After a week off (a bye week, as my best friend called it) SHIELD is back!  Last time we got our most mythologically interesting episode to date, which gave us glimpses into Skye’s backstory as well as more information about the mysterious Centipede group.  Tonight’s episode set aside the mythology to give us a mysterious investigation and a generous helping of emotion, we learned a lot more about Fitz and Simmons and got some excellent acting from Clark Gregg and company.  So without further ado, let’s dive into the amusingly named “F.Z.Z.T.”, written by Paul Zbyszewski and directed by Vincent Misiano.

Our episode opens with a group of young scouts gathered around a fire in rural Pennsylvania.  An older scout is telling ghost stories while the scout leader chimes in with commentary.  As the story ends, the scout leader asks the boys if they can hear that humming sound and when they say they can’t he heads off into the woods after it.  The scouts set out to make some smores but panic when the older scout’s metal cup starts to levitate and the air is pierced with the scout leader’s screams.  The boys hid in the truck, but without warning there’s a zap of electricity and the car’s battery launches through the hood and lands on the other side of the campground.  They go to investigate and find the scout leader’s dead body floating several feet in the air.

This sounds like a job for Coulson and his crew, who we join aboard the Bus.  Coulson is jogging on a treadmill supervised by Simmons, who comments on the amount he’s sweating.  “I don’t sweat, I glisten,” he replies.  Simmons says that his physical is going very well, especially for a “man of your age.”  “That’s something you say to an old person,” Counson answers.  It seems his physical therapist requested that he have a physical despite not being due for several more months.

Ward and Fitz are continuing to work on the night-night pistol while Skye watches, which Ward says is still an ounce too heavy.  Fitz scoffs, but Ward says that it can make a difference when there’s a target a hundred feet away in a heavy wind.  Fitz helpfully points out that they have a rifle for that, but Ward skulks off leaving Fitz and Skye alone.  Skye is wearing the bracelet that was a condition of her remaining with SHIELD after her betrayal in the previous episode.  She understands that she lied, but is frustrated by the reaction she’s getting from Ward, who doesn’t seem eager to forgive despite her apologies.  She complains that she was just “trying to protect my boyfriend”, which flusters Fitz.  He has some fun by doing an impression of Ward as some kind of 80s action hero, and is joined in the fun by Simmons.  They stop when Ward returns to gather the troops together, however.

Down at the campground nothing seems to make sense.  The area seems scorched like from an electrical storm, but there was no storm last night.  Skye tries to get close to Ward, and when he questions her she just says that she’s shadowing her supervising officer, but he gives her the cold shoulder.  Skye wonders why they were called in for this, as it doesn’t seem like something up their alley until they come across the scout master’s corpse, still levitating a few feet off the ground.  They collectively wonder what it could be, potentially an alien device or perhaps one of the superhumans on the “index” mentioned last time.  As Simmons gets closer to the the body, there’s a small arc of electricity between her and it, and it immediately falls to the ground.  No way this is going to end well.

Back aboard the Bus, Skye is looking into the scoutmaster’s past, though nothing unusual is showing up.  In addition to being a scoutmaster, the man was a school teacher and a volunteer firefighter which Skye says “makes Captain America look like The Dude.”  Coulson and Ward aren’t amused by the Big Lebowski reference, and tell her to keep searching.  After she leaves, Coulson admonishes Ward for being so tough on her, but Ward isn’t ready to forgive so quickly.  In the funniest scene of the night, we get a glimpse of Melinda May interrogating the older scout by telling him to “have a cookie” in the most menacing fashion imaginable.

Coulson joins Simmons in the lab where she is investigating the body while Fitz sits outside in the cargo bay out of fear of the dead body.  The two bicker through the glass about the gross things Simmons has done during their time together, including leaving a liver next to Fitz’s lunch.  The group looks at the man’s brain, which Coulson observes looks like a “burnt baked potato”.  She tells him that it was burnt up by an electrical surge twice as powerful as a bolt of lightning (2.42 gigawatts, then?).  The surge altered the man’s molecular density which caused him to float.  Coulson tells them to keep on it, and when Fitz complains about Simmon’s eagerness with the body she replies, “It’s science Fitz, I have to dissect something!”

The group gets warning of another electrical surge similar to the one recorded during the campfire, and Coulson, Ward and May head to a farm to investigate.  May takes a Twister-style shortcut through a field and the trio finds themselves at a barn which is locked from the inside.  Ward says they could climb up to the loft to get in, while Coulson suggests ramming the door with the truck, but May simply kicks the door in like a badass.  Inside they find another body, suspended above the ground in the same way.  Coulson observes that the man barricaded himself inside along with his shotgun, and Ward suspects that he was attacked, though he can’t find any evidence of that.  Skye suddenly discovers that this man worked as a firefighter along with the scoutmaster, and that both of them were first responders after the attack in New York.  Before the commercial break, we get a quick scene of another man holding the helmet of one of the Chitauri soldiers who were defeated by the Avengers in New York.

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