Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Rewatch: S1E21 “Ragtag”

Ah the penultimate episode of season 1.  How far we’ve come. I enjoy it.  A helluva lot goes down.  The first half of the episode is quite light and fun and pleasant compared to the traumatic shitshow that we end with. I love the oldtimey gadgets and undercover hijinks.  Then right as we’re getting comfortable with the camaraderie, the floor falls out beneath us – into the ocean.     This episode has everything: Huge file transfers, Antoine Triplett’s briefcase saving the day countless times, and silly Fitz starting a fire^[1]which I point out because it is the very last instance of Fitz being a goofball… things are about to change, mama. CHANGE, I tell you.  

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“direct quotes look like this”
‘my silly paraphrasing looks like this’
(tangents are notated in such a manner)
footnotes ^[2]spoiler contain spoilers for future episodes
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Flashback to 15 years ago
John Garrett is meeting Grant Ward for the first time in a Juvenile secure unit in Plymouth, Massachusetts (Garrett does look younger here.  That’s impressive).  Grant is here because he stole a car from his military school to drive 1000 miles and burn his house down…. Ok.  His brother was in the house at the time. Grant’s parents are pressing charges against him for attempted murder and his brother is pushing to get Grant tried as an adult.  So, Garrett offers an opportunity for Grant to leave with him.
Grant says yes so some of Garrett’s men bust in to bust him out.  

Deathlok is on the news because he was killing a Hydra drug lord in Bogota. Why? (wait yeah why?)

Without a holotable, Coulson has resulted to a fat marker and a big piece of paper. 
He made the connection that Cybertek is the center of all their problems right now. 
On the Very Important Hard Drive (VIHD), Skye left a trojan horse that will map every system it is uploaded to.  But it will only be activated if they plug another lil thumb drive into the baddie computers.
So! We are going undercover into Cybertek to try to get access to their computers.   We’re not SHIELD agents anymore. We’re vigilantes.

“I’ll be damned if we let Garret and Ward get away with murder….. and I want my plane back”

Deathlok ripped a drug lord’s head clean off …Garrett says he wanted a spectacle. Deathlok is rewarded with some streamed video of his son.   
RAINA is here. She is getting close to recreating Coulson’s miracle drug – with the help of the VIHD

Fitz wonders if Ward is being controlled. “I don’t believe that people are just born evil. Something must have happened”  which is a wonderful tie-in to the B story we see of Ward’s past with Garrett.  That’s what happened…. Does it explain or excuse any of his present-day actions?

Trip proves he truly is Cool As Hell when he brings in a briefcase of his grandfathers old Howling Commandos stuff! Since they don’t have any connections and no base and no plane, this is all they have. And Coulson is geeking out over the classic spy gadgetry. Fitz accidentally sets the drapes on fire. 

15 years ago, Garrett drops Ward off in the woods with nothing but some clothes and Buddy the dog – the dog that we will avoid talking about as much as possible.


Inside Cybertek, Phil is playing Theo Tittle; Melinda is Dr. Roum.      They’re showing off some SHIELD tech as a cover for their being here. I appreciate the scene of FitzSimmons talking into Philinda’s earpieces as they try to explain their scientific designs to the Cybertec bros.  May undercover and smiling is a joy.    Cybertek is like ‘youre old. Please leave.’
Skye can’t find any sign of data in the building. Interesting.
Philinda beats up a guy in the elevator. Melinda beats up a guy who spots them as they sneak into a data room.

Skye couldn’t find a mainframe because there wasn’t one. All the Cybertek files are hardcopies… to avoid getting hacked I suppose. 

On the Bus… COULSON’S bus… Deathlok confronts Raina. He’s pissed at her for getting him into this situation.  He asks why she is here. She’s here because she wants answers.  She believes that she and Skye have something in common… and that’s all we get out of her^[3] It’ll be a while before we learn their connection, but I am looking forward to the slow burn through the first half of the next season .

Back to our caper at Cybertek, it’s time for a great great gag. Great great line. Perfect perfect great:
Coulson radios to Skye “Get ready for a large file transfer” 
Skye says “how large?”
 – and Philinda just dumps an entire file cabinet out a fourth-floor window.   
Trip and Skye are shocked then get it into the van.  The shot of Philinda looking out of the window at them is genuinely hilarious.  Then they zipline down and leave. Great scene. Good spy stuff (hey this is a great spy episode).

Ward is yelling at Garrett for ordering his heart attack.  But when Garrett has a little attack of his own, Ward jumps into action opening a metal panel on Garrett’s side to try to help him. Ward clearly cares about the guy despite their extremely toxic relationship.

At the motel, the team is finding out that Garrett was the first deathlok.  That explains his techy abdomen. He likely wants the miracle drug for himself.  Skye is all ‘wah I should have let Ward die’ and her family is like ‘aw chica but you’re a good person blah blah’ get over it!   We, the audience, need Ward alive now for the drama and we can’t be distracted by wondering if our main gal Skye is immoral.  

Garrett admits to Ward that he is dying.  Ward looks concerned. 

May and Skye have a mother-daughter convo.  Skye is like “you’re a zen warrior statue” and May says, “I’m furious, but I’m not going to waste is on a tantrum” (like Fitz would).  May is going to release her anger on Ward when she see’s him… and she’s willing to teach Skye how to channel her own anger. Aw.

Trip ID’d several Cybertek shipments that ended up in Havana, Cuba.  We shall go to there. 

Cut to evil Ian Quinn at the evil barber shop in Havana, Cuba. He greets Garret and heads off to DC to capitalize on Deathlok’s display in Bogota… okay I’m finally putting the pieces together here (see I’ve seen this episode numerous times and never paid enough attention to the baddie plot).

