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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