Coulson's team

Coulson's team is an informal name for the group of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents led by Phil Coulson in Earth-199999. It includes agents Melinda May and Antoine Triplett, computer expert Skye, and scientists Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons, collectively known as Fitz-Simmons. They operate out of an advanced aerial command unit affectionately called the Bus. Grant Ward was an initial member of the team before his allegiance to Hydra came to light.

History

Centipede, Hydra, and the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D.

The mysterious Project Centipede

By September 2013, a hacktivist group known as Rising Tide had gotten onto S.H.I.E.L.D.'s radar by exposing sensitive information related to superheroes and the like, particularly a man who had recently displayed superpowers saving a woman from an exploded building in Los Angeles. Agent Phil Coulson formed a team to investigate Rising Tide and get closer to the new "superhero." He recruited Grant Ward, scientists Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons, and legendary spy Melinda May to pilot their aerial mobile command unit known as the Bus. S.H.I.E.L.D. soon acquired locational data relating to Rising Tide, and the team followed the data to a van in an alley in Los Angeles containing a woman named Skye. Ward and Coulson took her in for questioning. They asked what she knew about Rising Tide, the hero, and particularly the explosion. She denied having anything to do with the explosion, and brashly mentioned something called Project Centipede. Ward wanted to interrogate her more harshly, but Coulson took a different approach. He suddenly injected Ward with a powerful truth serum and locked him in the interrogation room (known as the Cage) with Skye, allowing her to ask him anything she wanted. Coulson believed that this would undermine Skye's bias against S.H.I.E.L.D. and encourage her to cooperate.

His plan had the desired effect, as Skye soon revealed all she knew about the L.A. hero: his name was Michael Peterson, a divorced man with a young son who was recently laid off from a factory job after an injury. Coulson deduced that someone had given Peterson his powers. That day, Peterson went to his former workplace and violently assaulted his former employer, leaving him in critical condition. Fitz, Simmons, and Skye combined their collective surveillance files from onsite surveillance and Skye's van—this required May and Skye to be in the stationary van as it synced with the Bus. The team uncovered footage of a man going into a rage at a scientist: upon closer examination, the man had an intravenous device on his arm shaped like a centipede. Simmons also recovered a piece of "alien metal" from the blast site that oozed a substance similar to Abraham Erskine's super-soldier serum, and there was a notable presence of gamma radiation at the site. The footage further revealed that the explosion was caused by the man himself, caused by another ingredient in the "centipede," Extremis. All of this meant that Peterson was also carrying Extremis and was liable to violently explode in the next several hours. Fitz and Simmons believed that the only way to stop it was to kill him ahead of time, but Coulson demanded another solution. Around this time, Peterson ambushed May and Skye at the van, knocking May aside and demanding that Skye "save" him and his son, starting with entirely removing his information from the internet as they drove off. As she worked at the computer in her van, Skye surreptitiously submitted her location at Union Station to S.H.I.E.L.D., and Coulson and Ward arrived on the scene. Coulson attempted to peaceably apprehend Peterson, but he stormed off with Skye and his son in tow. Skye briefly caused a distraction to allow the police to take the boy, but Peterson continued to drag her off. An unidentified third party, ostensibly a police officer, shot Peterson in the arm, knocking off of a high ledge. Coulson confronted Peterson and talked him down long enough for Ward to remotely inject him with a curative agent that Fitz-Simmons had apparently finished in the nick of time. Peterson remained in stable condition and made a full recovery. Coulson received word from Ward of an "0-8-4," and offered Skye a full-time position as a consultant with his team.

Camilla Reyes' plot

Skye accepted the position, much to the dismay of Ward and May. The team traveled to Llactapata, Peru to investigate an 0-8-4, an "object of unknown origin," and assess its worth and/or danger. Skye believed that they should warn the public in case the object was dangerous, but Coulson reminded her that S.H.I.E.L.D.'s mission statement was to keep situations of this sort "quiet and contained." The leader of an archaeological dig into an ancient Incan temple showed them the object, a glowing blue device inside the temple. Coulson asked him to evacuate his people until the object's risk could be determined. He had Fitz-Simmons examine the object closely to ascertain its origin, while Ward and May remained outside to stand guard. They were confronted by armed Peruvian forces, but Coulson diffused the situation after noticing that they were being led by an old flame, Camilla Reyes. Soon after, they were attacked by anti-mining rebels. As Reyes' soldiers fought them off, Coulson's team were forced to flee with the 0-8-4. Fitz wanted to stay and study it further, worried of what it may do if agitated, but Ward grabbed it and stormed off. The team, Reyes, and a few of her men managed to escape to the Bus, where Fitz explained that the device was powered by a Tesseract fuel cell.

The team, save May, continued to splinter over their varied philosophies and approaches. Ward was frustrated that he was on a team at all, and particularly at Skye's presence and what he saw as Fitz's overly scientific language. Coulson demanded that they work together and put their unique abilities to good use. He showed Reyes around the Bus, eventually bringing her up to his office. That night, she began coming on to him, more aggressively than she was apt to in the past. Coulson and Ward were each suspicious of their guests on the Bus, and were right to be so, as Reyes and her men soon initiated a hostile takeover before the team could sufficiently react. Reyes placed the other members of Coulson's team in the cargo hold, where they would fall to their deaths if the ramp was lowered. Coulson was tied to a pole in the central living area. She explained that the 0-8-4 was a weapon commissioned by Peru decades ago that had gotten lost after a battle in the jungle after the fall of Hydra. The other five members of the team at last put their heads together to devise an escape, beginning with May putting her elite espionage skills to the test, dislocating her wrist to escape her bonds and take down the armed guard watching them. May untied them, allowing them to access the lab attached to the cargo hold. Fitz remote controlled one of his drones toward the 0-8-4 in the Bus' central living area, where Reyes was keeping Coulson captive. Fitz had the drone electromagnetically agitate the device—which he and Simmons had discovered was essentially a powerful laser—blasting a huge hole in the side of the Bus. Fighting through an intense change in cabin pressure, the team overcame the surprised Peruvian soldiers, securing the 0-8-4 and regaining control of the plane—Skye cleverly covered up the hole with an inflatable raft. The Bus made it safely to the Slingshot, where the 0-8-4 was launched into the Sun, deemed too dangerous to exist. Reyes was taken to a S.H.I.E.L.D. containment facility. Outside of the rest of the team's sight, Skye received an encrypted text from a member of Rising Tide, who said that they were "planning to go dark," and asked for her status—she replied that she was in.

Franklin Hall's revenge

Coulson soon learned, and informed the team of, the abduction of Dr. Franklin Hall, a physicist whom S.H.I.E.L.D. had been transporting near Sterling, Colorado. Fitz-Simmons were distraught at this news, having been advised by Dr. Hall as part of their education. The team went to the site of Hall's kidnapping, a wreck on the interstate. They spoke with Agent Mack, who was driving the undercover eighteen-wheel truck containing Hall. He was accompanied by two smaller trucks. Each of the vehicles had in turn been pulled into the air by a mysterious, apparently gravitational force, and crashed down violently to the ground; Mack incredibly survived. Unknown assailants then forced their way into the truck's secure container, taking Hall from his strapped seat. Most concerning of all, Mack noted that the attackers knew their route, which he concluded had to mean they were working with someone within S.H.I.E.L.D. Elsewhere at the site, Simmons discovered a very small metal device that when activated, created an anomalous gravitational field around it. Back on the Bus, Fitz-Simmons got to work examining the device; Ward used tire treads at the scene of the crime to pinpoint a few potential owners of the vehicle; and Skye was assigned to go through all communications from S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters since Hall's transport began to suss out any hint of a possible mole. Skye also worked on close-range field tactics with Ward.

Coulson and Ward approached one of the potential owners, who confessed to having been paid for an excavator, but denied knowing anything about who they were. Strangely, he had been paid in gold bars, which the agents confiscated. Examining the gold, Fitz-Simmons concluded that it had been smelted in a mine rather than a refinery: specifically, a mine in Tanzania owned by Ian Quinn, CEO of Quinn Worldwide. Fitz-Simmons further concluded that the device was made of gravitonium, an exceedingly rare element which "distorts gravity fields within itself;" when confronted with electricity, the element solidifies, and the fields erupt in unpredictable ways around it, morphing gravity in the vicinity. The team struggled to come up with a way to get inside Quinn's palatial compound in Malta. kye volunteered, hacking herself up an invitation to a gala Quinn was throwing that weekend. Quinn's compound possessed an underground facility which could only be accessed externally from a beach cove, which was protected by deadly neodymium lasers. Because wireless access was impossible there by design, the easiest way to shut it off was for Skye to bring a wireless router of sorts, disguised as a compact, to allow Fitz-Simmons to briefly shut down the lasers and allow Coulson and Ward to go in and save Dr. Hall.

At the party, held in Quinn's substantial outdoor property, Skye snuck into his home to look for a place to establish a wireless connection. She was confronted by a suspicious Quinn in an empty hallway, and decided on an extreme tactic to avoid getting thrown out: she took out her communicator and essentially told Quinn the truth, informing him that she had been working for S.H.I.E.L.D. while feigning interest in his enterprise. They spoke in his office, where she laid down the router and allowed Fitz-Simmons access, successfully disabling the lasers. Ward and Coulson narrowly made it past the lasers as some of Quinn's men informed him of the situation. He held her at gunpoint and tried to convince her that S.H.I.E.L.D. was her enemy. She used her training from Ward to disarm him, jumping out of the window into a pool below. Underground, Coulson discovered that Hall had leaked his transport info himself, fully intending for Quinn to kidnap him and thus give him access to his gravitonium generator. Hall caused the generator to rapidly accelerate, intending to obliterate Quinn's mansion and everyone in it, specifically Quinn himself. Coulson stopped him by taking advantage of the anomalous gravitational patterns in the room to send Hall flying into the generator's core, stopping its acceleration and leaving no sign of Hall. In the chaos, Quinn and his men escaped by helicopter. Skye and Ward met up outside, and the two extracted successfully. Quinn's large supply of gravitonium was seized by S.H.I.E.L.D. and stored in the Fridge. Skye continued training with Ward, bonding over her tumultuous childhood with a series of foster families, and affirming her determination to succeed with S.H.I.E.L.D. May approached Coulson, concerned about him putting himself at risk in the field, and with that in mind volunteered to return to action beginning with the next mission.

