Agents of SHIELD rewatch: S1E8 “The Well”

My memory of this one was not so positive.  In this show, I am more drawn to the espionage than I am to the magical mystical goings-on.  Watching a bunch of people scream with magical rage takes a bit more disbelief-suspending than I am used to.  However, I do appreciate having Dr. Jemma Simmons around to remind us all that “magic is just science we don’t understand, yet” to help me get through the cringier moments.  This episode has such things as :  angry angry white folk, glimpses of Ward backstory!, hints to May backstory!, um wait are they gonna fuck? 
Let’s get there

Footnotes contain spoilers to future episodes.

Simmons is giving a voiceover monologue!  She is letting us know that that the movie Thor: the Dark World just came out and that the whole world has learned about Asgardian alien gods.

They are cleaning up after the mess to make sure nothing alien gets into the wrong hands.  Skye says she wished they had left an alien ship behind that they could go inside.  She asks May “you’re telling me piloting an alien ship isn’t on your bucket list?” and May definitely thinks about it^[1]season 5 episode 1, baby
Skye and May say Thor is dreamy.

Cut to a national park in Norway. A couple is cutting down a big old tree.  That’s definitely not cool.  The dude splits the tree open and finds a metal rod inside with Norse runes on it.  The girl grabs onto it and it glows, and she starts feeling intense rage.  He tells her to embrace it.   Some park rangers show up to get mad about the poor old tree and the rageful girl whacks one ranger down with ease and superhuman power.

The team is at the site now.  Ward is helping Simmons get over her newfound fear of heights (because of the events of FZZT)  as she walks up the felled tree.  He uses nerdy nonsense talk to distract her.  Its very cute ^[2]it is VERY sweet of him which makes the impending betrayal that much more heartbreaking.

One of the park rangers is describing the scene to Coulson and admits that he ran away while his buddy was smooshed.  Word, dude. You’re just smart.

Simmons takes a reading from the inside of the tree.  They create a 3D image using the imprint left behind from the removed object.   They know the rod was Asgardian because of the runes. We can see that it was broken at both ends, meaning there are at least two other pieces to the rod somewhere. 

Violence breaks out in Oslo led by the white couple from the forest- Jakob and Petra.   They wrote “we are gods” in FIRE in the middle of the road… A little much, kids. We are calling them leaders of a ‘Norse Paganist hate group’. They are obsessed with Norse mythology 


Our team goes to meet Elliott Randolph – an expert in Norse mythology who teaches at a university in Seville, Spain.  He recognizes the rod fragment immediately. It’s a piece of the “berserker staff” from a 12^th century myth about a soldier in the berserker army.  Fighting with it put the warrior in a state of uncontrollable rage to aid in battle.  The soldier from myth came to Earth from Asgard to fight but ended up falling in love with Earth and humanity.  He stayed behind with the staff. He didn’t want it falling into the wrong hands, so he broke it into 3 pieces and hid them in 3 places…  and wrote 3 poems about where he hid them.  Why did he do that if he didn’t want anyone to find them? Will we find out? Yes we will. Later. 
  At one point, Randolph calls Simmons “analytically minded and pretty as a peach” and Fitz immediately gets him back on track to the story.
The professor suggests they look at Baffin Island.  SHIELD sends some off-screen agents there, but they don’t find anything.

Skye finds details on some Viking routes. One goes right through Seville, Spain where they happen to be right now.  They decide to go to a crypt under a church that matches up with one of the poems.   I love the way Coulson says, “lets see what we can dig up? see what I did there?” all in the same tone.  It’s a type of dad joke that has been done to death, but his delivery makes it land.

Line of the episode. 
Fitz: “Must be nice having Mandatory naptime”
Coulson: “Siesta isn’t mandatory… just verry pleasant”  

In the crypt, Ward finds Professor Randolph trying to sneak away with a piece of the staff.  Ward tries to grab it from him, but Ward collapses, and we see he is having a vision of a boy at the bottom of the well. Wat dat?

The professor leaves with the staff but he is seen by the hate group.  They start flinging cars around and Coulson finds the professor without either staff piece. Damn he really screwed up 

Back in the lab on the Bus, Ward is being a real dick.  It seems that he has residual rage from the staff.  He says when he touched the staff he remembered ‘something he hadn’t thought about in a long time’.

Professor Randolph says he just wanted to be the first to study the staff – to prove that the berserkers were actually here and not just a myth. 

Simmons turns off the feed of the interrogation room because Ward’s heartrate was spiking while he was watching it.  Skye tries to get him to talk about the rage memory, but Ward is like ‘don’t you ever get tired of hearing your own voice?’ Simmons tries to sciencify Ward’s dickiness, but then he goes after Fitz, saying “are you gonna keep us safe or am I gonna have to save Simmons’s ass again?”  before stomping off.  They are shaken by Jerk Ward, but they take it pretty well. Simmons says he didn’t mean it, and they’re like “yeah we know.”

