Melinda May is S.H.I.E.L.D.'s most formidable field agent, gravely wounded in the events that preceded the team's leap into the past and placed in stasis to recover. For most of the team's first hours in 1931 she remains sealed away, healing from injuries that nearly killed her. By the time the others are deep in the streets of New York, she stirs, frees herself from her chamber, and slips out of sight, evading even the watchful Enoch.

Brought back from death and still mending, May wakes in the belly of the Zephyr changed, her memory clouded and her affect gone flat, with no curiosity about where she is or who the synthetic stranger wearing Coulson's face might be. She refuses the healing pod and turns on Enoch when he moves to return her to it, and though he now carries a hunter's combat programming, she overpowers him in a brutal scrap through the cargo hold, even driving her own sedative into him to no effect.

She recalls passing through the spirit realm, yet the news that she briefly died lands on her without a flicker of feeling. Only when the team returns from the field does something in her settle: the sight of the reactivated Coulson seems to quiet her, and she lets herself be put back under, calm and unreadable, moving through the motions of the soldier she was while everything warmer in her stays switched off.