Apologies, my fellow Agents of SHIELD/HYDRA/Nothing, for this week’s recap being late.  I’m at home sick with pneumonia, so my schedule is a little off.  We’re only a few episodes from the end of the season, and things have really gotten intense.  Last week we saw Ward kill Agent Koenig and head off with Skye, who had secretly discovered his ties to HYDRA, May left the base for complex reasons, while Coulson and the rest of the team rescued Coulson’s former girlfriend from a creepy, superpowered stalker.  This week’s episode was one of the most exciting, suspenseful, dramatic and emotional hours of the show yet, all while featuring the return of Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill.  So let’s jump right into “Nothing Personal,” written by Paul Zbyszewski & DJ Doyle and directed by Billy Gierhart.

We open in Washington D.C., site of the climactic events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  We see one of the key players of those events, Maria Hill, talking to someone on the phone while walking down the street.  It seems that everyone wants answers now that SHIELD has imploded, and she’s having to answer questions from the CIA, the FBI and every other organization out there.  The worst however is Congress.  “Congress is like kindergarten,” she says.  (Tell us something we don’t know, Hill.)  They ask endlessly annoying questions, including a particularly interesting one: “Who or what is a Man-Thing?”  By this point Hill is ready for a cocktail and a lobotomy.

However, she also has to deal with a different kind of “tail,” in the form of some incredibly obvious surveillance tails that are following her every move, including “fake yuppie not checking her texts at the bus stop, imposter homeless man (mildly offensive),” and a familiar looking hipster.  However, no sooner does she mention them than the hipster disappears, the yuppie is slumped over on her bench, and the homeless man is lying on the ground.  “Pepper, I’ll call you back in ten,” Hill says urgently, pulling her gun and heading down an alley.  In a flash she’s confronted by a familiar face, who says, “We need to talk, Agent Hill.”  “May, a phone call would have done it, but I appreciate the discretion” Hill replies, holstering her weapon.

Melinda May was just being nice, thinking that Hill would probably like the night off, especially considering that everyone is probably pissed that she’s now working for Tony Stark.  She explains the move (which was hinted at at the end of The Winter Soldier) by observing that all of the organizations that would want her out of the picture are no match for Stark’s army of lawyers.  “So for now we’re privatizing global security,” she says, in a brilliant line that echoes one delivered by Stark in Iron Man 2.  May’s not interested in signing up with Stark Industries, however, because Coulson needs help, and he’s not taking it from May anymore.

May tells Hill that Coulson is at the Providence base, and has enough to worry about without obsessing over T.A.H.I.T.I. and its coverup, which May and Hill were both involved in.  May gives us a recap in the guise of explaining to Hill what Coulson knows, telling her that he knows that he was brought back using alien biology and rewrote his memories, and that Fury did it all under someone else’s direction.  May’s concerned that the order came from Alexander Pierce, the only man Fury would take orders from, who just happened to be a head of HYDRA.  It’s clear May is not only worried about what impact this information might have on Coulson’s mental state, but also what, if any, HYDRA programming might have made it into his brain rewrite.

Hill actually asked Fury who had given the order, “and he said he buried that intel when he decided not to bury Coulson.”  May’s a little frustrated by the riddle of that quote, but Hill insists it was Fury’s way.  May decides she’ll have to solve it anyway, “unless you want to ask Fury for me.”  “Fury’s dead,” Hill replies.  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” May answers, with a rare smile.  May disappears as the FBI shows up to corner Hill, who criticises them on their response time.  “If you were my agents, it wouldn’t be for long.”

At Providence, Coulson, Fitz, Simmons and Trip are going over what little information they have.  The internal camera feeds were erased, meaning they can’t see what happened with Ward, Skye and May.  All they have is one camera from the hanger that is on a separate system.  It shows May leaving with her duffel bag, as well as Ward and Skye boarding the Bus hand in hand.  Add in the fact that Koenig is missing, and they’ve definitely got a mystery on their hands.  They float the possibility that Koenig got orders, but Fitz asks, “From who?  Not Fury.  Is there anyone left to give orders?  Aren’t we just improvising at this point?”

Everything is fishy, but Coulson confesses that May left because he told her to.  “I was mad, and I was mean.”  Trip says they don’t need her “sorry ass,” as he doesn’t want to waste time on someone who would just bail on them.  Simmons senses a fight coming, and decides to find some food, and Fitz tags along.  FitzSimmons lament how many things Coulson must be worrying about, but Simmons adorably decides that pancakes are the perfect solution to cheer everyone up.  They split up, with Simmons heading to the stock room and Fitz to the kitchen.

Fitz walks by the bathroom where Skye hid after discovering that Koenig had been murdered, and notices that the fake window inside the room is displaying a night scene while the one in the hall is showing a day scene.  He goes to investigate and finds that the scrolling mechanism for the image has been blocked.  He frees the screen, which rotates to reveal another scene, which has the words “WARD IS HYDRA” scratched into it.  Simmons finds some pancake mix, but as she’s leaving the supply room finds some blood on the wall and then screams as she discovers Koenig’s body.

On the Bus, Ward is painting over the SHIELD logo on the side of their vehicle, while Skye watches him and works on her computer.  While he’s occupied she starts searching the cabinets in the lab, but Ward sneaks up behind her and surprises her.  She says she was just looking for the satellite phone to call the team and check in, but Ward tells her he just did, and that Coulson says hi, and that he wants the hard drive unlocked.  Ward’s surprised that the location she chose to geolock the drive is a random diner in LA, but for Skye that was where the whole adventure started, because that was where she met Mike Peterson.  Not to mention it’s a safe, public place.  In fact, it’s so safe, that Ward tells her that she doesn’t need the gun she’s been hiding in her waistband, and takes it from her.  She confesses that she couldn’t find any rounds for it anyway, and now we know what she was looking for in the cabinets.  Ward gives her what he thinks is a reassuring hug, but as we zoom in we see the panic in Skye’s eyes.

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