“Orientation: Part One” is episode one of season five of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
At the end of the season four finale, “World’s End”, the team had finally come back together again and were sitting in a diner eating and essentially waiting to be arrested by General Talbot. The power in the diner went out and armed men entered, freezing the agents and then taking them away before the ‘window closes.’ The next thing was Coulson waking up in what turned out to be a spaceship (or station) in an improbably dense asteroid field with some sort of glowing energy in it.
This episode opens with a man leaving a house and diving into the swimming pool at the back before returning to the house and getting something from the fridge. Then he throws his towel onto a bed. Followed by his skin. Then he takes a shower, gets dressed and drives to what looks like a hangar. He meets someone there who has a van; the man with the van shows him different sign designs on a tablet, swiping through them – and the signs on the van are also swiped. Inside the van are a number of armed men. The van drives off – and these are the people who froze Coulson and the others in the diner, as they are just about to do. Coulson and the others – well, all but one of them; that one was apparently not on the list – are wheeled out of the diner in transparent bags on sack barrows.
When everyone comes out of the freeze they are in a room with a strange, but familiar-looking, white monolith Which dissolves and splashes over them. The next place Coulson is is on a spaceship in the strangely dense asteroid field. There’s a hole in a window and things, and some people, are being sucked out into space. Or they would be, but everything save Coulson seems frozen in time. Until time unfreezes, and one person is sucked out before shields cover the window.
There are two people left, and one person apparently deliberately broke the window. Then they notice Coulson – and know exactly who he is. He believes that he is there to save them. One man wants to stay and wait for the others; the other does not and leaves. Which is bad idea, as something called a Roach kills him. The man left is Virgil and explains some of what is happening. He is a true believer in Coulson. Then Mack slugs Virgil. They need to find the others, who are appearing all over a fairly hostile ship. Simmons and Yo-Yo accidentally fight each other, because Simmons is wearing a gas mask, and they are in a room full of dead people. Mummified dead people at that.
Meanwhile, someone in a helmet (oddly reminiscent of Star-Lord’s) enters the ship. May, who appeared impaled on a piece of metal is the first person to meet this individual, and it’s not immediately clear whose side he is on.
Coulson doesn’t have his extra-special robot hand. because he was expecting to be arrested and get it taken off him. According to him, there is no known S.H.I.E.L.D. outpost in space, and the people seem to be human. Virgil knows them all, as they’ve been studying them for years and he says that says Fitz didn’t get brought along. Coulson and the others are here to save humanity, but not from the Roaches.
After questions about whether this is a result of the bargain Coulson made with the Ghost Rider, and whether they might be back in the Framework, the decision is made to split up to search through the dark, monster-infested tunnels of the ship. Which causes Mack to reference Alien and point out that splitting up is a really bad idea.
The ship – only it’s much, much bigger, is in a debris field. It is beyond human tech to build, especially as it seems quite old and worn, yet it’s fit for humans. Humans aren’t the only people on it – there are also Kree. Who are not friendly (and result in a few subtitles). It’s believed that they should be close enough to Earth to get a message off (although even close by that would take months at the very least to arrive). At the end, everyone gets a bit of a shock.