In Episode 22 ("Beginning of the End"),the finale of Season 1, S.H.I.E.L.D. has been officially disbanded,
Fitz & Simmons are presumed dead, and Agent Grant Ward has been revealed as a Hydra traitor.
The remnants of Coulson's team raid a Hydra front at the Cybertek Manufacturing Facility, a lab where
Ward, Garrett and Hydra are recruiting unsuspecting workers to use in their super-soldier experiments.
At the same time, an equally unsuspecting U.S. Army General is visiting that lab, to listen to
a sales pitch about the new technology that Cybertek has created. Alas for the general, Garret
(who
has taken the alien blood serum that resurrected Coulson) is quickly losing his mind. And
when the General questions Garrett's sanity, Garrett kills him.
Outside, the S.H.I.E.L.D. team waits in the foothills surrounding the lab,
and then launches their assault on the building.
Taking over an armed vehicle, Coulson & Trip blast a hole in the wall that allows Melinda May & Skye
to get inside. While Coulson is holding off an assault by super-soldiers outside, May takes out
Ward (with a vengeance), and Skye manages to locate Mike Petersen's (Deathlok's) son,
freeing Deathlok to turn his wrath on Garrett. Checkmate.
In the aftermath, the Marines take away the bad guys, while Coulson deals a
quick & fatal blow to Garrett's final attempt to make a late comeback.
This scene was shot at the Alfred Mann Foundation, a high-tech research laboratory
located at 25134 Rye Canyon Loop (Building 34), in Valencia, CA.
It's located in a center known as Mann Biomedical Park, a collection of 21 buildings
purchased by Alfred Mann (an American entrepreneur & philanthropist) in 2002.
It has been used often for filming, including the movies: "The Aviator", "Tropic Thunder",
and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", as well as TV shows such as
"NCIS", "24", "The Mentalist", "Alias" and "Bones".
(The distant shot of a huge cargo plane parked in a nearby lot was faked, of course,
but the park does have its own helipad.)
It's in the foothills of the Santa Clarita area, about a mile northeast of Six Flags Magic
Mountain, just north of the intersection of Newhall Ranch Road & Rye Canyon Road.
Here's a Bing aerial view of the building and that water tank in the hills:
Side note: This was an extremely difficult location for me to track down. All I could tell is that it was
somewhere in the foothills. But L.A. has countless miles of foothills, on both sides of two different
mountain ranges, so that didn't help much. But after days of searching aerial photos, I spotted a
partial number in that night time scene, and I was finally able to pinpoint it in the Santa Clarita area,
in part thanks to that water tank and the electrical transmission towers seen in the nearby hills.
After I found the building, I determined that its address was "25134 Rye Canyon Loop", and
when I Googled that to see what was there, up popped this website (as well as this one)
about a place I honestly hadn't heard of before: the Alfred Mann Foundation. It turned out
to be a research lab doing its own noble experiments to
help end human suffering. Their
inventions include a cochlear implant for the deaf, and a tiny, implantable stimulator
that helps stroke victims recover the use of their paralyzed limbs.
