. Even he can see something is wrong. She claims to want a normal life, yet answers the door with a knife in her hand. So clearly something is up. She’s not nearly as secretive as she thinks.
And from what Hunter later tells her Ward is bugging her. He’s still out there and still a threat. In fact she believes he might have been behind the accident her father was involved in. So the two decide to team up and hunt Ward. This should be an interesting storyline, since the two didn’t exactly get along last season. May’s always been untrustworthy of everyone so she and Hunter make an unlikely pair.
Moving on to Ward. He’s turned into something of a bore; at least in this episode. Most of his dialogue is all about being lean and realizing your true self. It was a bit too on the nose for my taste, but hey, we got to see the son of Baron Von Strucker (that short-lived monocle guy in AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON), Werner Von Strucker. While having the appearance of a spineless trust fun boy, underneath he’s more like his father than we thought. Judging by the last scene of the episode, he appears to be an integral part of Ward’s plan to bring Hydra back into the world.
Of course, I have to wonder what that’s all about. At the moment Ward seems like a man without an ideology despite all the poetic waxing he was doing in the episode. My hope is he grows into a character who wants something more in life than just to take down Coulson. I’m not even sure why he wants to take down Coulson but this is only the second episode so there’s plenty of time for his plan to be revealed.
I’m almost five hundred words in and I haven’t even talked about the biggest part of the episode. The majority of the episode was about getting Simmons back. At the beginning we picked up right where we left off at the end of Episode 1. Fitz was screaming at the alien monolith and he is pulled away with some sand on his hand!
The sand links them to another planet. They don’t know where, but they know it’s not of this world. So they go to the only person they can think of to help them understand this: the Berserker! For those who may not remember, the Berserker is an Asgardian who decided to stay on Earth after accidentally winding up there and falling in love. He was part of the show’s first season and was in the series’ THOR: THE DARK WORLD tie-in episode.
Once they convince the Berserker to help them, the crew move on to England. It’s here they discover a lab where some people in the 19th century figured out how to control the monolith with vibrations. Well who do we know that can control vibrations? Daisy of course! (Not Skye as she reminds everyone.)
I wondered for a bit if they would actually figure out how to get Simmons back here or if we would have to wait a few more episodes. Nope. After Fitz decided to go bungie-jumping into the abyss, he and Simmons found each other and the pair were reunited. It’s interesting to note the Berserker was concerned by Daisy’s abilities and seemed visibly concerned when Coulson mentioned that she was an Inhuman. This makes sense, given the fact that Sif was sent from Asgard in order to hunt a Kree. The Inhumans are weaponized creations of the Kree so it would figure the Asgardians would have issues with that.
Looping back around to Simmons, one last time, my hope is we get an idea of what went on while she was on that planet. How did she survive? What did she eat? What was chasing her? How did she change? Simmons seems to be the character the show experiments most with and I’m interested to see what they do with her.
Written by Peter Freeman, AGENTS OF SHIELD Beat Writer
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