Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: The Frenemy of My Enemy (2x18)

Wow! Ahhh!!! Great episode. Everything about this season is making me so excited and nervous.

Fitz manages to meet up with Coulson, Hunter, and Deathlok. Their next step is to go make a deal with Ward. They find Ward and Agent 33, and Coulson asks Ward to get him close to Hydra. In exchange, Coulson will use the T.A.H.I.T.I. protocol to wipe Ward's memories and give him a fresh start. Ward agrees, and takes Coulson and the others to Bakshi. Bakshi has been brainwashed by Agent 33 and Ward. He goes in and meets with Doctor List, with Deathlok acting as his body guard. From this, we learn that Hydra is searching for Gordon. If Coulson can follow Hydra to Gordon, then he can find Skye, which was the whole point of this in the first place!

Meanwhile, Skye learns that Jiaying is planning on sending Cal away from Afterlife. Cal doesn't belong, because he's not a powered person. He makes people uncomfortable by being there. Skye realizes that Cal is going to freak out when he realizes he's been abandoned, and she decides to go with him to soften the blow and tell him that she'll visit. The two of them walk around Cal's old home town, as Cal talks about the life they could have had together. Skye calls May and tells her that she is with Cal, and she needs help keeping him calm.
 

Back at the base, Simmons reveals to May that the real Toolbox is with Fitz. May tells Bobbi, to Simmons' horror, but May says that they would have figured out eventually. May covers for Simmons, saying that taking the Toolbox was Fitz's idea, and Simmons has just been covering for him. May explains to Simmons that Coulson left them with a lot of secrets, so they need to figure out what's really going on before they make assumptions. At this point, Skye calls them. As she's warning them, Hydra's agents (with Bakshi and Deathlok) show up at Skye's location, having traced Gordon's power signature, since he's the one who dropped Skye and Cal off.

Skye and Cal see Lincoln, who has been sent to make sure that Skye is okay with her crazy father. Cal gets upset that he's not being trusted, and finally realizes that the plan was to abandon him all along. As the Hydra agents run around looking for them, Coulson, Ward, Fitz and Hunter come in to find Skye. Unfortunately, May and Simmons manage to trace the call and get a video feed to Coulson just in time to see him standing with Ward, apparently working with him.

Deathlok manages to stop Hydra from getting to Skye, but just as Skye sees Coulson, Gordon arrives and whisks her off. Coulson, out of options, decides to surrender to Bobbi and Mack, who have just showed up for the purpose of finding Skye.

Whew. Crazy. Lots of chaos in this episode. I don't think I have anything to complain about, really. Maybe Lincoln. I really like the idea of his character, but he's coming across as pretty generic right now. I hope we can complicate his character a bit, now that things are getting more and more twisted.

But everything about this episode was just... ugh it was just perfect. Everything is barreling forward towards some sort of intense season finale, and I'm not sure I'm prepared for it.

Ward and Coulson's dynamic in this episode was amazing. I have too many favorite moments of them to list, but I'll try to name a few... When Coulson first calls Ward, he uses Agent 33's phone. Ward answers "hey baby," and Coulson replies "hey sweetie." Then there's the moment during the confrontation on the Quinjet. Ward says that Bakshi will get them closer to List and other Hydra agents. When Bakshi starts going off script, things get a little out of hand. At one point, Ward says "trust me," and Coulson replies "trust you? I oughta shoot you just for saying that." That was the perfect response!

I'm a little bit confused about what Agent 33 was doing in this episode, because she didn't really seem to have much of a purpose. That being said, I enjoyed her strange relationship with Ward, and the ways in which we're starting to see that they actually care for each other.

Fitz! Honestly, I think it's more than a little terrible of Coulson to make Fitz work with Ward in any capacity. What Fitz went through is really, really traumatizing. Ward injured him severely, and he's never going to be the same because of it. I loved the mounting tension between them. I wanted to literally reach through the screen and punch Ward in the face when he talked to Fitz. Stay away from him!

Also, Hunter gets better and better in every episode I see him in. He was suffering from bland-sarcastic-asshole-syndrome for a while, but he actually has his genuinely funny moments now, like when he called Bakshi "Stepford Bakshi." He's also loyal to Coulson, and kind of a bad ass, and when he got shot I was genuinely upset about it, even though it's clear he'll be fine.

If I had to pick a favorite part of this episode, it would be Cal. Kyle MacLachlan is outstanding in this role. He's so creepy at some moments, and there's this sort of manic energy with everything he does. But at the same time, you can see the kind of father he would have been underneath it all. He's goofy, he tells dad jokes, he had visions of taking his daughter to school and helping her with her science project. I completely understand why Skye is drawn to the bits of her father than she can find beneath the madman.

At the same time, one of my other favorite parts of this episode was Skye. She didn't let her nostalgia for a childhood that never existed make her forget the reality. She knows Cal is dangerous. The only difference is that before, she thought of him as evil. Now, she knows he's completely unsettled and insane. There's a sympathy there between them, which just makes all the could-have-beens all the more depressing. We also get to see that Skye is still dedicated to staying at Afterlife with her mother and the others. When she sees Coulson, she wants to run to him, but Gordon gets to her too quickly. She says "not yet!" She still has every intention of staying with these people who are more like her, but Coulson is more of a father to her than Cal could ever be, and she wants, very badly, to be with him again. Ouch. My heart.

I could say a lot more about this episode, but I think I'll leave it with one final thought: all of these different plot lines came together so smoothly at the end. I loved the way that the culminating action scene built and built, and then suddenly everybody was there - representatives from both sides of S.H.I.E.L.D., from Hydra, from the Inhumans... all colliding in potential disaster.

Coulson says to Bobbi and Mack at the end of the episode: "take me to your leader." I'm so excited to find out what that's going to look like!

9/10