The "real" S.H.I.E.L.D. presents evidence to May that cause her to start having doubts about Coulson's secrets. Jiaying and Skye work to develop her powers, and discover that Lai Xi has connections to the incident in Bahrain that personally affected May.
Tropes:
- Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: Katya: dark-haired and crazy.
- Arc Welding: May's mysterious past is revealed to have involved two rogue Inhumans, though S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn't aware of that at the time.
- Bait-and-Switch Boss: Katya Belyakov was the real threat behind the Bahrain mission, not her mother, Eva.
- Break the Cutie: May before Bahrain is a stark contrast with May after. Being forced to kill a crazy child will do that to a person, especially if you're planning to start a family of your own.
- Call-Back: The shot at the end of the episode of May having transferred to desk work mirrors how we first see her in the pilot.
- Continuity Nod:
- The "Welcome Wagon" that turned sour in Bahrain is finally explored.
- The Theta Protocol is brought up, and seemingly explains why "real" S.H.I.E.L.D. distrusts Coulson.
- Coulson tells May after Bahrain the same words that May told Tobias in "Repairs": "Let the girl go."
- May's reaction to having her hand touched may be how Coulson knew right away it wasn't her when she was being impersonated by Agent 33.
- St. Agnes Orphanage is once again mentioned. Just a few days before this episode came out, we learnt that one Matthew Murdock was sent there, or at least in an orphanage with the same name, after his father died.
- The flashbacks are set seven years earlier, i.e. right when the MCU first got started, meaning Coulson chats a bit about Fury's new idea for assembling a team of Earth's mightiest heroes. He also uses S.H.I.E.L.D.'s full name with the local law enforcement instead of the acronym, as he did back in the first Iron Man.
- Cradling Your Kill: When Coulson makes it into the warehouse, he finds May clinging to the body of the insane Inhuman child she had been forced to kill, crying her eyes out.
- Cry into Chest: May cries into Coulson's chest after he tells her to "let the girl go".
- Death of a Child: Played straight with May shooting Katya.
- Defusing The Tykebomb: May tries this with Katya, and it almost works for a moment, with Katya the scared little girl asking to "go home," but her powers and psychosis again overwhelm her, so May the special ops agent is forced to do the uncomfortable wetwork.
- Dreaming of Things to Come: It appears that Raina's power as an Inhuman is seeing the future. She knew about the family dinner with Skye, Cal, and Jiaying before it happened.
- Dwindling Party: The S.H.I.E.L.D. strike team led by Agent Hart that attacked the Belyakov's Bahraini gangsters' warehouse go down absurdly fast, much to Coulson and May's shock. Not because they're killed, but because they're all brainwashed by the little girl they attempted to save in the first place. Eventually, they made it out alive, but at the cost of the little girl's life and May's spirit.
- Emotion Eater: Katya could leech emotions from people with just a touch and seemed to have a particular obsession with pain.
- Enfant Terrible: Katya went through Terrigenesis at a young age and was driven mad by her gift, controlling the minds of her mother and others.
- Epic Flail: Eva picks up a chandelier and its attached chain to use as a weapon against May.
- "Eureka!" Moment: The moment Lincoln realized what Raina's true power was.Lincoln: It's not a dream.
- Exact Words: After May goes in, the Bahraini military tries to take charge. Coulson tries to keep them out by telling the colonel there is a biological weapon. While the colonel thinks a standard bio weapon, Coulson refers to May herself.
- Foreshadowing: It's revealed at the end that Raina's dream about Skye and Cal having dinner was actually some form of prophecy, which implies that her other recurring dream (of being hunted) may also be this.
- Gory Discretion Shot: The scene cuts to outside the building just before May shoots Katya.
- Gossip Evolution: May was the only person who saw what really happened in that warehouse in Bahrain to walk out of it alive, and she was too traumatized to talk about what happened. All the legends of "The Cavalry" started from what the people that she rescued thought happened, based on the enormous number of bodies they found once they they regained their senses after Katya's death.
