ABC’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. returns tonight for the back half of their second season.  We still don’t know if the series has been picked up for a third season, even though everyone seems highly optimistic.

When we last saw the Agents, Skye’s Inhuman personality had just been relieved, Daisy Johnson aka Quake causing no shortage of earth shaking in a secret cave.  We lost team member Trip, which sources say will have major ramifications for the group during future episodes.

“We are coming in with the very beginning of Skye realizing what really is going on and, unlike a film, we have many, many hours to play that out and to explore the different emotional aspects of grappling with that huge change for someone who, as we’ve already seen, is on a journey trying to find herself and trying to find a place in the world,” Jed Whedon explained.

“Instead of montaging Spider-Man on the subway having fun for about three minutes learning his powers, we can actually explore what it means to go through that,” exec producer Jeffrey Bell agreed. “At the beginning of the season, we tried to take Skye, who wasn’t a SHIELD agent at beginning of last year and, coming in this season, really grow her up as a character and as an agent… Now there’s a whole new start and entering us into whole new world of Inhumans and what that means for her and how it affects other characters. Those are all really fun stories for us to explore.”

TVLine has this Q & A with Chloe Bennet who plays Skye if you want some more insight into Quake.

ComicBookResources has this interview with Clark Gregg about the return.

Variety has this really fantastic write up about what we can expect to see with the return of the series.  They say Skye will be dealing with the emotional toll of losing Trip, and fractures will soon start to appear within the team.  Mack (Henry Simmons), who was taken over by some kind of alien force in the temple and was compelled to attack his teammates will have issues this season: “I would say the group is probably split because they’re trying to determine ‘why? What are we chasing and why are we chasing certain things?’” Simmons explained.

Expect to see the return of Jaimie Alexander’s Asgardian Sif, along with the introduction of Edward James Olmos’s Robert Gonzalez in coming weeks.

Here is a sneak peek of tonight’s episode:

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. returns tonight on ABC, check local listings for time.