‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D’ 1.09 Episode Recap and Review: Repairs

The team is seeing ghosts at 30,000 feet on this week’s episode of Agents of SHIELD!

The Bus is sent to Utah to investigate the appearance of a possible telekinetic. Mysterious and terrible things are happening around a particular woman after an explosion in the particle accelerator that she was managing. (Side note: I try not to imagine that there were also “mysterious and terrible things” happening when Ward and May made the beast with two backs, as they have evidently been doing on multiple occasions since last episode.) When the team arrives, there’s a small mob gathered outside Hannah’s house. As the mob gets angrier, a nearby cop car starts moving on its own, scaring the crowd. May decides to skip the whole “talking her down” thing and just tranqs Hannah for transport back to the Bus.

Hannah thinks that everything that’s happened, from the accelerator explosion to the cop car, is her fault and that God is no longer protecting her from demons. There’s a brief attempt to explain how telekinesis isn’t demonic, but it pretty much falls flat when the crew starts seeing what appears to be an actual demon. (For the record, my notes on this scene include the phrase, “ZOMG!Demon! Need some Winchesters up in this business!”)

The “demon” looks remarkably like Tobias Ford, one of the workers who was killed in the particle accelerator explosion. Evidently, the researchers were working on a way to recreate the massive Portal game that was the last 30 minutes of Thor: The Dark World. Ford is phasing between our world and whichever one the accelerator was somehow able to access. The main issue here is that whenever he’s in our world, he’s doing his level best to take out the SHIELD team and get to Hannah, who’s locked in the Cage for her own protection. He phases in long enough to attack most of the crew and ground the plane.

May decides that it’s time to Get Things Done and takes Hannah off the Bus in order to draw Tobias out. It works, leading to a fairly epic May vs. Ghost fight. To her surprise, Tobias breaks off the fight in order to rescue Hannah from a falling timber. As it turns out, he hasn’t been haunting Hannah, he’s been trying to protect her. He even accidentally caused the explosion that “killed” him by loosening key bolts just so that Hannah would have to come down and talk to him. It’s kind of sweet, in a ridiculously creepy and ultimately tragic way.

Back on the Bus, Skye makes an intuitive leap to figure out that everything Tobias has been doing was an attempt to get Hannah to notice him, even back before the explosion. She leads the team to where May, Hannah, and Tobias are having their showdown just in time to watch May talk Tobias into leaving Hannah alone. Skye is left with an improved understanding of how May works, and May is a little closer to finding the person she was before she was broken (hence the episode title).

I have a theory (that it’s a demon. A dancing demon! No, wrong Joss show.) Seriously, though. I have a theory about Skye now. I think that Skye is Joss’s homage to Wesley Crusher, circa first season of Star Trek: TNG. Think about it! A young prodigy, accepted into a highly-trained organization without undergoing any sort of their own training, who magically appears to “know better” than any of the adults in the room. It fits! Which may mean that we’ll be dealing with Skye off and on until she actually goes to the Academy sometime in season 4. Curses.

After the events of this episode, I’m actually not sure why Coulson hasn’t sent Skye to the Academy (especially now that we know there is one). He seems to be training her as an agent, but isn’t there an entire subset of SHIELD that’s better suited to handling that particular task? I mean, everyone else on the plane went through it. The only ones who are having trouble in the field are the two who graduated early. Wouldn’t it just make sense to send her on?

Other than all of that, Agents of SHIELD really seems to be picking up speed. I’m enjoying the episodes more and more, and am even starting to look forward to Tuesday nights again. Well done, guys!

Best Quotes:

Fitz: “Obviously, I rigged this little beauty before I knew there was a dimension-jumping psychopath in the mix.”

Ward: “That isn’t a word in our language!”
Simmons: “Our language. You mean the English language, first spoken in England?”
Ward: “She used her British-ness against us!”

Things to Ponder:

  • Is Tobias dead, then? Or did they just convince him to stick it out in whatever alien hell-dimension he was jumping to?
  • I thought I’d been spelling “aglet” wrong for years. Turns out that “aiglet” is also an acceptable spelling. Thanks, Google!
  • There will come a day when I can see someone wearing a gas mask and not immediately think, “Are you my mummy?” But it is not THIS day!

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