Tonight’s episode, the first of 2014, promised answers to what happened to Coulson after the events of The Avengers. But to me,  I feel that we don’t quite know the full story of what happened to him.

Anyways, the episode opens with our SHIELD team minus Coulson interrupting  a deal for alien ware. It is all about capturing the seller a Van Chat (Aiden Turner), who has information that could possibly help them find Coulson.

Agent Hand is now on the Bus and heading our rag tag group along with other SHIELD agents. Skye believes by hacking into Van Chat’s off shore accounts might clue them in on where is Coulson by tracing stuff that he has sold to Raina.

Hand is not happy with Skye for doing some hacking and wants to kick her off the plane. Ward defends her and says she is an asset. When Hand asks May if Skye would be an asset to them on the plane, May says to no she wouldn’t.

So Skye gets kicked off the plane and is suppsoed to be debriefed by SHIELD. However before leaving, FitzSimmons and Ward give her a head start and a satellite phone to call them if she found something while on the ground.

While we think that May is one cold hard bitch for not sticking up for Skye, Ward realizes that it was her plan all along so that Skye can help them without the prying eyes of Hand and other SHIELD agents.

What Skye does on the ground is seek some IT mogul, Rathman, to help. She targets him after reading all about him some Fortune-type magazine. To get his help, she steals his car, gets it into an accidents and manages to convince OnStar to tow the car back to his house. She gets in via the garage and wants to do some hacking but can’t because of that bracelet. However, she manages to get Rathman to come home under the guise of his stolen car. Skye pretends to be SHIELD Agent Melinda May. She strong arms him into helping by some blackmail. Skye is also impressive in taking down the two home security guards and in the funniest scene of the episode, this IT mogul is computer illiterate and Skye needs one of the security guards to do the hacking for her.

What she finds is the location of where Raina and Pogue is keeping Coulson. And that is in the Mojave Desert in some abandoned nuclear test facility home to abandoned homes and creepy mannequins.

In this facility, Pogue is physically beating Coulson to reveal what happened to him after he died. But Coulson won’t break. Raina is questioning Pogue’s methods and it seems the Clairvoyant too. Raina speaks to the Clairvoyant via phone and after their talk asks to talk to Pogue. When the phone is placed to his ear, he is killed.

Raina’s approach is a little bit gentler. Instead of physically beating Coulson, she instead emotionally beats him and talks to him about the cellist that he dated and loved and who loved him back and grieved over his death. He finally agrees to learn what happened to him.

In what looks like a MRI device, Coulson starts to relive what happened to him. We learn that of course he wasn’t in Tahiti. We instead see that doctor in the pilot objecting to something. We learn however that what is being done to Coulson is under Fury’s orders. As we pull back in the operating room, we see a spider like device operating on Coulson’s brain. All the while Coulson is begging to let him die.

While all that is happening, Ward, Skye, Melinda and FitzSimmons descend on the facility to rescue Coulson. Ward takes down the Centipede soldier guards with something that FitzSimmons developed using the serum in the night night gun to knock them out. As Ward and Melinda take care of the guards, Skye hears Coulson begging to die and knocks out Raina. Coulson is saved.

Back on the Bus, Hand takes Raina into custody and hands back the plane to Coulson.

As a thank you, Coulson removes Skye’s bracele by simply telling the bracelet to deactivate. When Skye asks what he saw while in that device, Coulson lies and says that what they did to him was all trick.

However, we see Coulson later visit that doctor for the truth. The truth is that Coulson was dead for days not seconds. He underwent 7 surgeries (all on Fury’s orders) and was in major pain. What they did to his brain was give him pleasant memories and not memories of the pain he went through. The doctor continues on about if only Coulson knew the truth but Coulson has already left the scene before he revealed more.

So that is what frustrates me. There is more to what happened to Coulson and this show is still teasing us and I am about to give up. And also, if they don’t reveal next week that Melinda is either Skye’s mother or maybe killed her mother accidentally then I am going to scream.

Anyways, the post credit scene shows Michael Peterson alive and well but badly burned and missing a leg. But we see that he has that eye camera implanted and it asks if it is ready for his first mission. So it seems that the Clairvoyant perhaps has got his or her hands on Michael and maybe he comes a villain again.