Akela Amador's eye

Coulson soon received word of a series of remarkable—seemingly impossible—diamond heists, the most recent of which had occurred in Stockholm. A gem dealer had commissioned 55 military men to dress identically in red masks, each cuffed to identical locked briefcases, one of which containing a supply of diamonds, and separated them across 25 routes in their best attempt to keep the jewels safe. The plan failed, as the diamonds were stolen from a group of several of the men while on a subway. Eyewitnesses reported that a lone, young woman committed the theft with her eyes closed; cameras were out for an hour surrounding the event, believed to be hacked. Scanning social-media photos from the location, Coulson found the culprit: Akela Amador. Amador was a former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, believed to be dead after a job in 2006. The team tracked her to Zloda, Belarus, and deployed a van to the ground while May observed from the Bus. Coulson and Ward asked around the town and spoke to a woman who claimed Amador had a "gift," and had warned her of a previously unseen tumor. Meanwhile, Skye and Fitz-Simmons intercepted what appeared to be a surveillance broadcast coming from a nearby truck. The truck was driven by Amador, who knocked them into a ditch. The team was able to recover without serious injury, regrouping on the Bus.

Skye regained access to the broadcast and found that it was actually linked to a miniaturized camera inside of Amador's right eye. The team observed Amador writing down a note asking if she could sleep: Coulson concluded that she was somehow being controlled from afar. May believed Amador to be a threat that had to be taken down, but Coulson insisted she simply be taken in. May took the job of watching Amador's feed for clues to her location: late that night, she left without warning upon learning she was at a hotel in Minsk, preparing to meet someone at the Todorov Building the next day. Upon discovering that May was gone, Coulson had Fitz wake the rest of the team. May confronted a sleeping Amador in her hotel room—Amador averted her eyes to the ground, as whoever was controlling her could only see through her, not hear. May offered to take her in peacefully, but Amador knew that has soon as those controlling her saw May's face, she would have to kill her or be killed herself via a "killswitch" in her eye. Essentially, Amador was being extorted into fighting and stealing for the mysterious third party. The two fought and Amador pulled a gun, but Coulson burst in and shot her with a tranquilizer. They hijacked the feed from Amador's eye and installed it to a pair of glasses, which Ward drove to the Todorov Building to meet her "handler," as she called them. Coulson took Amador onto the Bus and explained the situation. She herself explained that she had been trapped in this arrangement for years, forced to perform crimes on behalf of an unknown handler she only knew as the "Englishman." She had also recently handed off her latest stash of diamonds for an access card to the Todorov Building. Coulson assigned Fitz-Simmons to remove Amador's eyeball and disable the fail-safe that was putting her life at risk.

Ward used the access card and camera glasses to make his way through the Todorov Building, following remote instructions from the handler. May tracked the handler's location from the Bus, zeroing in closer on his location (near the Todorov Building) with each message. Ward arrived at the "target," a security guard whom the handler said to "seduce." Clearly unfit for this approach, Ward attempted to simply befriend him, but this also didn't work and he was forced to knock him out. Ward entered the next room, where there were two men calmly sitting at typewriters surrounded by large chalkboards. On one board was an array of bizarre symbols, of which the handler took a picture and declared, "mission complete." The guard's absence caused an alarm, and Ward took his gun and fled. Ward accidentally looked at a mirror, exposing his identity to the handler. Fitz-Simmons cut the eye (containing the fail-safe) out of Amador's head and dropped it in a safety container moments before it exploded. Ward escaped and extracted with Skye, while Coulson closed in on the handler's location. Coulson flashed his S.H.I.E.L.D. badge, and the man's eye lightly exploded, causing him to drop dead: he himself was being handled from afar. Amador recovered from her surgery with an eyepatch. She was scheduled for trial for her crimes, but Coulson vowed to testify on her behalf. Amador speculated to May that Coulson had significantly changed in some way, but wouldn't speak further.

Centipede in Hong Kong

The team next received notice of the disappearance of Chan Ho Yin, a street magician in Hong Kong who possessed pyrokinetic powers. S.H.I.E.L.D. had been keeping tabs on him since a few years prior, when they discovered his power. Agent Quan Chen reported from Chan's apartment that fireproof clothing was found on the scene, indicating that whoever took Chan knew about his powers. Kwan further reported that S.H.I.E.L.D.'s local data stream had recently been hacked by the Rising Tide, and suspected them of exposing Chan's location. Skye went out of her way to deny involvement, and offered to trace the hack to absolve herself. She tracked it to Miles Lydon, a globally notorious hacker in Austin, Texas. Skye neglected to mention that she was romantically involved with Lydon, and warned him ahead of time to allow him to escape Coulson and Ward's pursuit. Skye arrived at Lydon's apartment and chastised him for hacking S.H.I.E.L.D. while she was inside, but this encounter eventually led to them sleeping together. Coulson had anticipated that Skye was a potential risk on this mission, and had sent May to tail her. May caught Skye in the act of fraternizing with Lydon, and the rest of the team stormed his apartment. Skye attempted to explain that her association with Lydon was an affectionate rather than professional one: that she'd had nothing to do with the recent hack. Nonetheless, she and Lydon were both taken into S.H.I.E.L.D. custody.

Fitz-Simmons dug up some bank statements showing that Lydon had deposited roughly a million dollars in the days following the Chan leak. Ward took these statements into Lydon and Skye's holding cell, revealing that he had sold the information—despite Rising Tide's credo of information freedom. Skye was shocked and furious at this revelation. Lydon said that he'd sold the data to a "rich girl in a flower dress" that he found to be from an ecological-research lab dealing with "some study with centipedes." Clearly, Chan was the subject of Project Centipede like Mike Peterson before him. Fitz-Simmons (correctly) speculated that his pyrokinetic powers would prevent any Extremis in his system from combusting. The team traced Chan's location to a building in Hong Kong, and Coulson assigned himself and May to the field work: Coulson looked to make up for having taken Skye onto the team against the advice of May and Ward. Coulson and May rendezvoused with agent Quan and a larger team of armed operatives. They raided the Centipede lab and freed Chan from his restraints. Chan had had heat-resistant platelets in his blood extracted by Centipede, removing his ability to withstand his pyrokinesis. Upon being released, Chan reinjected himself with the Centipede serum, further intensifying his power and killing Quan with a burst of fire through his torso.

Chan called himself "Scorch," a new "hero" name Centipede had given him. Coulson attempted to take him down with a tranq gun, but Scorch protected himself with a wall of fire, causing more severe burns across his body. Scorch was exhibiting more instability and aggression as a result of the serum, just as Mike Peterson had. Coulson determined that there was no peaceful way out of this situation any longer, and decided to detonate Chan with Extremis. He had the team on the Bus uncuff Skye and Lydon and tasked them with accessing the building's security and unlocking a path of least resistance through the ventilation for the explosion to go unhindered. This required Ward and Skye to get on the ground, where Skye also managed to extract some data files on Centipede. May got in close and injected Chan with a major overdose of Extremis, quickly sending him into a state of overload. Coulson and May evacuated the building, and the resulting explosion traveled safely out of the building's ventilation and into the sky. As punishment for his extreme negligence, Lydon was equipped with a bracelet to monitor him and restrict his access to electronics, and the money he'd gotten from Centipede was donated to agent Quan's family. Skye was intensely disappointed in her now former partner, and they went their separate ways. She reported to Coulson, who dressed her down for lying to the team since her arrival. He was sure she was hiding something else, and demanded she come clean or be removed from the team. She revealed a small SD card containing what was essentially her life's work: all the information she had been able to acquire about her parents, culminating in a S.H.I.E.L.D.-redacted file from an orphanage. Coulson offered to help in her search for information, but nonetheless equipped her with the same bracelet he'd given Lydon.

The Chitauri virus

The team next investigated an electrical anomaly in the forests of Wrigley, Pennsylvania, where they found a scout leader dead and floating in the air. Fitz-Simmons took the body and examined it, but found no immediate hints as to why it had been floating beyond severe electrical damage. The team picked up readings of a similar electrostatic event nearby and found a body similarly floating inside a barn, but any perpetrator there might have been had escaped. Skye found that the two victims—Adam Cross and Frank Whalen—were both firefighters at the same station and volunteer responders at the Battle of New York, indicating a causal link. Coulson, Ward, and May went to the station in question and asked around. They spoke with Tony Diaz, and May found a Chitauri helmet enclosed in a glass case. Diaz said that he, Cross, and Whalen had taken the helmet as a souvenir and had recently attempted to clean off what looked like "rust;" Simmons speculated that it was actually an alien virus, and they had each gotten infected. Coulson cleared everyone out and spoke with Diaz in his final moments, assuring him that the afterlife was "beautiful." Coulson left the station, and Diaz died like his colleagues.

The next day, Fitz scanned the agents who'd been on the ground and found no trace of electrostatic energy, while the other firefighters were taken in by S.H.I.E.L.D. and quarantined. The team took the Chitauri helmet and began flying it to the Sandbox in west Africa, a S.H.I.E.L.D. research facility specializing in hazardous materials. Simmons was tasked with finding a cure for the theorized infection, in case any of the firefighters are found to be compromised. She soon discovered that it was indeed a virus, and that it was transferrable from person to person: indeed, she had unwittingly contracted it from receiving a shock from Cross' body, and was immediately quarantined upon this discovery. S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists around the world were immediately put on conceiving a cure. Coulson estimated that Simmons had two hours before exploding, which would destroy the Bus in turn: they were currently in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, leaving them nowhere to land in that timeframe. Coulson was contacted by Felix Blake, who told him his orders were to "dump any infected cargo," which Coulson flatly rejected.

Speaking through the glass wall of the lab, Fitz-Simmons concluded that the antibodies from the human victims of the virus weren't strong enough to fight it, but that those from the Chitauri who originally wore the helmet should be. Fitz took the helmet from its storage container and took it into the lab, potentially exposing himself to the virus. The two synthesized an antiserum and tested it on a rat, but it was apparently killed as their previous rats had been. Accepting her fate, Simmons asked the observing team for a moment alone with Fitz, and they left her to it. As Fitz kept working on another antiserum, Simmons knocked him in the head with a fire extinguisher and began lowering the cargo ramp. Fitz recovered and noticed that the third rat was alive and cured, having simply been knocked into unconsciousness by the antiserum, but Simmons jumped out of the Bus before he could tell her. Ward arrived in the cargo hold and jumped after her with the antiserum and a parachute, catching her and curing her before landing in the ocean and being successfully recovered. Around this time, Coulson confided with May that he wasn't feeling his usual self, despite a physical indicating that he was perfectly fine. She comforted him with the fact that anyone would feel different after having died. Arriving at the Sandbox, Felix Blake warned Coulson that disobeying direct orders from HQ might result in his team being dissolved.

