Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – T.R.A.C.K.S.

• Title: Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – T.R.A.C.K.S.
• wiki: link

Coulson (Clark Gregg) and his team go after Ian Quinn (David Conrad) by tracking his $10 million purchase from Cybertek Technologies on a train through the Italian countryside. Breaking up into pairs, Ward (Brett Dalton) and May (Ming-Na Wen), Skye‘s (Chloe Bennet) and Fitz (Iain De Caestecker), and Coulson and Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), all board the train undercover as passengers hoping to nab Quinn when he shows up to take possession of his recent purchase. Unluckily for the team, the team chooses to trust the wrong man (Carlo Rota).

Presented in a series of flashbacks from the various team members’ perspectives, we see how the mission aboard the train went wrong including electronic scrambles, a time-freezing neurotoxin that freezes its victims, and several armed troops that cause Ward, Coulson, and May to all jump from the moving train. Given the incapacity and abscence of the rest of their teammates, this leaves Skye and Fitz to track the package back to Quinn, but Skye is unprepared with who and what she finds including a very much alive Mike Peterson (J. August Richards) who is getting his orders from the Clairvoyant and has been augmented through the tech Quinn bought from Cybertek.

The episode ends on a cliffhanger with the team’s edges beginning to fray and a mortally-wounded Skye kept alive only through the use of the hyperbolic chamber previously containing Mike. The structure of the episode works well allowing the audience to slowly fit the pieces together as to what went wrong on the train (although I could have done without the groan worthy cameo by Stan Lee awkwardly shoehorned into the middle of the episode). And the episode’s final scene confirms who the show is slowly transforming Mike into as he takes his first steps to becoming Deathlok.