Ward remembers more about the boy in the well. This time, we see another boy looking down at him from the top. 
May is like ‘stop punching things its not going to help.’    

The white haters are rallying somewhere. They are making each other touch the staff to get the rage power.  Eugh that does not look chill

Ward is a bit steadier but says he thinks his ability to do his job may have been compromised. Things he put away from his childhood are coming to the surface and distracting him.  It’s his worst memory. The first time he felt hate.  But Coulson is like ‘I know I can trust you because you are telling me this’   he suggests Ward go use his rage on the little professor in the honeycomb room. 

Ward goes to stab Randolph and the guy uses his hand to bend the knife.  He … is… Asgardian.  Then he just rips his handcuffs off.   Of course, Coulson had figured him out before sending Ward in to attack.  The professor had an expensive pen which Coulson clocked. And he wasn’t curious when Coulson brought up aliens.  HE was the Asgardian warrior from the myth. 
He says he knows telling people about the staff was a mistake… he made the mistake because he was horny. He met a French girl in 1546 so he told her the story of a peaceful Asgardian warrior who stayed.  (But why did he tell her the real locations?  Surely the story would have been just as cool if it ended with “and then he burned the staff in a volcano the end”)  On Asgard, he was just a mason for thousands of years.  He joined the army because he wanted to travel.  He hated the staff.  Ward asks what it does. It shines a light into your dark places…  I’m with Simmons, “that doesn’t explain anything.”
“I went to such great lengths to make sure the staff wasn’t found” hmph. Sure, Elliot.
They’re trying to get help from him regarding the hate group, but he says “eventually they’ll die of old age” so theyre like bro I stg you better start helping us. So THEN he tells them about a monastery he stayed in in Ireland where the last staff piece is. 

Ward asks if the effects of the staff are permanent.  The strength wears off.  The rage…. Its worse on humans… it wears off in a few decades… that sucks.   ^[3]okay is that the truth?  This is never brought up again. Am I missing something here?  This seems like a pretty big deal.  If he is truly going to be affected by rage for um… the rest of his … Continue reading Coulson again says about Ward, “he knows he’s messed up so that means he’s fine” I don’t know if I agree with that, Coulson, but hey you’re the dad.

In the monastery, Ward goes to get the staff but White Jakob already has it.  Jakob shoves a piece into Randolph’s chest.  Ward rips it out of Randolph’s body and has a superstrength fight with Jakob.    Coulson puts his hand into Randolph’s chest to slow the bleeding to give his Asgardian body time to heal itself. 

Skye goes up to Ward like “this isn’t you”  okay right now Skye? Really? We’re fighting.  Ward holds TWO pieces of the staff and knocks a whole bunch of white guys down.  We see more scenes from the well.  The boy is calling for Grant who is the one up top.  The boy is crying for help, but another boy shows up and tells Grant not to help. Grant eventually lowers the rope down when this other boy walks away.
Cut back to Ward in present day who has taken out about a dozen men by himself.  Skye rushes to him again like a big dummy.   White Petra shows up.  She mad.  May picks up the two pieces of the staff now.  Her reaction to it isn’t quite as strong as others we have seen from Ward and the hate group folks.  The third piece of the staff attaches itself to the other two and now May is fighting with the whole staff. She knocks Petra down and looks cool as hell.

Randolph wakes up. He looks at Simmons and says, “you’re easily the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a thousand years. “  okay dude that’s nice but step back.

Simmons decides to finally answer a call from her mum and dad to talk about the past few difficult weeks.

Ward asks May how she could handle the whole staff and she’s like ‘I see that memory every day.’  So she’s used to it. Ooo what is it though? ^[4]I’m glad to know already that the full reveal of her worst memory is very impactful so I’m enjoying this slow build

Coulson is tempted to pick it up.  He wonders if he would get more clarity on the moment he died.  He doesn’t touch it.   Some suits show up with a long thin staff-shaped container.  Very convenient. Who makes these things?

Coulson suggests Randolph relocate to Portland (we may remember from the Avengers movie, that Coulson had a lady there who played the cello) and says maybe he’ll introduce Thor to Randolph one day. 

Skye gets flirty with Ward at the bar of some hotel that they have been put in for the night.  He apologizes for the way he acted and she’s like ‘yeah it was hot.’ Okay she doesn’t say that but she seems way more into him than before.  He tells her a little bit about the memory – that it was about his brother as she had guessed. She offers to talk to him and lend a shoulder whenever he needs it.  He leaves her to go up to bed.  Ooooh but theeennnnn. As he is going into his room, May walks into her room with a bottle of booze. She looks back at him and leaves the door open…. And he goes through the door into her room. Aaahhhh.  Mayward! They’re gonna do it!

Final stinger. Coulson is getting a massage in Tahiti. The masseuse says, ‘it’s a magical place’ and he wakes up on his bed in his office.  Now he may be realizing that Tahiti was ‘too good to be true.’  

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** Spoilery footnotes below **

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