The Overkill Device

Coulson, Ward, and May received intel from an undercover agent in Russia: intel that was classified at level 8 clearance, meaning the team outside of Coulson wasn't privy to it. The team traveled to the Hub for information, but only Coulson, Ward, and May were allowed access to a briefing with Victoria Hand, while Fitz-Simmons (both level 5) occupied themselves in the tech wing and Skye (not yet level 1) was magnetically held in place by her bracelet. Hand told them that the intel they'd recovered warned of a separatist group in South Ossetia armed with a weapon loosely translated as the Overkill Device. Hand believed that the group intended to use the weapon in the next 24 hours to declare independence from Russia and Georgia. The Overkill Device was capable of emitting vibrations to activate other weapons at a long distance, making any attempt to attack head-on futile. Hand wanted a two-man team to cross into Ossetia undetected and quietly disable the device: she assigned Ward for his experience in the Georgian area; and Fitz, as they had no technological knowledge on the device and needed someone to assess and disable it on-site. The rest of the team would observe and/or relax in the Hub until the mission was over.

Arriving in the Caucusus Mountains, Ward went into a small bar and asked around for his usual contact. But the contact was dead; the people there took exception to Ward and Fitz's presence, and tied them up. At the Hub, Skye was frustrated at S.H.I.E.L.D.'s hierarchical information structure, and tried in vain to find a way to learn more about the mission. The proprietors of the Russian bar said that Ward's contact had been associated with separatists, and were prepared to kill Ward and Fitz in case they were also separatists. Fitz used a small EMP device to short the power in the bar, cutting off a broadcast of an important soccer game, and earned the bar's trust by repairing the electricity. They negotiated transport across the border into Ossetia, maneuvering around separatist gunfire. Back at the Hub, Skye enlisted a reluctant Simmons to find out more information about the mission, swaying her with thoughts of Fitz. She had Simmons access a restricted area and install a flash drive—Simmons was approached by agent Jasper Sitwell, panicked, and shot him with the Night-Night Gun, knocking him out. Skye told Simmons to find May and tell her it was an accident while Skye accessed the files and find out Ward and Fitz's status.

Skye found that the files for the mission indicated no extraction for Ward and Fitz. Coulson caught her in the act, and she told him that "the system sent Ward and Fitz in there to die." Coulson essentially told her to fall in line, scolding her for undermining a sensitive, classified operation. Secretly, Coulson himself was unaware that there was no extraction plan, despite being level 8. He took this up with Hand, complaining that his team should've been allowed to take the mission with full knowledge. Hand said that Fitz, untested in the field, would lose focus if he knew there was no extraction, and told Coulson to trust the system. Ward and Fitz successfully infiltrated the Overkill Device facility, and Fitz got to work disabling it. From the exfiltration team's lack of response, Ward deduced that there was no extraction, but Fitz doggedly continued working nonetheless. He successfully disabled the device, and Ward activated a beacon notifying the Hub of their success. As an alarm began to sound, the rest of Coulson's team—including Coulson himself—regrouped on the Bus to extract Ward and Fitz themselves. With the beacon activated, S.H.I.E.L.D. at large began their assault on the compound, giving the agents a limited time to escape. Fitz took the core from the Overkill Device and modified it slightly, allowing him to use its weapon-countering powers in miniature and fight off the separatist forces. Arriving outside, they were greeted by the Bus, and successfully extracted. Later, Coulson told Skye that he'd found the unredacted file from her orphanage: a female S.H.I.E.L.D. agent had dropped her off there, but her identity was unknown. He also neglected to tell her why, and later asked May to help him uncover the truth behind the situation. Nonetheless, Skye was overjoyed and appreciative to have made some level of progress. Alone in his office, Coulson attempted to call in a request for the file relating to his death, but found it restricted, despite his level 8 access.

The Berserker Staff

After cleaning up debris from the fight between Thor and Malekith in London, the team learned of an incident in a forest in Norway. A man and a woman had chopped a large metal stick inscribed with runes out of a thick tree; the stick had given the woman some sort of power, and she attacked and killed a forest ranger with superhuman power. Fitz-Simmons determined from the residue left behind was similar to the makeup of Thor’s hammer, indicating that it was of Asgardian origin. They analyzed the stick’s depression within the tree to make a 3D model of one side, which revealed that the stick—a staff or rod of some kind—was broken on both ends, meaning there were multiple pieces unaccounted for. As the team analyzed the crime scene, they learned of the suspects—Jakob Nystrom and Petra Larsen, of a “Norse paganist hate group”—causing rampant chaos in the streets of Oslo and leaving a burning message declaring, “We are gods.” Nystrom was specifically the leader of this group, which organized in deep-web message boards advocating Nordic supremacy and believing themselves inheritors of the Asgardian legacy.

Coulson attempted to get a hold of Thor to help with this mission, but Fury told him he was “off the grid.” Instead, he consulted Elliot Randolph, a Seville professor and expert on Norse mythology whom he’d previously contacted regarding the initial appearance of Thor’s hammer. Coulson and Fitz-Simmons took the model staff to Randolph, who determined that it was a piece of the Berserker Staff, a weapon that sends its wielder into a powerful, uncontrollable rage. He told them the legend of the Berserker Army and a warrior who “fell in love” with Earth and stayed rather than returning to Asgard, and broke the Staff into three pieces to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. Interpreting a piece of ancient literature, Randolph advised them to check along Viking raid routes for another piece, while the other was cryptically “close to God.” He specifically suggested checking off of Canada for the former of these, but a cursory search by other agents turned up nothing. The team instead visited an abandoned church in Seville itself, where Vikings had raided twice. As Ward and Skye investigated underground, Ward bumped into Randolph carrying a piece of the Staff. Ward attempted to grab it from him, but was sent into a state of shock by the Staff’s magical effects. He was attacked by flashbacks to an image from his childhood of a boy left to drown in a well—a memory he had otherwise repressed. Skye found him and resuscitated him as Randolph fled. Not long after, Coulson found Randolph a block south of the church: he had unluckily bumped into Nystrom and Larsen, and they forcefully took his piece of the Staff from him, leaving them with only one left to find.

Coulson took in Randolph for questioning, and he claimed he merely wanted the Staff for the incredible academic breakthroughs it would entail, but Coulson wasn’t satisfied. During a checkup, Ward exhibited an abnormal amount of aggression, behaving meanly to the other team members. The memory of the well continued to haunt him through the night. The next day, he approached Coulson and told him that the Staff had compromised his ability to do his job, but Coulson believed that that admission was proof enough that he was stable. He also believed that Randolph was secretly Asgardian, and had Ward enter the Cage and attempt to stab him. As expected, Randolph grabbed the knife mid-stroke and bent it in half effortlessly. When pressed, he admitted to being the Berserker soldier from the stories. He revealed the location of the final piece of the Staff: a monastery in Ireland. He also told Ward that the Staff's psychological effects would take a few decades to wear off.

Arriving at the monastery, the team and Randolph were confronted by Jakob Nystrom, already holding the final piece. He used it to stab Randolph in the chest, but Ward pulled it out, embracing the Berserker rage. As he and Nystrom fought, Coulson and Fitz-Simmons attempted to maneuver Randolph's alien anatomy to buy him enough time for his superior Asgardian regeneration to heal himself. Ward thoroughly trounced Nystrom and several other people from his organization, but was overcome by flashbacks of his brother telling him not to save the boy in the well, or he'd throw him in too. Ward collapsed, exhausted, and Melinda took up the Staff pieces in his stead, easily defeating Petra Larsen and fully assembling the Staff with no apparent ill effects. She too saw a dark memory from her past, but was able to withstand it, as she told Ward, "because I see it every day." Coulson was able to stabilize Randolph by grasping his heart inside his torso and slowing the bleeding. A recovered Randolph decided to leave Europe, and Coulson suggested he move to Portland. That night at an Irish pub, Skye comforted a downtrodden Ward, offering consolation if he needed to talk about his brother. Later at the hotel, Ward and May shared a glance as she carried a bottle of liquor into her room, and he followed her—this would soon turn into a full-fledged sexual relationship. As he slept that night, Coulson awoke in a cold sweat, discomfited by uncanny memories of Tahiti.

The man between worlds

The team learned of an alleged telekinetic in Batesville, Utah named Hannah Hutchins, a quality-control engineer at a particle-accelerator facility. The accelerator had exploded, killing four technicians; the town had put the blame on Hutchins, while an ensuing incident at a gas station suggested that she had developed telekinetic powers. Coulson, Ward, and May went to her home, where an angry mob had formed, blaming her for the deaths. For her part, Hutchins was visibly remorseful and distraught. As the crowd grew more antagonistic, a police car nearby suddenly began driving on its own, luckily not harming anyone. Hutchins tearfully asserted that it wasn't her, but May disabled her with a tranquilizer to be safe. Fitz-Simmons sent in their set of drones to analyze the particle-accelerator complex from outside, as it was deemed too hazardous to enter. Hutchins was taken onto the Bus, where Coulson and May spoke to her in the Cage. Hutchins again denied that she was responsible, and believed that God had ceased protecting her, and she was surrounded by demons. The team concluded that she was heavily traumatized.

A series of strange but benign events began to occur on the Bus. Eventually, while analyzing the drones' imaging of the explosion, Simmons discovered that it seemed to have torn open a portal to another world. Suddenly, a man behind her declared that it was "to Hell," and attempted to assault her with a wrench, destroying her holographic display and immediately disappearing. The man resembled Tobias Ford, a victim in the accelerator explosion. Moments later, the Bus lost all power and began plummeting to Earth. May managed to finagle a landing in a nearby field, with no serious damage or injury. The team worked to get the Bus up and running again, rerouting power to the door to the Cage to prevent the "ghost" from getting to Hutchins. Skye talked to Hutchins through the door in an attempt to comfort her and assure her that what was happening wasn't her fault. May stood guard at the door to the Cage, and when the ghost tried to attack her, she took Hutchins out and off of the Bus. Skye put the information together and deduced that Ford was actually trying to protect Hutchins rather than hurt her, having shown signs of (misguided) affection while he was alive. Fitz-Simmons believed that the particle-accelerator had been used in an attempt to study and recreate portals in the wake of the Battle of New York, and the disaster had caused Ford to become stuck between worlds, whether or not it was "Hell" as he believed. May took Hutchins to a nearby farmhouse to bait him out and learned the truth: Ford had deliberately loosened some bolts in the accelerator so that he could spend more time with Hutchins, the QC engineer; his actions had caused the accelerator to explode and killed himself and the others. May encouraged Ford to let go, and he faded away in peace, ostensibly to the afterlife. The team got the Bus back in working order and in the sky.

Centipede surfaces

The team next learned of a group of soldiers storming the Havenworth Federal Penitentiary and breaking out Edison Po in less than two minutes. The soldiers were equipped with the Centipede device. Po, an ex-marine, was serving time for a murder committed 18 months prior. Coulson notified the team that they would have backup in tracking down Po and the rest of Centipede: Mike Peterson, who had been training to be a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent since his capture. Peterson was eager to better himself after reaching his life's nadir with Centipede. The team identified one of the soldiers who rescued Po: one Brian Hayward, whose sister Laura was a student at the University of Ohio. Peterson was sent to the Bus lab for testing: he told Fitz-Simmons that his diet had to be abnormally large to maintain energy levels, and even larger after using his powers. Fitz-Simmons believed that his Extremis had been stabilized by someone else in S.H.I.E.L.D., but in fact their weapon had done it the moment he was shot. Skye found in the prison files that Po had only had one visitor in his entire sentence: a woman in a flower dress, like Miles Lydon had described. Footage of his visit (which did not capture the woman's face) showed Po saying, "The Clairvoyant does not like to be touched." Peterson said that the woman's name was Raina, and that she had recruited him to Centipede.

