[Hey superqueeros, still Valerie Anne filling in for Heather Anne! Which hopefully explains any gratuitous screenshots of Skye’s face.]
Previously on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Ward was the worst, Coulson got a secret message that lead the team to Providence (the secret base, not the city), and Ward was sent back in undercover to get into Skye’s hard drive.
We open on a crazy man sucking the life out of a grumpy man and stealing his truck, all with an eerie calmness. He’s wearing an ID bracelet that reads “Daniels” and looks an awful lot like he escaped from somewhere we wish he had stayed.
Back at Secret Base Providence, Ward is giving the team his version of what happened at the Fridge, complete with flashbacks to remind us that he’s a slimy lying liar. What pisses me off the most is that he has Simmons all worried about him and begging him to take it easy. He also says he killed Garrett, which is the lyingest lie of all.
Ward slyly says, “Oh but thank goodness Hydra didn’t get their hands on this here hard drive, we should probably make a few copies and each have one on our person at all times just in case, especially me.” Skye probably would have done it, too, but Coulson needs her for something more important first. See, a bunch of supercrazies have escaped from the Fridge. And I don’t mean supercrazy as in really, really insane. I mean psychotic in a dangerous way with the added benefit of actual superpowers.
Coulson asks specifically about a man named Marcus Daniels, and sure enough, that’s our life-sucking friend. Coulson says he’s going to round up a team and go fetch the supercrazies, but May and Skye think perhaps they should all stay put, out of Hydra’s reach. Coulson says he doesn’t care about what’s safe, he cares about what’s right, because he’s Coulson. Patton Oswalt…er, I mean, Eric vehemently disagrees with this plan. He’s still a little miffed that Coulson came with an entire team of unvetted people. To correct this, Eric says everyone must undergo orientation, aka a lie detector test.
Things he learns: May has been married, Triplett is a legacy, Skye doesn’t have a last name because the orphanage tried to call her Mary-Sue Poots and she was not having any of that. Probably the most telling set of answers is what they would want to see in a box they opened on a deserted island. May: machete, Triplett: cell phone, Fitz: Simmons (sweet yet a little creepy), Simmons: The TARDIS (BE CUTER I DARE YOU), Skye: her laptop, though she quickly talks herself out of it.
While Ward goes in for his orientation, Coulson takes FitzSimmons and Triplett on a mission to stop Daniels. His power is the ability to absorb electricity/energy, which is why a simple poke killed that guy dead. Luckily, Triplett knows how to fly a plane and FitzSimmons can construct light sources on planes, so off they go.
During his lie detector test, Ward says he would want a pistol in his box, and almost blows everything because he’s a lying liar. However, he manages to beat the system when Eric asks him why he’s really here, at Providence, because Ward says Skye, which sounds innocent enough, but is decidedly not innocent, in any way, shape or form. Alas, Eric buys it, and gives him his lanyard.
May finds Coulson and is PISSED that she wasn’t asked to fly the plane to go get Daniels; not only is she his usual go-to pilot, but she was there last time they took him in. But Coulson still doesn’t trust May, because he doesn’t think her ideas of “right” and “wrong” align with his, not anymore. Personally, I’m grateful, because otherwise all Skye would have had to protect her from Ward was Eric.
Coulson and his mini-team head to where they think they’ll find Daniels: the hometown of his “light in the darkness.” They arrive just as he found her jogging alone in the middle of the night in an empty park and scoop her up in a car. Fitz and Coulson throw a bunch of little lights into the air around him and point light guns at him, but Daniels tells them that the Fridge made him stronger. He knocks them both to the ground and disappears into the night.
Back in Providence, Skye figures out that Eric is using their shiny new lanyards to keep an eye on Team Coulson via digital Marauder’s Map. This gives her an idea. Eric figures out that she wants to hack the NSA and she nods like a little kid who just suggested they climb a tree, but he says absolutely not. Ward comes in and plays along, casually mentioning once again that perhaps they should decrypt the encrypted hard drive. You know, just for funsies. Skye brushes him off and says they’ll have to take a field trip before they can do that. With Ward’s second opinion, Eric gives his okay, so Skye skips off to the control room, saying she’ll have footage of the Fridge break-in after an hour or so, shrinking Ward’s timeline just a bit.
In a safehouse somewhere, Simmons is assuring their rescued cellist that they will keep her safe from Daniels. They keep calling her Audrey, but she’ll always be Fred to me.
She tells them about the first time Daniels creepily stalked her and sucked the light out of everywhere she went, and how a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent swooped in like a knight and shining armor and saved her. Yes, because of this Phil Coulson, she knows she can trust the two agents in front of her. Unfortunately, she thinks he died in the Battle of New York and stayed dead, but Simmons, knowing Coulson is listening from the other room, asks her questions about this mysterious Coulson that she definitely doesn’t already know very well or anything. Fitz tells Coulson he has a way to stop Daniels, and remains calm and persistent through a mini version of a Coulson temper tantrum, so he eventually agrees to use Audrey as bait.
May tells Ward that the Bus is fixed, and just before he kills her dead, he sees that she’s leaving, packed suitcase in hand, so he lets her go venturing out into the snowy abyss. Ward goes back inside to find Eric beside himself with joy, because Skye is actually actively hacking the NSA.
