Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. To Pit Victoria Hand Against Skye In Return Episode

When Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. returns tomorrow night, the episode (titled “The Magical Place”) will include the return of Saffron Burrows as S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Victoria Hand, one of the few characters from the comics to make the jump to the small screen so far.Hand, who has a…spotty…history within the organization in the comic book source material, will bring the full force of S.H.I.E.L.D. with her to help track down the missing Agent Coulson–though Marvel.com says she may not appreciate any assistance Coulson’s team might offer.And, as one might expect, it seems as if it’s all going to come down to a test to see whether Big S.H.I.E.L.D. can manage to find and save Coulson without help from his pet project, the hacker “consultant” known as Skye.”I think initially, as she hinted at in ‘The Hub,’ she viewed Coulson on the plane as sort of a recuperation period as opposed to doing serious work,” producer Jeffrey Bell explained Hand’s view of Coulson’s team. “One of our challenges with the TV show versus, say, the S.H.I.E.L.D. you see in [Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier] is we’re six people on a plane versus 5,000 people on a Helicarrier. To Coulson, he’s got talented people on this, and to Hand I don’t think she takes him very seriously. Part of the fun of [episode] 11 was bringing what we call ‘Big S.H.I.E.L.D.’ [in] at the beginning [and saying] okay, this is what happens when you really do this with helicopters and 10,000 men, and this is how you catch a bad guy, this is how you shut him down. When she takes over the plane, it’s the same thing. You want to see that there’s this big, big machine in place and they’re efficient, but there’s also something about them, like the NSA, [that makes the viewer say] I don’t know if I like these guys’ [methods] as much as the way our guys get stuff.”