Marvel's Agents of SHIELD - 'Aftershocks'

SHIELD and HYDRA have each taken a knock, and are fighting to recover their position. Coulson is determined to pursue HYDRA and make someone pay; HYDRA has begun to see that SHIELD is not the spent force they hoped. Meanwhile, Skye is in quarantine and Raina is on the loose and something other than human.

Trip is dead, to begin with, and to its credit and somewhat to my surprise, Agents of SHIELD remembers this. Coulson is going all hardass on his team, and May explains that this is because Trip represented all the ideals of SHIELD that Coulson believes in; his death is a tangible attack on the fundamental justification for everything that SHIELD does. What SHIELD does is under serious examination here, as Mac objects to Coulson's reckless gameplan, Simmons determines not to let scientific curiosity lead to any more deaths and thus devotes herself to the destruction of empowered individuals, and the team make a dramatic escalation in the battle against HYDRA.

Tension you could cut with a knife.

The A-plot is something of a heist movie scenario, with multiple twists and reversals building towards the eventual reveal of Coulson's gambit. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Simmons is checking to see if Skye is still Skye and vowing to destroy all mutants (this is a dramatic reversal, but utterly believable thanks to Elizabeth Henstridge's meticulously controlled emotional collapse,) while Fitz wrestles with his mental blocks to discover her transformation and conceal it, putting him on track to be directly at odds with Simmons when the truth comes out. He also gets to namedrop the Inhumans for the first time.

Fitz also gets another lovely moment with Mack, reaching out to his friend after Mack's traumatic possession:

Fitz: Well it's not good to keep things to yourself Mack. I know what you're going through.
Mack: Really? You know what it's like to lose control? To be trapped inside your own body unable to tell it what to do? To watch yourself hurt the people that you care about?
Fitz: Yeah.
Mack: I'm sorry buddy.
Fitz: It's okay.

This is the same understanding he shows to Skye later in the episode, telling her that she isn't wrong, just 'different', because being broken is something that he has struggled with, with only Mack to help him out. Now it's confirmed that Mack and Morse are seeking to steal 'Fury's toolkit' from Coulson; I'm going to be so heartbroken if they (specifically Mack, I have no attachment to Mockingbird and Lance Hunter's potential pain seems funny to me) turn out to be full evil.

Finally, Raina confronts the Doctor about her transformation.

Raina: I was supposed to become something divine, something transcendent. My grandmother said I'd be an angel, not some gnarled freak of nature covered in thorns.

"It's going to be okay, beautiful. I'll show you the way."

Disgusted by herself, she walks out into traffic and is almost captured by - I think - HYDRA operatives, but then she is rescued by Gordon, the eyeless Inhuman we saw at the end of last episode. I like this scene both because it establishes that to Gordon Riana's metamorphosis is not disfigurement, and because it means that not everything is about Skye.

Also, Gordon is immensely cool. Like... the second or third coolest Gordon ever.

'Aftershocks' presents me with a complication, because I was just about ready to give up on Agents of SHIELD before this, but there is almost nothing in here that I didn't like, from little character moments to big action to the total absence of Ward. The reaction to Trip's death is so note perfect that it makes me doubly angry that he didn't have anything to do in the rest of the season, and in particular no significant scenes with Simmons to reestablish their connection.

Will the rest of Season 2 be more like 'Aftershocks' or the episodes preceding it? Only time will tell, I guess, but for now I'll be back next week to find out.