The Magical Place is the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. mid-season premiere that picks up where the mid-season finale left off. (Remember when television shows just had one premiere and one finale per season?)

The “finale” ended on a cliffhanger with Agent Coulson getting himself kidnapped by Project Centipede.  Now the mission is to rescue him and take down Centipede.  After a two-week holiday hiatus, the series returns with one of the best, if not the best, episodes of the season.  How does it earn its stars and stripes?  Let’s debrief and find out.

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Victoria Hand (Saffron Burrows) is back and in charge of Coulson’s crew, Coulson’s Helicarrier wannabe jet, and a slew of back-up agents hellbent on Operation: Save Coulson.  Vicky is more bent on bringing down Centipede, however, much to the chagrin of Ward and the rest of Team Phil who have turned into grizzled vets over night.  Literally.  It’s only been 36 hours since Coulson’s abduction, yet gone are the Agent Cody Banks juvenile antics of Skye and Fitz-Simmons.  In their place is badass Skye who does whatever it takes to track down the kidnappers, including stealing fast cars, tying up security guards, and, for some unexplained reason, masquerading as Melinda May.  Fitz (or Simmons – I always get them confused) scowls and loses his patience with incompetent assistants.  He also weaponizes their previously cute *batteries not included-like flying drones named after the Seven Dwarfs. (Are Dopey and Sneezy coincidence, or sucking up to Marvel parent company Disney?  You decide.)  To quote Fitz (or Simmons), “Embrace the change.”  Sounds more like the showrunners have embraced the fans’ Spy Kids complaints, which is good news for all.

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Coulson finds himself in a deserted desert nuclear bomb testing town where returning villain Edison Po tries to use a brain-scan device to extract buried memories of his mysterious return to life.  Coulson resists the scan at the expense of massive pain.  Unhappy with Po’s torture tactics, the unseen but often talked about Clairvoyant puts fellow baddie, Raina, A.K.A. the Girl in the Flower Dress (who has now branched out to flower wallpaper), in charge.  Tasked with learning Coulson’s secret for the purpose of resurrecting Centipede’s super soldiers killed in battle, Raina convinces Phil to cooperate with the brain-scan in order to uncover what S.H.I.E.L.D. is keeping from him.

In a nightmarish flashback — SpOiLeR aLeRt — Phil learns that his idyllic recovery in Tahiti was a planted memory and that he was actually awake, begging to die, as multiple surgeries were performed on his brain by S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists and a creepy spidery robot.  Skye leads the team to Coulson where they rescue him from the scanner before he can learn more, but, he’s learned enough to end the show on another cliffhanger — Nick Fury is behind it all.

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The special effects budget on this series must be allocated to “very special” episodes such as premieres, finales, and this major milestone.  Unlike the cheesy North Pole dog sled chase we got a few episodes back, this time we’re given impressive effects shots of the Bus’ V.T.O.L. engines used to flip that bird around in midair. (Not to be confused with “flipping the bird.”)  There’s also an interrogation scene that opens up the jet’s honeycomb room in unexpected ways.  However, the most impressive shots are rightfully saved for the most impressive scene — Coulson’s flashback.

The trippy sequence — replete with Tahitian waiters morphing into doctors, barbaric lobotomy tools, and an eerie glimpse of Sam Jackson — would make Stanley Kubrick proud.  It’s a toss-up as to what’s more disturbing: the brain-numbing surgery or the spider-like robot performing said surgery.  The combo produces a genuinely frightening image on par with the chilled monkey brains Ray Liotta scene in Hannibal (the film, not the T.V. show).  Compound this with Clark Gregg’s helpless, heartbreaking pleas of “please let me die” and the image surpasses anything Hannibal Lector could cook up.

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The only thing more disturbing is the reference to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  There’s no reference, you say?  Sure, there is.  How is a mannequin-populated nuke test site and Skye’s threat to lock someone in “the Fridge” anything other than a reference to the world’s worst Indy film?  I just experienced my own nightmare flashback.  But I digress.

Bringing characters back from the dead is one of comic books’ biggest clichés.  It’s cliché not just for the frequency of it (“Guess who came back this month!”), but also for how nonchalantly it’s usually handled (“Someone else came back?  Big whoop.”)  Not this time though.

This time we feel the pain, horror, denial, and confusion of what Coulson goes through.  We see the wide-ranging ramifications of our hero learning the truth that he was dead for days, not minutes as he was led to believe.  We also hear how his cellist girlfriend — for whom he loved more than we thought, possibly more than even he thought — cried for days after his “funeral.”  Here’s hoping that the showrunners eventually introduce this oft referenced but never seen or even named character.  Could she be someone from the comic books?  Could she be the Clairvoyant?!

We don’t have the whole explanation yet for Coulson’s Lazarus situation, but we’re getting there.  Theories abound.  Some fanboys speculate an L.M.D. (Life-Model Decoy), a staple of S.H.I.E.L.D. comics established by Robert Downey Jr. in The Avengers.  Others surmise “magical place” refers to actual magic.  Could this foreshadow the Avengers sequel, in which the magic-powered Scarlet Witch will make her debut?  And then there’s that fly-through-the-sky shot in the Kubrick sequence that bears a striking resemblance to the outer perimeters of Asgard, home of Coulson’s murderer — Loki.

Regardless of the final revelation, this immediate reveal puts Coulson on a collision course with Nick Fury.  It pushes Coulson through the 5 stages of grief.  No more stage #1 — denial.  Now it’s time for stage #2 — anger.  Fury and anyone else involved had best tread lightly.

NEXT UP: Seeds