This is the Pilot! This episode is all about forming the party. We have to meet our Agents of SHIELD one-by-one to learn what each of them is all about. What roles will they be filling on our journey into mystery? We find out by throwing them into a first mission. This mission has it all: civilians in danger, a dad on the edge, a time limit, exploding men, ungrateful explosion survivors, a van…
Also! There is a pilot in this Pilot so that’s a huge fun bonus.
grammatical disclaimer: double quotation marks can be trusted. Single quotation marks are for fun
It starts with a cheesy voiceover from The Rising Tide to let us know right off the bat that the Strategic Homeland Intervention: Enforcement and Logistics Division has enemies. This antagonist is a group of people that are peeved that SHIELD is trying to keep the truth of superheroes under wraps.
Unemployed father and disinterested son look in a window at Avengers action figures. Avengers exist. They are heroes.
Big explosion. The dad SUPER STRENGTH’s his way up into the burning building to save a lady. He has his hood pulled up, so we know he wants to be a secret superhero. Should’ve had a mask. There is a young woman with a camera phone filming the whole thing.
Agent Ward is zooming into frame to retrieve a package that the Rising Tide is after. “if the job was easy –“ Ward says “-it wouldn’t be any fun” the man on comms replies… Interesting…. Let’s come back to that in 20 episodes.
So this hot chiseled Agent of SHIELD gets some fingerprints off the glass of a slick-looking red-tied rando as one does in spy shows. Then he gets the thing (we don’t know what it is) from behind a fireplace. A woman is exiting the room calmly for comedic effect and so that Ward can deliver the line ‘your fireplace is broken’ before demonstrating his hand-to-hand combat skills with a group of guys from Who-Knows-Where. (Really I don’t know where. Are these guys with the rising tide? Or are they with the red-tied guy from before who puts all his finger pads on the bowl of a champagne glass? Don’t think it matters -we’re behind – we gotta catch up with Agent Ward)
then he just like climbs onto the roof? And then grabs a rope hanging from a helicopter and flies away. What a cool guy.
Now he’s at Agent Maria Hill’s field office. We are meant to recognize her as Fury’s second from The Avengers movie. She asks what SHIELD means to him. To Ward, they protect people from things they don’t need to hear. The package from the fireplace was a Chitauri neural link. It was left over from the battle of New York (from The Avengers movie).
Hill is like ‘you need to talk to Agent Coulson.’ Ward is like ‘um he died in the Avengers movie. I know because I’m level 6’ but then Phil Coulson (who died in the Avengers movie) steps out of a dark corner and says, “welcome to level 7.” Then he makes a joke about hiding in the dark corner just to make this moment work. Good joke.
Coulson is putting together a mobile SHIELD unit. He wants to recruit Ward to help them find the Rising Tide because the Rising Tide is following the hooded dad man. SHIELD wants to make sure the hooded man is like contained and under control or whatever. Ward prefers working alone, but it seems he has no choice but to join Coulson’s team.
Maria Hill is like ‘the team you picked out is sketchy’ to Coulson. Shepherd from Firefly (the Whedon show) is there because this is a Joss Whedon episode. He is a doctor now and he is like ‘I didn’t want to clear you for the field, Phil, because you just died in the Avengers movie’ and Coulson says he healed up just fine while he was in Tahiti because “it’s a magical place.” When he walks out, shepherd doctor goes “Tahiti….he really doesn’t know” and Maria says “he can never know” which means something shady happened to our dear Phil after he died (in The Avengers movie). Intrigue.
In a diner, the hooded dad is approached by the camera phone lady. This is Skye. She has the voice from the intro-voiceover and big main character vibes. They’re calling him the Hooded Hero and she warns him that SHIELD wants to pick him up. She suggests he get a mask (he should really listen to her) but instead he’s all ‘nah’ and walks out. Skye steals his ID for us so now we know hooded dad is named Mike Peterson.
We are introduced to Agent Melinda May pushing papers in an office. Coulson asks her to join the team. She doesn’t want to see combat. He’s like ‘word. No combat…. Come join the team to be a uh… pilot… yeah just a pilot’
Ward goes to big plane (‘The Bus’) to meet “Fitzsimmons”. FitzSimmons is two people – Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons. They are our science kids on the team. Engineering and Biochem, respectively. They are arguing over a tranquilizer rifle that Fitz calls “the Night-Night Gun”, but Jemma says “it doesn’t work and we’re not calling it the Night-Night gun.” They are British and bumbling and bickering and cliché and perfect. We are best friends, and I would die for them. Also, the barely-intelligible gun discussion is actually pertinent to today’s episode.
