Spoiler Alert!

Agents of Shield treated us to the rapid setting of a stage wherein two dangerous, powerful enemies are set for a collision of apocalyptic proportions, and the agents are caught in the middle, trying to protect everyone around them.

Agents of Shield

6.08 “Collision Course, Pt. 1”

When the gods, or monsters, or just a pair of powerful, dangerous, deadly people, do battle… the mere mortals caught in between do not fare so well.

The episode begins with Fitz-Simmons making it back to Earth. Yay! …right? Well, not so much.

So, Izel, the woman who saved Fitz-Simmons, is the evil creator of the shrike. She has very little value of life, seeing most people as idiots or thieves. She is after the three monoliths that were destroyed and, in their destruction, made a breach to a fear dimension. She is said to have escaped from a world of fear and darkness eons ago, so I think we can assume she came from that same fear dimension.

But just because she is evil, that does not make Sarge good. She clearly fears him, and knows the truth of him. And he seems to share her ruthless disregard for any lives caught in their path. He also goes from supposedly sharing nothing about his past to sharing how Izel killed his family, his world, and he is driven to take revenge and kill her. He doesn’t care what he has to do or who he has to sacrifice to achieve that goal. In both versions of the story, he’s come pretty close to doing it, the closest being on the Chronicom homeworld. He and his crew took out her minions and had her cornered, but somehow she managed to slip away at the last second anyway.

So, up in space we have Fitz-Simmons coming home and unwittingly bringing the end of the world with them. They’re on board with a woman who wipes out entire civilizations, and she easily consumes the entire crew with her shrike. They don’t notice a thing outside a little odd behavior because they’ve no reason to suspect anything, and they’re caught up in their own issues. All without any means of communicating with Shield.

Meanwhile, on Earth, Sarge and Shield dance the tango of treachery, which, again, Sarge has probably done so many times before that it’s automatic by now. He’s not just good at the game, he’s a grand master.

Sarge takes Snowflake and is given Daisy, May, and Deke to work with, and drives his truck to where the shrike are gathering and turning themselves into a tower.

Deke is assigned in order to keep a shrike-repelling device working properly, and he only goes when Mack threatens to tell Daisy about the version of her in Deke’s game, and Mack gets a ten percent interest in Deke’s company, along with assurances that Deke stops stealing Shield tech. Considering that Deke apparently gets to make out with Snowflake, instead of being killed by her, I’d say the deal works out fairly well for him.

Daisy, May, and Sarge talk about the important things, like, say, the connection between him and Coulson, and the difficulty of Sarge having Coulson’s face, and, oh, right, the plan to stop the shrike and kill Izel. Coulson claims that he intends to use a magic sword and stab her through the heart, but he also says he has something else in mind. That turns out to be a potent alien bomb, and he has no problem killing thousands, even hundred of thousands, of innocent bystanders (which could have been evacuated instead). He doesn’t seem to think it’s even a big deal, as it saves the entire planet, including billions of people and all the other animals.

He also does not hesitate to forsake Snowflake, leaving her to die, much to her apparent devastation. I wonder how genuine that is, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Mack follows after Sarge in the Zephyr, with Yo-Yo, a number of agents, and Pax and Jakko as prisoners. They make another mistake in guarding the prisoners too lightly, and another agent dies when Pax gets loose and releases Jakko. Yo-Yo easily subdues the both of them, though, and finally gets some answers, especially regarding the bomb. Too late, though, as Sarge is already in position, has already armed the bomb and set the truck to drive itself into the shrike tower, and already has his exit plan ready. He uses that portal thing from a couple episodes ago to go from the truck to the Zephyr, leaving Snowflake, Daisy, May, and Deke on the truck to die in the imminent explosion, and joining his two remaining men in a position to take control of the plane.

Episode ends with a cliffhanger, as two dangerous forces are set to collide, with Shield agents caught on both sides and in the middle.

EDIT: Oh, and apparently Enoch is trying to rally the observing anthropologist Chronicoms to rebuild their society, whilst Malachi wants to go into the copy they have of Fitz-Simmons’ mind in pursuit of time travel.