The SHIELD team face a threat they can’t see, and which prevents them from trusting completely in anyone or anything.

So when May burst into the interrogation room and shot Sarge at the very end of last week’s episode, it was pretty clear there had to be more going on than met the eye. Doubly so when you factored in the very obvious hints around Davis and his ‘passing out drunk’ at the party beforehand.

So the team are up against the sort of threat that’s very difficult to combat – one that can hide right in plain sight and swap positions at will. That’s one of those story ideas that’s highly ambitious and also really difficult to make work for any great length of time without it getting dull for the viewer. Fortunately, while all that’s going on, there’s other stuff to keep us occupied.

First of all there’s the mystery of why Sarge isn’t simply dead after having four bullets put into him at close range. That’s of course only the latest in a long line of questions about who Coulson’s double is and where he came from but it’s the most pressing one right now. Well, it seems to be the most pressing one, until something else overtakes it.

Then there’s the whole deal as to what SHIELD’s mysterious antagonist is really after and why. Believe it or not, this mystery ties into that other one, in a scene which barely works because of the committed performances of the actors as they are forced to deliver a fairly sizeable lump of science-fiction mumbo-jumbo exposition between them. The truth as it emerges is… ambitious, if a little convoluted and messy, and it certainly ties back into stuff that the SHIELD team have faced previously. One name drop in particular raised my hopes for a moment, but I don’t think it means what I initially hoped.

As the episode moves onto a fairly sombre conclusion, it really does seem as if the team have lost, and that’s important when one considers the sheer scale of what’s at stake if they fail. One thing is for sure, this feels like one battle the team isn’t going to be able to win easily.

Verdict: Tense and mostly well-executed (some clunky exposition aside). It really is starting to feel as if we the audience have underestimated the adversary as much as the characters have. 8/10

Greg D. Smith