Agents of SHIELD 2.04 “Face My Enemy” & 2.05 “A Hen in the Wolf House”

This could be my favorite episode so far, if only because it features an awful lot of Agent May (Ming-Na Wen) — one of the few age-appropriate-for-me hot women on the shows I watch. Anyway, “Face My Enemy” is pretty awesome from start to finish, as May and Coulson (Clark Gregg) go undercover at a big money charity event in order to get their hands on a recently discovered religious relic that happens to have more of the mysterious alien writing on the back.

Which means we get Agent May in a sexy dress, dancing, laughing (and generally disturbing everyone who is listening on the coms), before finally opening up a can of whoop-ass on herself! Not really herself, but the brainwashed Agent 33 (Maya Stojan) wearing an Agent May mask! And because there’s only one dress to go around, the real Agent May has to fight in her slip.

What? You need less-creepy reasons to love this episode? Okay, okay.

The fight scene really is an amazing piece of fight choreography, especially considering Ming-Na Wen is playing both characters and they’re just beating the living hell out of each other (does that mean Ming-Na gets paid twice?). It’s beautifully violent and had me cringing at least twice as May slammed Agent 33’s face into various objects — most notably a table in what was one of the most amazing acrobatic takedowns I can remember seeing on TV.

If there’s one thing Marvel Studios has down pat, it’s how to make the women in their movies and shows gracefully violent and brutal. It’s like a ballet of punching and kicking that combines MMA-style moves, judo, and gymnastics. The stunt coordinator, Tanner Gill, has been in the business since the early Nineties and has earned his stripes first as a stunt man in movies like Dolph Lundgren’s Army of One, The Replacement Killers, and Charlie’s Angels up through Mission: Impossible III and Rush Hour 3, and then also in TV shows like Walker, Texas Ranger, 24, Alias, and Prison Break. He’s working double-time to make Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. one of the most stylistic and action-packed shows on television.

Things aren’t looking very good for Raina.

Keeping up with my Marvel Women Kicking Ass theme, we move on to episode 2.05 “A Hen in the Wolf House” and see the introduction of Bobbi Morse (Adrianne Palicki), a.k.a Mockingbird. Not only is she undercover with HYDRA, keeping an eye out on Simmons, she’s also both a Black Widow-level operative specializing in the use of a pair of ‘battle staves’ for combat, and she’s Hunter’s Hellbeast ex-wife.

Oh, and Adrianne Palicki played Wonder Woman in that failed pilot a few years ago. I think she dodged a bullet there.

Meanwhile, HYDRA is trying to reverse engineer the Obelisk’s power, but is only partially successful; meaning not everybody who gets dosed with their version actually dies. Many do, but not all of them. They really need the Obelisk to get their mass murder plans underway.

But The Doctor (Kyle MacLachlan) has the artifact and Raina can’t convince him to give it up, even for a short while. It turns out he knows who Whitehall is and is a little peeved that Raina seems to fear the ex-Nazi more than she fears him. MacLachlan seems to be having a blast with this character, shifting from polite-if-on-edge to full-on-psychopathic-explosion from one beat to the next. His rage issues seem to be tying him to some sort of Hulk-like freakouts, but at the moment, we’re still in the dark as to just who he is from the comics.

Since The Doctor won’t give her the Obelisk, Raina decides to try to blackmail Coulson into retrieving it by threatening to expose Simmons to HYDRA. But Coulson don’t play dat, and while Bobbi gets Simmons out, Raina finds herself tagged with a S.H.I.E.L.D. tracker and set loose as bait to draw out Whitehall. It’s cold, but effective. Nice one, Coulson. And Skye almost meets her dad, but he’s already flown the coop after Raina’s attempt to sell him out.

As the episode ends we get another couple of revelations. Skye wants to know what’s going on with Coulson and he tells her. The whole “you may be an alien” bit was a nice touch, lightening what could have been an extremely melodramatic moment. Plus, add to that Skye’s insistence that the alien script isn’t actually writing, but is instead a map and we’ve really got something interesting developing.

But not before The Doctor stops by HYDRA HQ with the Obelisk, saying he wants to make a deal, since they have a common enemy: Phil Coulson.