Marvel's Agents of SHIELD 1x05: Girl In the Flower Dress.

A dude in Hong Kong has fire powers that he uses to impress a girl... who then has guys in fire-resistant suits kidnap him.

SHIELD suspects the Rising Tide, so everyone suspects Skye had something to do with it. She starts trying to track whoever hacked into their data stream so she can clear her name.

Meanwhile, the fire guy is being seduced with offers of power and fame... and a new name: Scorch.

The hacker is a guy named Miles Lydon, who makes Ward right away, then bolts in his product placement Jetta. He uses some hacker trickery to cause gridlock and gets away. As it turns out, Skye used to date him, and warned him so he could escape.

They meet up, and she castigates him for hacking SHIELD while she's on the inside. Then they need an excuse for Chloe Bennet to take her clothes off, so they have sex. But Coulson had May follow her, and they get busted before Skye even gets her clothes back on.

Miles was paid $1 million by what he thought was an eco-research company to hack a Chinese SHIELD data stream. That got them Scorch, who they juice up with the super serum from the pilot. Then they start sucking him dry. His blood platelets are fire-resistant, so they'll help stop the soldiers from exploding in the future.

SHIELD agents manage to save him before he dies, but he's not happy to see them, since they were his former oppressors. He doses himself with super soldier serum and starts tossing fireballs.

May tries to reason with him, but he's not interested, and eventually they have to just dose him with more serum until he explodes.

Miles gets kicked out of the plane in Hong Kong with a magic bracelet that does whatever SHIELD wants on his wrist. Skye tells Coulson that she hacked into SHIELD to find out what happened to her parents. She gets a bracelet, too. Then the titular girl goes to see some guy in prison. She needs him to get in touch with "The clairvoyant" whoever that is.

What I Liked
-Giving the guy a nickname makes him more dangerous. That's true in real life, too.

What I Hated
-Fitzsimmons spouts more trolltastic technobabble. This is a show for nerds. We know what things like TCP, hyper-text and mob mean, assholes.
-As Miles is escaping, he hits something on his phone called Gridlock.mp4, which is contained in Act 1 Video Playlist.

It's a damned smart phone. It can do anything they want, and their fancy hacker thing is a goddamn video playlist. And they didn't even bother to change the name to something inconspicuous. How lazy can you get? Did the graphics department not have twenty free minutes to whip something up?

-Coulson has a flying car, and yet he goes after Miles in a regular SUV. I know the plot required it, but the plot is dumb, so that's no excuse.
-They knock Scorch out with some gas so they can restrain him, then leave him awake while they suck out his blood platelets. That seems needlessly cruel. Sure, they're an evil organization bent on world domination or something, but they don't have to be dicks about it.
-SHIELD kidnaps a guy, dumps him in Hong Kong, and robs him. I realize that he was a bad guy, and if he hadn't haxored SHIELD's Gibson, things would've been better, but it wasn't exactly his fault that Scorch went nuts. It wasn't his fault that the guy died, either: May killed him. Not even in self-defense, either. She and Coulson decided he needed to die, so they extra-judicially murdered him. SHIELD's full of assholes.
-Skye is storing the data on her parents on a mini-SIM card. That makes very little sense. An SD card is about the same size and holds far more data.

Final Thoughts
So Skye's an orphan, and the only info she has on her parents was redacted by SHIELD. I still don't care. She's a bland character with a hackneyed backstory, who seems like she was designed by committee. All the new characters on the show seem that way, in fact. They got together in a room, chose some standard character types, and then decided they didn't need to do any more character development: Super nerds, master of waif-fu, Agent Hardchin, and the oddly attractive hacker who grew up in an orphanage. That's what we got from this show, and we're not getting anything else. The really big problem is that I'm not even sure it's possible to care about most of them. Fitzsimmons are disposable scientists and Ward is a disposable agent. Based on what they've done so far, you could kill them all and replace them with with similar characters, and almost no one would give a damn. They're completely generic and have no personalities. It's like they brought three bottles of store brand cola to life and dressed them up as humans.

Which would be forgiveable if the plots were interesting. They're not, though. Some guy we've never seen before had super flame powers. He used them for fives seconds and then exploded. The end. Not exactly compelling stuff. Sure, there's a long-running plot about the CENTIPEDE people, but they've only shown up twice so far, and they seem to be comically inept. Twice now, they've had their plans messed with by a ragtag group of misfits. If the Bad News Bears were a spy agency, they'd give SHIELD a run for its money.

Still, this was better than the previous episode, which admittedly is not saying much. They fought a lower-tier super-powered guy, which is at least sort of comic booky. Of course, most of the episode was focused on the too-pretty hacker and her personal issues, but at this point I'll take what I can get.