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Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Review – Ye Who Enter Here – Season 2, Episode 9

By Nick Tylwalk

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No, I’m not Christina Roberts. Sorry about that. She’ll be back next week for the midseason finale, but for right now, she’s enjoying the Most Magical Place on Earth. I think I’m allowed to use that tagline here since I’m writing about a Disney show.

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I’ll do my best to fill in for her as we explore “Ye Who Enter Here,” which sees Director Coulson and his team attempt to explore the secret city that his weird alien carvings told him to find. If you’re a regular viewer, that doesn’t sound weird at all.

Twists and turns await, so …

Not-So-Short Summary: We open with Skye running through the strangely abandoned S.H.I.E.L.D. base. Something’s not right. Ah, I get it. it’s a dream, and a strange one at that, with Coulson and May leaving a baby behind and a weird box that starts turning Skye to stone when she picks it up. She’s really on the Bus, awakened by Coulson as there’s a briefing to attend.

Mac is driving a tiny, remote control version of Lola through the hallways, revealing to Fitz that he still hopes to tinker with the real thing at some point. He looks in and sees Bobbi and Lance flirting and mentions that there’s a storm coming. Speaking of dysfunctional relationships, Mac also tells Fitz he’ll have to talk to Simmons.

She’s busy sewing up Triplett, who you might recall nearly dying last episode. Skye walks in just as their conversation turns to her psycho dad, which would be awkward if she didn’t agree with their assessment. She’s got a vibe that something really bad is going to happen. Lazy foreshadowing from the writers? We’ll see.

At Coulson’s briefing, we get a small info dump about the city they’re seeking and how Hydra doesn’t know where it is, though the bad guys do have the obelisk. The entrance to the city is in Puerto Rico, of all places.

In Vancouver, Raina is running a con on some poor guy when she bumps into May. Only that’s not May, it’s the imposter May from a few episodes back, still sporting the half-burnt face she got at the hands of the real thing.Whitehall wants his people to bring Raina in, but she gets away thanks to Agent Koenig and a … stealth umbrella? That’s kind of cool.

Both Koenig brothers (they’ll become a running joke throughout) fill in Coulson on the situation with Raina. May and Skye are watching a news report about the death of Senator Christian Ward and his parents, and both agree that Grant Ward had to be involved. When Coulson announces that he’s splitting the team, Skye assumes it’s to go after Ward, but it’s really to extract Raina. May knows why Coulson wants Skye away from the city: to keep her away from her father.

Now it’s time for the feels! Bobbi Morse, of all people, has a heart to heart with Jemma about her relationship, or lack thereof, with Fitz. Though she’s not the best person to be giving that kind of advice, Bobbi suggests that Simmons at least needs to be honest with the man she says used to be her best friend.

Skye hugs Coulson before the city-hunting team departs. In the cockpit, Mac and Bobbi talk about how things are going between her and Lance, and she says there are no plans to bring her ex in on “that other thing.” Wonder what that’s about?

Back to Vancouver, where Billy and Sam Koenig help May take out random Hydra grunts. Skye ends battling Fake May (she’s really Agent 33, but I like Fake May better), and gives a pretty good account of herself. Just as she’s about to lose the fight, Hunter appears to bail Skye out. He says he’ll go look for the real May.

Coulson and Morse are on the ground in Puerto Rico, where Bobbi expresses her concern that if they find a weapon in the city, they might recover it instead of destroying it. He replies that he’s not Fury, backing that up by mentioning that there are no acceptable civilian casualties. Phil would rather use a scalpel than a shotgun, but if he needs the latter, that’s why he has Bobbi.

And it’s time for “The Talk,” as Mac leaves Fitz and Simmons alone. It turns one-sided pretty quickly, with Fitz offering to leave the lab so she can be in charge. He says he can work for her but not with her, and Jemma turns teary-eyed but is mostly speechless.

Meanwhile, Raina and Skye are having some quality time together. Raina says that not only can she hold the obelisk (she calls it “the Diviner”) without being harmed, Skye can too. Once she figures out that Hydra is hunting for her because they need her to help use the obelisk to unlock the temple, she actually wants Hydra to come get her, but May arrives in a van and slams into those poor bozos. Alas, the bad guys have put a tracker on one of them, and Whitehall says he’ll send in his best man to pursue them.

AT HQ, the Koenig brothers have some fun with Triplett. In Puerto Rico, since there’s a legend scaring away the locals, it’s up to Fitz and Simmons’ dwarfs to scope out the bottom of an Indiana Jones-like pit. That is, of course, unless something makes them power down as soon as they start sending back data. Someone’s going to have to go down there …

Raina keeps ranting to Skye, calling her dad misunderstood. She gives some back story on meeting him as well, saying he took her in along with some of her con men friends, but not to replace Skye, as no one could ever do that.

The Bus finds itself surrounded by Hydra Quinjets despite its cloaking device thanks to the tracker. Whitehall says his representative will be coming aboard to claim Raina.

It’s Mac who ends up in a harness to go down into the pit, and it’s probably bad that we cut quickly back to Skye being told by Raina that anyone not worthy to enter the city should probably have said their goodbyes. For the first time on the show, Raina talks about legends of blue-skinned visitors called the Kree.

Sure enough, Mac touches some runes inside the temple and immediately starts screaming in agony as the weird symbols appear on his hand and arm,

The team hauls Mac up, and he tells them to run. He’s got weird glowing eyes, and as Coulson finds out the hard way, super strength.

On the Bus, the “top man” Whitehall was referring to is Ward. He wants Raina to come with him, and Skye too.

Morse goes into full Mockingbird mode, but even with her billy clubs, she’s no match for the hulked-out Mac. Even Coulson unloading a clip from the Icer doesn’t bring him down.

Quickly back to the plane, where May has no intention of allowing Skye to leave with Ward. However he promises to allow the S.H.I.E.L.D. plane to leave unscathed if she agrees, and Skye tells May she can take care of herself.

Mac is still tearing through the team, and Coulson barely manages to save Simmons from falling into the abyss. Mockingbird is able to shock Mac into unconsciousness with electrical discharges from her batons, but he ends up tumbling into the pit instead. Over Bobbi’s objections, Coulson orders the tunnel to be sealed.

The final scene has Agent 33 explaining to Whitehall that Ward retrieved Raina but also took Skye “as insurance.” He’s not happy about that, and even less pleased that the S.H.I.E.L.D. plane was allowed to live. Whitehall demands that the situation be fixed, so Agent 33 makes a call to the Hydra jets to shoot down the bus.

Badass Moment of the Week: Mockingbird ending the fight with super Mac certainly qualifies, but Skye doing fairly well with Fake May was even better. She’s come a long way since she was the semi-helpless rookie last season.

Best One-Liner: Had to be the Koenigs telling Triplett that there were 13 of them, then laughing at his reaction. There was a callback to that later when Ward asked them the same question on the Bus.

I’m going to leave it to Christina to figure out what all of this means when she returns from Florida, but it irked me a little that the team got so close to the city only to seemingly abandon it. Previews for next week, which is the midseason finale, make it appear they’re going to have to go back in there, but now Hydra is holding nearly all the cards. I’d be really ticked if Mac is dead, but my wife pointed out that whatever made him strong could also have allowed him to survive the fall, which Fitz estimated at 100 feet. I’ll buy that.

We got our first confirmation of the Kree, which was cool, but are we supposed to think that Mac is an Inhuman? Are Raina and Skye Inhumans too? It’s going to be an interesting end to this half of the season, for sure.

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