Marvel's Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 1, Episode 5: Girl In The Flower Dress

Not a bad episode this week. For the first time since the pilot we actually got a character with honest to goodness superpowers, which is a good thing, seeing as this is a show set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It feels like they're finally starting to find the tone of the show. If the quality continues to improve as it's done the past couple of weeks, we may end up with a good show here.

This week we get a Chinese man who called Scorch who can generate flames from his body, a mysterious woman who kidnaps him and injects him with Extremis so he can blow people up real good, and Skye's cover is blown and she's almost kicked off the team, but Coulson settles on probation.

One thing this show really needs to do: stop making up generic characters like Scorch and start using actual Marvel super villains from the various comics. Obviously they're not going to waste a major villain like Taskmaster on the TV show, but they've got plenty of second and third tier characters (that have no chance in hell of ever making it into a movie) that they could use.

This is a Marvel show after all, so it only makes sense that they ought to be using Marvel characters.

Thoughts (SPOILERS!)

• All season I've been marveling (HAW!) over the way May can fly the Bus, an enormous C4 type of plane, all by herself. No copilot or navigator needed.

This week she goes one better-- Coulson orders her to set a course for Hong Kong and without making any apparent moves or gestures she says, "Already done."

Did she mean she'd already set the course on her own before he gave the order? Is her brain somehow connected to the plane? Is she flying it with her mind?

• We learn of The Index, a list S.H.I.E.L.D. keeps of known super powered people it has under surveillance. Hey, just like our government!

• Coulson tells May he has a lot of energy lately and has to burn it off in the gym. I'm assuming this is another clue pertaining to his resurrection.

• During the showdown in the lab, May and Scorch yell at one another in Cantonese. It sounded to my admittedly amateur ears like they were both speaking it very awkwardly, almost like they'd learned the lines phonetically. 

Maybe their Cantonese is rusty after years of living in America?

• So it's starting to look like the Extremis formula (from Iron Man 3) is being used the way the kryptonite meteors were used on Smallville. In nearly every episode of Smallville some teen would get powers from exposure to kryptonite. It looks like Extremis is in danger of becoming a similar catch-all origin story generator here.

• So Skye reveals the real reason she joined S.H.I.E.L.D. is because she's looking for her parents. Apparently the only record of them she can find in all the world is a heavily censored S.H.I.E.L.D. document.

Are her parents dead? Or did they both have superpowers and S.H.I.E.L.D. made them disappear? 

• At the end of the episode Coulson puts a tracking bracelet on Miles The Hacker and tells him not to get near any high-tech equipment for a while. It's implied that this means the electronic bracelet will interfere with computers and wifi and the like, preventing him from further hacking.

Then he hands one to Skye, who sighs and reluctantly puts it on her wrist. Is her bracelet the same type as they gave Miles? If so I hope S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn't need her to do any hackery for them next week.

• The new Thor movie comes out in a couple of weeks. Wouldn't now be a great time to have Chris Hemsworth make a little cameo appearance to drum up interest in both properties? Get on that right away, would you ABC?