Here is a group who are stuck with each other, but would also die with each other, as they hide out in underground bunkers or their perpetually cloaked spy plane. It is this dynamic, established with a familiar snarky wit, that has allowed the characters to grow increasingly complex. Coulson is the father figure guiding her and their tightknit Scooby gang as they face down one imminent apocalypse after another. The overarching narrative has followed Daisy Johnson, AKA Quake, a young woman struggling to grasp her new identity in the wake of kick-ass super powers emerging in the second season. If anything, Agents of SHIELD has always felt more affinity with the 90s oeuvre of Joss Whedon: no surprise, since Whedon created the pilot, and the showrunners are his brother Jed and sister-in-law Maurissa Tancharoen, who collaborated with him on Dollhouse. While no one would deny that recent seasons have had their hokey moments – including an army officer transformed into one of the campest costumed villains since General Zod – its final legacy does not deserve to rest in a cluttered MCU dump truck alongside Iron Fist and The Defenders. Even cardboard heartthrob Grant Ward, as played by Brett Dalton, evolved into a nuanced, multi-faceted character.Ĭlark Gregg as Coulson with Henry Simmons as Alphonso Mackenzie. The pairing of Iain de Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge, as lab partners Fitz and Simmons, provided the kind of best friends-turned-lovers chemistry most romcoms would kill for. Clark Gregg’s everyman-hero Coulson became a televisual oasis of unruffled sense and decency while the real world was being overrun by incompetent narcissists. Part of that is down to central performances full of warmth and integrity. With every new phase, a descent into silliness beckoned yet, somehow, was kept at bay. Narratives expanded to take on any number of sci-fi tropes and genres, from biological warfare to AI to hell dimensions to grand space opera. Core characters were revealed to be treasonous villains. After a leaden opening gambit as an X-files-style procedural, the show got more enjoyable the more it appeared to over-reach. In an era when you couldn’t accuse Marvel of underselling anything, SHIELD has been one of the franchise’s forgotten gems. The writers’ approach to the ever-widening scope of adventures seems to be to shrug and say: if Doctor Who can get away with it, so can we.Īnd it works. Now, at the start of season seven, the team have beamed back in time to 1930s New York. What began as a spy operation, comprising a hacker, two scientists, and a couple of black-ops specialists, was now a band of intergalactic renegades protecting the Earth with a blend of superpowers and bionic limbs, not unlike the Avengers themselves. A couple of years ago, even its producers looked ready to walk away, with a fifth-season finale that offered endings all round.Īn unexpected, and much shorter, sixth season propelled the plot into deep space: a perfect symbol of SHIELD’s mission creep. But it lost profile amid the slew of series that followed: the classier Agent Carter, the cooler Jessica Jones, the more “adult” Punisher. The show that made a hero of the movies’ bit-part player Phil Coulson, a suit working at a shadowy men-in-black government division, received huge hype as the Marvel Comics Universe’s (MCU) first TV crossover. W hen Agents of SHIELD returns to UK screens on Friday for its seventh and final season, there will be plenty of casual Marvel watchers surprised to hear it is still going.
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