The accelerated pace of Agents of SHIELD has allowed for a number of advancements that might have once taken far too long.  It’s one of the best arguments that the series was waiting for The Winter Soldier to come along to kick the series into proper gear; now that the gloves can come off, the writers are wasting very little time.

One complication that has been lingering in the background, causing all manner of friction between allies, is the truth about Coulson’s resurrection.  May and Maria Hill parse it out very neatly.  If it wasn’t Fury, then who was it?  The list is not very long, and one very prominent possibility is Alexander Pierce, who was revealed as a member of Hydra in The Winter Soldier.  With Ward’s behavior being less than obvious in terms of motivations, and Deathlok taking orders from Garrett without question, there’s a reason why May and Coulson himself might wonder if Hydra could pervert Coulson against his own team.

In more immediate action, the chess game between Ward and Skye lasts only so long as it needed, and then the action moves to something a lot more ugly.  One might quibble over Ward’s inability to recognize Skye’s various tells, but it has been pretty clear from the start that even if Ward wasn’t going to switch sides for Skye, he was also treating her differently than everyone else.  It may not be love, per se, but some blindness made sense.

Speaking of Skye, this is the best episode yet for Chloe Bennett.  I know that a number of people have praised Dalton’s character turn and recognized that he was holding back, but I wonder if just as many will give Bennett credit for how strong a performance she delivered in this episode.  Ward attempted all the usual tropes with Skye, begging to be understood, but she was having none of it.  It was more than enough to underscore, repeatedly, that Ward was doing all of this out of loyalty to Garrett and his belief that following orders was justification enough.

It goes so far down the path of showing how psychopathic Ward has become about his “duty”, to the point that he can’t grasp why Skye can’t see it as clearly, that Deathlok’s orders come as the perfect shock to his system.  The idea that Garrett would see him as expendable is hard to swallow, and he has to face his own reaction to his fate being dependent on “just following orders”.  I doubt it will be the beginning of a reversal for him, but it might lead him to take on Garrett on his own.

Oddly enough, Ward’s fate may not be set in stone.  The other layer of the episode was Skye’s insistence that Mike Peterson was a good man, and didn’t have to be bound to the orders he was given.  If Mike/Deathlok could still turn that corner, why couldn’t Ward?  The fact that Ward seems to be on a sacrificial trajectory makes me think that the opposite might happen.  Ward may end up in a cell somewhere, to return when the time is right (or terribly inconvenient).

Turning back for a moment to the revelation about TAHITI, that cuts right to the bone when it comes to Coulson’s disillusionment in the SHIELD he was fighting to maintain.  Maria tries to tell him that there is no SHIELD, no magical reserve of support, but I think it’s the realization that Fury went against Coulson’s demand to shut TAHITI down.  There’s also the not-so-minor problem that Coulson knows too much about his resurrection, and use of the drug on Skye could cause serious problems.  If she is something unusual and dangerous, or potentially so, how much will the effects of the drug matter?

I’m not sure where the series would go in a second season, but Maria Hill should certainly be a part of it.  I see Coulson raging against the dying of SHIELD and doing everything possible to resurrect it, metaphorically not unlike his own rebirth, and thus pick up the threads following The Winter Soldier  even more obviously than the series already has.  Could Fury come along in the final episode and sanction Coulson’s team, with Maria Hill’s support, to rebuild SHIELD from the bottom up?  I suppose it depends on just how critical Garrett was or is to the entire Hydra infiltration effort.

I also want to give kudos to the action sequences.  There were some amazing fighting scenes throughout the episode, and while the effects were somewhat dodgy, the sequence with Lola was a nice throwback to the series premiere.