Agents of SHIELD Yes Men review S1 E15

Yes Men earns the season’s worst timing award. It’s hardly a bad episode, but outside of a few moments it largely fails to build on the momentum of the escalating Clairvoyant story arc.

Coulson is looking for answers to the source of that alien he found in the T.A.H.I.T.I. lab, but he’s not sure who to trust. He’s so distrustful he doesn’t want Simmons to send the serum sample to anyone at SHIELD until he can talk to Fury. Coulson’s apprehension might be warranted, but if I were Fury, I’d consider Coulson pretty ungrateful for bringing him back to life. Coulson doesn’t get much headway with his pal Agent Sitwell, who doesn’t know Fury’s location. Then SHIELD gets those magical readings to alert them that another Asgardian has entered the area.

This time it’s Lady Sif, tracking down Lorelei, who’s already made a mess of things bowing men to her will. Lorelei broke out of Odin’s custody during the Dark Elves assault. Again, Agents of SHIELD did some commendable work to continue dealing with the fallout from Thor: The Dark World. Acting on Odin’s (but really Loki’s) orders to bring her back to Asgard, Sif sought out SHIELD to help.

I’m not a fan of Coulson seemingly going out of his way to avoid telling the Avengers he is alive as it creates awkward moments like this one where he asks Sif to hold off on telling Thor so he can himself. Sif was the ideal kind of MCU character to bring over to SHIELD for a cameo. I really wish Kevin Feige didn’t get so selfish with the toys in the movie sandbox as SHIELD made for an excellent avenue to showcase some underutilized movie characters.

The episode gets a little silly with Coulson and Ward helping Sif take down Lorelei only for Ward to get caught under her sway. He takes her to Vegas and they hook up. I was a little disappointed Ward didn’t even try to blast Lorelei with Fitz’s upgrade to the Night Night stun gun, the Icer.

In our seemingly weekly propping up of Skye, Coulson tells her she’s the best radar SHIELD has to track them down. I think SHIELD would have had an easier time explaining Skye’s importance by just having her be a recruit Coulson had his eye on as opposed to this random hacker who’s allegedly better than SHIELD’s best tech agents.

Lorelei and Ward sneak onto The Bus hoping to deal with Sif and SHIELD in one stroke. Lorelei trash talks May and says she’s not the SHIELD agent Ward is in love with before leaving Ward to fight May as she battles Sif. I’m glad they didn’t try and fake like May could hang with an Asgardian. It was fun watching Sif in action and eventually take down Lorelei with SHIELD battling in the background. Coulson knocking out Fitz was strangely satisfying to me for some reason.

With Sif and Lorelei gone, Coulson has to unpack everything that’s happened. The only other thing that came out of this episode was May ended her hook-ups with Ward and told him to be honest with himself. Guess she doesn’t want to play runner-up to Skye for his affection?

Taking May’s advice he tells Skye what happened. True to form, Skye isn’t rattled and is just grateful to still be alive. Take note Phil. Coulson doesn’t want to tell the rest of the team to keep that info and them safe, but thanks to a handy listening device, May heard everything and called someone to tell them Coulson knows.

Alright, it’s about time for some real answers. This was a weird episode in the Lorelei/Sif conflict was fun, but was a distraction from the main plot and it felt like the wrong time to put it on the back burner. It almost felt like this would have been the ideal Dark World tie-in instead of The Well.

There’s only one more episode of SHIELD before Captain America: The Winter Soldier!

Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Photo Credit: ABC