Diplomacy's hit a few snags,
The sort that require body bags.
So war's broken out,
The battle's a rout,
And Jiaying's busy planting false flags.
Now, Raina serenely objects,
But Jiaying needs all her subjects.
So rather than gloat,
She just cuts Raina's throat,
But Skye catches her and defects.
Now Cal seems to be in a clamp,
But a drug cocktail gives him an amp.
And while those prosthetics
Might fail in aesthetics,
MacLachlan's delightfully camp.
The Inhumans will not be barred,
And catch the carrier off-guard.
They capture the ship,
But some give them the slip,
And Mack gets to pull a Die Hard.
Hunter and May found the spot
Where Bobbi was tricked and then caught.
The two win the day,
Although in the melee,
Both Bobbi and faux-May get shot.
Jiaying has Terrigen, and gets to it,
Flying out to more broadly spew it.
Skye's ready to spring,
But then Cal kills Jiaying
To spare Skye from having to do it.
That's done, but there's still more to set,
And there must still be some kind of threat.
So Terrigens fly
Into the food supply
To set up more Inhumans yet.
So Cal, for his dopey part,
Is set loose with blank mind but big heart.
But Coulson and Skye
Must return to play spy.
There's a Secret Avengers to start.
With FitzSimmons together anew,
A few people's ships have come true.
But before that's adjourned,
While Fitz's back is turned,
Simmon's swallowed by alien goo.
For a while, the show had declined,
And I'd written it off in my mind,
But free of that fetter,
This finish is better
Than the rest of the season combined.
Although tie-ins were once a fixture,
This episode sidesteps that stricture,
And only devotes
Its first couple notes
To a plot point from their latest picture.
Bobbi thinks she's with May, unshaken,
But quickly learns that she's mistaken.
The May that we see
Is Agent 33,
And Ward secretly has Bobbi taken.
Now Raina, precog, sounds the chimes,
And warns of impending SHIELD crimes,
But as much as it grieves her,
Still no one believes her.
She's cried wolf too many times.
Gonzalez wants peace, no one blames him,
But an impulse to catalogue claims him,
And the threat of a cage
Provokes massive outrage,
Skye's mom kills Gonzalez and frames him.
It does seem an odd way to go,
And a break with the character flow.
Skye's mom was a pillar,
But now she's a killer.
Why? I guess the plot said so.
With Mike and Lincoln off the field,
And Coulson with no choice but to yield,
Seems they're all forsaken,
Or otherwise taken,
They by Hydra, Coulson by SHIELD.
Hydra wants their prisoners' condition
To bring their own plans to fruition.
With minimal winces,
Phil Coulson convinces
SHIELD to go on a rescue mission.
Though at times they just scrape by,
They get back their people and fly,
Especially now
That their team is endowed
With a freshly returned agent Skye.
Raina's visions brought about
Skye's new, SHIELD-convergent route.
But post this collision,
She has one more vision:
That Age of Ultron's coming out.
Of late, the show has a good spine,
But feels it must pad out the time.
To that end, we have scenes
About what it all means
That it could have covered in one line.
Fitz is still in last week's scrape,
Agents trailing behind like a cape.
He calls friends to sort
Out a little support,
And they talk him through how to escape.
With not enough people aboard,
Coulson puts pieces back on the board.
So despite the treason,
And against all reason,
He tracks down and then recruits Ward.
Cal is intent on restoring
His fam'ly with feelings outpouring.
And he uses his clout
For a father's day out.
That ends up surprisingly boring.
We're almost glad when things emerge
And Hydra pours forth in a surge.
And Skye chose to invite
SHIELD for the firefight.
Meanwhile Hydra and Coulson converge.
Skye gets teleported and grabbed,
Hunter gets shot, Hydra gets stabbed,
No one wins the brawl,
And most crushing of all,
Both Lincoln and Deathlok get nabbed.
With Coulson a late escapee,
And Fitz on the lam with the key,
The show takes a breather
To focus on neither,
But three stories concurrently.
First, we find out what's so extreme
That it managed to curtail May's dream,
And what she went through
Is that she once had to
Kill a child to save her whole team.
Skye's story, by contrast, is calm,
And she takes to her life with aplomb,
And especially
When she learns guide's ID,
And gets to spend time with her mom.
And, fin'lly, May with the new crew,
Trying desperately to sort through
The myriad plans
That have passed through her hands
And find what Coulson's been up to.
The crosscutting sometimes gets clogged,
But the whole thing is hardly a slog,
And after that bout,
We get to find out
That Raina might be a precog.
Spoilers, obviously:
With SHIELD determined to stalk,
Coulson's left to wait out the clock.
