Agents of SHIELD continues to spiral into new and uncharted territory following the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  Beyond how the team is supposed to keep itself alive and intact while fighting an internal war against Hydra is fodder enough for solid plot threads, but the previous episode also ended with the revelation that Ward is apparently working for Garrett, aka “The Clairvoyant”.

If Ward is still working for the good guys, then his moral relativism is a lot more questionable than I might have guessed.  For now, I’ll concede that Ward appears to be what he claims.  He might still have some lingering feelings for Skye and respect for Coulson and the rest of the team, but his cold-blooded killing of SHIELD agents is harder and harder to reconcile.  And it’s very clear from his conversation with Raina that he can be derisive and even cruel, and entirely loyal to Garrett.

Brett Dalton spends most of the episode proving that his former semi-wooden portrayal of Ward was less a lack of ability and more solid acting.  He shows more range in this episode than we’ve seen all season.  It almost makes me wonder if the long con that the writers were playing, based on the timing of Winter Soldier, wasn’t to the detriment of the series.  Early audiences didn’t get to see what Dalton could bring to the table, and a case could be made that it was the same for most of the cast.

What makes Ward’s turn particularly interesting is that his loyalty to Garrett doesn’t seem to extend to Hydra much at all.  If anything, he seems a bit unimpressed about the whole Hydra business, and might even prefer that Garrett stake his own claim, given that they are the team that took the best goodies from The Fridge.  While I accept that Ward has been working for Garrett all along, and doubt he would simply switch sides based on a preference for Coulson at this point, I could see a scenario in which Ward feels like Garrett has been sipping too much of the Hydra Kool-Aid.

Part of that sense is how Garrett is being written.  Frankly, Garrett is not entirely convincing as a villain, and I’m not sure why.  Is it that his one-liners feel forced, or that his attitude seems a bit hard to pin down?  I almost think that he’s certifiable, and others are just drawn in by what seems like charisma and is really the shine of madness behind his eyes.

And I’m sure that part of it is the fact that Garrett’s reveal as “The Clairvoyant” continues to fall flat, and the writers felt the need to toss a lampshade on it by having Raina show her own disappointment.  Who wouldn’t rather see Ward take Garrett’s place with Raina as “Madame Hydra” at his side?  And if they can retcon things so Zola is “The Clairvoyant”, since that still makes more sense to me, that would be even better!

Turning to Coulson’s team, it makes sense that the American military would want to take control of SHIELD assets and even round them up as terrorists, given that the majority of SHIELD installations are in Hydra control.  Colonel Talbot doesn’t look like the type to work well with others (consistent with his portrayal in the source material), and since we know from the end of Winter Soldier that there is government pressure to shut SHIELD down entirely, it all fits.  What Agents of SHIELD now appears to be is the story of how Coulson, in Fury’s absence, helps to re-create SHIELD in the image of what it should have been, rather than the Hydra front that it came to be.

While I can’t say that I completely bought Coulson’s crisis of faith, since the casting of Patton Oswalt and his role in this episode had been long since spoiled, I did feel like the tensions within the team were written well.  I think Coulson is transferring his inner conflict between the Fury he trusts implicitly and the Fury that has been making very questionable decisions onto May and Skye, which feels authentic.  Now that he knows Fury is alive, but cannot tell his team, he’s effectively in the same position that May was in, and it will be interesting to see how that pans out.  That is, if that order is genuine; I can’t imagine why Fury wouldn’t want May to know he’s alive, if he trusted her enough to watch Coulson.

Agent Koenig isn’t just questionable because of the war within SHIELD; there is just something about him that seems less than genuine.  And I think that the beach scenes on the walls weren’t simply “window dressing”, either.  Since we know that Fury didn’t run the TAHITI project (if we can believe he was telling the truth to May), I can’t help but wonder if Koenig is connected to TAHITI in some way.  It would make some kind of weird sense for Fury to send Coulson to investigate the people who brought him back to life, but it could be that the paranoia within the team is rubbing off on me!