TV Recap: Agents of Shield 1-6 - FZZT

I’ve been asking for development for someone other than Skye, and they actually listened to me.  In fact, Skye was pretty much a supporting character for a change.  As you might expect, I enjoyed that.  (Again, it’s not that I don’t like Skye, I just want to learn about some of the others.)

The episode opens with a group of scouts out camping.  The leaders are telling a scary story until one of them starts hearing a weird noise.  He goes off to find whatever it is, and enough freaky stuff starts happening to make the other leader decide to take all the other kids to the car where the battery pops out of the engine.  When things calm down, they go to search for the leader only to find him dead and floating in the middle of the air.

That's weird enough that our team heads out and start investigating.  As they do, the body suddenly drops down to Earth.  The scientists are loving it because of the weird stuff they get to investigate.  The guy who died seems to be a great guy with no one holding a grudge against him, and S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters doesn’t have anything on something like this.

Then it happens again, this time to a guy alone in a barn on his property.  And that’s when they start making connections.  Both of the victims so far are firefighters who were in New York during the excitement of The Avengers.  Our team heads to their firehouse to learn the guys took an alien mask as a souvenir.  Three of the guys had polished it a couple days ago during a boring night shift.  And the third guy dies while they are there.

Our team takes the mask and leaves heading to S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters which is somewhere across the Atlantic.  Here’s where I show my lack of knowledge about S.H.I.E.L.D. since I would have assumed it was in the US somewhere.  Anyway, Jemma keeps running tests while they are in flight.  And that’s when she realizes the men who died had actually contracted a virus from cleaning the mask.  Then to their horror they realize she is infected and there are only a couple hours left before she dies.  If she’s still on board, she’ll take everyone with her since she’ll blow up the plane.

Here is where Fitz steps up.  He’s been freaking out and staying away from the lab, which is why he is not infected.  But when the lab goes into quarantine, he starts working on devices to help from the outside.  After trying a couple of anti-serums that don’t work, the two of them figure out that the virus was in the mask itself.  With a renewed chance to save the day, Fritz goes into the lab despite the quarantine and the two of them get to work.  Only the third try doesn’t seem to work either on the rat they experiment on.

The rest of the team is watching remotely, and this news upsets them.  They don’t want to lose anyone.  But then the rat revives.  The third serum works!  Only Jemma didn’t stick around long enough to find out and is jumping out of the cargo hold in order to save everyone else.  Ward quickly grabs a parachute and the serum and jumps after her, saving the day.  They turn stuff over to S.H.I.E.L.D., although Coulson does get a bit of a talking to about not following procedure hours ago when he'd been told to throw Jemma from the plane to preserve the evidence.

Speaking of Coulson, he started the episode getting a physical, which he claimed his doctor requested.  However, when the results come in fine, he confesses to Melinda May that it is because he isn’t feeling quite normal after coming back from the dead.  She reassures him that it is normal to feel abnormal after something like he went through.

As I said, I liked this episode.  It showed us just how much the team has come to care for each other.  Ward got teased quite a bit early on in the episode, and at the end everyone was appropriately concerned.  Skye isn’t happy that Ward doesn’t trust her yet, but seriously, that’s not that kind of thing someone gets over right away.  She needs to be patient.

Now we await the next episode.  While we do, thoughts on this one?