Summary
Some heroes never die. Others are honored for their sacrifice. Others still are forgotten. Then, there are those who live in secret (on television) for years before being told their experiences meant nothing to the Sacred Timeline they were initially sculpted to be essential to. Well, news flash:Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.happened. Clark Gregg’s Phil Coulson died, got revived, died again, was revived without any memories, died again, and finally came back as an android who painfully absorbed all of his organic counterpart’s memories to finish out his team’s story alongside the rest of his remaining co-stars.
With the recent re-canonization ofNetflix’sDefendersshows through Disney+’s direct sequel,Daredevil:Born Again—and Season 2 already expecting tostar at least one more Netflix Defender, if not all of them—it should be clear to Marvel Studios that another long-running set of characters needs reintroduction. Phil Coulson and his team of Melinda May, Daisy Johnson, Al “Mack” MacKenzie, and married geniuses Leo Fitz and Gemma Simmons deserve to return. After seven bombastic seasons ending on a high note of multiversal, time-travelling Marvel television,Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.in all its respects would benefit from reintroduction to the Sacred Timeline—and the MCU’s multiverse could make more sense.
Where It Started vs. Where It Ended
Thirteen years ago inThe Avengers, during the MCU’s first world-threatening battle between the God of Mischief Loki, his army of Chitauri, and the original six Avengers, audiences got their first taste of significant tragedy:Agent Phil Coulson, eventual S.H.I.E.L.D. leaderand Nick Fury’s humorous right-hand man, gets heart-stabbed by Loki’s scepter. He was the first major on-screen “death” of a character who appeared in multiple MCU installments, making it a tragic loss. However,Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.quickly rectified that: using the blood of a dead Kree in a secret program called Project T.A.H.I.T.I., Phil Coulson got a torturous transfusion that required erasing his memories of the procedure to preserve his mental stability.
After Coulson’s resurrection, the titular agents—May, Fitz, Gemma, and Daisy, among others—go throughseven seasons of dangerous missions, from stopping the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Season 1 to getting hold of a slightly different-looking Darkhold than the one present inWandaVisionin Season 4. While the series' first five seasons contain certifiable, if small, connections to the MCU, the last two threw the timeline in the air. With each of Seasons 6 and 7 spanning only thirteen episodes, the showrunners waste no time getting into the show’s final arc, which sees the team time travel so much they create new multiversal branches.
Coulson dies a second time in the Season 5 finale, but Season 6 quickly opens with a fully mind-wiped Coulson double who gets thrown into spacetime and a battle across the multiverse, where the team reconnects with old enemies who obtain new knowledge that further throws timelines and lives into chaos. The series ends on a bombastic high note in Season 7, where Fitz—presumed missing from getting lost in time a season earlier—reveals himself to have been in hiding to work out the scientific kinks of multiversal travel. Fitz and Jemma’s relationship mends, the team finds their way home, and allalternate universe characters get relatively happy endings elsewhere.
A Multiversal Explanation for Agents' Absence and Knowledge Gaps
In theory, multiversal travel could solve a significant canonical problem: why Thanos' snap and anything pre- or post-Avengers: Endgamegets no mention inAgents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Seasons 6 or 7. The crew were too busy fighting their own multiverse-threatening demons in an alternate universe they inadvertently created (or at least entered) to understand what happened in the Sacred Timeline. The Avengers handled Thanos andthe S.H.I.E.L.D agents were needed elsewhere. Plus, logistically, relations between the series and the rest of the MCU would feel much clearer; vague mentions towardAgents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s events were made in past films, so keeping the two connected up until the agents' consequential Season 5 travel to the future makes sense.
A continuation of the show could also help alleviate some of the burden the MCU has faced in recent years, with an overwhelming number of installments in Phases 4 and 5 not providing concrete demonstrations of the franchise’s current direction, threats, or multiversal mechanics.Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.ends with a seasons-long demonstration of how that multiverse gets ripped open and works. These seasons could easily be interwoven into the MCU’s structural mechanics, such asLoki’s birthing of a healthy multiverse via Yggdrasil. Whatever method is ultimately used, there are certainly paths forAgents of S.H.I.E.L.D.to be fully reintegrated into the MCU properly as if they never left. If Daredevil can do it, Coulson and company can too.
