Quote Originally Posted by Erys View Post
It's not weak, or even an excuse.

There is a big difference between pushing someone (largely a grapple) and actively trying to throw a series of punches.
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Except we don't even know that she got to that step. She said she was going to punch out the robots and steal their guns, but we don't know if she even started to do that. All we know is that she snapped out, then immediately snapped back cringing in pain.

And as for the argument that her "malfunction" with the gun was the same thing, I disagree for two reasons. First, her reaction in this episode was immediate, not delayed - she snapped out and immediately suffered consequences. In the last episode, there was no reaction whatsoever for at least a couple of minutes.

Second, her hands didn't malfunction when it came to the gun; they moved along the table and knocked into it. One of the points they made is that the hands themselves do not feel; they don't have nerve endings that let her feel with them. She specifically asked Coulson that when he was trying to be reassuring. As human beings, we are accustomed to operating by both sight and feel; I can forgive the idea that she wasn't thinking about where her hands were, and they dragged along the table and brushed the gun. I'm not convinced that it was a delayed reaction to her using her powers.

Overall, I just think it was a badly-written, contrived effort to take her out of the scene, because they knew that her presence would ruin Strucker and Atomic Blondie's attempt to hijack the device. They needed her out of the room, and if she could use her powers and her hands there was nothing that could force her to leave. So her hands had to malfunction, to add stakes, then she had to fight the robot with neither hands nor powers, and then she had to be disabled by falling out of a window, all in order that the bad guys could threaten Fitz and Simmons.

If this was meant to be foreshadowed by the previous scene with Mack, they could have done it. Easily. Show some sparks on her hands. Show her wincing. Anything. They did not do that. That tells me that it was not planned that way.