The biggest came in showing us where the real Simmons has been, undercover as a double agent within Hydra. It's about as "fish out of water" as you could get, as Skye pointed out near the end of the episode. It's going to force Simmons to do a lot of growing up in a very short time -- and it could all still conceivably end with a trip to Hydra's brainwashing machine. In the previous two episodes, something didn't sound quite right about Simmons just walking out on Fitz, but now we learn it's even more sad than that. She too is used to having him around, and is suddenly forced to get by without. (So far, she's making do without conjuring up a hallucinatory Fitz.)
It was also a big episode for Skye. It's interesting to me that May was one of the last characters to "get there" in season one, largely because she was so walled off emotionally. And yet Skye has become instantly more interesting by making her more May-like in the off-season. This episode was all about Skye finding her zen calm, even as she had to make her very first kill. The epilogue, though expected, was still excellent as it showed us what can still drill right through that calm.
As wonderful as all that was -- and it was -- I still think the most powerful scene of the episode came when Fitz stumbled on to Ward and was forced to confront him. It started out looking like a moment that was going to dropkick poor Fitz emotionally and send him back to square one as far as his recovery. Instead, Fitz went down a dark road and fought back, torturing and nearly killing Ward. You could hardly blame him, and yet you also felt in that moment as though a character who has already lost a lot lost something even more.
I wish I could spend a little more time talking about Donnie Gill (aka Blizzard), as I thought his return was quite interesting. Like the Absorbing Man of the first two episodes, he seemed a threat both credible and entertaining, and I oddly felt more engaged by his "forced to work for evil" storyline in just two total episodes than I felt in all of the Mike Peterson saga of season one. But Donnie wasn't built to last; instead, he wound up as the capper on Skye's story, when she had to put him down. I'm sad to lose the character, but the show has been doing so well with new baddies so far this season, I'm hopeful they'll be able to do it again.
I'm left thoroughly entertained and eager to see what happens next. I think I'd have to call this episode an A.
1 comment:
I won't be surprised if Donnie shows up again. The authorities still haven't found his body — and we saw that body freezing over as he submerged. I have to wonder if the writers want us to think that was just from falling through the icy water, while their actual plan is that he was putting himself into cryogenic suspension.
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