Ward posed as a gaming commissioner and told Laura Hayward that her brother had won the lottery and to please contact him. Suspicious, Laura did call her brother, and S.H.I.E.L.D. traced his location to an abandoned factory in Oakland, California. Coulson, Ward, May, and Peterson with a specially designed suit arrived there to quietly scope it out with minimal combat. They were ambushed by three super soldiers, and Coulson fired on one with the same gun that cured Peterson, but the man simply got up and kept fighting. Peterson managed to fight off two of them, getting stabbed in the gut in the process, and leaving one helpless on the ground. Coulson tried to get some answers from him, but he suddenly died as a result of the same kind of fail-safe they had seen in Akela Amador. Unfortunately, Centipede had upgraded the technology, and it was now untrackable. The team were dumbfounded at Centipede's remarkable resources and wondered how they could possibly manage all of this.

On the Bus, Skye continued to search S.H.I.E.L.D. files for her parents, but May harshly scolded her for doing so, telling her to keep her mind on the mission. Coulson talked to Peterson about the fact that he hadn't visited his son since joining S.H.I.E.L.D. Peterson said that his son's enduring picture of him was what he did at the train station, and he couldn't bear to show his face to him again. Coulson encouraged him to think about his son before making the choice to go any further in his S.H.I.E.L.D. career. Taking this to heart, Peterson called his son Ace, who told him that he was with a "friend:" Raina. At this point, Centipede's soldiers required constant upkeep to maintain their powers, and they needed to have Peterson to learn why he didn't require such maintenance. Peterson told the team that Raina had offered to trade Ace for him, and set up very specific requisites for the trade, including absolutely no electronics. Fitz-Simmons instead applied to Mike an odorless scent that they would use to track him with a device for up to 50 kilometers. Coulson and Peterson met Raina and a Centipede soldier at a closed-off bridge while May, Skye, and Fitz-Simmons observed from a van and Ward watched from a rooftop sniper position. As the two sides met, Raina revealed the true deal: Ace for Coulson. Peterson profusely apologized, and tried to back out at the last minute by killing Raina, but she assured him that her employer had no problem with letting her die and killing Ace anyway. Realizing the futility of the situation, Coulson submitted to the deal, allowing Mike to leave with Ace. One of Raina's soldiers injected him with something, knocking him out, and put him in their car. Without comms, the rest of the team didn't understand what was happening, and May immediately radioed for backup. Mike dropped off Ace with Skye and ran back to the Centipede car, but was brought to a halt when a pair of tankers on the bridge suddenly exploded, seemingly killing him. Moments later, the Centipede car also exploded, but in fact Raina, Coulson, and her men had boarded a helicopter, which fired upon Ward as it took off, knocking him down. As Coulson came to, Raina told him that they wanted to know about the day after he died.

Coulson's capture

Burnt remains were recovered from the bridge, believed to be Peterson's. Two days after Coulson's kidnapping, the team participated in a S.H.I.E.L.D. operation to apprehend the infamous criminal Vanchat, who was in the middle of selling a piece of Chitauri metal. He was known to have similarly sold alien metal to Centipede for use in their serum. The op was overseen by Victoria Hand herself, the hope being that Vanchat could lead them to Centipede. Hand took over leadership of the team, and immediately attempted to remove Skye from the mission, remembering what she had done at the Hub. She also added several more agents and scientists onto the Bus. Ward attempted to vouch for Skye, but when asked for her opinion May agreed with Hand that Skye would not be of use. She was to be taken from the Bus and have her devices confiscated; Ward took the responsibility of leading her to her debriefing as her superior officer. Fitz-Simmons slipped her an emergency satellite phone that, for one call only, would resist her dampening bracelet. Ward notified her that the debriefing agents would arrive in 12 minutes, slyly hinting that she had time to escape from the grounded Bus. Before being exiled from the mission, Skye was looking to investigate Vanchat's financials to trace them back to Centipede, and intended to do so one way or another.

Coulson awoke in a nondescript room inside some sort of scanning machine, observed by Edison Po. He claimed that the "Clairvoyant" could see Coulson's death, but couldn't see what came after, and wanted to know. Coulson refused to budge. Ward took over the interrogation of Vanchat, cooperating with Fitz-Simmons to open the ceiling in the now-airborne Bus, threatening to suck the newly cooperative Vanchat out of it. He gave up a list of locations of buyers of the Chitauri metal, and S.H.I.E.L.D. sent out strike teams across the world. Ward confronted May about letting Skye get thrown off the plane: she simply said that she did it to allow her to work outside the system, without protocol-minded agents looking over her shoulder. Ward tacitly agreed that it was the right thing to do. Hand sent word that Centipede's helicopter had been found in the Mojave Desert, and May set course for their location. At Centipede's hideout, Po received a call from the Clairvoyant, who apparently deemed him cruel and ineffective as an interrogator, and used the phone's technology to inject and kill him, leaving Raina to take over. She explained to Coulson that her organization was interested in a way to bring their soldiers back to life, and wanted to know he had come back from death.

Skye contemplated a way to get at Centipede without being able to use electronics because of her bracelet. She enacted her extra-agency plan after learning of legally embattled businessman Lloyd Rathman. Through a series of clever maneuvers, she got into Rathman's home and masqueraded as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent "Melinda May." She told him that S.H.I.E.L.D. would give him immunity if he helped her hack into Vanchat's bank account. Rathman pressed a silent alarm, but Skye was able to subdue the police who arrived and get them to cooperate. Rathman proved incompetent with computers, so a policeman helped her, and she was able to track down Raina. Raina gently tried to convince Coulson to allow her to scavenge his memories: she brought up his cellist girlfriend whom he had been dating before his death, and who cried for days afterward. Coulson was shocked that Raina could know of her. He was also concerned by the fact that whenever anyone mentioned Tahiti, he would knee-jerkingly respond with, "It's a magical place." He agreed to go into the machine, which would use theta waves to activate his buried memories.

Fitz-Simmons developed a device that could be attached to the Centipede serum injector that would numb their powers—as long as someone could get close enough to attach it. Skye called on the emergency phone and notified the team of a real-estate purchase made by Centipede 100 miles from the Mojave Desert lab where Hand was sending a strike team. The team notified her of the situation and told her that they would be going after Coulson irrespective of her wishes. They arrived at the specified location, a farm, and fought off a series of Centipede soldiers. They found Coulson inside the machine, overseen by Raina, whom Skye punched out. Coulson was overcome by the returning memory of laying on a laboratory table, overseen by two doctors, as a complex machine poked and prodded at his brain, and pleading with them to let him die. Dr. Streiten was there, insisting to the other doctor to stop and clearly already regretting his actions. Skye and May released him from the machine and took Raina into custody. Hand returned control of the Bus to Coulson, and informed him that various Centipede operations had already been taken down by other strike teams, but the Clairvoyant had yet to be found. Coulson was pleased and impressed with Skye's efforts to save him, and at last removed her dampening bracelet. Later, Coulson confronted Dr. Streiten in his car. Streiten explained that after being killed by Loki, Coulson had been dead for days, and Nick Fury went to great lengths to resurrect him. After a series of unethical operations (Streiten was only brought in after the sixth), Coulson was alive and enduring catastrophic pain and neurological damage. He lost his will to live, and so he was implanted with memories of Tahiti in an attempt to restore who he had once been. Streiten deeply and sincerely apologized—Coulson left without a word.

Storm at the Academy

The team soon learned of an incident at S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy involving a device designed by Fitz-Simmons during their days there. A pair of cadets had nearly died when a pool they were swimming in suddenly began freezing over. The device in question was responsible, and had been lodged in the pool for several days, suggesting that this was a premeditated attack. Ward and Skye went to the Academy to investigate, while Fitz-Simmons were asked to give a motivating lecture to the other cadets. According to Agent Anne Weaver, the Academy had narrowed the list of potential culprits for the attack down to 10% of the student body. Ward interviewed one of the victims of the attack, Seth Dormer, who noted that a cadet named Donnie Gill had been present when the pool froze. In the lecture hall, as Fitz-Simmons spoke, Gill himself was suddenly overcome by ice, and was completely covered in it in moments. Ward arrived on the scene and smashed the nearby freezing device while Fitz-Simmons freed and warmed Gill, saving him. Ward concluded that Gill was the intended target of the original attack, which was odd given that Gill was essentially quiet and didn’t associate with any other cadets.

Weaver noted that Gill, 18, had been recruited by the Academy after flunking high school with a 190 IQ, indicating severe boredom, a trend that Weaver feared might continue in the Academy. She was considering having him graduate early and assigning him to the Sandbox. Fitz spoke with Gill in his room, and observed a series of incredible projects he was working on. He advised him on how to improve a power source he had stalled in developing. Skye asked around and discovered that Callie Hannigan had been at the pool, but refused to get in: moreover, she had apparently been passed over for a top spot at the Sandbox. Ward spoke with her, and she revealed that Dormer and Gill had been discussing meeting Fitz for "weeks." Simmons concluded that the two had staged the attacks as a way to get to Fitz-Simmons, using a device of their design—in truth, Fitz improving the power source was precisely Gill’s intention in luring him there. Simmons informed Fitz by phone, who had recently left Gill’s dorm. He ran back in and caught Gill working on a larger ice machine, and Dormer blasted him against the wall with a compressed air cannon, knocking him out. The cadets took the device and escaped, and the team regrouped on the Bus.

As all of this was happening, Coulson confided in May regarding the circumstances surrounding his death. Partly to get his mind off of it, May informed him of a lead in the investigation into Skye’s parents. The woman who had left Skye at the orphanage, Agent Linda Avery, was killed shortly after, but her partner Richard Lumley had simply disappeared the following day, avoiding S.H.I.E.L.D. attention for 23 years. The agents concluded that he had either killed Avery himself, or escaped whomever had. Lumley was recently seen in a teenager’s selfie posted online from Mexico City; because of his extreme caution, he would surely be making a move soon, and their opportunity to catch up with him was narrow. Coulson and May touched down in the city and scoped out a shop where Coulson suspected Lumley would go for fake papers on his way out of the country. During the stakeout, May encouraged Coulson to not dwell on “Tahiti,” and to trust her that nothing would be gained from pursuing it. In this moment of bonding, May revealed to Coulson that she and Ward were sleeping together, but he completely disregarded it as he spotted Lumley. They chased him down and took him into custody—Lumley was relieved to learn that they were from S.H.I.E.L.D.

