Marvel’s Agents Of SHIELD Season 3 Finale Recap: “Absolution”/”Ascension”
By Steve Lam
![](https://images2.minutemediacdn.com/image/upload/c_fill,w_720,ar_16:9,f_auto,q_auto,g_auto/shape/cover/sport/64ccdae10a17fac7cb203b1a7e54ceb87c5ab535e5cd5bf5a1b86ce56627ff7a.jpg)
Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD Season 3 Finale Recap Part 2: “Ascension”
Not-So-Short Summary: Daisy continues to beg Hive to take her back. He happily accepts her, but he’s unable to infect her with his nanites. After Lash removed them, he made her impervious to Hive’s influence. Angered and frustrated, she unleashes her quake powers on him.
Coulson and the rest of the team try to make their way to the hangar. Radcliffe reveals that his Primitive Inhumans are basically brainless with the memories of previous talents—which allows them to operate weapons and other things. Mac learns that the Primitive Inhumans are advancing into the base via the vents. Fitz and May discover that Daisy is missing.
More from TV
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters episodes 1 and 2 review: Aftermath
- The 9 best (and 8 worst) Arrowverse characters
- 10 things nobody wants to admit about The Walking Dead
- Harley Quinn renewed for a fifth season on Max (and it’s well-deserved)
- The Walking Dead: Every TWD spinoff show coming in 2024 and beyond
In the hangar, Daisy continues to wage a ferocious battle against Hive. She ends up overpowering him and stabs him multiple times. However, there’s no effect on Hive whatsoever. When his Hydra team arrives, he knocks her out. Hive’s plan is to take Daisy as insurance to keep SHIELD from shooting them out of the sky. He’ll leave a few Primitive Inhumans to destroy the base. As Hive starts to regain his lucid self again, he starts to remember how to fly the Zephyr.
Mac exits into a hall where a Primitive Inhuman fires a barrage of bullets at him. Miraculously, he isn’t hit. That’s because Yo-Yo, with her speed, saved Mac. However, she’s hit in the abdomen and is critically injured. Mac carries Yo-Yo to his workshop. In another location, Simmons hides from the attackers in the base’s cellar.
The Zephyr finally takes off and starts to ascend vertically. Hive plans to use the containment module that Daisy arrived in as a lifeboat after detonation of the warhead. Little does everyone know, Fitz and May have already boarded the Zephyr.
Yo-Yo is bleeding out too fast. With no medical supplies in sight, Radcliffe suggests using a blowtorch to cauterized Yo-Yo’s wound. Mac performs the procedure after Yo-Yo requests that he do it.
The Primitive Inhumans finally break into Simmons’s hiding place. One approaches her, but doesn’t detect her. Eventually, a noise causes all of them to exit the cellar. Simmons hypothesizes that the heat from the furnace may have masked her detection. She turns the furnace on high.
Yo-Yo is running a fever due to an infection. The team needs to move her, but it would be impossible with hostiles everywhere. Feeling the temperature rise, Radcliffe deduces that Simmons may have figured out that the Primitive Inhumans use infrared as eyesight. He tests this theory out on himself and it works.
On the Zephyr, May takes out one of the Primitive Inhumans, and Fitz goes to work trying to free Daisy. Giyera surprises them, knocks out May and holds Fitz at gunpoint. Fitz pleads for his life and warns Giyera that if he dies, an unseen hidden weapon will take them down. After a bit of back-and-forth, Giyera allows Fitz to show him. When Fitz gets into the right position, he kills Giyera with an invisible gun and frees Daisy.
Coulson and team move through the halls and find refuge in Coulson’s office. Surprisingly, they run into Simmons. With no way out, Coulson calls an automated quinjet. He commands his team to stay behind while he goes alone to intercept the warhead.
The Primitive Inhumans drag Giyera’s body to Hive, revealing the presence of SHIELD. Suddenly, Coulson’s quinjet docks onto the Zephyr
As the doors open, Hive greets Coulson and the two trade a few words. However, Coulson reveals that Hive’s been talking to a hologram, with all of this being a distraction. The rest of the team are already onboard.
Hellfire ambushes Lincoln, but Lincoln is able to fight back with an assist from May in knocking him out. Hellfire, though down, ignites an object, causing an explosion which seriously injures Lincoln. Daisy talks to Lincoln, apologizing for everything she’s done. He sees her crucifix (knowing that it pertains to her vision of someone dying) and makes her promise not to try and sacrifice herself to atone for her sins.
Meanwhile, Coulson has plans to have a volunteer fly the warhead into space via the quinjet, where it can detonate and harmlessly disburse the pathogen. When the team looks back at Lincoln again, Daisy is gone. Lincoln’s efforts were futile in trying to stop her.
The Primitive Inhumans arrive and the team engages them. Daisy, in the Zephyr, uses her quake abilities to transfer the warhead to the quinjet. Hive confronts her, but Lincoln blasts Daisy out of the quinjet and flies off. He quickly ascends to a high altitude.
Daisy radios him. He tells her that this was his fate. Reaching for her crucifix, she discovers that it’s now gone and in Lincoln’s possession. Right before the radio goes dead, Lincoln tells Daisy that he loves her. As the quinjet reaches space, Daisy pleads with the team to save Lincoln. They’re powerless to do anything, as the quinjet cannot be controlled anymore.
Lincoln and Hive trade a few last words, noting how beautiful the world is. With the scene matching up to Daisy’s vision, the warhead detonates.
It’s six months later and the team is tracking Daisy. From newspaper clippings on Coulson’s stakeout board, it seems that Daisy has gone rogue. The wife and daughter of Charles (the Inhuman who gave Daisy her vision in “Spacetime“) meets Daisy in public. When Daisy gives the daughter a wooden carving made by her father, she exposes herself to Coulson and the rest of SHIELD. Quickly, yet calmly, she exists the area. Arriving at a remote alleyway, Daisy uses her quake powers and launches herself to the top of a building. When Coulson and team get there, they have no idea where she went—as if she disappeared into thin air.
Next: It's not quite over yet ...