Ward catches up with Raina.  She has special secret intel on Skye’s background.  She knows lover boy Ward will be more interested than Garrett, so she reels Ward in before spilling.   She tells us a familiar story  about a baby in the Hunan province many years ago. Some monsters tore up a village looking for the baby…. And the monsters…. Were the baby’s parents. Ooooh  ^[4]Okay okay.  I know it’ll be a whole season before I get the whole picture but if I’m remembering correctly…. Skye’s father actually destroyed a village of people as a gift/offering to … Continue reading.  

Flashing back to little Grant Ward in the woods. He’s mad at Garrett for leaving him alone for six months but gets over it quickly.  Seems to be a pattern in this relationship.   Now Garrett will teach him how to use a gun.  

In the present, Raina has whipped up a single vial (of course it’s only one) of magical GH juice for Garrett.  

Trip is passing out more nifty gadgets before the party idiotically splits up.  He gives Fitz a walkie-talkie that looks like a quarter and keeps the other one.  Simmons looks on proudly as her boys are both being friendly with each other.    Coulson sends FitzSimmons out ALONE to search for the Bus from the ground.  He says, “call us if you find it and don’t engage under any circumstances.”  ( Dad, you’re literally sending them out to track down baddies ALONE.  Remember when you were all ‘aw wah I should never have let Skye go anywhere alone. I’m a bad dad!’ ? You’re doing it again!  At least Skye has been receiving training. We’ve never seen Simmons touch a weapon more powerful than a fire extinguisher.  Whyyy would you not send one of your two specialists with them? You’re splitting the party in two… why four and two instead of three and three? Are we supposed to believe that he was SO SURE that ALL of the bad guys would be at the barbershop and that no one would be patrolling the area around the plane?  Yes the resulting drama and tension from the FitzSimmons capture is amazing, but the storytelling that gets us there is irksome when I think about it too much)    

So. FitzSimmons finds the plane and sees it being loaded up for takeoff.  Tryephilinda is 3 HOURS AWAY at the barbershop.  They find it empty but decide if they can find a computer in there, they can plug in Skye’s trojan horse and they don’t even need to worry about the plane for now (SO YOU DIDN’T EVEN NEED TO – I’m okay).  

FitzSimmons plan to send Sleepy onto the plane as a spy, but they are caught by Grant Ward himself.  Eek!
 On the plane, Ward catches Fitz reaching into his pocket but shrugs him off when he sees that all the nerd has is a prank joy buzzer.  But heyo! It’s actually an EMP! Thanks Trip! When Fitz hits the button, Garrett’s techy abdomen shuts down and he collapses! Brilliant.  
Ward is panicking and orders Raina to contact Cybertek.   
Fitz is pleading with Ward to let Garrett die.  He’s still hoping for some light in that man.

In the past, Garrett is telling a slightly-older-Ward why he hates SHIELD.  He was injured on some operation, and they didn’t save him blah blah blah.  He taped his intestines back inside himself and crawled to freedom to join Hydra. 
Ward has now been accepted at SHIELD and Garrett congratulates him on getting himself there (ah.  I caught something for the first time on this watch.   This last portion of the episode is about Ward’s weakness of getting attached to people.  We are clearly meant to associate this weakness with FItzSimmons. BUT here we see Garrett standing in front of him literally saying “you don’t owe anyone anything. You got here by yourself” and still Ward rambles on to Raina about how much he OWES Garrett.  He never learned that lesson.  He continues to misdiagnose his own weaknesses).    Garrett says attachments are a weakness and he orders Garrett to murder his dog.  

In the present day, Garrett orders Ward to murder Fitzsimmons.  Right …. Of course.  Ward leaves Garrett’s side to go… do that.  
When Raina opens Garrett’s robot tummy, she sees that he has been using her centipede serum to keep himself alive.  He tells her to jumpstart it with her magic GH juice
 

As Ward chases down his precious little victims, they run into a med pod.  Fitz continues to appeal to Ward’s humanity and their past friendship.  We see a flashback to the forest in which Ward shoots into the air instead of at the dog.  This is here to give us some gross false hope.  Simmons already knows Ward is too far gone to care.  Ward moves to eject the med pod out of the flying plane! Ah! As they are screaming for their lives, we get a continuation of the flashback…. The dog was shot after all(There is some debate online regarding whether the shot is fired by Garrett or Ward.  Did Ward change his mind or did Garrett finish the job for him?   I always interpreted it as Ward deciding to shoot from a distance instead of close-up).  And now…. We see my two best friends plummet out of the plane and into the ocean.   The plane seems to be flying extremely low.

Raina injects Garrett with the stuff.  He spasms and glows.  Ward says, “what are you feeling?” and Garrett replies, “The Universe.”   Welp.  That can’t be good.

In the Barbershop, trip uses a gadget to find a false wall.   Phil says “A secret door?  I got this.  They’re, like, my thing.”   (Hey all my bolded quotes this time were from Coulson; proof that I love more than just the one character… Truthfully, I had to rein in quite a bit of gushing over Fitz this time. I’m taking a break from it until the finale). They enter to find the computers they are looking for…. As well as a group of Centipede soldiers.  One of them is holding the rage staff from episode 8.   Oof.  That’s a cliffhanger, y’all.

Stinger
Ian Quinn is proposing to sell 1000 super-soldiers to the military.   He’s all ,’yikes bikes Hydra and SHIELD sure are spooky scary.  You’re gonna want some protection.’      And then he offers to give them a tour of Cybertek.   Okay as stingers go, a little underwhelming but maybe it sets up some more political intrigue that I completely forgot about.