Lumley fully cooperated: he told them that he and Avery had pursued an 0-8-4 in China that turned out to be a baby girl—now known as Skye. Whoever had had her to begin with killed the other agents on the mission, and Avery and Lumley went to great lengths to protect the girl’s identity. They had her move between various foster families so that she wouldn’t remain in any one place at a time—Avery was killed by those trying to reclaim the girl. Lumley warned them to stay away from the girl, as death followed her wherever she went. Coulson decided to release Lumley, determining that S.H.I.E.L.D. custody would be unsafe for him, and dropped him at an undisclosed location. May told Coulson not to tell anyone, especially Skye. The agents regrouped with Skye, and Fitz-Simmons, who informed them of the situation. Ward and Weaver were searching for the cadets, and Fitz speculated that Dormer had taken advantage of Gill’s isolation to befriend and manipulate him. They would also need significant backing, as the parts required to construct the device were very rare and expensive. Skye traced the purchases to none other than Ian Quinn: a series of parts were shipped to Dormer’s father, a lawyer for Quinn Worldwide, and Quinn was going to buy the completed device from the cadets. Coulson had the team inform Weaver and Ward of this to aid in their search.

Noticing his odd behavior around her, Skye confronted Coulson. Given his recent revelations about his own past, Coulson was newly disinclined to keeping secrets, and told Skye everything he and May had learned about her. She was naturally overwhelmed, but also encouraged to know that her series of moving between foster families was due to S.H.I.E.L.D. protecting her. Meanwhile, a massive storm brewed around S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy, and hailstones ranging up to basketball-sized began falling, clearly the result of Dormer and Gill’s "improved" ice machine. Ward and Weaver secured any cadets underground as the foundations of buildings shook in the face of catastrophic winds. Observing atmospheric imagery, Fitz-Simmons noted that the device was in the eye of the storm. Fitz insisted that they rescue Gill, and they landed the Bus in the eye. Gill and Dormer had recklessly enacted a “demonstration” of the device for Quinn (at Dormer’s urging and Gill’s reluctance, as Fitz suspected), causing the unexpected storm, and had begun working on reversing the process. As they tinkered with the device, Dormer was knocked back by a small explosion, sending him into cardiac arrest moments before the Bus arrived. The team took the cadets on board, and tried to revive Dormer as they took off, but were unsuccessful. Gill was more distraught and sullen than usual following Dormer’s death; S.H.I.E.L.D. assigned him to the Sandbox to "keep an eye on him:" rightfully so, as he had secretly gained ice-manipulation powers from the explosion that killed Dormer. Coulson used Dormer’s phone to call Ian Quinn, and informed him that S.H.I.E.L.D. would shoot him down as soon as he entered allied airspace. Quinn retorted, relaying a "hello" from the Clairvoyant.

Pursuing Ian Quinn

The team immediately set their sights on Quinn. A few days later, they learned of a purchase Quinn had recently made totaling ten million dollars from research firm Cybertek. Cybertek had hired private security to protect whatever object Quinn had purchased as it was transported by public train through rural Italy. In order to avoid conflict, Coulson decided to send the team in undercover as passengers. Despite their best efforts, including some extensive character backstories, they were found out by Cybertek's guards. May had to make a hasty retreat from the roof of the train; moments later, Coulson and Ward were chased out of the back, where one of the security men threw a strange purple device at them. It exploded, and the train seemingly disappeared into thin air. In truth, the explosive had emitted a toxin that essentially froze the agents in place and made them think that no time had passed when they recovered a while later. In the meantime, May found them laying helpless on the ground and tried to find a way to get them back to the Bus. As she searched, she was taken in by the local law-enforcement captain, who was ostensibly working with S.H.I.E.L.D. but in fact had been paid off by Cybertek. He tied her up and interrogated her as to Coulson and Ward's location, but she was able to escape with minimal effort. As he fled, she chased him to the Bus, where Coulson and Ward had returned and witnessed her killing the captain with a knife to the back. May explained the situation, and the three of them began to locate where the train had gone.

While the other agents fled the train, Skye and Fitz were in a cargo hold managing communications. They were also set upon by Cybertek guards, and Simmons ran in to join them. She took the brunt of another of the memory-altering devices, which Fitz identified as being derived from dendrotoxins like his Night-Night Gun. The two left Simmons' unconscious form hidden, armed with a Night-Night Gun of her own when she recovers. The train soon came to a stop, and Skye and Fitz witnessed the package being dropped off with more guards. The two agents trailed the package to a mansion where Quinn soon arrived, and activated a tracker so that the rest of the team could find them. Skye infiltrated the mansion while Fitz remained outside and disabled Cybertek's and Quinn's cars. Inside, Skye entered a wine cellar and found Mike Peterson alive, laying in a hyperbaric chamber. He had severe burns on the right side of his face, had lost his right leg below the knee, and had been equipped with a Centipede failsafe. She was caught from behind by Quinn and a man from Cybertek, who held her at gunpoint. Quinn awoke Peterson and gave him the package from Cybertek: an advanced cybernetic leg. Peterson, grim and cold, declared that he had orders from the Clairvoyant to kill someone, and left the room. Moments later, Quinn shot Skye twice in the abdomen and softly led her to the floor, telling her that he had his orders too.

Coulson, Ward, and May found the train, stationary, with a recently recovered Simmons inside. The four followed Fitz's tracker to the mansion, where gunfire had begun to erupt inside: Peterson, by the Clairvoyant's orders, had refused to pay the Cybertek officials on behalf of Centipede due to their inability to keep S.H.I.E.L.D. at bay. The team stormed the mansion, quickly taking out Quinn's men and subduing Quinn himself. Coulson found Skye in the wine cellar, and called the rest of the team down. Skye had no pulse, and had lost a significant amount of blood. Simmons put her in the hyperbaric chamber nearby, and Skye began to breathe. Quinn and the chamber were taken onto the Bus—Skye required medical attention in a matter of hours or the conditions in the chamber would cause permanent brain damage. Privately, Ward seemed frustrated with Coulson for allowing her to get into this situation.

Saving Skye

The team dropped Skye off at a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility in Zurich, Switzerland, almost two hours after finding her, where she underwent an emergency operation. Some time later, a doctor informed them that the bullets had penetrated her stomach and intestines, and that they could do nothing more for her. Upon hearing this news, May went back to the bus and violently assaulted the restrained Quinn, where Coulson caught up to her and stopped her. He decided on a new plan of action: if certain doctors at S.H.I.E.L.D. had brought him back from the dead, surely they could save Skye. S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters requested that Coulson transfer Quinn to their custody, but he refused. He revealed the truth about his own death to the members of the team who didn't know, and transported Skye—in essentially a large, mobile hospital room that was airlifted onto the Bus—to Bethesda, Maryland, where Coulson's operation had apparently taken place. Meanwhile, Coulson had recently been granted access to the official file on his death, which he had pored over countless times. He gave it to Fitz-Simmons so that they could perhaps understand the methods involved themselves, and encouraged them to direct any questions to Dr. Streiten, though he was later found to be "off the grid." Of particular note was Coulson's exact cause of death: Loki had rended his heart in two, but the doctors had fully repaired it, indicating that they should be able to do the same with Skye's organs.

The Bus was soon boarded in midair by other agents from S.H.I.E.L.D. in response to Coulson disobeying a direct order to turn over Quinn. Specifically, agents John Garrett and Antoine Triplett boarded, insisting that Quinn be given to them. Coulson and Garrett reached an agreement whereby Garrett and Triplett would interrogate Quinn there on the Bus as Coulson's team continued to Bethesda. Quinn gradually revealed that his orders weren't exactly to kill Skye outright, but to critically injure her and force Coulson to figure out how he had been resurrected so that the "all-seeing" Clairvoyant could learn this information himself. Later, Simmons told Coulson that the file was full of dead ends, referencing locations and people and hospital rooms that didn't seem to exist. Simmons had located mentions of a drug known as GH-325, which had initiated cellular regeneration in Coulson's body in minutes, but there was no way of knowing how to access this drug. Accessing a series of S.H.I.E.L.D. files, Fitz-Simmons learned that "GH" was apparently short for the Guest House, a decommissioned bunker from World War II—not an official S.H.I.E.L.D. facility.

Coulson, Ward, Fitz, and Garrett landed near the Guest House, a secure bunker with a security camera to greet them. A voice came through a speaker requesting a countersign, but none of the agents knew it, and Fitz couldn't find it in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s database. Instead, the four forced their way in, ensuring a hostile reception. They went in and took down the pair of soldiers guarding the facility—Garrett discovered that the bunker was rigged with explosives, and that a failsafe timer with under ten minutes remaining was ticking down to detonation. Coulson and Fitz urgently searched the facility for answers while Ward and Garrett figured out a way to stop the explosion or escape. The former two found a small vial of GH-325 in a biohazard containment ward, where Coulson also found a room marked "T.A.H.I.T.I." He stepped inside as Ward and Fitz escaped the facility with less than three minutes until detonation. Inside, he found a large, cylindrical drawer labeled "G.H.", which when pulled out revealed a tank of liquid containing a detached, partly decomposed, grayish-blue male humanoid body. He wandered out in a stupor, horrified by the sight and implications of what he had seen. Garrett came to recover him, and the two escaped and narrowly boarded the Bus as the ground behind them exploded violently. Coulson ran to Skye's bed yelling not to give her the drug, but as he arrived, Simmons had already administered it—Skye was near death, flatlining, as Simmons injected her with the GH-325. After a few moments of intense heart palpitations, Skye stabilized and leveled out at a resting heartrate: the drug had saved her. May approached Coulson about why he'd try to stop them from using GH-325, but he lied to her, saying that he'd simply worried that Skye would suffer like he had. Ian Quinn was at last handed over to Garrett's custody, ensured of a swift conviction given his videotaped confession on the Bus and Skye's pending consciousness and certain testimony.

The invasion of Lorelei

Skye made a full recovery, but remained bedridden for some time, much to her chagrin. As a result of her infiltration, S.H.I.E.L.D. as a whole was now cognizant of the fact that Mike Peterson was alive. Meanwhile, Coulson took some "personal time," spending several days trying to speak with Nick Fury personally. May sent herself, Ward, and Fitz to the California-Nevada border, where aerial energy readings consistent with previous arrivals of Asgardians had been detected. Simmons remained on the Bus to watch over Skye. As the team drove to the area in question, they nearly ran straight into another Asgardian arrival, this one by Sif, whom Fitz identified as having assisted Thor during his initial time on Earth. Sif warned the agents that their world was in grave danger. They led her to the Bus, where Coulson had recently returned. Sif explained that she had been sent by Odin to capture the Asgardian sorceress known as Lorelei, who had used her magical powers to wreak havoc across the Nine Realms 600 years ago. Lorelei was capable of controlling men—not women—with her voice, and her supplementary touch if necessary. She had spent centuries imprisoned on Asgard, wearing a muting collar that Sif now held. She had escaped imprisonment after Malekith's forces sacked Asgard, and had recently come to Earth through a secret passage between worlds (subverting the need for the Bifrost).

