Okay! It took me a while to get through this one. I’ve started looking forward to future episodes and storylines and this one doesn’t necessarily move anything along. But to get to those, I have to get through these early more stand-alone stories. But, this episode is not bad! It has everything: a robot eyeball, an exploding robot eyeball, a robot eyeball with a camera in it, a surgery removing an exploding robot eyeball camera! Woah awesome. How do we get there?
Well here is Sergels Square in Stockholm, Sweden. It looks fun. It looks hip. It looks lively. The jabbawockeez are here in black suits and red masks, but they’re not dancing. There are dozens of them, and they each have a silver briefcase handcuffed to their left arm.
A woman is standing in the middle of the hubbub with her eyes closed because she’s not impressed with any of it. She is wearing a leather jacket, black pants, and earbuds. She looks cool as hell. As the jabbawockeez pass her, she follows them to the subway. On the train, the red masks slow-mo turn their heads toward her. Very freaky. She elbows something which turns off all the lights on the train. When it stops, all the redfaced dudes are down. Dead? And ONE of them has his left hand totally chopped off! His briefcase is gone.
Cut to the bad bitch opening a bloody silver briefcase filled with diamands. Ooooo diamonds. Girl’s best friend, right?
On the Bus.
Phil stops by the cockpit to talk to May. She cuts the conversation short by saying she enjoys the solitude of flying. But before he leaves her alone, she almost smiles! Aw May is glad to be here.
FitzSimmions shows off the new Night-Night Pistol … which apparently doesn’t work yet. Ward notes the specifications he needs for this lil gun – it needs to knock someone back as well as out – and says they must change the name. Simmons’s hair is very curly. That really stood out to me in this scene. She really took the time to get done up before sciencing. (Which, honestly, is not unrealistic. I knew tons of beautiful nerds in college who looked profesh every day…. Couldn’t be me…. ) Anyway in the Night-Night Pistol, each mag holds 8 rounds of the paralysis toxin. They will get it “working in no time.”
Phil asks Ward how Skye’s weapons training is going. He says “is she still saying ‘bang ‘ when she pulls the trigger?” that’s funny. But Ward sounds defeated because Skye is still confusing the safety release with the mag release. Silly girl
Skye is hiding in the van in the cargo hold. She’s having Me time. Coulson asks her not to call him Phil. She calls him A.C. … which isn’t much better, but he doesn’t push it. He tells her that someone has been stealing millions of dollars in diamonds. He wants her to figure out their exploit.
Coulson, May, and Skye go to the scene of the crime. Turns out that 55 men – all military – were hired by a gem broker and sent along 25 routes in Stockholm. No one knew which case contained the diamonds, even the men. They did the special tactic because somebody has been targeting diamonds. Before this, diamonds were stolen from an armored car in Milan and a safe in Monte Carlo. The train system may have been hacked for an hour because there is no camera footage. Skye suggests the culprit could have ESP. May is like ‘naw that’s never happened’. Then Sky is like oh maybe they read minds! Girl, we just established that no one knew where the diamonds were so reading minds wouldn’t have done anything. Pay attention. But Skye does end up being helpful. She finds people on Instagram who took pictures of the redfaced men.
On the bus they start flipping through all these social media posts to find someone who looks suspicious. Phil spots her immediately. He knows her. He trained her. She is… Akela Amador
She was a shield agent who led a raid seven years ago against Vanchat’s gulags…. You know… Vanchat’s…. gulags. We all know who Vanchat is right? Right good… okay whelp better move on (Okay coming back to this from the future after I rewatched the first few episodes again for no reason – okay I was stalling – and Vanchat was mentioned in the pilot. He was the guy that had the Chitauri neural link that Ward stole). Everyone on her team was killed and she disappeared.
Ward has a list of people who might be fencing these diamonds.
May wants a manhunt. Phil says no manhunt until they learn more.
Skye Is like ‘aw I’m not special you had a protégé before me.’ He says ‘you two are different because Akela did not work well with others.’ He might blame himself for the dark turn she took
Akela is in a hotel room. She closes her eyes before lunging for a guy outside her door. She mad because he brought men with her. We can’t see the other men, but she can. He’s like ‘its security for when I leave’ and she is satisfied with that. She shows him the way the diamonds are hidden. They are hidden in golf balls which dissolve in water. She paid him 30 million dollars in diamonds in exchange for a key card. He says “it will access all the levels” whatever that means. He asks if Akela has a plan. She says “it’ll come to me” hmmm intriguing.
Now the team is in Zloda, Belarus. May is still on the Bus and told HQ they are tracking a potential suspect nothing more. Phil doesn’t want HQ knowing about Amador. The kids will stay in the the van (code name ‘short bus’) and “maintain radio silence unless they really need help…”. Ward and Coulson walk through a ca-yute street looking for Akela’s hotel
The kids in the short bus call Ward. So much for radio silence. They found some secret broadcast signal but haven’t figured out what it shows yet. Also, they have to pee. Ward suggests they pee in a water bottle. Skye is like hey two of us don’t have penises. Ward doesn’t care. Fitz wants to know if there are snacks. Ward hangs up. I mean these are important questions, Ward.
The men stop by a hotel. The desk lady calls Akela her angel because she detected a tumor in her. Saved her life! (no. nope. we see later what Akela sees. She does not see into bodies. whatev lets just pretend it only sees tumors on the inside and nothing else.)
On the short bus, they focus the secret broadcast signal. It is of a street. Cute and boring. The camera starts looking at THEIR VAN. Then it shows a BACKSCATTER IMAGE of them inside the van. How cool! I mean oh no its scary! Akela is driving right toward them! Skye gets a gun. “safety off” she says as she releases the magazine… Then she says “bang” while helplessly staring down the oncoming danger – nice touch. Akela crashes into the van and knocks it over so that she can get away without being followed.
