She’s taken back to the SHIELD plane for interrogation, and we find out her name is Skye.  Ward is seriously pissed at her, over her connection with Rising Tide, who he’s been fighting for a while, but Coulson is impressed with her abilities.  She managed to stay hidden from the all-powerful SHIELD for a long time, and she has skills and information he thinks they can use.  They accuse her of blowing up the building in order to draw out Mike, which she denies.  She asks them what they’re after, which Ward dryly replies “world peace”.  She then references a mysterious operation known as “Centipede”.  Some of Joss’s famous pop culture references come out as Ward accuses her of being a superhero groupie who does cosplay (which she admits to), while she compares him to a T-1000.

The two men leave and discuss ways to get her to talk, with Ward proposing a rough method, but Coulson pulls out a vial and a needle.  They return and he explains that it’s an improved truth serum, and Skye looks nervous until he jabs Ward with it.  Ward’s pissed and says that it hurts, but that he usually hides his pain in front of attractive women, before realizing that the serum works fast.  Coulson leaves Skye to ask him anything she wants, hoping that this will help earn her trust.  She clearly is having fun with it, taking off her sweater to reveal some more skin and asking Ward if he’s killed anyone.  He says yes, but gets defensive trying to explain that they were all bad people and he still feels bad about it.  She then ask if his grandmother knows about this, and he gives an adorable “Gramsy?” in response.  These two have a good chemistry right off the bat, and the show seems to be setting them up as one of those classic love/hate relationships.  They’re pretty much at opposite ends of the spectrum, but they’ll have to find a way to work as a team.  We don’t get much more of the two of them together, but this is another pair to keep an eye on.

While the interrogation is going on, May and Fitzsimmons have gone to inspect the site of the explosion.  Simmons is excited at the prospect of getting to examine the dead bodies, while Fitz is a little disturbed by it.  But Fitz doesn’t have to interact directly with the scene, instead deploying a swarm of flying robots with a quickly sung chorus of “Heigh-Ho” from Snow White, which makes sense when we realize that he’s named each robot after one of the Dwarves.  It’s a cute little call out to Marvel and ABC’s parent company, Disney, and I hope we get to see more of the little flying robots, each of whom are programmed for a different task.

Mike is disturbed by his encounter in the diner with Skye, and he makes a phone call to an unknown person he keeps calling “doctor”.  He says the “product works”, but he doesn’t seem to get what he wants from the person on the phone. He then tries to go get his job back, but the foreman isn’t interested.  There are a hundred guys right outside the door who would kill for a job, and he’s not going to give Mike a second chance.  Mike gets angry, using his strength to shove aside some heavy crates in his anger.  The foreman is terrified, saying that he’s not a bad guy, it’s the corporation that’s to blame.  But Mike is possessed by a new fury and says that he finally gets it.  “You’re the bad guy, and I’m the hero,” before he smashes and presumably kills the foreman with a propane tank.

Mike then goes to the hospital to visit the woman he saved, and here is where things take a turn.  Instead of being rescued by a heroic stranger, it turns out the woman was the mysterious doctor Mike was calling, and that she gave him those powers after he hurt his back at work.  She references the people who gave her the technology that made him strong, but says that the previous person they experimented on couldn’t handle it.  When she won’t help him he jumps out the window, after referencing that this is his “origin story”.

The SHIELD crew (I feel like our heroes’ group needs its own name to differentiate it from SHIELD as a larger unit) is working on deciphering the clues they found at the explosion site.  It turns out to be the lab where Mike was experimented on, and the explosion was caused by the previous subject exploding in rage during a confrontation.  Coulson reveals that this is related to the Extremis technology that was the primary threat in Iron Man 3 (conveniently out on DVD today).  The crew uses some cool 3D visualization technology (“It’s like magic, but it’s science.”), but they need some info from Skye’s van.

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