Agents of SHIELD Episode 3.01 Recap and Preview for Next Week

Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD episode 3.01 recap

A lot has changed with SHIELD. May split and never came back. Coulson has a bionic arm and a spiffy new plane. With Simmons eaten by the monolith and Fitz on a crazy, desperate hunt to figure out what happened to her, Bobbi has been relegated to the lab. Skye is now going by her birth name, Daisy. The “biomorphic event” has been spread via sea life and ocean water, meaning the first people to be affected are those who take fish oil pills. SHIELD is now trying to collect these new Inhumans before an unidentified black ops crew can get to them.

The first Inhuman we meet is Joey, who can melt metal within a certain proximity. He is terrified and doesn’t know what is happening to him – the city is crumbling around him as he tries to make it to the hospital. A black ops team tries to take Joey, but SHIELD beats them to it and convince Joey to come with them. He doesn’t fully trust them, and goes through a roller coaster of emotions, but he eventually realizes that staying with SHIELD is safer than being out on the street.

Of more interest to Coulson and the crew is this other black ops team. They seem to always get to the Inhumans before SHIELD can. The woman who seems to be in charge of the team goes by a number of aliases and has been linked to all manner of government agencies: CIA, MI6, KGB, NASA. Bobbi helps nail down this woman’s routine, and finds that her train home is the only time she is without bodyguards. Coulson and Hunter approach her on the train, but she was expecting them, and the entire car is filled with her agents. She goes by Rosalind, and she and Coulson have a pissing contest over who knows more. Rosalind believes the altered humans are a threat. “The laws of nature have changed, the laws of man haven’t caught up yet.” A moment of honesty between the two agents yields something surprising: someone has been killing Inhumans, and it is not the doing of either agency. Calls come to both agents phones, suggesting another Inhuman has been found. Rosalind takes her call in the next car, while Coulson uses the time to break free of his restraints and beat up the agents holding him. From the other car, Rosalind hears an explosion. She returns to the car to find her agents dead, half the car blown away, and Hunter and Coulson are gone.

Daisy is not doing a very good job initiating Joey into the life of an Inhuman. Unsurprisingly, Mac isn’t the most patient, fuzzy guy in the world, so they go find Lincoln, who is interning at a hospital. This isn’t the first time Daisy has tried to get Lincoln to help them, and this isn’t the first time Lincoln has turned them down. This time, the lights in the hospital flicker, and neither Daisy nor Lincoln are causing it. Out in the hallway, they see a beastly arm ripping the heart out of a security guard. The creature comes forward, looking like a masculine, monstrous version of what Reina became. Mac’s gun is useless on the hulking Inhuman, and it takes Daisy and Lincoln’s combined powers to slow him down. They collapse the floor, causing the beast to fall to a lower level, but by the time they get there, the beast is gone.

Meanwhile, Fitz has been globetrotting, trying to find a lead on what the monolith is, and what it may have done with Simmons. Fitz’s latest theory (after discovering that Simmons was not inside the monolith, and was not shrunk down to microscopic size) is that the monolith is a black hole of sorts. He sets off on a mission, alone, in Morocco, where he bluffs his way into seeing a black-market dealer who specializes in antiquities. He convinces Yousif to trade what he has in his briefcase for an antique scroll casing. (Let’s make a deal!) Yousif agrees, and gives Fitz the scroll. Inside the case are a dozen splinter bombs. Yousif laughs at Fitz for being so stupid, then decides to test them. They are actually light bombs. In the confusion after one is detonated, Fitz escapes, with the casing. Back at SHIELD, Coulson warns/begs him to return his focus to the team, but Fitz is certain that this casing will have the answer. Inside is a scroll, with a single Hebrew word written on it. “Death,” translates Fitz ominously.

In the last few minutes of the episode, we see what happened to Simmons. She is alive, and seems to be trapped on a barren planet, running from some unseen horror.

Overall a pretty solid season opener: a lot of subtle recapping for those who don’t remember last season, and just enough details to whet our whistles for the upcoming season.

Check out a preview for next week’s episode of Agents of SHIELD.