Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Close this dialog window Streaming Options Warning: This article contains spoilers from the season 6 premiere of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Read at your own risk! Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. encountered a very familiar face in the season 6 premiere. Picking up a year after the season 5 finale, the ABC drama’s season opener found the agents adjusting to life without the late Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg). Mack (Henry Simmons) is now the director, but still checks in with a Coulson hologram; May (Ming-Na Wen) seems to have reached the acceptance stage of grieving; and Yo-Yo (Natalia Cordova-Buckley) has a new boyfriend. Of course, all this forward motion would be challenged by the premiere’s big reveal. At the end of the episode, three new non-Earthly characters, who breached in from God knows where, converged on a museum and welcomed their leader, Sarge, who looks exactly like the dearly departed Coulson (and is also played by Gregg). But this isn’t Coulson, as Sarge made clear when he said he has no idea what S.H.I.E.L.D. is and shot one of the agents in order to save a comrade. Meanwhile, the search for Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) continued in space. Daisy (Chloe Bennet), Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), Piper (Briana Venskus), and Davis (Maximilian Osinski) managed to locate Fitz’s cryo-pod, which was mysteriously empty. A cold and determined Simmons found some deep-space coordinates in his pod and wanted the team to follow them. Three out of the four people, though, voted to return home instead because they’d been gone for so long and deep space is pretty dangerous. But when a Confederacy ship fired on the Zephyr, Daisy ordered Simmons to input the coordinates to Earth, and instead Simmons put in the other ones, sending them further into space to find Fitz — who is currently working on an alien planet and has green alien eyes now. NATALIA CORDOVA-BUCKLEY, MING-NA WEN Credit: ABC/Mitch Haaseth After watching the premiere, EW hopped on the phone with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. showrunners Jed Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, Jeff Bell to talk about the season ahead: ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Last season we got a reference to the events in Avengers: Infinity War, but there wasn’t an MCU reference in the premiere. Can we expect any references or nods to Infinity War or Endgame in the new season? JED WHEDON: We are pre-Endgame. That means the season is taking place during the years with the vanished. Does that have any bearing on the story at all? JEFF BELL: We’re actually pre-Snap. WHEDON: For the multiple reasons, we had to do that. One of the main ones being that we were not positive when season 6 would air. We were pretty sure it was going to be in the summer, but if they moved us up to January and we had tied into in any way, it would’ve destroyed everything. So the safest course of action for all parties involved was for us to stay pre-Snap. The premiere introduces Clark Gregg’s new character, Sarge. Who is Sarge, where do he and his team come from, and what do they want? MAURISSA TANCHAROEN: That’s something we hope to answer! [Laughs] BELL: That takes us 13 episodes to answer. TANCHAROEN: We set up the mystery. That will define the season. Is what Sarge and his team are ultimately after based in Marvel mythology, or was that something you created for the show? WHEDON: I think that one’s a wait-and-see. [Laughs] How does Sarge differ from Phil Coulson? WHEDON: Besides his cool jacket and his cool boots, it is a very different character. When we were tossing around ideas for a potential season 6, it was one of the main things we struck upon that made us feel like we could keep doing this in thrilling fashion. We felt like we needed Clark Gregg still at the center of the show. Everything was founded on him and he’s still at the heart of the thing, so we wanted something for him. When we stumbled upon this idea, we felt like it would be thrilling for the fans and difficult for fans to see him be someone so different, and also would be fun for Clark. He’s been playing the same guy for a decade. From a writing perspective, has it been difficult writing Clark, at least based on the trailer, as more of an antagonist? WHEDON: Yeah, with any new character, we had to find the character’s voice. We talked a lot about what that would be and how to let Clark play humor, which he’s so good at, in a new way, in a dark way. We weren’t positive that we got it right until we got the dailies and we went, “Okay, this is going to be great.” This premiere revealed how everyone has processed Coulson’s passing. How does May react meeting Sarge for the first time and dealing with him? TANCHAROEN: It’s going to be difficult for all of them. They’re still going through the process of grieving Coulson, and we’ve made it very clear that all of the team’s process is about moving forward and just plugging on. Specifically for May, it was important to not have her be steeped in sadness. She’s in a new place. She’s thankful for the time they had together. So of course, to be confronted with the face of the man you love, that you are — BELL: — still grieving TANCHAROEN: — it’s definitely going to stir up emotions for her and the entire team. Who has the most visceral reaction to this? Is it May