OK, so last night...
(Obviously, spoilers abound, so either catch up on your DVR or skip this post... come on, most people skip my posts anyway, it isn't hard.)
+Phil, come on bruh. I mean, I sympathize, the lady you were seeing and kinda-working with (ish?) got shot in the throat while you were trying to enjoy a perfectly good burger. It happens to the best of us, really man. It goes without saying that you handled that VERY badly. You're throwing agents against walls, you're handing the keys to the whole organization to your mechanic (granted, I like Mack, but... really, THAT'S your pick?), you're leaping out of airplanes and diving headlong into a portal that isn't five feet wide (should have joined the circus with that trick!)... did you consider maybe behaving like a sane agent for a few instead of losing your everlasting shit like that? Now you're unconscious on some alien rock with no idea (when you wake up) where Ward's team went to begin with. Hope you took good notes from Simmons, dumbass- you're just as lost as she was now. (Worst of all, did you even finish your burger? Blind rage works up a pretty hefty appetite, and believe me, I'd know!)
+Bobbi's call to Phil that Hydra has SAMs locked on to the bird just before he jumped had me chuckling. If Hydra is firing SAMs with that kind of accuracy, you're making Stormtroopers look like snipers. For shame, Hydra. ;)
+Malik (sp?) is up to a lot more here than he's letting on, and Ward is uncharacteristically swallowing the bait he's put out. If I want Ward out of the way- wither as a threat to siphoning off my power base in Hydra, or just to keep him from stabbing all my organs in alphabetical order sometime if he's bored- I couldn't think of a better way than this. Make Ward think he's going to be a giant freaking hero to Hydra by going through the portal- if he comes back, he brings your 'messiah' figure with him and that's awesome. And if he doesn't... well, then he failed, and Malik now has control of Hydra again as well as anyone loyal previous to Ward (which Malik might not have been able to count on if he'd just had Ward killed). Win-win for Malik- and puts Ward in a very tough spot, literally. Then again, we've seen Ward put himself in bad places intentionally before, only to show he's playing a bigger game than anyone realizes (see: the entire first half of Season 1).
+Speaking of Ward, let's take a minute to appreciate the shot he took. That kind of distance? Even with the kind of technological treats a sniper rifle can probably gain from access to SHIELD/Hydra engineering, that's a heck of a shot. Bravo! (Of course, we'll also accept that network rules mean that the real effects of a shot hitting someone in the throat like that were watered down considerably. ;) )
+I get it, Fitz. We all do stupid things sometimes for someone we care about (see: Coulson, above), and hearing Gemma getting tortured in the next room had to be just awful for him, but... man, I'm not sure this was such a hot idea for him. We'll see how it goes. I guess if nothing else, if he wants to really get Ward back for that whole 'dumping you in the ocean' thing from season 1 (what, you're STILL mad about that? Move on, Fitz!), now's a pretty good opportunity.
+Lastly, while she was hardly in the episode, May had a very interesting line- her reading asset assessments and noting that she's not sure whether to take this as her husband's words, or Lash's. That right there explains at least why she didn't get the controls from Coulson when he abdicated the throne to Mack- Melinda is seriously questioning just about everything going on in her world right now, and getting handed SHIELD at a time when she's scared of her own shadow would have been a recipe for disaster.
+OK, one more thing. I've been going back through the first two seasons when I have time on Netflix, and it's interesting to see something in season 3 that we didn't see as much previously. Daisy/Skye? She was the focal point of the show in the first two seasons. Everything going on seemed to either revolve around her directly, or was a sideshow to her story. This year? It's not that she's become unimportant, but really think about this season compared to the previous two and it really is interesting how much of a backseat she's taken to people like Gemma and Bobby this year. Take last night- while she had brief appearances, they could have cut those completely from the episode and it wouldn't have changed the show much at all. Try removing her scenes from almost any Season 1 or 2 episode and there's not much left. Very interesting- granted, they told her story through those two seasons and that arc is over, so it makes sense in that regard, but it makes for a very interesting change to the show's dynamic.
