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Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD Recap – “Love In The Time Of Hydra”

By Christina Roberts

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Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD gets dark and gritty this week with two separate SHIELDs running on their own. Good thing my New Year’s resolution was to stop typing all of the periods between those letters. With such an action-packed episode last week, it’s no surprise that this week is a little calmer. Which isn’t exactly a bad thing.

Not-So-Short Summary: It’s long lost stepson Grant Ward and Agent 33! Agents of SHIELD has a running theme of creepy people in diners these last few weeks, because Ward and 33 are ordering pumpkin pancakes with pecan syrup, bonding, and making the whole thing a heist for one man. Said man repairs 33’s face. It’s weirdly gruesome watching him patch her up and also explains what we’ve all been wondering:

There’s no way to take the mask off. She’s stuck like this, hiding her scarred/charred/disfigured face beneath a mask.

Agent 33 has no way to repay Ward for all he’s doing (though he insists that’s not what he’s after), and when he returns from some mysterious errands, she has Skye’s face. It’s obvious that 33 wants to be a thing with Ward, and he warns that he would only want it with the real 33. When she says she’s lost, Ward understands. With a flourishing speech about him and his family expressing their feelings to each other, he brings 33 on his side and completely ignores the fact that he murdered his family. Details aren’t important apparently.

Ward’s plan is to give her Bakshi to help her heal. With him in Air Force custody, they must do it together. She goes undercover as Colonel Talbot’s wife. Of course, Talbot’s actual wife calls him and he catches on, knowing it’s that mask that stole his face forever ago. He calls all female workers into a room, but 33 is already a male worker and has already found Bakshi. They spring him from prison, but not before 33 punches him when he tries to get her to reconfigure her compliance mechanisms or whatever Hydra did.

We also have our first glimpse of Skye wearing some sort of gauntlets like Quake in the comics. Fitz believes that if she can control her powers, after time she could become something like Captain America. Simmons verbally eyerolls at him and says if anything, Skye is the Hulk–dangerous and destructive. They bicker about the Avengers and Skye’s powers until she starts shaking things.

Because Skye’s alien DNA is a whole new category for SHIELD, May agrees with ex-husband Andrew’s prognosis that Skye should no longer be a part of SHIELD. Coulson reluctantly agrees despite his best efforts to bolster May’s confidence in finding a way to train Skye once more. Anyone want to know what happened in Bahrain? It’s a name-drop like Budapest with Hawkeye/Black Widow.

Elsewhere, Mack takes Hunter to the big cheese of bizzaro SHIELD: Robert Gonzales, who I have crazy theorized is Norman Osborne (don’t take me seriously, please). Hunter asks for their spiel on why they are the “real” SHIELD, and Gonzales gives a grandiose speech about how leaders should be held accountable for their actions, how Fury did none of that and kept secrets and how Coulson is doing the same. And they know that Fury is dead (hah!), but Coulson is alive and well and they don’t want him in power. Hunter freaks out, saying Bobbi wouldn’t go along with this…until she walks in the room. His gaze is nothing but murderous daggers.

Gonzales continues, discussing how close he was to Hartley from the season premiere. They believe that if Coulson hadn’t been so relentless in his pursuit of alien technology, so many of their own wouldn’t have been in the line of fire: Hartley, Triplett, Skye, and even Raina. Mack and Bobbi have been feeding Gonzales intel on what Coulson’s been up to and then he lays it all out on the table:

They believe Coulson has been compromised.

Mack returns to the Bus and is automatically under the gun by May, who reveals at the end of the episode that she doesn’t believe his lies. Bobbi talks to Hunter in a private conversation and she explains that she gave Coulson his name because she never anticipated him sticking around like he did. The raw emotion between them–how they both feel betrayed and burdened by their feelings–holds much gravitas, and it almost hurts when Bobbi says she won’t stop him from leaving, but “everyone else will.” Of course they’re on a warship in the middle of the ocean, so Hunter has nowhere to go. Or does he?

Back on the Bus, Coulson takes Skye for a road trip to a safehouse cabin for people with powers. I wondered very briefly if this isn’t the cabin we have seen in clips for Avengers: Age of Ultron, but I doubt it really matters. Coulson tells Skye that he has to pull her from active duty, but this will give her time to handle her abilities and channel them properly without putting everyone she knows in danger.

He gives her new gauntlets that Simmons made for her to tame her powers back slightly. I did a little more than just squee at their reveal. Coulson heads back to base, leaving Skye all alone (at least until next week). And on the Bus, we get a kickass Fitz who calls Simmons out for being so out of character and afraid of everything. She dances around that, saying she’s trying to fix those who have changed, and he points out that she’s the one who has changed and that’s the scariest change of all.

Talbot calls and warns Coulson about Ward and 33, but it’s overshadowed by how Coulson doesn’t feel like he did the right thing with Skye. Neither Coulson nor May believe Mack. And off in the middle of the ocean, Bobbi wants to get back in with Coulson and crew before Hunter gets there in 12 hours.

Post-Credits Stinger: Agent 33 disarms her mask to look at her disfigured face. Ward introduces himself to her and she replies in kind with her name, Kara. What they have done is just the beginning, and what they’re doing is attempting to brainwash Bakshi, Hydra-style. He’s going to die no matter what.

Badass Moment of the Week: Skye and Coulson eating Twizzlers in synchronization. This should be an Olympic event.

Best One-Liner: I only managed to write down two of Talbot’s lines, but I didn’t know he was this hilarious: “Lieutenant…when was the last time I got your name right?” Talbot asks.
“….Never, sir.”

Runner-Up: “I’m gonna be up to my ears in Edible Arrangements trying to make up for this!” he says about his wife.

And mad props to Hunter for knowing his Harry Potter houses. I don’t even remember his line, I just know he said something about Hufflepuff.

I feel like every scene that held any sort of deep conversation between two characters held much more weight than it showed. Writing this after sleeping on the episode, I feel myself on the verge of cracking under the weight…or it may be that I need to drink my coffee faster. The Ward/33 “romance” looks nice on the surface, what with Ward saying he’s not crazy enough to keep pining after Skye (as if!), but I have to believe he’s just found someone vulnerable he can mold to be on his side. The Bobbi/Hunter stuff is heartbreaking, mostly because with each new episode, I love them both a little more. The Fitz/Simmons hurts because Fitz throws the truth in her face.

And Coulson/Skye is a strong yet strained father/daughter relationship. I thought his anecdote about his father being a car dude and them constantly working on a car together was great, especially with the (not so) big reveal that said car is Lola. He said all those afternoons spent with his father when he could have been playing with his friends gave him a greater appreciation for the whole thing. This one may have hit a little too close to home for me, too, what with my own dad being a car dude and his ’69 Chevelle sitting in my garage.

Back to Bobbi/Hunter… this show has given us a complex, layered, vulnerable take on Mockingbird, one I never anticipated. She’s a standard badass in the comics, one that gets the job done and doesn’t think twice. In Agents of SHIELD, she shows an internal battle with her emotions, grappling with which truth to believe and what team to follow, and how tortured she can be if she really allowed herself. Again, mad props to Adrianne Palicki for all she brings to the table for Bobbi.

This week felt like a large setup for the inevitable war that’s coming in both the rest of the season and in next year’s Captain America: Civil War. Does anyone else find it strange that the show seems to be setting up for Cap 3 and The Inhumans before setting up for, oh, I don’t know, the movie that comes out in six weeks?

The preview for next week’s episode looks like all hell breaks loose between the two SHIELDs, and we may have our answers then as to how it will tie into Age of Ultron.

Mostly I’m looking forward to the May/Bobbi showdown.

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