Coulson and Sif looked through recent crime reports in the area where Lorelei had apparently landed, figuring out that she had taken a group of bikers under her thrall. Coulson, Ward, May, and Sif stormed a bar in the area, where they were met by the gang in question, as well as several local police officers whom Lorelei had also turned. As the fight went on, Lorelei took control of Ward, and the two drove away on a motorcycle. The muting collar was also broken in the process: Coulson handed it over to Fitz for potential repair. While sitting up in bed, eager to help, Skye took to locating Ward and Lorelei: Ward would be using any number of aliases and dead drops to stay hidden. Coulson had recently asked Simmons to examine Skye's blood and figure out anything she could about GH-325 and its effects on her, but she wasn't making any progress. She insistently requested to have it sent to S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters for more thorough examination, but Coulson adamantly refused, ordering that it should be kept within the team. Meanwhile, Ward took Lorelei to Las Vegas, where the two slept together in a hotel room. Lorelei told him to get her an army, and that Sif must be defeated in order for her to rule.

The team tracked Ward to Vegas, but Coulson, May, and Sif failed to locate anyone upon storming his hotel room. While they were gone, Ward and Lorelei came to the Bus themselves, and Lorelei took control of Fitz. As Coulson, May, and Sif returned, Fitz informed Sif that he had fixed the collar, leading her into the Cage. He had indeed fixed it, but really just used the opportunity to lock her (and the collar) in there. Ward took the Bus into the air with Lorelei beside him in the cockpit. As Coulson maneuvered around the Bus, he pretended to already be controlled by Lorelei. Ward used the cockpit controls to open the roof of the Cage, sending Sif (holding the collar, and having angrily stuck her sword into the bed) out of the hole and closing it behind her. May confronted Lorelei directly, but Ward joined her and held May at gunpoint. Lorelei claimed that Ward had told her of the woman he had desired before meeting her, and it wasn't May. Skye remotely reopened the Cage, allowing Sif (clinging to the roof of the plane) to return and hide behind the door. Lorelei came in and took Sif's double-bladed sword, but Sif jumped out and fought her as Skye locked the Cage door behind her. Sif, the superior warrior, overcame Lorelei and trapped her in the repaired collar, releasing her hold over Ward and Fitz in the process. As everyone recovered, Sif took custody of Lorelei and returned her to Asgard, thanking the team for their assistance and declaring that it had been an honor to fight alongside them. May implored Coulson to tell Skye about whatever he had seen in the Guest House, for her sake. Later, Ward tried to apologize to May, making no attempt to deny what Lorelei had said; May simply and bluntly ended their relationship. Coulson approached Skye and told her the truth of GH-325, apologizing profusely for subjecting her to unknown, alien consequences. Skye took it well, simply happy to be alive. Nonetheless, Coulson was frustrated with the situation. He cast aside any pretense of protocol, determined to discover the truth, and insisted that the rest of the team had to be protected from the truth until he and Skye knew why Fury was fighting so hard to keep it a secret. Unbeknownst to them, May was listening in via a concealed microphone, and submitted an audio log through an encrypted network telling someone, "He knows."

Hunting the Clairvoyant

Soon after the run-in with Lorelei, agents Garrett and Triplett were attacked in a supposed safehouse by Mike Peterson, but were able to repel him. Peterson had come to be known as Deathlok, after Centipede's codename for their "project" unique to his recovery and enslavement. The two met with Coulson's team on the Bus, along with Victoria Hand and Agents Blake and Sitwell, to discuss the situation. Coulson and Garrett determined a possible route to finding the Clairvoyant: examining claimed, rejected psychics on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Gifted Index. Coulson decided that Skye could oversee the operation, assigning randomized pairs to different individuals on the Index. Hand agreed in principle, but pointed out that she would need to be an official part of S.H.I.E.L.D. to gain proper clearance. With that in mind, Coulson made Skye an official level 1 agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Ward and Triplett were assigned to Elijah Fordham, a former soldier serving a life sentence for a series of murders; May and Blake to Thomas Nash, who had apparently been catatonic for four years after a car crash; and Coulson and Garrett to Noriko Sato, a genius college student.

As May and Blake split up inside the home where Nash was being held, Blake was attacked by Deathlok. Deathlok fired upon May with a rocket launcher newly installed on his arm; she dodged out of the way, and he left the vicinity. May went on to discover that Nash wasn't in the home, despite being listed as a resident. Blake was recovered in critical condition. S.H.I.E.L.D. took these events to mean that Nash was now their prime suspect and had seen them coming. Simmons was dropped off at the Hub, where she was eager to do advanced work with Skye's blood. Observing Blake's recovered equipment, Coulson found that he had fired a tracker, meaning that they could potentially track Deathlok. Indeed, they traced the signal to an abandoned racing facility in Pensacola, Florida, and a large group of agents convened on the building. Eventually, Coulson and Garrett chased him down to the basement. He escaped, but they instead found a room with various monitors, at which sat a motionless man: Thomas Nash. As more agents arrived, Nash, utterly paralyzed, "spoke" his words through a computer. He accepted his fate, but told Coulson that he would continue to "see" him no matter where they put him. He also noted that Skye had something "we"—the vague organization to which he apparently belonged—wanted, and that they would stop at nothing to get it. As he continued to pontificate, Ward suddenly shot him in the chest, killing him. Later, May informed Coulson that Fury was waiting for him at the Triskelion.

Ward was held in the Cage during transport, on his way to the S.H.I.E.L.D. review board. Skye confronted him, and he adamantly did not regret his actions. She went to Coulson, who was troubled that Nash might have been the wrong man: since the computers had spoken for him, he could have been positioned as an elaborate prop. Together, the two deduced that everything the Clairvoyant knew lined up with S.H.I.E.L.D. files: his vast knowledge wasn't due to any psychic powers, but a high level of security clearance within S.H.I.E.L.D. His lack of knowledge about Coulson's resurrection was due to the file being utterly exclusive. Meanwhile, as he looked through the plane's communication systems in an attempt to establish an encrypted line to Simmons, Fitz noticed a suspicious line. He traced it to a phone in the cockpit protected by a thumb scanner belonging to May. She caught him in the act of examining it, and he awkwardly slipped away and informed Skye, who anxiously told him to cut the line. He did so just as May attempted to send a log, and she chased after him. As he took refuge in the lab, Skye ran for Coulson. He had confronted Ward in the Cage and demanded to know if someone had ordered him to kill Nash, which Ward adamantly denied. Skye told Coulson the situation, and the two confronted May at gunpoint, demanding to know the truth. She said that she couldn't say whom she had been calling; at that moment, the Bus suddenly rocked backward and began taking a different path; May denied having anything to do with it.

The emergence of Hydra

Coulson and Skye got May to drop her weapon, but she remained adamant that she was not affiliated with the Clairvoyant. Under increased pressure, she said that the phone was a direct line to Fury. Coulson had Skye look into S.H.I.E.L.D. communications to determine why and to where the Bus had been suddenly diverted. When pressed about why he was in the plane's comm lines in the first place, Fitz admitted that he was trying to contact Simmons at the Hub. Coulson was concerned about whom she might contact for help and whether they could be trusted with knowledge of GH-325. Meanwhile, Simmons herself was preparing to contact Agent Weaver covertly; she tried to hide her plans from Agent Triplett, but he eventually offered to help her. Skye informed Coulson that S.H.I.E.L.D. communications was being blanketed with white noise, potentially an encrypted code. Suddenly, the team received a message from Agent Garrett, who was flying nearby and being attacked by S.H.I.E.L.D. drones. To avoid further distraction, Coulson shot May—it was in fact an Icer, the new variant of the Night-Night Gun—and stashed her bound in the Cage next to Ward. He set Skye to decoding comms, and with Fitz's help unlocked the weapons array to assist Garrett. Coulson successfully shot down the drones, and Garrett boarded the Bus. Garrett had noted the plane's trajectory from outside, and told Coulson that it was heading straight for the Hub, meaning that Victoria Hand was responsible.

Coulson concluded that Hand was the Clairvoyant, but Garrett wasn't convinced. Skye decoded the message, which appeared to be a call to arms for agents of Hydra, long thought defeated. At the Hub, Simmons and Triplett contacted Weaver, who warned them that the Academy was under siege from within by Hydra, and warned them not to trust anyone. Triplett locked the door to the room they were in, and Simmons was concerned, but he handed her his knife as a gesture of goodwill. As May and Ward traded jibes in the Cage, Coulson came in and informed May that Fitz had repaired her line, and told her to make things right. As the Bus landed in the Hub, Coulson took the still-shackled May to her phone and told her to call Fury. Soldiers in the landing area began remotely destroying the plane's guns. A man answered May's line and told her that Fury was dead. Suddenly, soldiers began openly firing upon the Bus, hitting May in the arm with one of their bullets. The team regrouped, and Ward was let out of the Cage due to the direness of the situation.

As Coulson removed the bullet from May's arm, he demanded to know the details of May's secrecy now that Fury was dead. She told him that her job was to inform him of any physical or mental deterioration on Coulson's part—as such, she knew the details surrounding his resurrection. Coulson felt betrayed that she would keep those details from him, but she said that Fury told her it was imperative that he not know. Even the formation of the team was down to May and Fury: she had suggested someone who could repair Coulson's body; someone who could "reprogram" his brain; and a specialist who could help her take him down if needed. Fury then relayed these parameters to Coulson, in so many words, so that he could find the individuals himself. During this conversation, the soldiers outside ceased firing, wanting to preserve the plane, and would certainly soon send in a team to attack more directly. Ward advised wiping the Bus's database of all of the dangerous knowledge they had acquired since forming the team; Coulson agreed, and Skye backed it up on a small external hard drive before doing so. Fitz used his mouse hole technology—a laser capable of burning a quick and effective hole through the floor—to allow the team to escape the Bus as the strike team boarded. Skye handed Ward the hard drive, as he would hold up better under torture should it come to that.

