| For alternate versions of the Rescue in Bahrain, see the Rescue in Bahrain's Event Hub |
- "All Inhumans know you. Bahrain. It's funny... 'Cause the world blames Inhumans for what happened. But it was you that got it wrong."
- ―Vijay Nadeer to Melinda May[src]
The Rescue in Bahrain was an altered version of the S.H.I.E.L.D. mission that ended in Melinda May saving Katya Belyakov rather than killing her.
Background[]
- "May proved to be the key. Peacefulness wasn't enough, she'd keep fighting. And fighting wasn't enough; she'd win. But, once I remembered she was fighting a fight she'd already lost, all I had to do was change the fight. Take her back to Bahrain."
- ―Holden Radcliffe to Aida[src]
In 2017, Holden Radcliffe kidnapped Melinda May, and subsequently attempted to placate her using the Framework, with limited success. After being confronted by the android he had replaced May with, Radcliffe decided to fix May's greatest regret - the Rescue in Bahrain, the outcome of which had traumatized her to such a great extent that it destroyed her marriage to Andrew Garner and caused her to retire from field work.
Within the Framework, the mission had much the same background as the real-world mission: Eva Belyakov had stolen Terrigen Crystals from Afterlife after Jiaying deemed her daughter Katya unsuitable for Terrigenesis due to her young age and signs of psychopathic schizophrenia, Katya had gone insane from the sensory manipulation powers she had been granted, mother and daughter caused chaos in Bahrain, and Melinda May was sent to sort out the crisis.[1]
Rescue[]
- "I saved the girl."
- ―Melinda May to Andrew Garner[src]
The rescue followed much the same path as it did in the real world, until what would have been Melinda May's decision to fatally shoot Katya Belyakov. Within the Framework, May was able to talk Katya down, and brought her to an ambulance.[1]
Aftermath[]
- "Take the Cambridge Incident. It was a setup. That girl shouldn't have been at that school in the first place."
"Where we're from, she died. This never happened." - ―Phil Coulson and Daisy Johnson[src]
Despite the signs of psychopathic schizophrenia Katya displayed, S.H.I.E.L.D. brought her back to the United States and enrolled her at a school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The result was a massacre that resulted in S.H.I.E.L.D. shutting down and HYDRA taking over. The massacre was not blamed on Katya's mental instability, but rather on the fact she was an Inhuman.[2]
As a result, discrimination against Inhumans became rampant. After Daisy Johnson triggered some of his real-world memories, Phil Coulson opined that HYDRA had intentionally engineered the blunder in order to sow the seeds of the ensuing dictatorship.[3]
May became a hated figure among Inhumans because her lapse in judgment had doomed them to persecution; worse, she took part in that persecution in a misguided attempt to make up for her blunder, only realizing this in itself was a blunder when she saw children evacuating a HYDRA-run re-education building she had been ordered to authorize an airstrike on.[2]