Simmons and Triplett lead Audrey to her usual rehearsal space, hoping it will draw Daniels out. Audrey is a little wary, considering she only has two agents on her case, and SHE could probably take one of them, but Simmons assures her the best agents she knows are on the job. Said two agents are in the projection room above the auditorium with a gamma ray gun made by the Hulk himself.
At Providence, Skye finds the control room empty, but Ward tells her that Eric is just off sending important messages. He pours her a drink and tries to put on what I imagine he thinks is smouldering charm, but it causes her to backpedal so hard out of her end-of-the-world-adrenaline-rush kiss. He just hands her a drink in response and she wastes another flirty smile on him that should be for Simmons and Simmons alone. Skye and Ward go into the darkest room they can find and Ward starts talking about how he has no emotions, but he feels things for her, but she couldn’t possibly like him because he has a dark, abusive past and she’s so good. But Skye is a precious unicorn, and tells Ward that there’s good in him, too. Because she truly believes it. They kiss, and Ward’s brain starts bleeding in a burst of instant karma. (OK, not his brain. Something on his head does start bleeding, though.)
While he goes off to clean up, Skye finds Eric’s tablet with the lanyard tracker and tries to figure out where he went off to. At which point it occurs to me that maybe Ward wasn’t bleeding, maybe Skye’s hand found some leftover blood from whatever he did to Eric.
Meanwhile, Audrey is practicing the cello when Daniels appears. He apologizes for creeping her out, and begs her to keep playing, which she does, providing a nice, spooky, suspenseful soundtrack for Skye’s search for Eric. When she finally finds him…well, his body…in a vent in a storage closet, and sees only Ward on her Marauder’s Map, the truth comes crashing down on her.
Also crashing down is Audrey, because Coulson & Co. shined so many lights on Daniels that he blew to smithereens. Coulson kisses her on the forehead and tells her she’s okay, but by the time she becomes fully conscious, it’s not Phil’s face she sees above her. Skye, upon realizing not only that she just kissed the enemy, but that she is now trapped in a top-secret location in the middle of nowhere with said enemy, starts to panic. She takes some deep breaths and tries to come up with a plan, fumbling around the storage closet for something she can feasibly use as a weapon. She gets that adorable “I have a plan” look on her face, but then is somehow magically back in the hallway. When Ward opens the door to the storage closet, the penny he had placed atop it so he would know if someone was in there had been replaced, and Skye delivers a beautiful cover story about being afraid of sharing her feelings, complete with a kiss right on his lying liar mouth to be sure she could distract him from the truth. He says the Bus is ready for them to go, that the feds need their help, and that no she may not go back and get any of her belongings, not even a spare flannel shirt. Skye tries her darnedest not to look terrified, takes his hand, and follows him out of Providence.
When Coulson, Fitz, Simmons, and Triplett get back to find the Bus and the other half of their team gone, they are quite at a loss. Eric is dead, May is MIA, and Ward is letting Skye tell them where to head next-luckily, now that Ward mentioned the hard drive for the eleventy billionth time, Skye is finally onto exactly what he needs.
Cut to Ontario, Canada, where Agent Melinda May is walking along, her bag slung over her shoulder, as though she hadn’t walked far enough for a climate change. A car pulls up, and she hops in, where she’s greeted by someone who must be her mother, because she scolds her for not saying “thank you” within the first five seconds. May asks if she got the contact info she asked for, and her mother did pull through. As it turns out, the contact info is for Maria, which is probably Maria Hill. May’s mother asks if she plans to “take her out,” but May says she only wants to talk.
What did you think of “The Only Light in the Darkness?”
You guys are hilarious and most of you are already shipping MayHill, before they ever share screen time. Never change. Here are some of our favorite #superqueeros tweets from this week
Mary. Sue. Poots. #superqueeros
– Tammy (@tylynn_sings) April 23, 2014
As questionable as that approach was, I’d probably get in the car too if Simmons was the kidnapper. #superqueeros
– Jenn Russi (@jrussi) April 23, 2014
Jemma’s off book! She does not do well undercover! IT IS THE MOST PRECIOUS #Superqueeros #AgentsofSHIELD
– Ruth (@ruthosaurus) April 23, 2014
Run for it, Skye! If Ward kills the man who voiced the main character in a Pixar movie, who knows what he would do to you? #Superqueeros
– Tom B (@AnistonAnarchis) April 23, 2014
Well there are a large group of us who think you’re in the closet.. #superqueeros #AgentsofSHIELD
– Catherine (@CMeushaw) April 23, 2014
Oh, please tell me Maria Hill and Melinda May were secret lovers, torn apart when Hill chose duty over romance. Or something. #superqueeros
– KP (@pearlofgray) April 23, 2014
Technically though, the TARIS *is* a box. #superqueeros
– Chen Drachman (@shokoshik) April 23, 2014
let’s send skyeward skyward. as in launch that idea into space. get it as far away from me as possible #AgentsofSHIELD #superqueeros
– julia sparkles (@tokaikko) April 23, 2014
It’s amazing to me who Ward’s face has done that Ezra Fitz thing where suddenly he just looks creepy. #AgentsofSHIELD #superqueeros
– anh62950 (@anh62950) April 23, 2014
Would it be weird if I made Simmons saying “the TARDIS” my ringtone? #superqueeros #AgentsofSHIELD
– Marie (@buknerd) April 23, 2014