- Happily Married:
- The episode begins with a flashback to the time when May and Andrew were still married. They are quite affectionate and looking forward to starting a family.
- Jiaying speaks of the time when she lived with Cal and it sounds like a nice time.
- Hates Being Touched: May showed shades of this after her ordeal in Bahrain, which involved a little girl who could brainwash people with a touch.
- Heroic BSoD: May, post-Bahrain, has the Thousand-Yard Stare and emotional detachment of the trope.
- Hypercompetent Sidekick: Coulson and May were lower-ranked and answered to Agent Hart during Bahrain mission. But they came off more level-headed than Hart, who immediately decided to bring a squad of S.H.I.E.L.D. strike team once he deemed the peaceful approach failure. His squad almost didn't make it and May had to save them all while Coulson distracted the Bahrain military.
- Improvised Weapon: Eva used a chandelier as a ball-and-chain. May killed her with an improvised spear made from a lamp.
- Internal Reveal:
- Jiaying tells Skye that she's her mother.
- Turns out that Coulson was keeping something big away from his team called the "Theta Protocol," which involves a lot of money and resources. This is why "real" S.H.I.E.L.D. distrusts him, since they believe it involves hoarding gifted humans.
- Irony: Raina used to work for the Clairvoyant (Garrett), who didn't actually have any ability to see the future; now it appears her Inhuman gift is Dreaming of Things to Come.
- It's All My Fault: While
Word of God says that Jiaying blames Cal for losing Skye, this episode implies that she feels responsible for how far he went because he promised her that he would find Skye. - Locked Out of the Loop: Coulson has everyone but the Koenigs locked out of the loop when it comes to Theta Protocol. Even after months of investigation, "real" S.H.I.E.L.D. only has the barest idea of the scope of it.
- The Man Behind the Man: Katya was the real mastermind behind the Bahrain mission. Her mother was just one more flunky.
- Made of Iron: May shrugs off getting Punched Across the Room by the superstrong Eva, twice, after having fought through atleast a couple of thugs and then still continues to fight after being shot in the leg.
- Madness Mantra: "I need your pain. I feel your pain." courtesy of Katya Belyakov and her mindslaves.
- Mind Control: Katya could control a person with a touch.
- My God, What Have I Done?:
- Jiaying eventually came to realize that the methods she was using to try to find Skye were turning her into a monster, which is why she gave up.
- May suffers this after killing Katya.
- My Greatest Failure:
- Jiaying has two: giving up looking for Skye and letting a rogue Inhuman cause chaos in Bahrain.
- For May, it was failing to get through to Katya in Bahrain and being forced to kill her to save her teammates. This is why she hates the nickname the mission earned her.
- Mythology Gag: When discussing the Avengers Initiative, Coulson describes it as gathering "Earth's mightiest, [to] see if they can be heroes." The Avengers comic book uses "Earth's Mightiest Heroes" as a tagline, and Tony Stark says it during The Avengers to describe the team.
- Nepotism: Jiaying and Skye have to keep their relationship secret for fear of accusations of this, especially since there was an incident some years previous where an Inhuman arranged for her daughter to skip the standard approval and preparation process before undergoing Terrigenesis like Skye did inadvertently, and disaster struck as a direct result.
- Noodle Implements: The Stinger ends with Hunter about to give Fitz instructions on how to shake a hostile tail with an electric hand dryer. The next episode never shows how the hand dryer was used.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: When only he and May remained during Bahrain mission, Coulson contacted S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ to request for reinforcements. But whoever he's talking to was rather... slow to learn how desperate the situation really is. They also turned down Coulson's suggestion to send May in.
Fridge Horror kicks in when you realize this is when S.H.I.E.L.D was infiltrated by HYDRA. - Oh, Crap!: Simmons, when May asks her to open the Toolbox, because she gave the real one to Fitz.
- One-Man Army: This episode finally shows where May got this reputation. While she did end up with credit for a handful of kills that weren't actually hers, she did stealth into a fortified location, kill a few brainwashed guards, slip away from a dozen brainwashed special forces agents, fight and kill three men in hand-to-hand, and finally do the same to a woman with superstrength. Yes, her reputation was unintentionally exaggerated, but she's still no slouch.
