shield-4-5Simmons is worried about the increasing number of secrets she is going to have to try to conceal in her mandatory lie detector test. Coulson wants to know what May saw when she was dead. Robbie’s uncle may hold the key to stopping Lucy in her quest for the Darkhold, but getting hold of him might be tricky, and Jeffrey Mace gives a live TV interview which may make or break the newly revealed SHIELD.

So much happened in the last episode that you might expect the showrunners to give us a bit of a breather this time. And in a way they do, limiting the majority of what’s going on to one of the above threads with the others interweaving in their own little ways.

Mainly, having worked out what Lucy is after and with her husband now no longer a factor, Robbie’s uncle holds the key to moving forward, and getting him out of the prison where he is held and transferred into SHIELD custody becomes priority number one. Of course, Mack, Coulson, Daisy and Robbie may not be the only ones who have worked out Eli’s importance and be after getting him, so when they arrive it becomes a little more than a matter of sorting out a few forms.

Meanwhile, Fitz and Holden have cracked the required antidote to the fatal madness imbued by the touch of Lucy and her ghostly allies, although Mack for one isn’t entirely thrilled with the method of delivery. As two separate teams go into the prison to respectively locate and extract Eli and a besieged May and Coulson, all hell breaks loose, in some instances quite literally. Possibly not the best time for a live TV interview with the head of SHIELD!

Yet that interview takes place, with Simmons speaking to Mace via an earpiece mic to help him deliver the very best facts and answers to his interviewer. However, the interview goes in an unexpected direction as Mace is asked about the ongoing prison siege and SHIELD’s involvement, and the way he chooses to end things is a big risk which you can’t help but feel may come back to bite both him and the whole organisation in the backside later on. However, it does give Simmons the opportunity to deal with her own little issue in a fairly permanent way – clever girl!

As the siege comes to its end, Daisy once again exhibits that dangerously self-destructive streak of hers, with May in particular not being terribly impressed. It’s interesting to watch these two interact these days. May is still the older, wiser teacher but Daisy is far from the impressionable student. Both women bring a world-weariness and a whole lifetime’s worth of baggage to their respective points of view, and there’s an ever present feeling that the only way the simmering tension between them is ever going to be resolved is going to involve fisticuffs at some point.

Robbie, in spite of his earlier promise to Mack, finds himself distracted on the prison mission by a very personal agenda which he tries and fails to ignore. The subsequent conversation and revelations tell us a little more about his own history and his current mission, but leave us teasingly wanting more. If nothing else, it serves to remind us that as likeable as Reyes is (and he is easily the standout star of the current season so far) he is also a character with an extreme dark side. Almost as an emblem for the series as a whole, Reyes has us cheering for a guy who isn’t exactly a hero, but is a whole lot better than the guys he is up against. This is new territory for SHIELD – season 3 was dark because it revolved around a resurrected bad guy now possessed by an alien god. This series is dark because of the very nature of the fractures within the team themselves, and the alliances that they are forced to make because of it. It feels, in a very real sense, as if the show has grown up – not a bad achievement when one character has a flaming skull for a face.

Verdict: It’s hardly surprising that we have the flaming motif all over the current series logo, as the Ghost Rider is rapidly becoming the standout character in a mighty fine cast. Secrets and intrigue still run throughout every corner of the show, and the looming greater threat uniting the gang currently can’t hide either. Stellar stuff. 9/10

Greg D. Smith