Agents of SHIELD S2x05 “A Hen in the Wolf House”

WARNING! MAJOR SPOILERS!

I’m going to start this review by saying that I think Mockingbird might just be my new favourite Agents of SHIELD character. I mean, come on. It was well past time that we got another character from the comics into the series and it was great to see Bobbi Morse in action here. She makes an excellent addition to the team and hopefully, unlike Lucy Lawless’ character, she’ll be sticking around for more than one week which should be great fun indeed. And fun was essentially what this episode was, as it was only a matter of time before Hydra uncovered Simmons’ identity as a double agent, and when she did things were about to become very awry indeed.

I think it’s safe to say that as well as A Hen in the Wolf House featuring a new favourite character, it was also the best episode of the season so far. It focused primarily on the serialised storyline rather than wasting time with a villain of the week, and dealt with some great entertainment. Even if the twist concerning Bobbie’s character was robbed when it was originally announced over the summer that Adrianne Palicki’s character would in fact be Mockingbird, it was still executed incredibly well. This is the kind of SHIELD that we like to see, and the sort of thing that makes it so entertaining to watch. More comic book characters in a comic book show are a good thing, you know. (Just putting it out there – I’d love to see a Mockingbird ongoing comic right now and I would totally buy it.)

The episode itself dealt with two threats but the one more interesting than HYDRA was probably Skye’s father. I’m loving MacLachlan in this role, and it makes an excellent addition to the cast. He’s got lots of potential and nobody’s quite sure what species he really is (unless of course, he’s just a normal guy with extreme powers). The team up with HYDRA showed what lengths he was willing to go and just how deadly he can be, and even though it won’t be a permanent one, it doesn’t look like he’s going to be the greatest fan of how well Skye and Coulson are getting along.

This week’s episode also featured Fitz and Simmons’ reunion. It’s clear that things can’t go back to the way they were straight away but we got an emotionally satisfying encounter that worked quite well. With Simmons returning to SHIELD this was inevitable, and it was good to see that they addressed it here rather than wait until next week. Even with the fact that there’s no Marvel movie until May (Age of Ultron), they seem to have got to the point where they don’t actually need the momentum from a movie to keep it going.  However, the inevitable fallout from Age of Ultron will be very interesting to watch indeed, but we’ve got to wait a while to have worry about that.

The Skye plot gave us a few new hints this week that could possibly set the direction for the following episode. We learned that Skye isn’t her real birth name, and a possible theory of the mysterious markings that Coulson keeps carving. Could they be a map? It’ll be interesting to see whether they’re explored in the next episode or not, because I can’t wait to see where we go from here. I think the safest bet regarding Skye and her father is that they’re actually Inhumans, which certainly would be interesting to say the least. Again, it’s only speculation at this point.

In conclusion, this episode was great, giving us the best episode of the season as well as a fantastic new character. Bobbie Morse was awesome and the pacing was handled very well indeed. It’s great to see that they have a new comics character on board and hopefully as she is an actual Avenger, there may be room for her to show up in the films as well, which would be great to see. I guess time will tell though, and next week can’t come quickly enough.