or someone else? BELL: I would say it’s both May and Daisy. One is a partner, and one there was very much a father-daughter relationship between Daisy and Coulson. I think part of the fun will be to see how they each react to it. Is there hope? Is there a connection? Is there not? Is this an affront that we should destroy? I think everyone will be affected, but those two in particular. MARVEL'S AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. - "Missing Pieces" - Scattered across the galaxy, the team works to find their footing in the wake of losing Coulson in the spectacular Season 6 premiere of "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.," FRIDAY, MAY 10 (8:00-9:00 p.m. EDT, on The ABC Television Network. (ABC/Mitch Haaseth) CHLOE BENNET, ELIZABETH HENSTRIDGE Credit: Mitch Haaseth/ABC Daisy and Simmons are out in space looking for Fitz, and Simmons takes them even deeper into space at the end of the premiere. What dangers await them out there? WHEDON: We already see someone is after them, and we’ve seen that Quake is sort of known throughout the galaxy on the data streams. They’re a little bit wanted, they’re in unfamiliar territory, and they’re going to go to some new planets. I think that it’s not looking for great for them. Then we get a glimpse at where Fitz is, and I think it’s safe to say that he’s been on his own adventure. We’re excited for the audience to see how that plays out. This Fitz hasn’t gone through anything that happened last season. How is he different? BELL: The big headline is that he has no idea he was married. There was a whole adventure with him and Simmons, and they got a beautiful wedding and all of that. Then to also find out that another version of him died. I think those are all pretty big issues for him to have to process once we learns about them. WHEDON: Right now he believes that his friends have been sent to the future, doing everything he can to get there. BELL: He has no idea that they succeeded, that they got back, that the Earth has been saved. He’s just trying to get there to reunite with Simmons and save the Earth. Simmons seemed much colder in the premiere. Can we expect her one-track focus on Fitz be the source of a few more problems? WHEDON: Yeah, I think she has already pushed them over the edge.<doc-sep>The Season 6 premiere of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.delivered everything we hoped it would -- a new Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) centered mystery, Daisy Johnson (Chloe Bennet) kicking ass and taking names in space, and some touching words about Coulson's (Clark Gregg) demise -- but there was one noticeable omission. How the heck does the Thanos snap factor in? The Season 5 finale gave a nod to Avengers: Infinity Warwhen Taryan (Craig Parker) told Talbot (Adrian Pasdar), "Thanos and his forces have begun an assault on your world even as we speak." Naturally, we all assumed that since Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. would be premiering after Avengers: Endgame came out, we'd get a nod to that resolved conflict. But the show pretty much skates right by the Thanos snap without a single mention, even though the Season 6 premiere takes place one year after the Battle of Wakanda and one year into the world's existence without half its population. Instead, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. 's showrunners have said they consider Season 6 as happening before the snap, even though that doesn't quite make sense with the timeline they'd established. The reason for that choice has more to do with logistics than anything. Discover Your New Favorite Show: Watch This Now! Elizabeth Henstridge and Chloe Bennet, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Mitch Haaseth, ABC "Part of it had to do with a question of when we'd air, truthfully," Jed Whedon told reporters on a recent set visit. "We had talked about summer, but there's always a chance that we'd get moved up to the beginning of the year, and with the amount of characters and money and machine in place with Endgame--" "The most important film of the year, let's say that's what it was," Jeph Loeb interjected. "We had to dodge it completely," Whedon said. "Imagine if we'd incorporated it and then at the last minute, the network was like, 'You know what, we'd love to have this on in January.' Then all of the sudden, we've spoiled something horrible. So we made the decision to just be pre-snap and tell our story and just carry it forward." It's true that there was simply no way to incorporate the snap (and the characters they'd have to lose as a result) without setting up the major potential for spoilers. Even though the timeline is now seriously wonky, the producers are confident that fans will be forgiving -- and they may even find a solution to the problem in the endless Marvel mythology. "I live in a world where there's enough Time Lords and Chronicoms that live on the internet that they'll figure it out and explain it back to us," Loeb said. "It does work, you just have to sort of figure it out." Well, there you have it superfans. Get working on a way to explain this craziness! Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. airs Fridays at 8/7c on ABC.