Episode Report Card Couch Baron: C- | 130 USERS: B YOU GRADE IT Your Ghost
By Couch Baron | Season 1 | Episode 9 | Aired on 11.26.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.To get a couple things out of the way: May and Ward are still knocking boots and keeping it a secret. Also, Fitz/Simmons get the idea to prank Skye, so when Skye asks where May's Cavalry name comes from, they shine her on about May having killed more than a hundred men single-handedly on a rescue mission. Ward tells her she's been pranked and that it was only twenty, but Coulson gives her the real deal -- he and May were part of a welcome wagon mission that went bad (like, David Koresh bad) and while May saved the hostages and killed the enemy, she lost her joie de vivre in the process. I mean, Coulson makes it sound worse, but that's essentially what we're dealing with.
In Batesville, UT, a young woman named Hannah Hutchins manifests telekinetic powers that seem to have a mind of their own, as -- under emotional duress -- she seems to blow up a gas station without intention or control. S.H.I.E.L.D. goes to check Hannah out, finding angry townspeople on her lawn who blame her for a lab disaster that killed four of their people. With the situation escalating, S.H.I.E.L.D. night-nights and takes Hannah into protective custody on the plane; knowing that she's going to be agitated when she awakens, Coulson and May make the initial onboard greeting, and Hannah tells them she's responsible for the deaths of those people, as she must have missed a fault in the reactor's coupling assembly. Coulson then tells her she may now be telekinetic, but Hannah tells them it's not her -- she's being haunted by demons. The S.H.I.E.L.D. team doesn't believe her, but we catch sight of a spectral figure that suggests she's not crazy, and soon, mysterious things are happening on the plane… things moving, knives disappearing, that sort of thing. Creepy!
Skye's investigation shows one of the dead techs apparently had it in for Hannah, as he'd reported her for safety violations several times. Soon, the man himself makes an appearance to Simmons, just as her analysis shows that the explosion ripped open some kind of invisible window to a different dimension or plane of existence or whatever you want to call it. He seems to be able to move between corporeal and ethereal form effortlessly, and he cuts power to the plane, forcing it to make an emergency landing in a deserted field; from here, it's a horror-movie setup with limited lights and no hope of rescue while being stalked by, essentially, a ghost. Fitz/Simmons theorize that their ghost is actually a man trapped between two universes, but that doesn't help them fight his shadowy self. Before he can get to Hannah, May's taken her off the plane to draw him away from her people. The rest of the team realizes that the guy has actually been enamored of Hannah, and he confesses that he regularly screwed with the reactor so she'd pay attention to him. May super-texts her way through a speech that convinces him to move on, and it's a pretty lame ending to an episode that while hardly groundbreaking at least delivered some decent suspense. Of course, May does rediscover her love for pranks, so I guess Ward should take his post-coital showers with one eye open from here on out?
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!As country music plays, we open on a close-up of a local paper that informs us of a lab accident that killed four people. The subhead tells us that the lone survivor was questioned after the particle accelerator exploded. The door of this convenience store then opens, and as a chyron lets us know we're in Batesville, Utah, the woman whose photo we were just regarding on the front page enters. She grabs a few sundries and puts them on the counter, but instead of ringing them up, the clerk prefers to give her a basilisk stare, so she asks if there's a problem. The guy rather aggressively tells her that "Jack Benson" was a friend of his, and from her stricken look before she apologizes, we can assume Benson to have been one of the explosion victims. The guy goes on that she was the one in charge and that the widow Benson says it was her fault, and the woman -- who looks a bit like Taissa Farmiga's older sister -- is like, you know what, my need for these paper towels actually isn't all that dire, so what say I just peace out?
The guy blocks her path, but after she trepidatiously tells him to stay away, a bunch of cans start flying off the shelves and hitting him. He asks if she did that -- it's probably worth noting that this guy from the sticks accepts the possibility of her being telekinetic in like .2 seconds, but certain S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who have known gods and monsters alike think that idea is just crazy -- and although she promises it wasn't, a stand of shelves then topples over on the dude, causing the woman to get one of those über-victimized faces that are an early warning sign I'm going to have no use for her. The guy runs out of the store, pulling his phone out as he goes, but once he's outside he sees the stations' gas nozzles lying on the ground spilling fuel liberally over the ground. And… don't you need to pay to get those going? While we think this is telekinesis, it makes sense, but is our dead-ish villain still up-to-date on his credit-card payments? The clerk heads for the hills as the gasoline flows toward a burning copy of the paper we saw earlier, while inside, the woman is a watery mess as she prays for this not to happen again -- whereupon the gas pumps explode. Well, now she's really not welcome at this establishment. Title card.
In a hotel room, May is getting dressed when her phone beeps and the noise of the shower stops. She calls that "we" have a mission and then Ward appears; even if TV standards force him to have a towel tied around his waist, it looks like now that they've gotten his shirt off, they're keeping it that way. It's the Evan Peters principle. He starts to talk about how they should follow the same plan as before (so maybe this is only their second hookup, which would jibe with the information we got last time that off-plane overnights are few and far between) -- take separate routes back, stagger their timing, talk about how they definitely haven't had any sex since the show started -- but when he turns around, she's already gone. Well, at least he's amused by her ability to walk out on boring conversations.