Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Midseason Premiere Recap With Spoilers: The Magical Place

The episode opens with Chitauri smugglers offering attempting to sell a piece of tech to someone; when they're finalizing the deal, a disc rolls across the floor and blows a light charge, blinding everyone in the room. Ward comes in, and there's a flurry of combat; the smuggler runs to the only exit he can find, in an elevator, but Skye freezes it, then sends it to the roof, where he tries to escape but is met by Victoria Hand in a black helicopter with a team of  soldiers; they take in the man, named Van Chatt, and take him on board the plane for interrogation. Hand has a massive force on board the plane, and she's taken control of it. She's doing a briefing, when alarms go off; they figure someone's hacking in, and Hand goes to kick her off the plane. Ward stands up for her but May won't, so she's off the plane. Ward is charged with getting her to debrief, confiscating her phone and laptop. Ward gives her twelve minutes to escape before the debrief team shows up, and the Brits give her a satellite phone. Cut to Coulson in Tahiti, and then he wakes up with Poe and Reina over him. He lies to them about what he sees, and tells Poe that he'll die before he gives them anything. After Coulson refuses to give them anything, Poe brings in an Oddjob-like sidekick with a cattle prod to do it "the hard way."

At an Internet cafe, Skye tries hacking into S.H.I.E.L.D. and gets the whole building locked down. She leaves and on the way out finds a Wealth magazine with Lloyd Rathman on the cover, saying he's her way in. She steals a sport utility vehicle somebody just parked and uses the on board computer to try to hack into S.H.I.E.L.D. When it doesn't work, she crashes the truck into a median and uses OnStar to tow her "home." At the Centipede hideout, Coulson is thrown into a bed, having been roughed up, where he produces a pair of tweezers he apparently lifted during interrogation and breaks into his cuffs. Back on the Bus, Ward fools the interrogator out of the room and takes over the interrogation; he buckles up a belt and has Fitz and Simmons open a role in the roof of the interrogation room; while the man is about to be pulled out of the plane, he agrees to talk. Back at Centipede, Coulson manages to misdirect and then choke out the guard who comes to feed him, then escapes out of the building he's in for a nuclear testing "town" like the one used in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Poe tells Coulson that there's nothing but desert for hundreds of miles around, and then he's attacked from behind. At the home of the person whose truck she stole--Rathman--she calls into his office impersonating a police officer and saying that they've found his stolen, damaged vehicle and have cops waiting at his home for him. When he arrives, she tells him he's in trouble, and that she's Agent May. She tells him that S.H.I.E.L.D. has evidence that his clients are dirty. She tells him if he calls his lawyer, her offer of immunity is off the table and she'll send him to The Fridge.

On board The Bus, Hand is about to dispatch forces to Sydney to look for Centipede's headquarters. She asks Ward if there's a problem and he says no. He tells her Coulson is important enough to jsutify the manpower. At Centipede, Reina comes and tells Edison to stop abusing Coulson; he tells her that the Clairvoyant would back him, but then he gets a call from The Clairvoyant, who wants to speak to Reina.  He tells her to do things her way, and then when she hands the phone back over to Poe, a sound whirrs and he immediately dies. Back on The Bus, Ward chastises May for not standing up for Skye. She tells Ward that Skye is no use to them on the plane; that she wanted Skye off the plane and outside the system to do what she does. Hand calls forward to the cockpit that there'sa  change of plans and direction; they're headed to the Mojave Desert. At Rathman's office, Skye is trying to force Lloyd to get her into a Swiss bank account. He tries to have her stopped by his security guys, but she takes them down. At Centipede, Coulson and Reina debate tactics and whose organization is right. Coulson asks her who The Clairvoyant is; she doesn't know. She says they want to change the world that S.H.I.E.L.D. brought upon us. Her organization wants to know how Coulson was brought back because it's the only thing they can't control for their Centipede soldiers. She sweet-talks him, trying to get him to cooperate so that he--and they--can find out what happened to him after he died. He tells her that she won't get anything classified out of him, but she tells him she isn't interested in that--just in the secret S.H.I.E.L.D. is keeping from him. She says she's sure it will work because the machine worked on her. At Rathman's, Skye has the security guys tied up and is trying to force Rathman to get her information on Reina, but he isn't capable. She ends up forcing the security guys to do it instead. Back at Centipede, Reina continues trying to convince Coulson to give her a look inside his head; she dangles the cellist in front of him, saying they had a chance at a normal life together. She tells him that they broke her heart with the lie that he was dead, and that they're lying to him, too. He denies it at first, but she keeps pressing and when she says Tahiti, he says "It's a magical place," and that pushes him into wanting to know why he does. Skye calls in to tell them that she's figured out where Coulson is. The team has a confrontation with Hand, but ultimately Ward tells her he's taking his team and leaving. At Centipede, Reina starts using Coulson to look back through his memories; on the beach at Tahiti, he sees a surgery team working on him, saying that it was on Fury's orders. Skye arrives in the desert community where Centipede has Coulson in Rathman's car, which she stole after she was done with him. She's looking around when a Centipede soldier finds her, but before he can catch her, he's hit by Ward's SUV. Back on the table where Coulson is, he sees an operating theater, but he tells her that everything is dark, and he can't see anything. Ward takes off after some Extremis soldiers using a night-night device that Fitz and Simmons designed that he has to adhere to them. There's a prolonged fight scene where he and May have to bang through security onsite, but ultimately the device works--it takes away the powers from the guard he sticks it to. There's a brief glimpse at Fury, then at a bunch of high tech devices, in Coulson's memory. Then he drifts into space. He sees his skull open, his brain being copied by machines while he begs them to let him die. Skye comes into the room and cold-cocks Reina, then shuts down the machine that's giving Coulson his flashbacks. When he recovers a bit, he's happy to see her. Hand tells Coulson that there's no sign of The Clairvoyant, but that Centipede is shut down all over the world. Coulson shakes her hand and thanks her for her help; she tells him that she's glad he's back because The Bus isn't her style. She leaves, and Coulson thanks the team and puts them back to work. He tells Skye that it's time to take off her bracelet. She asks if Centipede learned anything; he says no, and then denies that he learned anything, either, telling her that Centipede were just messing with his head. The doctor who operated on Coulson gets into his vehicle that night and Coulson is there waiting for him. The doctor tells him that Coulson was dead for days, not seconds, and that Fury moved Heaven and Earth to save him. He tells Coulson that they kept him conscious when they should have let him die; that the trauma he endured was ungodly. He tells Coulson that they gave him a pleasant memory to restore the man he'd been before all the trauma--that he'd lost his will to live and they tried to get it back. He apologizes, and Coulson leaves. In the post-credits sequence, Mike Peterson wakes up in a dank hospital room, one leg missing and his face scarred. He's seeing through one of Centipede's eye devices, which tells him to stand by for further instructions.