<doc-sep>May is the month when most broadcast shows are wrapping up their seasons and heading into the summer hiatus. But on Friday, May 10, ABC will air the premiere of the sixth season of “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D,” the fun little Marvel Cinematic Universe show that could. After a disastrous start and years of low ratings, the show has now outlasted the more celebrated and prestigious offerings from Marvel TV on Netflix to establish a place in the Marvel Universe, separate and distinct from the big-screen world. The show has outlasted the more celebrated and prestigious offerings from Marvel TV to establish a place in the Marvel Universe, separate and distinct from the big-screen world. “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” first arrived in 2013, a direct spinoff of 2012’s box-office smash “The Avengers.” It seemed a smart vanguard for the newly created Marvel TV project, and featured Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), a smaller character from the films who was a mid-level manager in the Earth-based bureaucracy known as S.H.I.E.L.D. The agency’s job? To clean up the messes the Avengers made and keep the public from realizing Earth might have had an alien (or “powered people”) encounter. It was a little like “Men In Black” (another Marvel property) but with an FBI-procedural vibe and a large dose of “the family you choose”-type emotional bonding. The show drew in legions of Marvel fans, with 12.2 million watching the premiere. It then proceeded to lose them just as quickly, with barely 5 million tuning in by season’s end. SIGN UP FOR THE THINK WEEKLY NEWSLETTER HERE This drop was due largely to the show’s initial determination to stay tied into the big screen Marvel series. Seemingly inspired by shows like “Mad Men,” “S.H.I.E.L.D.” attempted a slow burning plot that would pay off once “Captain America: Winter Solider” arrived in theaters in the final weeks of the show’s first season. But a show that runs 22 episodes cannot spend most of its time meandering. The last four episodes of the season were fantastic, once “Winter Soldier” revealed that half the characters in “S.H.I.E.L.D.” were actually evil H.Y.D.R.A. sleeper agents. But many viewers had already tuned out, and, despite the show getting better with every season, the ratings never recovered. Since then, “S.H.I.E.L.D.,” and all the other Marvel TV series that followed in its wake, have stridently insisted they are completely separate from the movies. While this didn’t help the multiple Netflix series that followed, it did allow the ABC series to experiment with storylines. Coulson, for instance, was a character killed off on the big screen and but resurrected for TV. It worked for the show, but it was also one of the reasons the “Avengers" sequel, “Age of Ultron,” didn't want to include the S.H.I.E.L.D. characters. It seems director Joss Whedon was not happy his one death didn’t stick. Freed from caring about what happened to the Infinity Stones or anything else the big screen Marvel Studios was cooking up, the show linked Coulson’s mystery to a completely different aspect of the comics, tying it into technology invented by the alien species known as the Kree, a notorious set of comic book villains whom “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Captain Marvel” later also included in their plots. The series also figured out how to use the too often overlooked “Inhuman” characters from the Marvel comics, people with mutations that give them superpowers, not unlike the X-Men. The big screen MCU still hasn’t been able to make these characters work. The latest season of S.H.I.E.L.D. continues this trend. The last two seasons have seen the agents living in alternate realities created by artificial intelligence and time traveling into the future and back again. The current mission focuses on rescuing lost member Leo Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) who is frozen in space somewhere. Meanwhile the rest of the team, now lead by Alphonso "Mack" MacKenzie (Henry Simmons) and Quake (Chloe Bennet), is still trying to adjust to the loss of Coulson, who has finally died for good this time. Or so everyone insists. Actor Clark Gregg, who has been the heart of the show since the beginning, is still part of the cast, so obviously the mysteries aren’t over. Along the way, “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” discovered how to balance the desire for prestige, TV-length stories with a 22-episode broadcast season, separating it into three “pods” of seven to eight episodes, which formed a larger whole starting in season three. It also weathered several corporate shake-ups as ABC attempted to get out from under a pile of poorly rated Disney pet projects, including another MCU spinoff, “Agent Carter.” (The direct “S.H.I.E.L.D.” spinoff, “Marvels Most Wanted” never made it out of the pilot stage.) Rumors were “S.H.I.E.L.D.” would be canceled after season four, but Disney executives mandated it had to stay, with a resulting season five that was both critically praised and which saw streaming numbers rise. In the wake of Netflix canceling all six of its Marvel TV series in rapid succession, Marvel TV is going to try tospin off more shows from the “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” series — just not on ABC. “Marvel’s Ghost Rider,” based on the Robbie Reyes version of the Ghost Rider character, has been greenlit for the 2019-2020 TV season on Hulu. Joining it on Hulu will be the new “Marvel’s Helstrom;” and the streaming platform already hosts the popular teen soap, “Marvel’s Runaways.” With Disney owning 60 percent of Hulu to Comcast’s 40 percent (and Comcast now in talks to sell that portion to Disney as well), Marvel TV is far less likely to get pushback about Hulu renewals than it did at ABC. The decision to turn “S.H.I.E.L.D.” into a summer series makes sense for ABC, since it does well in streaming numbers, if not with live-same day viewership. A summer start also means there’s less competition for the latter, and it also reduces the episode count from 22 to a Netflix-like 13 installments, making it less expensive to produce. ABC has even gone so far as to greenlight a seventh season for next summer. This means “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” will stay on ABC through 2020. However, it will continue to remain an outlier and chances are the little show that could may not last into the next decade.<doc-sep>
