Piece of the Puzzle: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S2 E3 - Making Friends and Influencing People

In which I review the most recent episode of Marvel's Agens of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Agent Simmons has been busy since leaving Clouson's team: working her way up through Hydra's ranks as a double-agent an gathering what intelligence she can from inside their organization.  Since S.H.I.E.L.D.'s most recent encounter with them, Hydra has set their sights on bringing Donnie Gill - the ice-powered dropout from S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy last seen in Seeds - who has resurfaced in Casablanca.  But when Hydra orders Simmons to bring Gill into the fold, she risks losing her cover as well as her life when S.H.I.E.L.D. attempts to intervene.

Hail Hydra.

 After teasing Simmons' defection for the first two episodes, Making Friends and Influencing People delivers everything that Shadows and Heavy Is the Head promised.  While I never believed that Simmons' move to Hydra was earnest, I did believe that it was done without Coulson's (nor the rest of the team's) knowledge of her deception and because she needed to tap into Hydra's considerable scientific resources in an attempt to hasten Fitz's recovery.  The actual reasons for it - that Coulson needed a double agent within Hydra specifically because of their considerable scientific resources - was far better than my over-complicated predictions

Simmons was without a doubt the perfect character to throw into this scenario, specifically because her inability to convincingly lie has been addressed throughout the series' first season.  The Hub showed a normally eloquent Simmons hopelessly bumbling through Agent Sitwell's questions about why she's in a particular hallway accessing a particular wall panel.  Her obvious lies drew his suspicion and, panicking, she shot him with an Icer.  She is by far the least likely spy that Coulson could have implanted into Hydra, and yet her intelligence, personability and dedication to her true cause makes her deception work and her role in it convincing.

Agent Simmons shoots Agent Sitwell in The Hub.

A second highlight of this episode was Fitz discovering that Agent Ward was being kept prisoner in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s new base: right underneath his feet.  Fitz defended Ward long after everyone else had resigned themselves to his allegiance to Hydra.  He had to be a triple agent working for S.H.I.E.L.D. or have a retinal bomb like in Eye Spy or something.  He believed in him up until Ward threw him and Simmons into the ocean, resulting in the brain damage that Fitz has struggled with all season.

His reaction to finally confronting the man that he had thought was his friend - the man who shattered his confidence and destroyed his capacity to contribute to the team - is utterly devastating.  His decision to take the oxygen out of Ward's cell - to show him what he had to endure because of him - as he rattles off what happens to the human body when deprived of oxygen is easily the darkest direction that the character was ever taken in.  His inability to go through with it, though, proves to be his greatest personal triumph: one worthy of an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

"You need to accept the truth, Fitz.  He doesn't care about us or about anything."

More than anything else, Making Friend and Influencing People proves how to write female characters well, something that I recently complained about Gotham being incapable of doing.  It's not about making them over-the-top warrior women, reformed lesbians nor former (possibly current) junkies.  It's about making them people: convincingly human, whose presence and actions matter.  It's not enough to just give them some screen time and a back story.

With Making Friends and Influencing People, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. continues to prove why they are without a doubt the best comic-inspired show on television.  And yes, it's even better than Arrow.  Fitz and Simmons turn out to be equally engaging apart from one another as they have proven to be together and Ward's interrogation are fast becoming my favorite part of the new season.  I give the episode a solid 8.5 out of 10.

We may have just found out.

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