Many Heads, One Tale

"Many Heads, One Tale" is the eighth episode of the third season of ABC's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the fifty-second episode of the series overall. It aired on November 17, 2015. It was written by Jed Whedon & DJ Doyle and directed by Garry A. Brown.

Plot
Confirming he knows Ward is looking for a secret Strucker family vault said to contain a secret great power, Malick orders his men to kill him. However Ward overpowers and tortures them, learning the vault is in Germany.

Mack voices his concerns over Coulson's relationship with Price, but Coulson reveals that though he wants to trust Price, he has been planning a sting operation to unearth the ATCU's secrets. While Coulson gives Price a tour of the Playground, Daisy uses a device smuggled into the ATCU with Andrew to hack their mainframe, and Hunter and Morse visit to deal with the security breach, disguised as an FBI team. Morse sneaks away to investigate the part of the facility where the Inhumans are being held, but instead finds vitamin supplements containing Terrigen, discovering that they are given to all ATCU staff. She realises that the ATCU are keeping the Inhumans elsewhere and are not working on a cure for Terrigenesis, but are instead trying to activate more Inhumans.

Updated on the situation, Coulson interrogates Price, suspecting she is Hydra, but she claims innocence of administering Terrigen to her staff, and reveals that Malick, her business partner, is responsible for overseeing the captured Inhumans. They realise that Malick has been removing the Inhumans to an unknown location, and is making more to serve him. Morse and Hunter are attacked by Malick's chief of security, the telekinetic Inhuman Giyera. After they subdue him, Banks helps them escape.

Investigating the Distant Star symbol, Fitz and Simmons find variations over the centuries, and learn of a group who have been sending people through the Monolith for hundreds of years. Simmons becomes frustrated with Fitz for being so willing to help rescue Will, and he expresses his belief that they are cursed, because every time they have tried to express their feelings for one another something has interfered, such as Fitz nearly drowning or Simmons being sent to another planet. They kiss twice, the first being initiated by Fitz out of frustration, and the second being initiated by Simmons. By the way her head moves after the kiss, she is going for a third kiss, but Fitz breaks away. A book is knocked off of the table behind where they kissed Simmons notices that one of the old Distant Star variants is identical to the symbol of Hydra. Price explains that she met Malick in 2001, when he was working with NASA on Project Distant Star. Meanwhile, Ward breaks into the Strucker vault and finds a waiting Malick, who shows him the family treasure: pieces of the Monolith carved centuries earlier. He reveals that Red Skull did not create Hydra - the organisation was instead founded in ancient times by the worshippers of a powerful Inhuman, whose enemies feared him so much that they banished him to another world using the Monolith. Ever since then Hydra have been sending sacrifices to this Inhuman (the creature Will and Simmons fought against), and have been seeking a way to bring it back to Earth. Malick has also been building an army of Inhumans to serve the ancient creature. Ward agrees to help Malick rescue the Inhuman, in exchange for his help destroying SHIELD. Ward later tortures Andrew with mustard gas in a bid to make him transform into Lash.

Starring

 * Clark Gregg as Phil Coulson
 * Ming-Na Wen as Melinda May
 * Brett Dalton as Grant Ward
 * Chloe Bennet as Daisy Johnson / Quake
 * Iain De Caestecker as Leo Fitz
 * Elizabeth Henstridge as Jemma Simmons
 * Nick Blood as Lance Hunter
 * Adrianne Palicki as Bobbi Morse
 * Henry Simmons as Alphonso "Mack" MacKenzie
 * Luke Mitchell as Lincoln Campbell

Guest Starring

 * Powers Boothe as Gideon Malick
 * Constance Zimmer as Rosalind Price
 * Andrew Howard as Luther Banks
 * Nelson Franklin as Steve Wilson
 * Mark Dacascos as Giyera
 * Blair Underwood as Andrew Garner

Trivia

 * This episode scored 3.60 million viewers upon its initial airing.