The team set out to save Simmons and Triplett, who at that moment were being held at gunpoint by Hand's men. May remained bound, much to her protest. Soon, Hand herself approached Simmons and Triplett and told them to pledge "unwavering loyalty" to Hydra, or die like Fury had. Triplett took one of her men at knifepoint and told her he'd take him too. She congratulated them and declared that she now trusted them as part of S.H.I.E.L.D. She had apparently used this test already today, and very few had passed. Hand further believed that Coulson himself was part of Hydra. She cited his many digressions from S.H.I.E.L.D. protocol in recent months as evidence of his betrayal. Coulson's team split up into two teams: himself, May, Fitz, and Garrett; and Ward and Skye. The former soon attained operation of a control center, while the latter was sent to disable the Hub's controls, especially their hold on the Bus. Ward and Skye hid from a large group of soldiers on the way, having a moment of bonding in a janitorial closet. Ward asked her out to have a drink if they got through this, and they kissed. The team of four contemplated how best to rescue Simmons—Garrett was adamant that they should kill Hand herself. Coulson didn't think killing her outright was the best approach, especially given the recent situation with Nash. Garrett rattled off a list of the Clairvoyant's atrocities, including brainwashing Raina—something Coulson had never told anyone. Coulson suddenly realized the truth: that Garrett was the Clairvoyant. Garrett tried for a moment to backpedal, but gave up and sighed. Suddenly, several soldiers burst into the room, and Garrett told the Hydra sympathizers among them to take out the other soldiers, declaring, "Hail Hydra."

Garrett took a few moments to gloat over his victory. He was interested in taking Fitz into Hydra, willingly or not, and instructed his men to shoot him in the kneecaps while killing Coulson and May. Just before they could do so, Ward and Skye succeeded in destroying the Hub's "nerve center," detonating it with C4. The blackout knocked out the lights and forced a backup generator into action. Coulson and May took the opportunity to take the fight to Garrett and his men. Using a combination of fists, Icers, and Fitz's technology, they managed to knock out all of them. Hand, Simmons, and others walked in, having heard all of what went down through a surveillance unit on the wall. Garrett and his men were taken into custody, and Hand attained a newfound trust and respect for Coulson. She informed him that Hydra had taken control of, at least, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s East African headquarters and the Treehouse. She was going to personally oversee Garrett's imprisonment in the Fridge; Ward, his former protégé, was incensed at Garrett's betrayal, and requested to come along. On the plane ride over, Hand offered Ward to shoot and kill Garrett outright as a way of making up for killing Nash. He stood up, cocked his gun, and shot and killed Agent Hand, nodding his allegiance to Garrett and Hydra.

Providence

Coulson took over administration of the Hub in Ward's absence, overseeing the global struggle between S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra. He was contacted by Glenn Talbot of the U.S. Air Force, who was concerned about Hydra's far-reaching presence within S.H.I.E.L.D. Talbot said that he would be sending some men over to ask some questions. Coulson agreed, but was privately concerned that the government may be planning to violently wipe out S.H.I.E.L.D. to avoid any further problems. He loaded the team on the Bus, despite its serious damage, while many other agents remained behind to surrender. Triplett offered to come along; Coulson firmly declined, but Simmons vouched for him. Coulson hesitantly agreed, as long as he was her responsibility. Coulson set his sights on wiping the team's association with S.H.I.E.L.D., including having Skye remove all traces of their identities from the internet. The plane's damage and their limited rations were such that they could only remain in the air for a few hours. Skye was worried about Ward, and called him on Coulson's cell phone. He claimed that Hand had taken a long way around to the Fridge to avoid military attention; in truth, he was with Garrett in a Hydra safehouse. Coulson had Skye round up the team's S.H.I.E.L.D. badges, and stored them in a safe in his office. As he was doing so, his own badge suddenly lit up with coordinates. Coulson was certain that this was Fury's doing, and set course for the coordinates' location in the Canadian wilderness.

May confronted Coulson in his office, believing his behavior to be erratic and possibly influenced by Hydra. She told him that Fury wasn't in charge of the Tahiti Project—she didn't know who was, only Fury did, but that person may have been affiliated with Hydra, and if so, may have resurrected Coulson to do Hydra's bidding. She therefore requested that he hand over his gun. Coulson refused and ordered May to get out of his office. The team could only land 7 miles away from the coordinates, and had to make a long trek through the snow to arrive there, amid rampant concerns that Fury truly was dead and it was a trap. Arriving at the location, the team found seemingly nothing, and Coulson grew increasingly frustrated. He threw his badge into the trees, triggering a sentry gun that shot it out of the air. The team ducked behind cover, but Coulson walked in front of the gun to learn its intentions. It asked for his identity; when he told it, it welcomed him, and a rock wall moved aside to reveal a hidden base. The team walked in and were greeted by Eric Koenig, a level-six S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, who welcomed them to Providence. Koenig told the team that Fury was indeed dead, and further, the Fridge had fallen to Hydra forces. As Skye worriedly called Ward, Koenig led Coulson into another room to tell him that Fury was actually alive, and that knowledge was extremely limited on Fury's order. Coulson wasn't comfortable keeping secrets from his team, but Koenig assured him that there would be a "major problem" if they found out. He also told him that Providence was equipped with a hangar for the Bus. Skye learned from Ward that he was fine, and told him that they were in a secret base in Canada and that Fury was dead. Ward arrived not long after, effortlessly entering the base and once again infiltrating the team on behalf of Hydra.

Blackout and the cellist

Ward essentially told the team exactly what Hydra did at the Fridge, stealing myriad objects such as the Peru 0-8-4 and Berserker Staff and freeing such people as Ian Quinn—he naturally left out the fact that he was directly involved, presenting various injuries as having been caused by Hydra's attack. He further lied that he killed Garrett by shooting him in the head. He presented the hard drive, which he claimed Hydra had luckily not gotten their hands on; in truth, they had, but needed information from Skye to access it without wiping its contents. He suggested that Skye back it up now that the Bus was secure. Coulson was more immediately concerned with the inmates who'd been freed from the Fridge. He particularly asked about Marcus Daniels, also known as Blackout, who had indeed been freed and was now on the loose. Coulson decided to bring a team to take down whomever had been released from the Fridge, starting with Daniels. Koenig stopped him, noting that there were protocols for leaving Providence: anyone doing so would have to go through "orientation," a series of questions while attached to an incredibly accurate lie detector designed by Fury himself. Coulson was the only one intrinsically approved to be there, and everyone else had to prove themselves. Anyone who passed would be assigned a special lanyard, which Skye later learned had a tracking beacon in it that Koenig would observe by computer.

As interviews went on, Coulson explained to Fitz-Simmons and Triplett (who had each passed theirs) who Marcus Daniels was. He had been working as an assistant at a physics lab working on Darkforce, a form of negative cosmic radiation. Daniels was exposed to the Darkforce and gained the power to absorb energy at will, making his touch fatal to humans. Gaining the powers had also done severe damage to his mental faculties, making him more violent and impulsive. This power makes him virtually invulnerable to standard weaponry; when he was first captured, agents "overloaded his system" with a great amount of light. The Bus still needed fueling and repairs, so Triplett was assigned to pilot the plane that Ward had taken to get to Providence. May objected, saying she should be the pilot, but Coulson still harbored ill will over her keeping the nature of Project Tahiti from him. Ward narrowly passed his orientation, relying on his sincere attachment to Skye to explain his presence at Providence. He, Skye, and May stayed at the base while the others left to pursue Daniels. Coulson believed he would be heading to Portland: Audrey Nathan, a woman with whom he was obsessed, lived there; she had helped S.H.I.E.L.D. capture him the first time.

The team quickly tracked Daniels down: he was stalking Audrey Nathan in a park while she was on a night run. They arrived in a van and took Nathan in while Fitz surrounded Daniels with drones blasting him with light. Coulson tried to get him to come peacefully. Daniels said that the people at the Fridge weren't simply containing him, but had made him stronger. He knocked Fitz and Coulson back with powerful blasts of Darkforce and escaped. Back at the base, Skye and Koenig decided the best course of action for tracking Fridge escapees was for her to hack National Security Agency satellites, given that S.H.I.E.L.D.'s were now offline. Ward went on to the Bus, where May was, seemingly to kill her, but learned that she was in the process of leaving. She had been staying on the team for Coulson's sake, but his refusal to forgive her meant she had no reason to remain there. Ward did nothing to stop her, and she walked out the front door of Providence with a large bag over her shoulder. In Portland, Simmons and Triplett spoke to Nathan, who discussed her romantic history with Coulson. He and Fitz were in another room listening, as Coulson didn't want to reintroduce himself into her life now that she was finally starting to heal. She also told them about Daniels' obsession with her, having showed up at countless cello recitals of hers and eventually stalking her in earnest.

Fitz believed he had a way to take down Daniels for good, but it required potentially putting Nathan in harm's way. He'd taken equipment from the jet to create a ray that would modify stage lighting at one of Nathan's recitals to turn them into gamma rays that would stop Daniels. The team set her up on stage in an empty concert hall and had her play as normal. The plan worked, barely, as Daniels entered the venue and told Nathan that she could save him from being a monster. The concentrated radiation caused Daniels to combust in a puff of Darkforce. Nathan was safe and could return to her normal life. Meanwhile, at Providence, Skye successfully hacked into the NSA satellites, but Ward killed Koenig and modified the feed to reveal nothing useful. He stored Koenig's body in the ceiling ventilation of a storage room. When Skye saw him again, he offered her a drink and they bonded further, even sharing another kiss. Ward had been slightly careless, and there was blood behind his left ear. Skye noticed it, and he hurriedly rushed off, claiming it was from the attack at the Fridge. Wondering where Koenig had gone, Skye checked his beacon and followed it to his corpse. She concluded the truth, that Ward was an agent of Hydra, but decided to keep the knowledge close to her chest. When she saw Ward again, she overtly committed to a relationship with him. He lied to her that Fitz needed their help, and they took the Bus ostensibly to meet him somewhere; Skye played along to not arouse suspicion. Ward claimed that Fitz wanted the 0-8-4 from Peru, which was ostensibly destroyed, but Fitz had kept the schematics for the device, and they were now on the hard drive Skye had given Ward. This was of course all a cover for Hydra wanting access to the drive, which only Skye could access with a particular set of coordinates. Melinda May called her mother to pick her up in Canada, causing her to drive 500 mlies to retrieve her. May sought Maria Hill to ask her some questions. Returning to Providence, Coulson and the others found the Bus and the rest of the team missing.

