SPOILER ALERT!

Last week’s episode was high on action as our agents stopped recovered a Tesseract-powered weapon from Peru all before just about stopping the Peruvian soldiers they saved from crashing their SHIELD bus and stealing the ‘0-8-4’. Oh and Nick Fury made a customary end-of-credits appearance. Awesome.

"The Asset"

This week’s episode began with some crazy zero gravity truck flight and Skye getting some combat training. Here’s your full recap.

Skye somehow looks hotter this week, maybe it’s her wavier hair, or maybe it’s because she might be on the verge of betraying the gang (remember the end of last week’s episode?). But that’s neither here nor there.

Agents Coulson briefs the group on this week’s mission and who was behind all that zero gravity craziness a few minutes prior. Apparently a SHIELD convoy was intercepted while carrying a category ‘red’ asset. One Professor Franklin Hall, Fitz-Simmons’ former science teacher.

At the scene of the heist/kidnapping, Fitz discovers a small device that’s affecting the gravity and stuff. Ye I have no idea what they do be talking about a lot of the time either, but it’s fun to feel smart when you eventually kind of understand something from the scientific jargon.

Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

We now see who kidnapped Professor Hall, a certain Malta-based billionaire called Quinn. It all reeks of ‘evil billionaire needs genius scientist to help take over the world’. The device from earlier is then revealed to be ‘gravitonium’, which can change gravity. I’m pretty sure David Cameron didn’t write this episode, but with that name you’d be forgiven for thinking to the contrary.

Quinn wants to use the gravitonium (for lifting womens’ skirts probably) but needs Professor Hall to figure out how to control the gravity field, because imagine if the gravity field spread to uggos.

With Skye managing to magically hack herself into getting an e-vite to Quinn’s big gravitonium soirée, Agent Ward expresses his doubts and worries to Coulson about the girl he clearly wants to get frisky with.

Now comes the big ‘how to infiltrate evil lair’ scene and some clearer clarification on whether Coulson actually died in Avengers Assemble. With Agent May expressing her disinterest in going into the field, Coulson reveals it will be him that will join Ward. “You forget. I saw plenty of action with The Avengers,” he says. “And you died,” replies May as Coulson walks away. So he DID die, and SHIELD have obviously brought him back to life. Or did they create a new Coulson somehow? Anyway, we must move on.

We’re now at the evil lair party, with Skye looking particularly sublime in her fuchsia ensemble. After schmoozing with Quinn for a minute or so, he offers Skye a job. But then again, you would too. It’s not often you come across a decent looking hacktivist.

With Quinn announcing his revolutionary plans for the gravitonium, Coulson (in his suit and not the recommended recon outfit) and Ward dock at the coast of the evil island lair, while Skye infiltrates inside the evil villain mansion. But wait! Quinn catches her lurking the corridors. Then that two-faced little shrew inexplicably tells Quinn that SHIELD are listening. We’ll probably still forgive her.

This episode is really starting to feel like scenes from an Austin Powers movie what with the evil, albeit terrible in terms of shooting accuracy henchmen. Then our faith in Skye is restored as she was with SHIELD the entire time and ends up using her make-up kit to somehow hack their security systems. We’ll leave that one to the boys at Mythbusters.

With Ward warding off (see what I did there?) the evil goons, Coulson finds Hall only to discover the professor actually wanted to be kidnapped so as to unleash the evil gravitonium, swallowing up the evil lair and destroying it, saving mankind.

Get the chopper! NOW!

With the lair now going all mental from the gravity shifts, Coulson tries to talk Hall out of this madness. A soaking wet Skye (she jumped into a swimming pool, people!) is then saved by Action Man Ward who arrives in the nick of time to stuff some more goons.

In the meantime, Coulson and Hall are walking on the walls and ceiling as if in Inception while fighting and arguing. They exchange their own moral objections before Coulson shoots the glass they’re standing on, leading to Hall falling into the gravitonium generator, most likely killing him. Probably.

Coulson’s narrow escape from a gravit-astrophe prompts May to reconsider her office job. She’s back in the field, didn’t see that coming at all. Skye then gives Ward some boring insight into her family while hitting a bag, though Ward holding it has to be merely symbolic, as she hits like a, well, you know.

The episode ends with the gravitonium being locked away in some secret SHIELD vault, as we see Hall’s arm protrude, telling us this kitty still has legs.

Verdict:

Another very fun episode, improving on a lot from last week but at the same time you felt like you’d seen this plot played out numerous times before. Skye not betraying SHIELD was a cool plus, though we can’t rule it out later. Clarification that Coulson did die in New York was welcome too. I just hope they don’t drag out this Skye/Ward romance too long though, it could get annoying.