The war between SHIELD and Hydra escalates more quickly than one might have anticipated as the personal conflict between Coulson and Ward takes an ugly turn.  Frankly, I was impressed by how ruthless Ward was at the beginning of the episode, because I wasn’t sure how far they would let him go.  As it turns out, typical to Whedon-esque form, no happy couple is allowed to emerge unscathed. 

For a while it felt like the series was trying to do too much, but now that the endgame of the fall season arc is upon us, the pieces are falling into place fairly well.  Other than the fact that Daisy’s team is taking forever to come together, it seems pretty clear that all these plot threads were meant to intersect exactly as they are.  But it bears consideration that a lot of this is also generating some of the backstory going into Captain America: Civil War, at least in terms of adding to the public debate over the dangerousness of powered individuals.  


But it’s the characters themselves, and their tortured relationships, that stand at the core of this episode.  More than two seasons worth of history feeds into every decision and reaction, and it’s damned consistent.  So much of the team’s early days with Ward as a teammate gets thrown on the table, and it’s not pretty.  It might have been a little more potent had Coulson’s forgiveness towards Rosalind been established more clearly, but that’s splitting hairs.

If there is a flaw at the heart of the episode, it’s the ugly reality that Rosalind existed to die, not unlike Kara.  That’s sure to draw some criticism, especially if the entire history between Coulson and Ward is overlooked in favor of making this his sole motivator.  That said, it’s easy to lose that distinction when the episode goes out of its way to draw enough parallels between Coulson and Ward to suggest that the loss of a lover was a key point of comparison.


As someone else pointed out to me, having the depth of FitzSimmons right there in front of the audience to compare the Ward/Kara and Coulson/Rosalind relationships against was narratively unfair.  Neither couple had the same level of on-screen chemistry, and a great deal of Ward’s torture of Fitz and Simmons hinged on the bond between the two.  It put a spotlight on the vast differences, that’s for sure, while also telling the audience in which relationship they should be investing.





At the end of the day, though, Ward is a fascinating villain.  He’s got the usual abusive childhood that writers love to trot out to explain psychotic behavior (really, that cause/effect trope has got to go), but it’s more correct to say that he operates more from a warped sense of what his intense emotions mean in his worldview.  Add to that the kind of training and psychological modification he endured, and it’s no wonder he’s so dangerous.  It also means that the series would suffer from his absence, so I don’t see Coulson (or Daisy) getting final closure any time soon.