Clark Gregg reprises his role as Coulson from the film series, starring alongside Ming-Na Wen, Brett Dalton, Chloe Bennet, Iain De Caestecker, and Elizabeth Henstridge.
Louis Ozawa Changchien portrays the super-powered man Chan Ho Yin, while Ruth Negga is introduced as Raina—the titular "girl in the flower dress".
"Girl in the Flower Dress" originally aired on ABC on October 22, 2013, and was watched by 11.16 million viewers within a week.
In Hong Kong, street performer Chan Ho Yin is convinced by the mysterious Raina to reveal his secret pyrokinetic abilities.
She traces the hack that released the information back to Miles Lydon, her secret boyfriend and Rising Tide contact.
The team tracks the buyer, Raina, to a Project Centipede facility in Hong Kong, where they are draining Chan's fire-resistant platelets against his will to use as stabilizers for the Extremis serum within their super-soldiers.
Realizing that Chan can't be reasoned with, Coulson and May inject him with a large dose of Extremis, causing him to explode.
Lydon, convinced that what he did is harming people, helps by using his hacking skills to direct the blast through the ventilation and out the top of the building, while the others escape to safety.
Coulson then confronts Skye about her true motivation for joining S.H.I.E.L.D., and she explains that she is searching for information on her parents, who she believes are tied to S.H.I.E.L.D.
[3]: 76 Marvel confirmed in September 2013 that the episode would star main cast members Clark Gregg as Phil Coulson, Ming-Na Wen as Melinda May, Brett Dalton as Grant Ward, Chloe Bennet as Skye, Iain De Caestecker as Leo Fitz, and Elizabeth Henstridge as Jemma Simmons.
They also announced the episode's guest cast, including Louis Ozawa Changchien as Renshu Tseng, Ruth Negga as Raina, Austin Nichols as Miles Lydon, Shannon Lucio as Debbie, Tzi Ma as Agent Quan Chen, and Cullen Douglas as Edison Po.
[2]: 3:29 Magician Gregory Wilson was brought to set to assist Changchien with hand movement and placement to make his magic "believable".
Special effects supervisor Gary D'Amico lit a boulder attached to a zip line on fire to simulate the fireballs, allowing visual effects supervisor Mark Kolpack to composite the content together and enhance it further with additional digital fire simulations.
He said, "A rocky start is to be expected, but by this point in the season, most procedural dramas tend to have hit their pace both in structure and audience."
[18] Eric Goldman of IGN graded the episode 8.1 out of 10, calling it "pretty damn busy and quite fun", highlighting Skye's character development and the drama it caused, as well as the connections to "Pilot".
"[4] James Hunt at Den of Geek found the episode to be "mostly, quite good," praising Skye's story, the idea that S.H.I.E.L.D.
"might actually be as bad as the people they're trying to fight", and the character of Raina, who he said was "the closest thing this series has yet had to an original, interesting idea".
Club graded the episode a "B−", stating, "I've defended this show against complaints that it's terminally bland, but formulaic material like this really does expose its flaws.
"[21] Morgan Jeffrey at Digital Spy scored the episode 3 stars out of 5, calling it a "slow burn", and concluding that "Skye's arc is easily the weakest aspect of "Girl in the Flower Dress" but there's a decent villain and a strong climax to help compensate.
"[23] Jim Steranko, known for his work on Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., felt the series "has settled into a pragmatic, if sometimes predictable comfort zone", and said that the episode "delivered enough premise, pace, and patter to get its audience through a mellow hour — and set the bar higher for the rest of the season.