Agents of SHIELD - Heavy is the Head

SHIELD's new manly (white) man of action is Lance Hunter,
which sounds like a silly macho name until you learn that the
actor's name is Nick Blood.

Episode 2 of Agents of SHIELD's second season picks up where 'Shadows' left off. May is chasing the Absorbing Man and the stolen obelisk, SHIELD have swiped a cloaked quinjet to help Triplett remain almost entirely unseen, FitzSimmons are being replaced by a very tall man, likable newcomers Izzy and Idaho are dead, and dickhead newbie Lance Hunter (you can tell he's a lift from the comics with that name) is being set up as a potential traitor to SHIELD in a move that we might care about if he'd had more than forty-five minutes to get established.

Fortunately, things get better from there.

"According to these readings, you and me could write a rad
bromance..."

'Heavy is the Head' does some establishing work on newcomers Hunter and Mac (the tall man in the tech department). Hunter is an ex-SAS maverick agent with an attitude and a bit of a mockney accent, but that's two more defining character traits than Ward ever had. He wins a place on the team by being cocky and a bit suspect so... yay him.

Much better than that are the scenes in which Mac begins to bond with the brain-damaged Fitz through his refusal to treat him with kid gloves. It's touching, and gives me hope that they aren't just throwing Fitz to the scrapheap, as well as giving Mac a character beyond 'black mechanic'.

Skye was mostly winging about how Coulson never trusts her, which is true, but doesn't make her any less annoying when she does it. There was no Ward, but he was referenced, so I guess they haven't dropped him down a hole yet. Oh well.

There's a decent showdown with the Absorbing Man and the introduction of villains old and new, in the form of arch-manipulator Raina and her mysterious new employer, played by Kyle MacLachlan (who now specialises in these smooth villain roles) and may be Skye's mysterious father. These two are pitched as a third side in SHIELD vs HYDRA, working their own agenda.

'Heavy is the Head' wraps up the story begun in 'Shadows', setting the scene for the new, much more limited SHIELD team and its new antagonists. It fixes a lot of the problems that the season opener had, and in a lot of ways the two episodes are better considered as a two-parter. I didn't see any indication of this in the credits, but I may have missed it. It's still not perfect, and in particular I find it hard to forgive sidelining Triplett in favour of Thick McRunfast. (Although given their previous relationship, I'm still hoping to see Triplett come back into his own when Simmons returns to the series.)