After featuring ancillary agents Blake, Garrett, Sitwell and Victoria Hand in solo episodes, we now have their Avengers-like team-up in the latest installment of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  The quartet joins Coulson & Co. in stopping the Clairvoyant once and for all, a goal complicated by the presence of Mike Peterson, A.K.A. Deathlok the Demolisher, which sounds a bit more intimidating than Mike Peterson.

Aside from climaxing the ongoing Clairvoyant subplot, this episode is also tasked with serving as the lead-in to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which opens nationwide today.  Toss in major turning points for Skye, Ward (skyward?) and May, along with an ominous title like End of the Beginning, and the showrunners have a lot to live up to.  Read on to see if they do.

Newly appointed agent Skye combs through the S.H.I.E.L.D. superhuman index for anyone with psychic powers, anyone who could be the Clairvoyant.  She narrows the field to several candidates scattered across the globe.  The agents — both Coulson’s crew and the ancillaries — splinter off into pairs to investigate the leads.

“We stand around a lot on this show.”

One lead takes Blake and May to a nursing home in search of Thomas Nash, a suspected psychic/evil supervillain. (Insert diabolical laugh here.)  They don’t find Nash, but they do find Deathlok who unloads a nifty new bio implant on them — Boba Fett wrist rockets!  Blake is critically hurt, but not before tagging the escaping ‘lok with a tracer.

All pairs converge on Deathlok’s traced location — an abandoned horse racetrack.  Here they learn that the cyborg is bodyguarding a man in desperate need of a new body.  It’s Nursing Home Nash, a wheelchair-bound catatonic with computerized voice.  Think Stephen Hawking… but evil! (Insert computerized diabolical laugh here.)

Everyone believes Nash to be the Clairvoyant, including Nash’s W.O.P.R.-like voice that confirms it.  He gloats that he’ll always be watching them, particularly Skye who he intends to kill.  Ward’s emotions get the best of him and he shoots Nash dead.

Elsewhere, Simmons secretly studies the alien blood transfusion that saved Skye’s life a few weeks back.  Fitz, meanwhile, discovers May’s secure phone line in the bowels of the Bus.  This would be the clandestine line that she’s been using to update someone mysterious about Coulson’s personal investigation into his own resurrection. Got all that?

“Not as much as we stand around.”

When the ancillary agents are dismissed, it’s just Coulson and his usual staff aboard the airborne Bus.  Good ol’ Phil suspects that Nash wasn’t really the Clairvoyant, but just a red herring.  Philly accuses Ward of killing Nash to misdirect them from the Clairvoyant’s true identity.  Skye, on the other hand, accuses May of actually being the Clairvoyant.

After a climatic standoff, the whole team is essentially kidnapped when exterior forces, i.e. Victoria Hand, hijack control of the Bus and steer it toward parts unknown.

As noted before, this is a stuffed episode, but not overstuffed.  It delivers big on storylines that have been trailing along since the pilot:  Skye, to her surprise, becomes a legit S.H.I.E.L.D. agent.  The team learns of May’s dubious agenda.  Deathlok, who each week becomes more machine than man, affirms that the machine has won when he declares, “Mike Peterson is dead.”

As tense as these plots are, the writers wisely intersperse them with quiet character moments.  The easy rapport between Clark Gregg and Bill Paxton makes one hope Paxton’s Agent Garrett doesn’t end up being a double agent.

Deathlok or Cyborg?

The writers also sprinkle a healthy dose of Marvel Easter eggs throughout the super shenanigans.  A “multi-spectrum overlay” of Deathlok unveils the half cyborg face mask from the comics, only here it’s under the skin rather than above it.  Smallville pulled a similar trick with Cyborg and Clark Kent’s X-ray vision.  Both feel like cop-outs.

Before becoming vegetative, Nash was part of Department H, which every Marvel Zombie knows is home to Canada’s official superhero team, Alpha Flight.

Agent Sitwell gets reassigned to a ship named the Lemurian Star, which makes an appearance in Captain A’s sequel.  In the comics, the Lemurians are an undersea race of blue humanoids.  Could their blue skin be the same as the dissected blue alien whose blood saved Skye?

Cyborg or Deathlok?

The best part of the episode is Coulson and Skye using their brains to figure out that, “The Clairvoyant doesn’t have abilities.  He has security clearance.  He’s a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent!”  So it wasn’t psychic powers that enabled the Clairvoyant to predict the future.  It was detailed dossiers of every agent around.

In the end, End of the Beginning delivers on all fronts, especially as a Winter Soldier lead-in.

Sitwell gets orders from the Triskelion to board a boat that connects him to his appearance in the film.  Early in the episode, we learn that Director Fury is back and he wants to see Coulson who wants answers.  The final scene gives us Fury himself under attack by the Winter Soldier.  It’s just a film clip featuring Sam Jackson, but it shows the audience where this episode and the movie fall within M.C.U. continuity.  And nothing is better for A.B.C./Marvel synergy than continuity — If you see one chapter, then you gotta see ‘em all!

NEXT UP: A trip to a theater near you for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and then back home for Turn, Turn, Turn.