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Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD Recap – “Aftershocks”

By Christina Roberts

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Welcome back to season two of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. While I adored Marvel’s Agent Carter, I’m excited to see where SHIELD plans on going with the Inhumans angle. Also, I’m pretty sure this episode’s title has nothing to do with giant subterranean worms, but I can say, like the first Tremors, it doesn’t let up.

Not-So-Short Summary: It’s a flashback to 1983 to when Skye’s mother (Jiaying) is overseeing those who are exposed to the Terrigen Mist and trying to cope with the Terrigenesis. We get to see the man from the post-credits teaser of the winter finale, the man with no eyes, named Gordon. Very Nightcrawler-esque, he finds himself unable to control his teleportation, even with Jiaying trying to calm him down and guide him. More on him later.

Before I hop into the rest of this “summary,” I want to toss this out there: this Agents of SHIELD episode had so many grandiose/emotional/raging speeches that I couldn’t type fast enough to keep the gist of them all. Lots of verbal exposition coming from Coulson, from Mack, from Fitz, and from Simmons.

In the wake of Triplett’s death, we see everyone coping. Skye and Coulson no longer can sleep; Simmons is scouring the underground city and readying it to be flooded; Fitz’ brain isn’t quite working as well as it did before; and Mack may be suffering worst of all because he simply cannot deal with anything remotely alien.

Skye and Coulson begin heated back and forth where Skye blames herself for Trip’s death. If she hadn’t been stupid enough to go after Raina herself, then SHIELD could have blown the city and Trip would still be alive. Coulson believes otherwise–they were on a mission, and this is a war, they managed to win the battle that has put Hydra out on the ropes.

One thing this episode gives us is a visual of Skye’s relationship with everyone in the Agents of SHIELD crew. May comes as her SO, concerned for her but understanding the situation and not letting emotions get the best of her. Bobbi shows up as someone who completely understands what Skye is going through, a comfort more than anything else. Simmons is supportive in her scientific way, trying to find out what happened to Raina (because she came face-to-face with this new iteration down in the city) and making sure it doesn’t happen to Skye, like it’s some sort of plague.

Coulson calls an emergency meeting for everyone in the crew, and it nearly backfires because Mack has had enough of Coulson’s Fury-esque BS. All he does is give orders and expect people to follow them blindly–look what happened to Trip! After some smack-down by Coulson (and threats from half of the staff), Coulson readies his new plan:

Turn Hydra against each other.

He wants to trade in Bakshi (remember him?!) over to Colonel Talbot, but he also wants to take out a few of Hydra’s heads in the process.

What comes of this plan is a three-minute scene that had my Marvel buddy Austin texting me, “Stop watching. Just stop. Don’t do it.” (I was three minutes behind for the first fifteen minutes or so). On the way to drop off Bakshi with Talbot, May and Coulson’s car gets t-boned at an intersection. There’s a standoff where May takes out all of the Hydra agents but one, who blatantly shoots-to-kill both May and Coulson and takes Bakshi for his own. And it’s Hunter. With an American accent.

Of course it’s all fake and it has to be, even with those super bloody shots of Coulson falling to the ground after screaming, “You’ll never take us alive!” Which sounds straight out of a Die Hard film. “If I’d had you write it, no one would have said anything,” Coulson tells May afterward.

Hunter takes Bakshi to the roundtable of Hydra heads, who are trying to fill Whitehall’s position (with lots of mentions of Baron Von Strucker from Avengers: Age of Ultron). SHIELD, however, has gotten so far ahead of them that it feels like the entirety of Hydra turns on each other. Let’s just say this is a really bloody episode, from all the blatant killshots (with blood spatters) to Raina just ripping people’s throats out.

Elsewhere in this episode, we find Cal, Skye’s father, hiding out on a barge only to be found by Raina. Look, I’ve never liked Raina, but that speaks measures about Ruth Negga’s acting. This episode, however, she hits it home emotionally for the pain and betrayal Raina feels. “Well, you did always like flowers,” Cal says when Raina complains about the thorns all over her. She hates the fact that she’s some hideous being when she wanted to look like an angel. But nooooo, Skye got to take that part, too.

And that’s when Cal writes off Raina completely and discusses going back to find his daughter. He also basically tells Raina to kill herself, which is a little harsh. And she actually listens! She tries to cross a five-lane road, only to get cornered by SHIELD who want to bring her back in. Before they have a chance to shoot her like she wants, no-eyed Gordon swoops in with his teleportation and tells her, “It’s okay, beautiful,” before teleporting away again.

I smell a new love interest!

Back at SHIELD HQ, Fitz comes to talk to Skye in what might be the biggest showdown of this episode. He has fixed her biometric watch and found that at the time of the temple collapse, her heart rate was 300 bpm, which is “inhuman.” He also notes that while everything else was decimated, Skye was perfectly fine during the earthquake, leading him to believe she started the earthquake. Give Fitz credit–he may be slower than he used to be, but his mind is definitely still there.

This conversation upsets Skye so much that she explodes the lights in her quarantine and ends up cutting herself on the shards of glass. May and Simmons are concerned about it, especially because Skye’s blood work is about to come in, comparing her new blood to her old blood, and that’s when Fitz comes back in to say that everything matches perfectly. When Simmons and May have left, he tells Skye he switched her samples, and that her secret should just stay with them.

“You’re just different now,” Fitz tells her. “And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Badass Moment of the Week: The fake showdown with Hydra agents. May took down, what, eight Hydra agents in a matter of twenty seconds? Not bad!

Best One-Liner: “Drop the accent, it makes you sound like a douchebag,” Bobbi tells Hunter.
“Now you know what it feels like for me to live in this country,” Hunter replies.

One thing I will say about Agents of SHIELD is that it is horribly drab compared to Agent Carter. I mean in color tones. Everything is grey, black, very neutral-to-dark while Carter always had pops of colors (though set in the Fifties, that makes total sense). Agents of SHIELD is also much darker with their subject matters, too. Maybe they need a little Stark to spice things up!

Mack just deals with all the feels in this week’s episode. He freaks out at Fitz for trying to tell him he understands, shouting things like how Fitz never had to deal with his body not listening to his mind and being trapped inside, helpless. I had to eyeroll at that, but at least Fitz took it in stride and Mack calmed down. Although, his face-off with Coulson had me sweating. Like May said: we rarely ever see Coulson that angry and unhinged.

Hunter comments about Bobbi and Mack’s secret, only to find out that they are in a support group for their lifestyle. Hunter believes her (or so it seems), but I didn’t fall for it. In the post-credits stinger, we see the mini-Lola model scan Coulson’s office, looking for Fury’s Toolbox. What the heck are they up to? Is Bobbi really brainwashed by Hydra? Is there another operation somewhere that they’re working for?

I can’t even talk about the brief shot of Coulson showing up at Triplett’s parents’ house/apartment because that was absolutely heartbreaking. If you’ve ever had to deal with any sort of loss in your life, you know how difficult it is to bear that bad news. Especially when you’re telling a parent they have lost their child.

I feel like there’s a lot of comic book lore I didn’t touch on for this week’s episode. Bear with me while I brush off all the rust from this show being gone for three months. If there’s anything dire, please leave it in the comments and we can have a hearty discussion!

With Agents of SHIELD back in action, that means we’ll be getting back into our weekly “Brainstorm” sessions every Friday! Be ready for more wacky theories and Avengers cameos! Can we get Agent Carter to show up as a life-model decoy? Will we see Baron Von Strucker ever show up in an episode of Agents of SHIELD? And when will I get my Captain America cameo?! All this and more!

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