Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S1E4 - "Eye Spy" Recap

In Sergel's Torg in Stockholm, Sweden, men in suits and red masks all holding briefcases handcuffed to their wrists head to the underground station. A woman follows them onto the tunnelbana and shortly after boarding, she sets off the alarm that turns the lights off. When it arrives at the next station, the other passengers hurry off and a police officer boards and finds that all the masked men are dead and one has had his hand cut off. We see the woman with his briefcase and she unlocks it to pull out some diamonds which she then places in her backpack before disappearing.

The team arrives in Stockholm to investigate the scene. They use social media footage uploaded to the internet to survey the men in suits and identify possible suspects. Coulson spots Akela Amadour, whom Coulson trained. She used to be a SHIELD agent and was believed to be dead after a mission went bad seven years prior but her body was never found. Coulson asks May to delay reporting her to HQ before they can track her down and learn more about her.

In Belarus, Akelah uses the diamonds to purchase a key code. Coulson and Ward go out into the city to look for Akleah while Skye and FitzSimmons stay in the van. They track her down to a hotel where the woman working the front desk identifies Akelah from a photograph and calls her an angel. She had told the woman to go to the doctor's, after which a tumour was found and she is now set to have it removed, thus saving her life. The team struggles to hook up to a server but with Skye's help, they're able to stabilise it. The feed shows a van that looks eerily similar to theirs and then the vision switches to x-ray. They quickly realise it is indeed a feed of their van and a vehicle crashes into them. Skye looks out the window and sees that it is Akelah, who rams them again with a truck, causing their car to flip over.

The team is unhurt but Ward warns Coulson that he must put aside his regard for Akelah. Skye begins working on tracing the feed Akelah used to watch them from the van. She hacks into it and the team sees Akelah's reflection. She then takes a screwdriver to her eye and May realises that Akelah's eye is the camera. May wants to take Akelah out but Coulson wants to bring her in. Just then they see Akelah write a message asking if she can sleep and a response appears in her eye. The team realises that someone is controlling her.

May sneaks out to go after May and visits her in the room. She questions Akelah about her eye and Akelah says there's a fail safe in it. If May doesn't kill her, she will have to kill May. They fightand May has the advantage until Akelah shuts the light off. Using her X-ray vision, she prepares to shoot May but Coulson busts in and hits her with the night-night gun, containing a powerful dendro-toxin.

Akelah wakes on the bus and Coulson tells her they've highjacked her feed. Ward is now wearing a set of glasses with which he is following her mission and the messages received. The team is working to disable her kill chip and Akelah reveals that they've been controlling her for years. These bad guys kidnapped her after her mission, after which they installed the camera-feed in her eye.

Ward makes his way into a room with various symbols on the chalkboard walls, which Akelah's controller copies to complete the mission. FitzSimmons perform surgery on Akelah while she is awake, since they may need her feedback during the operation.  Ward has to escape without any help but manages to get out relatively unscathed. Simmons is able to remove the eyeball from the socket but it is still connected to her skull, after which Fitz must step in to cut the wires without killing Akelah. Coulson manages to track down the eye controlling Akelah's eye but when he flashes his badge, the man's own eye-kill-switch activates. Looks like Akleah's handler was just another middle man.

Coulson promises that Akelah will have a fair trial, at which he will testify on her behalf. Coulson later sits with Skye in her van, where he tells her that after he got a second chance, he feels it only right that he allow others to have the same.

At the end, we see Fitz and Ward playing poker. Fitz tells Ward that he will lose because he has a tell. But as it turns out, this "tell" is Skye still armed with the x-ray glasses. She tells him through his earpiece that if she turns them on, she'll also see Fitz naked, which leads him to fold. Nonetheless, Skye turns them on and checks out Ward in the buff.

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. airs on Tuesdays on ABC at 8PM.