Deke Finally Returns to Agents of SHIELD in "Code Yellow" Preview

At long last, it looks like Deke Shaw (Jeff Ward) is gearing up for his season debut on the next episode of Agents of SHIELD. The episode, titled "Code Yellow," will feature Deke as he bumps into Sarge (Clark Gregg) — a person he thinks is Phil Coulson — seemingly still unaware of the character's evil intentions. The preview shows Mack (Henry Simmons) and Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen) coming to save the day by helping Deke with his escape from the evil doppelganger. It'll mark Ward's first appearance on the show since being promoted to a series regular at the end of last season.

With his new regular status, it's likely the character will end up appearing in the remainder of Season Six's episodes. After five seasons of 20-plus episode seasons, ABC reduced the series order down to just 13 episodes, matching the episode count of the former Marvel Television shows located on Netflix. In comparison, the only other actively-running Marvel show is Freeform's Cloak & Dagger, which will cap off its sophomore outing with its tenth episode of the year next Thursday.

"Code Yellow" will also serve as the directorial debut of Agents of SHIELD visual effects supervisor Mark Kolpack. When we spoke with Kolpack earlier this month, the VFX boss called it a "super fun, very cool" episode.

"Well, it was a lot of pushing. It was a lot of reminding. It was a lot of talking," Kolpack said of getting the director's chair for one episode. "It was a lot of not giving up. I started asking for an episode back at the end of Season Two. Now it took me to season six, so it took some time and a lot of that is just because you got to build a confidence in the relationship and the production and he EP's and all that kind of thing. "

"Then finally, we got to season six and I got mine and it was pushing from my agent and everything else, so it's just not giving up," he continued. "They knew that I was going to do well at it. It was just a matter of the right season at the right time."

Agents of SHIELD airs Friday nights starting at 8/7 p.m. Central on ABC.