Oh man, another high-strung intense episode of SHIELD for me.  Things are escalating toward the winter break, so if you aren’t all the way caught up, there are inevitable spoilers here.  Fair warning for…

Ye Who Enter Here – Summary

We start off with a look into Skye’s creepy dreams, and that sense of dread over something bad going to happen, or maybe repressed memories of something that did.  She is startled awake by Coulson telling her to get ready to go.

The team wastes no time in going to the hidden city that they found at the end of last episode.  Unfortunately, Raina is being tracked by a Hydra team led by Agent 33, who is still wearing May’s face.  It has never been stated, but I’m just going to run with the idea that after she got shocked in the face, she got stuck in that bio mask thing, and now can’t get it off.  ‘Cause come on.  It’s not a good look for her.

Coulson splits the teams and sends May, Skye, and Hunter to extract Raina, while the rest go to San Juan to find the lost city.  On the way, Fitz and Simmons finally have the talk they’ve been needing to have, kind of.  Fitz tells Simmons he’s going to work with Mack in the garage and that he can work “for” Simmons but not “with” Simmons any more.  How this will actually play out remains to be seen.

Raina almost jets to join Hydra, just because she wants to be in the city with the obelisk / diviner, but May comes to the “rescue”.  They get back on board the quinjet and fly back to meet the rest of the team.  Midway, Hydra hacks Raina’s SHIELD tracker to find her in the sky, surround the cloaked plane, and send “someone” on board to collect her.  That someone is Grant Ward, who decides to also take Skye, and as a result save the plane from being shot down, anyway.

On the ground in San Juan, Coulson and Bobbi use oooooooold intel to find a vertical shaft into some tunnels to get into an underground city.  With a legend about people disappearing.  They find a really deep hole and send those dwarf copters down, but lose the signal.  They send Mack down with some lights, but he touches the ground and goes into an almost berserker rage, throwing his teammates around the room.  Even the icer does nothing to stop him.  Fitz threatens (with Coulson’s okay) to shoot him with “real bullets”, and only doesn’t because Bobbi takes him down with a shock to the neck.

Whitehall gets an update on the success of getting Raina back, only to discover that Grant let the plane go free.  Well, that wasn’t his decision to make, so Agent 33 gives the order to shoot the plane down.  End of episode!

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So when we get back next week, we’ve already got the team split in two, both halves in peril.  We know they’ll get out of it, but not how.  And, sadly, we can’t be certain about Mack’s fate.  He may become a superhero, supervillain, corpse, or the effects wear off and he just gets freaked out by the whole thing.  Who knows.

We also got a little clue that Bobbi and Mack have something in the works that they’re not telling anyone, especially Hunter, even though she and him are getting a little close.  Hunter’s been accusing her of playing some kind of angle since she showed up the first time, and it’s looking like he’s right.  Now what angle is that, and how bad is that going to be for SHIELD when it pops into the spotlight?

Fitz and Simmons continue to break my heart every time they talk about each other, or with each other. Seeing Fitz trying to talk and not able to finish his sentences, and Simmons can’t or doesn’t want to, and he doesn’t want her to… in contrast to last season where they were practically one character and spoke almost in unison.  It’s not looking good, guys.  Maybe, maybe in a world where the writers like to make our characters happy, maybe something in that city will give him his brain back and things can be just like old times, right?  Right?

Right?

I’m loving seeing some more Patton Oswalt as every Koenig that ever lived.  And, from experience, I know how hard filming clone shots is, so major kudos to the entire cast and crew for making it work.  Good job, guys!  I like that he’s still in and out and doing active field work, but he’s not a primary character we see all the time.  It makes the world feel just a little bigger than this one show.  Also, bonus points for making two very different characters who are believably clones / robots / etc, but you can still tell them apart.

It was interesting seeing Raina and Skye just get some time to chat about their mutual connection.  Hearing the words spoken out loud that they are human, and not alien, so we have to figure out where we’re going next.  The question is “what they become” which happens to be the title of the next episode, so hopefully we get a clue.  I know for a fact we’re going to get a major twist thrown at us and have to wait several months to figure out where it takes us.  I’m guessing some kind of close up on someone’s eyes opening right before the final commercial bump for Agent Carter.  Or, you know, something like that.

A lot of dominos are set up, ready to be knocked over.  And we know by the trailers and TV Guide listings that it’s going to involve the entire SHIELD team, Whitehall, Ward, The Doctor, and a mysterious underground city that will kill all but the unworthy, give ultimate power to someone, and change at least Skye and Raina in some interesting and permanent way.  There’s interesting wording about “fate” and “destiny” coming up in the blurbs about next week – so let’s see what lasting impression gets made on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, eh?