What you need to remember from season 5 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. MARVEL'S AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. - “Orientation (Part One)” - Coulson and the team find themselves stranded on a mysterious ship in outer space, and that’s just the beginning of the nightmare to come, when “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” returns for its highly anticipated fifth season with a special two-hour premiere, FRIDAY, DEC. 1 (8:00-10:01 p.m. EST), on The ABC Television Network. (ABC/Jennifer Clasen) CHLOE BENNET, CLARK GREGG, ELIZABETH HENSTRIDGE MARVEL'S AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. - “Orientation (Part One)” - Coulson and the team find themselves stranded on a mysterious ship in outer space, and that’s just the beginning of the nightmare to come, when “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” returns for its highly anticipated fifth season with a special two-hour premiere, FRIDAY, DEC. 1 (8:00-10:01 p.m. EST), on The ABC Television Network. (ABC/Jennifer Clasen) CHLOE BENNET, CLARK GREGG, ELIZABETH HENSTRIDGE Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Close this dialog window Streaming Options Season 5 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was a wild ride. It started in space in the future, and ended by almost ripping the Earth apart in the present. Ahead of the show’s return for season 6 on Friday night, here’s a quick refresher of everything that went down. Following up the season 4 finale’s cliffhanger, season 5 began with everyone but Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) being mysteriously abducted. They were then taken to a monolith, but not the black one that transported Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) to Hive’s home planet back in season 3. This monolith was white, and sent the team forward in time rather than space. As a result, they ended up on the Lighthouse, a space station floating around the desolate wreckage of the Earth and run by Kree colonists. The team found themselves separated and oppressed by this dystopian society. A Kree prince named Kasius (Dominic Rains) was in charge of the Lighthouse and became the villain of the first half of the season. But the team also found unlikely allies, such as Deke (Jeff Ward), a Peter Quill-like scavenger who was also secretly Fitz and Simmons’ future grandson. Enter Fitz. Since he wasn’t taken to the monolith, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s resident Scottish genius had to find his own way to the future. Old friend Lance Hunter (Nick Blood) returned to help break him out of a military facility run by the domineering General Hale (Catherine Dent). Then, using the prophetic drawings of Charles Hinton’s daughter Robin as a guide, Fitz teamed up with the alien Enoch (Joel Stoffer) and went into cryostasis for 74 years, eventually awakening in the era of the Lighthouse to help his friends. After a long struggle, the team killed Kasius and returned to their own timeline via the monolith — but not before finding out that Daisy (Chloe Bennet) was prophesied to be the Destroyer of the Worlds, whose earth-shaking powers were destined to rip the planet apart. General Hale became one of the major villains of the season’s back half. She was a former HYDRA operative and trained her daughter Ruby (Dove Cameron) to be the ultimate HYDRA leader. Ruby was a powerful enough assassin to slice off Yo-Yo’s hands, but the whole “future leader” thing? That didn’t quite work out. Having developed an obsession with Daisy, Ruby wanted to take her place as the Destroyer of Worlds. To that end, she tried to absorb a powerful substance called gravitonium that allows the user to manipulate gravity. But Ruby was too weak to control it, and met her end at the hands of a vengeful Yo-Yo. The world’s destruction hadn’t been averted yet. Glenn Talbot (Adrian Pasdar), recently awakened from a coma, absorbed the gravitonium and became Graviton. At the same time, Thanos’ invasion began (as seen in Avengers: Infinity War). Obsessed with his new powers, Graviton sought to uncover gravitonium reserves hidden under the Earth’s surface so that he could become the one to save the world from Thanos. Knowing that instead his efforts would destroy the planet and create the dystopian Lighthouse future, Daisy faced him as Quake. Using the Centipede serum, she enhanced her powers enough to fatally blast Graviton into space. Unfortunately, without the serum, Coulson (Clark Gregg) was done for. His transformation into Ghost Rider at the end of season 4 had burned out the last of the drug that was keeping him alive. So he passed on, leaving S.H.I.E.L.D. in the hands of his capable comrades.