So now Ward and Evil May are a team-- interesting, but if Skye was okay with shooting him, why didn't she make sure he was dead?
I don't think Skye is willing to kill except in immediate self-defense or the defense of others. She shot Ward knowing he'd survive, but be incapacitated and unable to overpower her. That was her only goal.
Possibly-- but she did shoot him in the chest, not the knees.
Well, there are two possibilities then:
1. She intended to kill him and therefore shot him in the chest, but did not stick around to ensure he died because she had to move fast.
2. She intuited that Grant would have a bullet-proof vest (was that a vest?) and shot him knowing it would disable but not kill him.
ETA:
Sci said:
I see no reason why the Allies would have wanted or needed to keep Hydra a secret, nor why they would not have wanted a full airing of Reinhardt's crimes. I mean, is it really a threat to national security to say that he went around mutilating innocent people while looking for something that would give him superpowers?
The threat isn't the fact that he was looking for superpowers - the threat would be in revealing how close he came to finding some.
Ever hear of a guy named John Sutter? He operated a mill in California in the 1840s. When a worker came to him with gold flecks found in the river, he was terrified, and for good reason - the ensuing Gold Rush overran his business, wiping out his investment in the same, and he eventually died a poor man, a failure, despite having had a personal hand in one of history's greatest discoveries of wealth.
The Allies are John Sutter here - the longer they can keep the occult discredited, the less likely they are to have to deal with all sorts of enemy and rogue powers coming at them with magical weapons. If that means sweeping a few HYDRA types into a cellar without a trial...
That strikes me as a weak argument. If there was an entire division of the Third Reich devoted to locating and harnessing fantastical technologies, then it's pretty obvious that the secret is already out by the time World War II starts. The Soviets are necessarily going to have their own fantastical technologies acquisition agency, the Brits and the Americans seem to have combined theirs into the SSR and then SHIELD, the French (assuming they didn't combine with the SSR/SHIELD) are going to have their own, so are the Chinese, the Japanese, etc. The genie is already out of the bottle, at least as far as foreign governments go.
Now, we do know from early
Agents of SHIELD episodes that, pre-dissolution, SHIELD seems to be a transnational agency whose authority in matters of the fantastical are regarded as superseding national authority (presumably by treaty in those countries that are signatories to whatever treaty it is that authorizes SHIELD). Hence, SHIELD apparently having the legal authority to seize the Hydra 0-8-4 from the Peruvian government (the Republic of Peru presumably being a signatory to the SHIELD treaty).
It strikes me that perhaps SHIELD's apparently transnational nature was the Allies' way of trying to mitigate against the danger of an international arms race for fantastical technology. If all--or most--of the nations of the world agree to give jurisdiction over fantastical technology to an international paramilitary organization that they all have a voice in running, that could presumably help stabilize things. And if they all agree to keep the existence of these fantastical threats a secret from the public, that mitigates against the possibility of rogue actors/terrorist groups, etc.
(I will concede that it is my suspicion that the Soviet Union, and, later, Russia, may never have agreed to become a signatory to the SHIELD treaty. I base this on the apparent hostility between SHIELD and the KGB during Black Widow's time as a KGB agent, and on SHIELD's willingness to undertake a convention military strike against pro-Russian separatists in South Ossetia in "The Hub.")
Meanwhile, there's no evidence that it would be necessary to keep the existence of Hydra, or its atrocities, a secret in the immediate post-war context. There's no reason to think that Reinhardt, or the rest of Hydra, had access to any sort of fantastical technologies other than the Diviner and the Tesseract-powered weapons we saw in
Captain America: The First Avenger. Reinhardt could easily be prosecuted for any of his (no doubt numerous) "conventional" crimes against humanity, and if it was necessary to bring his Diviner murders into the open, the exact nature of the Diviner could be obfuscated on grounds of international security under the SHIELD treaty while still establishing for the purposes of the trial that it was capable of killing those who touched it. (And I again am not convinced that Diviner-related information would need to be declassified it were possible to simply try him for crimes against humanity that did not involve fantastical technologies.)
We just caught up on the last couple. I was so pissed and knew it would come back to bite them in the ass when Agent 33/ Evil May wasn't eliminated as she lie unconscious on the floor. To say I was mad is an understatement. That was a ridiculous rookie mistake made just to move the plot along. Didn't like it one bit.
Nah, SHIELD is the good guys. If Agent 33 had died during the fight, so be it. But unconscious on the floor? Good guys arrest her or leave her be. Even if there's a chance it will bite them in the ass later.
My favorite moment in the entire series was when the near death Garrett climbed into the bionic repair chair, was rebuilt as a super-super solider (cooler armor with extra lights) and makes his revenge speech, only to be blown to tiny shreds by Coulson with the 0-8-4.
How many times have have we seen that type of scene before, setting up another confrontation later down the road? I call that a 'FireFly' moment after Mal kicking one of the assassins into the idling engine after his revenge speech.
Well, I'd say Coulson's killing of Garret was different. Garret was literally armed and dangerous, and was openly rambling to himself about plans to violently attack those who opposed him. It's the equivalent of shooting a man holding a gun who is saying to himself, "I'm going to kill those people."
Whereas, the guy Mal killed in "The Train Job" was literally a helpless prisoner. Sure, he was threatening Mal and company, but he was tied up and quite helpless. Prisoner murder is very different from self-defense against an armed and dangerous opponent.