Melinda May is piloting the Bus. Ward is like ‘woah woah woah that woman is a legend.’ So now we know that.
Skye is voiceovering again from a van. She’s all like ‘you won’t find us. You can’t stop the Rising Tide. You will never see us. Nothing can stop us. Nothing nothing will ever ever find us-‘ and then she gets straight kidnapped out of her van by Coulson and Ward. She is then interrogated in a weirdly-lit honeycomb-walled dark room in the Bus.
Skye mentions ‘centipede’ and Ward doesn’t know what that is. Ah so the young lady does have knowledge they can use.
Hooded dad Mike Peterson is talking to a doctor on the phone saying “your product works.” and woah he has a centipede-looking device implanted in his arm! Okay so this centipede mechanism is what caused his superpower. Got it
The nerd kids and Melinda May go to the scene of the hooded-rescue-explosion which turns out to be a lab. Simmons is like ‘fun dirty dead burned bodies! I’m excited by this’ and Fitz is clearly uncomfortable – so we understand they are, indeed, two different people with separate personalities. Melinda May is not fazed.
Fitz sends drones looking around. The drones are named after the seven dwarves. Bashful finds a camera from which Fitz can salvage footage.
Back in the interrogation containment room, Coulson pulls out some TRUTH SERUM to get answers from Skye…. But he stabs Ward with it. He tells Skye to ask whatever she wants so she starts with “have you killed anyone?” and “does your grandmother know?” but if she asked for any heavy-hitting spy secrets, they happen off-camera.
Mike Peterson tries to get his factory job back, but instead he fully throws his former boss against the wall and bashes him in the head. Hooded Hero has lost his chill.
Skye is all ‘we should still help him’ so that’s the mission.
Perfect Nerds and Skye brainstorm about recreating the last scene recorded by the lab camera before the blast.
Mike goes to visit the lady he saved but *twisty twist* she is THE DOCTOR that put the centipede contraption in his arm! We learn that he was a volunteer for that experiment. Doctor lady is mad. His heroic act to save her threatened to reveal her whole deal. “You’re losing it just like the last guy” she says. Last Guy…. was the guy who blew up the lab.
Fitz makes a cute hologram of the final recorded scene from the lab. We see that the Last Guy had a centipede thing in his arm as well. They infer that this is some sorta super soldier serum and it made the Last Guy get angry and then literally just explode.
Elsewhere, Mike knocks out May and kidnaps Skye in her own van. He brought his son along for the kidnap field trip. He wants Skye to help them run away and start over, but she tips off SHIELD to come and get him. Uh oh he is showing the same signs as the hologram dude. He is def going to explode.
Gift-to-this-world FitzSimmons are like “we have to cure him or kill him.” Simmons is worried that curing Mike is impossible, but Coulson is all “don’t ever say that” big Disappointed Dad style. Effective.
Mike throws a bunch of people around at Union Station. Ungrateful Doctor Lady shows up with a Big Guy with a big gun.
Some fighty fighties take place between Mike and Ward while avoiding gun blasts. Tag in Melinda May who reveals herself to be a badass. She takes out Big Gun Guy as Skye looks on like ‘werk.’
Coulson tries to talk Mike down but he’s too angry from the centipede steroid juice. He looks like he will explode any minute. Ward has a gun pointed at him- ready to take him down before boom. Coulson reminds us again that he died in the Avengers movie. He knows how Mike feels. Mike has a lovely tender moment when he says “I coulda been a hero.” And Daddy Phil Coulson says “I’m counting on it-“ then OMG Mike is shot in the head! By Ward! But wait! The gun has changed since we last cut to Ward. It’s glowing blue. Ahhh….. It was just the Night-Night Gun from the FitzSimmons intro scene! It worked. Mike is paralyzed. We get slo-mo shots of each member of the team smiling and nodding to each other. This was a positive paralysis. They all worked together to make it happen. Teamwork makes the dream work – if the dream is stopping a man from exploding from the inside.
Skye goes with Coulson to make sure Mike’s son is safe with his aunt. Skye is like ‘okay you guys are cool’ and Coulson is like ‘Get in the car we’re going on another mission.’ And the car literally flies off. Oh and the car’s name is Lola. She’s red. She’s hot.