“Paradise Lost” is episode sixteen of season three of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
This episode opens back in 1970, on the day of the funeral for Gideon Malick’s father. Gideon is with his brother, Nathaniel (who has never been seen or even mentioned before; this does not bode well for his future), and they have been summoned to go and see Daniel Whitehall in his prison cell – that night the ceremony that HYDRA holds to send a Traveller through the gate, as seen in “Purpose in the Machine”, in order to give the Other a new host, is going to happen. Gideon does not agree with Whitehall’s vision of HYDRA (Whitehall has a more scientific approach than the Malicks’ religious one), but this is not a request. The episode then returns to the present, with Malick pulling up outside his mansion where his daughter, Stephanie, is waiting.
In the previous episode, “Spacetime”, Malick touched Charles and saw his own death – a painful death, at the hands of the Other. There are clips throughout from the past, including with Whitehall in his cell, where the he tells the brothers to look for the titular book in their father’s study, and it appears that Gideon does have a reason to fear. Stephanie tells her father that the Other has come to the house, and has summoned the Inner Circle to reveal who he actually is, and Malick believes that the Other will kill him that night in front of them. Gyera, Malick’s head of security, appears to have transferred his allegiance to the Other.
S.H.I.E.L.D. is concerned as Ward appears to be alive, although what he is is much worse, something they have realised. May says that at least it means that she will get a chance to kill Ward as well. Fitz and Simmons have examined the bodies of the people the Other killed at Transia Corporation, and come to the conclusion that they were, in fact, eaten very rapidly by micro-organisms.
Lincoln and Daisy are heading off to see a man who was thrown out of Afterlife and was refused to be given any powers. He was thought to be crazy, as he kept going on about a hostile ancient Inhuman with the ability to raise the dead. With the appearance of the Other, this doesn’t seem quite so crazy now. At Afterlife, he had been caught rummaging through the archives, so Lincoln thinks he’s worth questioning. Unfortunately, he’s and more than a little bitter, but he does have a Kree artefact and knows some of the Other’s history.
The rest of the team head to an agro-chemical factory owned by Transia Corporation. It’s the only company that doesn’t overlap with Malick’s organisation. So, whatever the reason was for the extremely hostile takeover of Transia had nothing to do with advanced prosthetics or exoskeletons, but agriculture. Which is a surprise.
Daisy is concerned over the vision she saw the second time after touching Charles, because it revealed someone from S.H.I.E.L.D., going by their badge, on the spaceship when it exploded. Coulson is having moral doubts over how he killed Ward in “Maveth”.
A cliff-hanger ending to the episode, which is unusual.