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“Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” recap (1.20): Skye’s the limit

[Valerie Anne here again. I almost felt like the powers that be knew I would be temporarily taking over these recaps and gave me a Best of Skye episode.]

Previously on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Ward revealed he was on the A team-I mean, Hydra and killed Eric. Skye found out but is playing along, pretending she’s going to decrypt a hard drive for Ward as soon as they get to a specific location.

We open with someone complaining about the US Congress not understanding anything and being generally useless. And that someone is Maria Hill!

She knows she’s being followed, but when she notices the three people she pegged as spies go down for the count, she hangs up quickly and is ready to fight. Luckily it’s just Agent Malinda May who has come to ask for Hill’s help. Well, more specifically, to ask for Hill to help Coulson, since he doesn’t trust May anymore. May asks who was in charge of performing the TAHITI procedures on Coulson, because if it was someone in Hydra, Coulson might be a sleeper agent. Hill says she doesn’t know and that she can’t ask Fury because he’s super dead. May doesn’t buy it.

It’s unclear whether or not Hill will help Coulson when officers swoop in to apprehend Hill. She hilariously tells them they were too slow and that if it were up to her, she’d fire them.

Back at the Providence base, Coulson is going over what little surveillance they have with what’s left of his team. Fitz runs through it for what might be the hundredth time. May leaves through the front door, Skye and Ward leave holding hands, then the Bus takes off.

Simmons decides the best way to snap Coulson out of this cycle is to make them all some food. (Girl after my own heart.) Fitz cuts Triplett off to go help her. Fitz is trying to talk somewhat seriously when Simmons is like LET’S MAKE PANCAKES! They split up, Simmons to get the ingredients, Fitz to fire up the griddle. Fitz walks by a bathroom and notices that the “window” inside the room is set to the nighttime landscape, but the hallway window is daytime. So he goes in and removes a screwdriver he finds wedged in the corner of it. The dayscape scrolls up and scratched into the image is the message WARD IS HYDRA.

At that exact moment, Simmons looks up and sees Eric in the vent of the storage room. Pancakes saved the day! And also scarred poor FitzSimmons for life.

On the Bus, Ward is spray painting over S.H.I.E.L.D. symbols so Skye goes snooping through some cabinets. When Ward catches her, she says she’s looking for the phone to check in on the team, but Ward insists he just talked to Coulson and everything is just fine.

Skye tells him that the coordinates that will unlock the hard drive encryption point to the diner where we first met Skye back in the first episode. Ward gets all close to her and takes her gun from out of her waistband, and he has suffered a complete Ezra Fitz transformation, so everything he does is extra creepy. For example, when he tells Skye, “I’m not going to let you out of my sight.” In Providence, Fitz is on the fritz. He refuses to believe that Ward is Hydra. He was their friend! A little cold and aloof, sure, but not evil! But when Simmons finishes her autopsy, she confirms that Eric was killed by someone who was about 6’2″, strong, and broody. It was definitely Ward. Fitz starts slamming his head against the wall and Coulson tells him to focus this energy and use it to find and save Skye. They figure out that since Ward is Hydra, that means Garrett is alive and Hand is dead (RIP) and he came back for the hard drive. Coulson trusts that Skye has a plan and will be stalling, but he still would like to find her sooner rather than later. After all, her alien powers haven’t kicked in yet.

At the diner, Skye is telling Ward to stop being annoying and staring at her. He can tell she’s being overly confident overcompensating for something and she covers by saying she’s thinking of Mike Peterson. They have a veiled conversation about turning on people you care about and she goes back to pretending to decrypt the hard drive.

Coulson and Company are interrupted in their Save Skye mission by an intrusion of US armed forces. There was a lot of witty one-liners, specifically of Coulson’s, that made me giggle this episode, but I think the Whedonest one of all was when Coulson called out to the colonel, “If I come out, will you shoot me? ‘Cause then I won’t come out.”

