Back on the Bus, May compliments Skye on her new May-ish jacket while Raina is led away to be interrogated, though there’s still no word on the Clairvoyant.  Coulson is back in his traditional suit, though still looking a little worse for wear.  He thanks Hand for helping to find him, and she leaves after telling him that the Bus isn’t really her style.  He turns to his team and thanks them too, giving them a look that says far more than words ever could, before warmly telling them to get back to work.  They break up and he turns to Skye and tells her that he knows what she did for him and that it’s time to remove her bracelet.  She holds out her arm to him and he leans in and says, “Disengage bracelet.”  It immediately falls off and she says, “Are you kidding me?”  “I thought you’d like that,” he responds with a smile.  She asks him if Centipede learned anything from him but he says no.  She then asks if he learned anything, and he tells her that what he saw wasn’t real, that they were just messing with his head.

A while later, Dr. Streiten is getting in his car when Coulson speaks up from the back seat.  Streiten says that he knew this day would come, and Coulson says that they weren’t really operating on his heart, were they?  Streiten says that Coulson wasn’t dead for seconds or minutes but in fact days, and that he was called in for Coulson’s seventh operation.  They did everything they could to keep him conscious on Fury’s orders, despite the extreme pain he was feeling.  By the time Streiten was called in they were attempting to restore the man that Coulson once was.  He had lost the will to live after being artificially kept conscious for days despite his broken body.  They tried to give him that back, which is why they created the Tahiti memories to hide the horrible experience he went through.  Streiten tells Coulson how sorry he is, but Coulson vanishes before he could say any more.

After the credits we see another person recovering from severe injuries, Mike Peterson!  Yes, everyone’s favorite sort-of superhero is still alive (yay!) after the explosion on the bridge.  He’s badly burned on his face and his arms, and he has a new Centipede device attached to his arm.  He pulls back the covers of his bed to reveal that he’s missing his right leg.  As he sits up and looks at himself in the mirror, we see himself through his eyes as he surveys the damage.  Suddenly, words appear in front of him.  “Good morning, Mr. Peterson.  Stand by for further instructions.”

Holy crap, what an episode, and what a way to pick up after a cliffhanger!  It was intense, emotional and funny.  We got some huge answers that brought up more questions, some good character development and some excellent performances from the cast.  We also got one of the most gruesome and shocking images yet!  I think tonight’s episode will have lasting consequences for the show moving forward, and I would expect some big events over the next two episodes (which will take us up to SHIELD’s original order of 13 episodes).  I’m still a bit stunned but tonight’s episode did more to hook me on the show than any since “F.Z.Z.T.”.  I can’t wait to see what happens next.

  S.H.I.E.L.D. Thoughts

So we finally got some answers about Coulson’s resurrection, though we don’t know everything.  I think we can safely say that he is definitely not a Life Model Decoy or some kind of robot at this point.  I interpreted the information we got as Fury using every possible method to keep Coulson alive enough to repair his body.  The green glowing thing that we saw seemed to suggest some kind of sciencey superhero remedy, perhaps gamma radiation, while the black fluid in the IV was something different.  There was definitely something that looked like a rune carved in a rock which might be ancient or alien.  And I definitely got the impression from the starfield that something Asgardian might have been included.  It sounds like there wasn’t one particular method but a little bit of everything, some or all of which was probably ethically dubious.

However, the most important aspect of Coulson’s resurrection is that he was brought back/kept alive against his will.  Clearly his suffering during all of this was on a level beyond comprehension, causing him to literally beg for death.  There are definitely shades of season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer here, where Buffy was brought back from the dead and in the process ripped out of heaven against her will.  It will be interesting to see what effect this has on Coulson and how it affects his attitude from here on out.  All the speculation of the method of his resurrection is rendered pointless when compared to the actuality of what it meant to bring him back.  Heavy stuff, and kudos to SHIELD for having the guts to go there.

I’m still pretty shocked and impressed by the imagery we got during this sequence.  The image of him being zipped up in the body bag following the shot of blood on his hand was especially creepy.  But nothing compares to the brain operation, which I assume was done to alter his memory (since he seemed to be pretty well alive by this point).  That’ll definitely stick with me for a while.

Everyone say it with me now… “Mike Peterson’s alive!”  I don’t think there was a lot of doubt on the subject but I’m still glad he’s not dead, even if he does look a little worse for wear.  The twist of him now being a Centipede agent was a good one, and sets the stage for a reluctant showdown between SHIELD and Peterson.  I actually have far less confidence that he’ll be able to survive this than I did about him surviving the explosion.  Peterson seems like the sort of guy who would never willingly do anything to hurt others, even if it meant sacrificing himself over it, especially after his actions at the end of the previous episode.  Regardless, I’m thrilled that this means there’s more Mike Peterson (and of course J. August Richards) in our future.

Let me take a moment to praise Clark Gregg.  He’s shown some great range thus far in the show, but nothing as impressive as his performance tonight.  There’s nothing harder than watching someone break in captivity, and the moment Raina brought up the cellist from Portland was truly heartbreaking.  Coulson can tell himself that sacrifice is part of the job, but watching his reaction showed that he doesn’t really fully buy into that.  Gregg acted the hell out of this episode, from that scene to his desperate pleas for death, and his performance really helped sell the fantastical and shocking side of the revelations by grounding them on a human level.  The rest of the cast was great as well, particularly Skye getting to stand on her own and put her new skills to use, but Gregg climbed above them all.

Don’t forget to tune in next week, where we’re promised some revelations about Skye’s past, along with some more exploration of the effects of Coulson’s resurrection and some mysterious weather.  The weather angle looks fun in a silly way, but the rest of the episode looks pretty serious.  Coulson is wondering whether SHIELD changed anything else about him while they were altering his memories.  And then there’s Skye, who tells Coulson that the truth about her parents “can’t be worse than what I imagined.”  Coulson’s answer of, “It is,” sounds pretty ominous.

What do you think?  Did you enjoy “The Magical Place”?  What did you make of Coulson’s resurrection?  How do you interpret what we saw?  What do you think this will mean moving forward?  Anyone else see shades of Buffy?  Did you enjoy seeing how far the team has come since the show started, and how well they work together?  Are you happy Mike Peterson is still alive?  Let me know in the comments!