Skye's encrypted drive

May found Maria Hill in Washington and incapacitated the several thinly veiled surveillance agents that were keeping an eye on Hill as she walked through the streets, subject to intense scrutiny after the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. Hill had recently taken a job in Stark Industries. May asked for Hill's help with Coulson since he wouldn't take it from her anymore. She also wanted to know who was truly in charge of Project Tahiti if not Fury, but Hill had no answers. Hill also continued to pretend that Fury was dead, but May was skeptical. Noticing the surveillance had been taken down, authorities soon arrived and took Hill into custody. Back at Providence, the team found that all of the security camera feeds had been wiped save for that in the hangar, which showed May leaving the Bus with a large bag and later showed Ward and Skye boarding the Bus—Koenig was naturally nowhere to be found. But Fitz-Simmons soon explored the base more closely and found the answers: Koenig's body and a scrawled, hidden message from Skye declaring that Ward was Hydra. Fitz in particular had an extremely hard time accepting Ward's betrayal. Examining the body, Simmons concluded that he'd died of asphyxiation by a thin wire after May had left the base, and that based on the angle of attack, the killer had to be Ward's height. Coulson knew that Skye got onto the Bus because she was playing Ward, and hoped that she knew what she was doing. He further concluded, correctly, that Garrett was alive, Hand was dead, and Hydra needed Skye to decrypt the hard drive. Just as Fitz tracked the Bus's location to Los Angeles, Providence was beset by alarms alerting them to hostiles outside the base. Skye had taken Ward to the café in Los Angeles where she'd met Mike Peterson: the place to which the hard drive was supposedly geo-locked, but this was of course a lie. She told him it would take at least an hour to decrypt the drive.

As Coulson and the others armed themselves for a potential confrontation with Hydra, the blast doors calmly opened to reveal Glenn Talbot and a team of special forces soldiers. Coulson asked how he'd found the base, and Maria Hill arrived to reveal that she had told him. She and Coulson had a private discussion while Talbot tried to convince the others to give themselves up and potentially reduce their sentences. Hill similarly tried to convince Coulson to hand over the base to the military, but he told her about the Ward situation, and she realized the urgency of the ordeal. The two got the jump on Talbot and his men, taking them down with Icers and escaping with the rest of the team. Meanwhile, in the café, Skye took her time at her laptop to tip off the police about Ward's (and her own) location. Police soon arrived and began to arrest the two of them, but Ward broke free and began taking them down. Skye tried to run out of the café and let herself get arrested, but Ward continued to use his Icer to knock out police. She began driving away in a police car, but Deathlok suddenly appeared and crashed through her windshield, grabbing hold of her and taking her back to the Bus with Ward. Ward chastised him for making a "public spectacle," but Deathlok said that Garrett had told him to shadow Ward. Deathlok left him alone to interrogate Skye, but she was adamant that she would never cooperate. Garrett became impatient and ordered Deathlok to force the situation. Deathlok suddenly attached a heart-stopping device to Ward's chest and told Skye that he would die unless she told them how to decrypt the drive. Even as she was filled with hate for Ward and his betrayal, she couldn't bring herself to let him die, and she told them how it worked. Once she input the password, if the plane rose to 35,000 feet, the drive would decrypt itself. As promised, Deathlok released his hold on Ward and told him to get the plane up in the sky.

Coulson and the others arrived in Los Angeles, where Hill and Triplett sat in the plane on the runway and Hill told Ward over the radio to surrender. He obviously refused, but this was really just an act of subterfuge to allow Coulson to slip into the Bus's landing gear unnoticed. He found Skye in the Cage and freed her, sharing a moment of reunion. Upon learning that Deathlok was on the plane, Coulson knew that they had no time to retrieve the laptop and needed to escape immediately. Deathlok saw them and followed them into the cargo hold, where they narrowly escaped with Lola, flying the car safely but harrowingly to the ground thousands of feet below. The team regrouped at a nearby hotel, taking the night to gather their bearings and plan of attack. That night, Coulson found May in his hotel room, who showed him the contents of a flash drive that she had found deep in the grave S.H.I.E.L.D. had made for him to cover up his resurrection. It contained a video of Coulson himself before his death, resigning from an appointment Fury had given him to head up Project Tahiti: an effort designed to potentially heal a mortally wounded hero. Coulson believed that, from the testing they had done to that point, the mental deterioration that was consequent to the physical healing was too great, and he thoroughly recommended abandoning the project.

The Cybertek connection

Hiding out at the motel, the team saw a report on the news about Deathlok killing a drug lord in Colombia—strangely, one with ties to Hydra. The team set their sights on Cybertek, recognizing its numerous connections to Deathlok, Ian Quinn, and Hydra at large. Skye had left a virus on the hard drive that Ward had taken in case of emergency, but hadn't had time to complete it, so it now had to be activated manually in order to gain access to Hydra's internal systems. Deducing that Cybertek and Hydra were linked, the team decided to infiltrate Cybertek and gain access to one of their computers to activate the Trojan. Triplett got a stash of old S.H.I.E.L.D. spy gear from his mother, who herself was the daughter of a member of the Howling Commandos. Coulson and May entered a Cybertek facility in Palo Alto in disguise under the pretense of a job interview, and found that there wasn't any computer database: all of the building's files were stored in hard copy. They found a large filing cabinet concerning Deathlok, and on a cursory glance inside learned that work on Project Deathlok went back to at least 1990, when John Garrett himself had some cybernetic enhancements made to his body. As security approached, Coulson and May tossed the cabinet out the window to be recovered by Skye and Triplett's van below.

Triplett tracked a number of Cybertek shipments that wound up in Havana, presumably at the location of a former S.H.I.E.L.D. base, and the team made their way there. Fitz-Simmons were sent to track down the Bus, while the others went to the base itself, which was hidden in the basement of a small, unassuming barbershop. Fitz-Simmons found the Bus on an airfield hours away from the base, and Coulson ordered them not to engage, but Simmons was frustrated at the idea of starting over without the Bus again. Before they could proceed with any plan of action, Ward snuck up on them and confronted them. He took them onto the Bus where they spoke to Garrett. Fitz activated a handheld electromagnetic pulse disguised as a joy buzzer, frying the Deathlok enhancements in Garrett's side. Fitz-Simmons were rushed into another room as Ward and Raina looked over Garrett alone. The plane took off, bound for a Cybertek facility in Miami. Fitz-Simmons escaped the hold of their relatively incapable captors and fled across the Bus, ducking into a cargo pod as Ward spotted them. Fitz pleaded with him through the reinforced glass door to reconsider his allegiance, but Ward used a control panel nearby to drop the pod and Fitz-Simmons into the ocean below. Coulson, May, Skye, and Triplett entered the barbershop and soon found a concealed computer system, but were set upon by a group of Centipede soldiers.

Fall of the Clairvoyant

As Coulson, May, and Triplett fought off their enemies, Skye installed the virus on the computer. One of the soldiers wielded the Berserker Staff, and May took it from him, using it to defeat the others and begin destroying the foundations of the building. The four escaped, virus installed, and May left the Staff behind, burying it and the soldiers inside as the basement caved in. With the Trojan installed, Skye would now be privy to essentially anything Hydra tried to do. The team regrouped on the plane, where Coulson learned and told the team that Fitz-Simmons had tagged the Bus, but he couldn't contact them: he knew that they were likely captured, and might be dead. He told the team that the only possible way to find Fitz-Simmons was to get to Garrett. Meanwhile, Fitz-Simmons were alive, stuck in the airtight cargo pod at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea. They initially gave up to the inevitability of death, but soon were able to get their morale up and begin thinking about a way out. Fitz used an EKG machine to send out a weak signal, but it was on a S.H.I.E.L.D. frequency and unlikely to reach anyone. Coulson and the others followed the Bus's signal to a Cybertek manufacturing facility in New Mexico, equipped with a complex plan that took full advantage of their newfound knowledge of Hydra's inner workings. May and Skye barged into the building and staged a bomb attack, causing Kyle Zeller, Deathlok's handler, to initiate the "default directive" in the facility's soldiers: a directive that told them to defend John Garrett at all costs. Coulson followed the soldiers to Garrett, and told Triplett to take the facility down if need be.

Fitz-Simmons came up with a plan to blow the window of the cargo pod and swim the 90 feet up, but there was only enough oxygen equipment in the pod for one person. Fitz insistently offered it to Simmons, saying in so many words that he loved her. The two tearfully embraced, and Fitz initiated the explosion. Simmons swam out and dragged him to the surface, where she miraculously saw Nick Fury reaching out to her from a helicopter above. She passed out, and Fury put her in a hyperbaric chamber while a crack medical team worked on the critical Fitz. When Simmons awoke, Fury asked if she knew of a way he could find Coulson. At Cybertek, Skye restrained Zeller and tied a fake bomb to him in an attempt to gain information. She was confronted by Grant Ward, who was intercepted by Melinda May. The two fought, and she took him down, nailing his foot to the floor with a nail gun and knocking him out with a roundhouse kick to the head. Skye had Zeller give her more information about Cybertek's "incentives program," and he led her to a hallway with several rooms occupied by innocent people. Zeller's wife was among them, and they embraced—Ace Peterson was in another. Hydra had been holding the loved ones of those they took under their employ to ensure their coerced loyalty. Meanwhile, Nick Fury arrived at the facility and assisted Coulson in getting to Garrett personally. The two confronted him, but he was backed up by Deathlok. Fury shot a clip of bullets into Garrett, but he survived almost without injury. Skye hacked into Cybertek's system and sent Deathlok a message from Ace, confirming that he was safe. With this knowledge, Mike Peterson didn't hesitate in blasting a rocket at Garrett, knocking him across the room and gravely injuring him. He further stomped a deep depression in Garrett's torso, seemingly killing him.

The U.S. Marine Corps arrived on the scene and rounded up Centipede soldiers, who would go back to being "essentially normal" people without regular injections of the Centipede serum, and as soon as they had their "failsafe" eyes removed. Ward was also taken into custody, and Coulson taunted him, telling him that the rest of his life would be a living hell as he learned to define himself outside of Garrett's narcissistic leadership. Coulson told Skye to bring in Peterson, but she hesitated upon seeing how remorseful he was. Peterson told her that she could observe his hardware and see that he would only be making amends for his actions, for Ace's sake. Ace was returned to his aunt's protection. While the agents and military filed out of the building, Garrett's body was put into a box, but he was still alive: he crawled to one of Cybertek's reconstruction machines, operated it, and had his limbs installed with advanced Deathlok machinery. As he rose to his feet, proud and ready to fight back, Coulson blasted him with the recently recovered Peru 0-8-4, instantly vaporizing him and killing him once and for all. Later, on the Bus, Coulson confronted Fury about Project Tahiti. Fury stood by his decision to go ahead with reviving him, telling Coulson that he was one of a handful of people alive that he trusted. He entrusted Coulson with the Toolbox, a small cube that he was to use to rebuild S.H.I.E.L.D. as its new director. Fury said goodbye, and told Coulson and May that he would be "everywhere." Inside the Toolbox Coulson found coordinates, which the team followed to another of Fury's secret bases, this one known as the Playground. Simmons was there, and she informed the others that Fitz was alive. They met Billy Koenig, a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who was conspicuously identical to Eric Koenig both in appearance and mannerisms. Koenig welcomed them and asked them how they would like to proceed. That night, Coulson examined a board of strange markings that Garrett had recently made while on the Bus—it matched the symbols that Ward had seen while posing as Akela Amador. Seemingly mesmerized by them, Coulson spent a significant amount of time scrawling the vast array of markings on the wall.