Ward is like ‘ugh now these dumb wimpy kids are gonna be in shock and useless.’ But hey Skye has been working on something. She hacked the feed that was watching them! Looks like the kids bounced back quick.
They all look at the hacked feed on the big screen. It shows Akela looking in a mirror! Her eye is a camera! And when she closes her eyes, it switches to backscatter. Fitzsimmons says its genius far beyond what they have seen from SHIELD.
May wants to bring her in. Coulson is like ‘bitch no. our teeny tiny team has got this.’ May is like ‘girl what? she’s dangerous.’
They see Akela write “can I sleep” on a piece of paper and receive a typed out response in her feed that says ‘STAND BY’. Ohhh she’s being controlled! They are going to take shifts watching the feed until they have a clue of her location.
Coulson apologizes for getting Skye knocked over in a van and for fighting with mom I mean May downstairs. Skye is like ‘dad, you value me so I trust you. If you think she deserves a second chance so do I even though I kind of hate her guts cuz she tried to kill me.’
In the lab with the screen, Fitz is sleeping. May is gone. Why is May gone? They play Amador’s feed back and see that there was a receipt giving away her location. May went rogue to go after her!
May is in Amador’s hotel room. Amador is like ‘okay bitch as soon as my handlers see you they are going to wait for me to kill you or they will kill me.’ So they fight! Akela turns the lights out and closes her eyes. She almost shoots May but Coulson comes in and shoots her with the night night pistol! I guess they got it working….
In the honeycomb capture room, Coulson tells Akela that they hijacked her feed. They have Ward wearing glasses with the hijacked feed complete with backscatter imaging. Her handlers will just have seen that she left the hotel room to head to her next mission – the one needing the 30-million dollar card.
She asks Coulson “where is the ‘I told you so’?” and he says “that’s not me anymore. I’m just glad you’re alive”
She says that on the Vanchat mission, she didn’t trust her team the way Coulson insisted, and it got them captured. She spent four years in a cage at the bottom of a copper mine. Four years! Then, she was taken out by a mystery team. She still doesn’t know who they are. They put the robot eye in her and started sending her to steal things and break into places. When she ignored the directions, they would give her migraines as a warning – to let her know there is a kill switch in her head. They only give her one direction at a time, so she doesn’t know what the whole mission entails before she goes in.
They deduce some info about her handler based on the way he gives directions -british, middle-aged, fat-fingered
Skye gets Ward ready for his mission into this secret research building. He can’t look in mirrors because the handlers will see that he is a tall white man and not Akela
(Hey since the vision is coming through glasses, wouldn’t the handlers notice that she wasn’t blinking? Hm. Oh well I’ll just decide that the nerds put in random blinks in the feed. I’m satisfied with that headcannon)
Simmons is in charge of surgically removing the eyeball. Akela helps her stab a local anesthetic in her own eye. Tight.
Ward sees a guy at a security desk and waits for direction. “hope it’s a knockout and not a kill” he says, but the direction comes in and it is…. “seduce him” aw how fun. Skye suggests he talk Russian man stuff like sports and vodka. Ward speaks Russian. Of course. “how about that game” cliché and fun. Nice try. Then ‘Had a wild night met two ukranian girls didn’t sleep much. You know how it is right? Da?’ The delivery of the “da” really got me chuckling. This Ward character has a funny bone after all.
The guy doesn’t go for it so Ward knocks him out… presumably without showing his big white man hands to the glasses and giving himself away. He walks in a lil room with a couple nerds on typewriters. The walls are covered with chalk boards. The handler camera takes note of some circle and line symbols and types out that the mission is complete ‘good luck’ …
It turns out the reason the order was to seduce the guard instead of knocking him out was because he is supposed to enter a security password periodically. So its too late… people are on him
‘Dr. Fitzy’ needs to step in to the eye surgery now. He calls Ward for tips on which wire to cut. But Ward looks in a reflective surface oh no they are caught! Fitz cuts both wires and Simmons traps the eye in some convenient explosion capture can. No one blows up! Yay!
Coulson finds the handler and tells him he is with SHIELD. But they guy’s eye goes bloody and he straight DIES. Turns out he was being handled as well. He was a former mi6 agent. The real threat is still out there.
Nobody has seen anything like the chalkboard writing. Might be alien. Might be an equation
Akela will get a fair trial. She’s not worried about it. She’s just glad to not be watched anymore. She’s grateful. She asks May ‘What happened to agent Coulson? hes different…..what did they do to him?’ and May looks at her like ‘wha huh?’ so Akela just walks off
Skye says to Coulson “youre cool. That’s why I call you AC. Youre cool for giving Akela a second chance.” They’re gonna be a peaceful chosen family forever!
Akela is in prison but she’s at peace. She closes her eyes to sleep. Aw love that.
The stinger! Ugh I’m not into this scene for many reasons. Fitz and Ward are playing poker. Fitz is crunching pretzels with his mouth open. No sir. Not acceptable. Also… he has set up a plan with Skye to peek at Ward’s cards using the special glasses, but she is like ‘hey if I do this, I’ll see you without any clothes on’ which like what? They have already seen a shot of them both through Akela’s special eyes when they were in the van and watching the broadcast…. They know its just backscatter… Unless they changed the glasses and set up a special type of xray vision specifically for looking through one layer of material . girl I don’t know. Even then, I don’t support that workplace harassment, Skye, you should know better