Agents of SHIELD, "Magical Place," How Coulson Lives

In the Agents of SHIELD episode titled "Magical Place," we're finally going to get some info about Coulson's resurrection.  Or do we?

The team collects a man who can help them find Coulson.  (Remember, Coulson has been kidnapped)

Skye is kicked off the plane by Agent Hand, but she does what she does, and starts to try hacking any computer she can get near.  All in the name of finding Coulson.

The plane is full of SHIELD agents as the organization rallies together to join in the search.

Coulson is being tortured for information... 

We learn that SHIELD is pulling out ALL stops to find him.  It's curious, the manpower put into Coulson's retrieval.

You see, tonight is the night we learn the biggest secret from the Marvel Cinematic Universe... and that's just how Coulson can be alive after the events in The Avengers.

Aside from the torture, we learn about his father dying when he was young, and of his wife? Who died?  The details were quick and caught me a bit off guard.

And then, after a quiet conversation with his captor, Coulson willingly gets into Centipede's mind reading machine.  The one that is designed to pull repressed memories from a person's mind.

Because...  Coulson wants to know too.

Because of Skye, they find the isolated place that Coulson is being housed and they rescue him.

But not before a horrid memory was brought to the surface.  One that he did not have before.  One that relates to how he's alive.

Coulson chats with Dr. Streiten (Ron Glass) and discovers that after Loki killed him in The Avengers, he had been dead for several days.  And that Col. Fury took extreme measures to resurrect Coulson.

The procedures he went through were apparently so painful that he repeatedly screamed that he wanted to die. 

But rather than leave him that way, SHIELD has a strange looking machine that looked mysteriously like the interrogation droid from Star Wars, poking and prodding Coulson's (exposed) brain.  It was here that the pleasant memories from "Tahiti" were implanted.  Implanted to give Coulson his "will to live" back again.

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And so it ends, the primary chunk of this mystery that Agents of SHIELD has been bantering about several times an episode since the show started.  It's been the apple dangled in front of the viewers.

We got what seems like a piece of the puzzle that has been the mystery of the resurrected Coulson.

But I suspect we did not get the entire picture yet.  We did not get the source of these horrid surgeries... the seven surgeries.  We did not get all the details.

But now we know something.  And it deliberately skirted the issue of LMD's, or Life Model Decoys.  Something many fans were suspecting.  And I'm guessing, too easy of an out... to use an old tool that's been with the SHIELD comic from almost day one, dozens of years ago.

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But...

In this mis-season premiere the opening sequences seemed short of nuance or details that would make the chase that ensued captivating.  It felt like a cheaply shot set of sequences.

Sure, they knitted together fine, but there's something I just can't put my finger on.  Something off.

And this bit about Coulson, took about a quarter of the episode, at most, to tell.  This is what the entire series, up to now, was about?  With some of the mystery resolved, the obvious dodged, will folks continue to tune in?  Will viewers feel like they've seen enough or come back for more?

BTW, the episode netted just under 6.5 million viewers.

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