Luckily he doesn’t have to worry about getting shot because these men are here for none other than Maria Hill. Hill has some offers for Coulson, pleas and compromises, but Coulson doesn’t want any part of it. His team is all he has now, and he’s a man down. He tells Hill about Ward being Hydra, and she is not pleased-she vetted him! This injustice is all she needs to hear, and when the colonel comes back in, she kicks his ass. Hill is on Team Coulson.

In the diner, Ward is being skittish because there are cops that have been lingering at the counter. Skye, feeling cheeky, starts asking Ward if he’s ever worked deep undercover, and how long, and was it hard? To rip the hearts out of people who cared about him? She calls him a “disgusting, backstabbing traitor” and before he can ask her how she found out his middle name, the police start to descend. She tells him, proudly, that she’s the one who tipped them off. Ward starts fighting off the po-po, so Skye runs outside and begs the officers out there to arrest her, but they’re too slow, and Ward kills them. She tries to steal the police car, and might have gotten away with it, too, but Mike “Deathlok” Peterson busts through the windshield and grabs her.

They take her back to the Bus and Skye is PISSED. She starts pounding on Ward so he cuffs her to a railing. He tries to tell her it wasn’t personal and she knows now how truly sociopathic he must be if he truly believes that. He tells her that even though literally everything else was a lie, his feelings for her were real, he promises. Skye says she’s going to throw up. I’m so happy I could cry. Ward lets his eyes show the crazy in his soul and Skye calls him a serial killer and I dance on the ashes of the SkyeWard ship.

Mike gets a secret brain message to go to Plan B to get Skye to talk. Plan B is to put an electrodart in Ward’s chest and stop his heart. Skye tries to appeal to Mike’s human side, but he’s convinced following orders is his only chance at survival, the only way to guarantee his son stays safe. So as Ward dies on the floor, Mike appeals to HER human side and asks if she’ll stoop to his level and let another human die when she can stop it.

Of course she won’t, she can’t, her heart would never forgive her, even if Ward is an evil lying liar. She tells Mike that the coordinates for the hard drive aren’t longitude/latitude, but altitude.

Maria Hill faces off with the Bus and radios over, telling him to stand down. Ward slews some sexist remarks about Hill being eye candy and how Fury should have just picked Romanoff (who I wish was nearby to hear him say that because she would kick his ass so hard) and takes off anyway. Luckily, the plan hadn’t been for Hill to successfully talk Ward down. It was to buy Coulson enough time to sneak into the plane. Into the belly of the beast, as it were.

Coulson finds Skye and she asks how he got past Deathlok. Well, turns out he didn’t, so they have to run like the wind! They jump into Lola and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang right on out of there. Skye almost flies right out because she didn’t buckle up like dad-I mean, Coulson told her to. The land perfectly between two parking spaces, just a little windblown. Team Coulson, now reunited (as much as possible) is staying at a motel. Fitz and Simmons are sitting by the pool, and Fitz asks Simmons to promise she’s not Hydra, because he just couldn’t take it if she was. Simmons looks at him earnestly and promises she isn’t, but to be honest, she could have said anything with that face and that voice and I would have believed her with all my heart.

Skye tells Coulson that she left a “present” on the hard drive when she decrypted it for Ward and Mike that should help find them. But for now, they get to hang out by the pool.

Agent May pulls a Coulson and appears out of the shadows. Thankfully, Coulson is happy to see her. He starts to apologize for making her leave, but she has something important he needs to see. She grave-robbed him and found a video with a Level 10 classification. When they play it, it’s Coulson giving a video resignation. He speaks out against Project Tahiti, saying it is not a wonderful place. It causes people to go insane, and the only solution is memory replacement, but even that is shoddy at best. He says his professional recommendation is to end the project now, because the cost is too great.

It is clear from the look on Coulson’s face that he does not remember making this video.

What did you think of “Nothing Personal”?

Here are some of our favorite #superqueeros tweets from this week:

             

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