- Origins Episode: May's, or rather, "The Cavalry's". One of the people working with Coulson and May said that if their mission went south, he'd send in the cavalry, referring to a squad of heavily armed agents that would eliminate all hostiles. They all got captured, so Coulson sent May in to rescue them.
- Properly Paranoid:
- Jiaying refused to let Katya go through Terrigenesis because she saw something disturbing about the girl's personality. She was oh so right to be worried.
- For whatever reason, Coulson's gone to great lengths to hide the existence of Theta Protocol. With the revelation that "real" S.H.I.E.L.D. has been tracking him in an attempt to uncover its purpose, it turns out he was right to do so.
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: After Katya starts killing off her puppets, May only thinks to talk her down after the local mooks are dead and her fellow S.H.I.E.L.D. agents are next on the list.
- Punched Across the Room: Eva does this to several people, including May
- Replacement Goldfish: Katya tried to brainwash May into being her new mother, but May killed her before she could.
- The Reveal:
- Turns out Raina is an oracle, but the visions only come in her dreams.
- The Gifted May took out in Bahrain was a rogue Inhuman named Eva who stole some Terrigen crystals for her daughter Katya. Katya, who was also transformed, went Ax-Crazy and was feeding on the pain of everyone she could get her hands on, forcing May to kill her to protect the agents under her control.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: Coulson tells the Bahraini military that a biological weapon was released. He's right; the Inhumans were created by the Kree as biological weapons.
- Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: When the initial assault on the hostage situation in Bahrain results in losing contact with twelve agents, Coulson defies orders to stand down and sends May in.
- Seers: Raina has become one due to her mutation, seeing the future in her dreams.
- Shower of Angst: May in the flashback after returning from Bahrain is a flat shell of the happy woman that was there earlier, with her husband.
- Shower of Love: May and Andrew get all touchy, feely, and "There's only one way to create a family" in the flashback before she heads off to Bahrain.
- Storming the Castle: The S.H.I.E.L.D. strike team led by Agent Hart did this to Belyakov's Bahraini gangsters' warehouse. They failed, because they didn't expect the little girl they attempted to save was the real threat.
- Super-Strength: Eva had the power to crunch a car unharmed and send humans flying.
- Tempting Fate: Agent Hart in the flashback in Bahrain. "Fury will have our asses if an Index Candidate falls to government's hands." Oh, if only he knew he's about to suffer worse predicament than that.
- Throw the Dog a Bone: Jiaying finally allows Cal to see their daughter by having a family dinner which is all he ever wanted. She even gets Skye to pretend not to know the story of her birth so Cal has a chance to tell it.
- Touch of Death: Just before May stops her, Katya had started draining all the people she had taken control of.
- Turn of the Millennium: The time period during the Bahrain mission. Notably, neither Coulson, May, or Andrew use smartphones.
- Villain Has a Point: The last few episodes indicated that "real" S.H.I.E.L.D. was over-reacting to little things about Coulson's behaviour. Now that they've shared the real reason behind their hostility — the mysterious "Theta Protocol" — it puts some weight behind their concerns that Coulson may be dangerous, even if a lot of it is guesswork. Even May is convinced of the need to investigate it, if only to prove that Coulson has a good reason for hiding it.
- We Used to Be Friends: Agent O'Brien is working for the "real" S.H.I.E.L.D. in the present day despite he was partnered with Coulson and May during the Bahrain mission.
- With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Katya was driven insane by her powers.
- Would Hurt a Child: When faced with no other option and the inability to talk down Katya, May is forced to pick up a gun and shoot her. This act, plus the fact she was trying to get pregnant with Andrew, is what causes her to retire from the field until Coulson brought her onto the Bus.
- You Don't Want to Catch This: Coulson makes up a story about a bioweapon to scare the local authorities into staying away from the building, buying time for May to rescue their captured teammates. "Bio always works".