But he proves tricky prey,
And soon gets far away,
Now joined by Hunter and Deathlok.
And Skye, never to be outdone,
Finds the Inhumans' place in the sun.
And, as is tradition,
Gets three-scene exposition
That could have been covered in one.
May's in the cell once used by Ward,
But her ability strikes a chord,
Olmos lets her live,
And then offers to give
Her a seat on alterna-SHIELD's board.
With Skye as a one-woman bomb,
Raina's presence threatens her calm.
So "The Elders" decide
That Sky should have a guide,
Who turns out to somehow be Skye's mom.
Coulson wants to clean SHIELD's clocks,
But also free Skye from her locks.
Ward will be recruited,
And, also, Fitz looted
That little black mystery box.
To kick off the story to tell,
We watch a flashback for a spell,
How Bobbi and Mack
Countered Hydra's attack
On the darkened day that SHIELD fell.
Today, both are back from the field,
But their secrets will soon be revealed.
Though 'fore Coulson can brace,
The team's secret base
Is invaded by alterna-SHIELD.
Once Olmos has breached their redoubt,
He wants intel for Coulson to spout,
And to break the locks
Of a strange little box,
But May rescues, then sends Coulson out.
Team Olmos thinks Skye is just mental,
And sends a team who's less than gentle,
But Skye receives quarter
From the teleporter
Who zaps her to Inhuman central.
Although he's been given the sack,
Coulson is still on the track.
He'll have to be blunter,
And so he and Hunter
Will team up to take SHIELD back.
Last time, big secrets were revealed
And we glimpsed the new playing field,
And who should appear?
Edward Olmos is here,
As head of a parallel SHIELD!
They say Coulson's in no mental shape
For anything more than red tape,
And by that same coin,
They ask Hunter to join.
He says no, then makes his escape.
Ward remains quite hard to find,
And alarmingly un-confined.
He lives day-to-day
On the run with Faux-May,
Both with vengeance quite firmly in mind.
They infiltrate an army base
To meet an old goon face-to-face.
But for all Talbot's spittle,
It comes to quite little,
And doesn't do much for the pace.
Skye is now out of the lab,
But is now somewhere equally drab.
So her seismic plot-age
Is confined to a cottage
For some superpower rehab.
Some bridges were finally burned,
But given Hunter wasn't turned,
It's folks with no mission,
Just growing suspicion
Of things that we've already learned.
Skye's dad wants these powers of hers
To be free of S.H.I.E.L.D. saboteurs,
He starts a project,
Going 'round to collect
Some superpowered prisoners.
The team has its own problems to spar,
And things only get more bizarre,
But though they're detained,
Skye's dad's campaign
Puts him squarely on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s radar.
Meanwhile, May gets her ex, with glowers,
To consult with them for a few hours
And though Skye is annoyed,
He still plays Sigmund Freud
To help her control her new powers.
The team wants to live and let live,
But Skye's dad doesn't want to forgive.
Mercy is refused,
But that's all defused
When Inhumans take him captive.
Just to add to a well-crowded field,
Some more layers start to be peeled,
For when Lance inquires,
It quickly transpires
Someone's started a parallel S.H.I.E.L.D.
Lady Sif appears on a beach,
Her memories just out of reach.
But even given that,
We never get at
Just why she's so stilted in speech.
The ep, using this, of course links
To some fish-out-of-water hijinks,
But all of this play
Is just pointless delay,
And not as funny as it thinks.
It was a nice little tweak
For the alien creature they seek
To tie into the arc
When we had him marked
As one more monster of the week.
Seems he's a Kree soldier, disguised,
And he gets them full apprised.
For us and the crewmen
The source of Inhumans
Gets succinctly summarized.
But all this talk gets Skye thrown,
And she goes all human cyclone.
After that twist and shout,
All her secrets are out,
But Bobbi's got one of her own.
Last time was our heroes' close shave,
Underground in an alien cave,
Where old Whitehall died,
Tripp got petrified
And Skye caught the Terrigen wave.
Now, Skye has had a good restorer,
But poor Raina's come out the poorer.
She thought she'd be divine,
But the show seeks to mine
Inhumanity for body horror.
Coulson and Co. then enlist
Their pris'ner's unwilling assist,
So that each Hydra brother
Will turn on each other,
Which is really a nice little twist.
Jemma's concern is just that
Skye's condition will be a plague rat,
But we have the acumen
To know she's Inhuman,
And for comics fans, this is old hat.
The show takes a chance to reload,
But happ'ly declines to be slowed.
It's smooth as a harp,
The dialogue's sharp,
And it's just a first-rate episode.
