Nothing keeps Phil Coulson down for long — certainly not death, and certainly not a little thing called unemployment.

Coulson and his team returned to the small-screen this week with the "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." season two premiere, featuring a leaner and meaner version of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division than ever seen before. Here's how it all went down:

Long, Long Ago…

A single winter has passed since the traumatic HYDRA reveal and public dismantling of S.H.I.E.L.D., with Coulson and his allies forced to continue operating in secret. The new director of the stealth S.H.I.E.L.D. can only rely upon the handful of people he trusts — and it's a small handful.

Among the new crew are Isabel Hartley and her band of mercenaries — "good" mercenaries, but still, money-driven soldiers with dollar-signs in their eyes. Hartley and her team, including the mouthy merc Lance Hunter, try to feel out a potential ally, ex-agent Browning, on Coulson's behalf, only to learn that he's like the rest of the S.H.I.E.L.D. expats — all of them traitors, detainees or sellouts.

Browning falls under the latter category, offering to sell the location of a prized artifact with Level 10 clearance. Before the deal can go down, however, a massively powerful man swoops into the scene, kills Browning, and runs off with the intel. We later learn that this is Crusher Creel, the goon known to comics fans as Absorbing Man. He has the power to absorb any material he comes into contact with, making him one of the most dangerous enemies our team has ever faced.

What's worse, Coulson learns that one of the items Browning was willing to sell was the original 0-8-4 — an object of unknown origin. It was recovered from a HYDRA base in Austria back in 1945, by Peggy Carter, Dum Dum Dugan and the other Howling Commandoes. (Their episode-opening cameo felt like "Captain America: The First Avenger" part two, complete with HYDRA soldiers looking exactly as they did under Red Skull's command.) Coulson needs his team to find the artifact, before Creel and HYDRA can get to it first.

The Rat in the Basement

In order to find Creel, Coulson asks Skye, now one of his top field agents, to do something she very much does not want to do: Ask Ward for help. The S.H.I.E.L.D. traitor has been imprisoned since last we saw him, attempting suicide on numerous occasions, but now, it appears that he's seen the light; he's clear-headed, accepting of what he did, and why.

Ward tells Skye how they can track down HYDRA, using old communication methods that will still be in place, even though the original S.H.I.E.L.D. infrastructure's down. Skye doesn't know if she can believe Ward's intel, but he promises that "it's true, and so will every word I say to you for the rest of my life." He's not asking for forgiveness, but he hopes that she'll come back to speak with him, because there's still "so much I want to tell you…"

Skye doesn't stick around to hear the rest of Ward's sentence, though perhaps she should have: "…about your father," he says to no one in particular.

The Spoils of War

Ward's info bears fruit, leading Coulson and the team to save one of the world's premier S.H.I.E.L.D. hunters, Brigadier General Tablot, from getting killed by Creel. Talbot's men take Creel into custody, while Coulson's men take Talbot into custody. Coulson pleads with Talbot to work together, because a guy like Creel can't be underestimated; in fact, he wanted to be captured, so he could be at the same location as all of the 0-8-4s that Talbot and the government took over when they shut S.H.I.E.L.D. down.

Even though Talbot's uncooperative, Coulson's crew manipulates him into leading the way to all the 0-8-4s. Hartley finds the object they're looking for, but when she touches it in an attempt to defend herself against Creel, it bonds with her hand, gravely wounding her. She escapes with Hunter and the rest of her allies, and convinces Hunter to cut her hand off, because she can't let go of the object, and she can feel it killing her. "I don't want to die," she commands.

Hunter complies, but it doesn't do much for Hartley's anti-death wish. Their car crashes into Creel during the escape, and everyone in the vehicle dies, except for Hunter. Even worse: Creel has the 0-8-4, and nothing can stop him from bringing the weapon to his master: Doctor Whitehall, the HYDRA leader first glimpsed during the episode's World War II flashback, looking as young and fit as ever in the present day.

There's some semblance of good news, however. In the raid on Talbot's facility, Skye, Melinda May and Agent Triplett are able to haul in a solid score of old S.H.I.E.L.D. weapons and technology, giving Coulson's team an edge against their enemies. But that doesn't mean they can stop their current methods of operations, fighting in the shadows, protecting people even when they don't know it — or want it.

Meanwhile…

** Good news: Fitz is alive, and awake! Bad news: He's not the Fitz we know and love. He suffered significant damage to his brain, causing him to forget things, and have trouble putting sentences together. Even worse: Fitz confides in an imaginary Simmons. She left S.H.I.E.L.D. not too long ago, thinking she was more of a burden on Fitz than an asset. While we still get to see Simmons on the show through Fitz's delusions, we're left in the dark as to where the actual Simmons wound up.

** The crazy theories surrounding Patton Oswalt's Koenig brothers aren't the exclusive property of the fans, not anymore. Even on the show, Triplett is very curious about the various Koenigs. He has tons of theories to run past Skye, but it all boils down to the same idea — there's no way these guys are just brothers. Something else is going on. In other words, conspiracy theorists, keep your Life Model Decoy dreams alive.

** One of the biggest cliffhangers from season one goes completely without mention here. Coulson does not write any strange markings down at any point in the episode. However, he's being closely supervised by May. She has two rules for Coulson: He needs to avoid field operations, and he needs to check in every few days. Perhaps Coulson confided his secret in May, keeping him on the sidelines for now. Either way, it's still the show's biggest mystery, and one we'll hopefully see followed up on in the weeks ahead.

What did you make of the "SHIELD" premiere?