AGENTS OF SHIELD
Strap yourselves in. Agents Of sHIeLD is heading to the stars in its fifth season. Tara Bennett escapes Earth’s gravity with the showrunners
Phil… in… space! Yes, Agent Coulson and the rest of Marvel’s TV superspies are heading to the stars in the show’s latest season.
s pace... the final frontier. these are the voyages of agent phil coulson. Wait, what? no, we aren’t mixing up our sci-fi dramas. the fourth season finale of Agents of SHIELD tipped us the unexpected cosmic locale for this year’s run of adventures, after all. remember that oh-so-tantalising episode tag after coulson and company got rounded up by a mysterious group who seem to have assigned phil to work on a space station?
coulson’s intrepid but beleaguered agents spent season four locking horns with government types out to rid the world of inhumans (including Daisy Johnson), ferreting out life Model Decoys and even working alongside occult comic book icon Ghost rider. now the inky black void awaits the team, and executive producers/showrunners Jed Whedon and Maurissa tancharoen are giddy about showing viewers what the new environment will bring out of their ensemble.
“this is a new journey that we are taking the audience on right alongside with our characters,” tancharoen tells SFX about the season opener, which picks up right from the tag. “there’s some fun to be had in the discovery happening simultaneously, for both our characters and the audience. it’s a new version of things that we’ve never done before on the show.”
Whedon continues, “We blew up our base, and we blew up the public perception of shielD, especially of Daisy, at the end of the season. they are going to have to find a new place to hide. trying to avoid capture from those who are against them is part of it. that threat is still real and unresolved. We have a lot of threads left hanging about the people who wanted our people dead, but also wanted them destroyed, and have succeeded at that. What is the fallout of that? the team went into that diner at the end of ‘World’s end’ assuming they would all go to jail. Whether or not that’s true, we’ll see, but they’re still being hunted. it will make the job of constantly saving the world, as they do, a lot harder.
“We’re in our fifth year with these people and our audience knows them well. now it’s just about putting them in stickier situations, and seeing where we can go that feels new, and causes them to have emotional reactions.” and while space may seem a reach, Whedon says there’s solid logic in getting there. “We like the fact that our tagline when we started was ‘not all heroes are super’ and we expanded from that,” he says. “We started with a very grounded scene with people with no powers. in year two, we let Daisy become an inhuman. and so we slowly expanded from a team of humans to super-humans, but who were still grounded in the world of science. last year, with the release of Doctor Strange, we could expand into the world of magic and strange phenomena, and that allowed us to bring in Ghost rider which was following in the footsteps of the cinematic universe. this year with Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 2 coming out and the expansion of that universe, we felt like ‘Why not go to space?’”
the setting also opens the door for the return of the Kree, who originally engineered the inhumans and whose blood revived a very dead post-Avengers coulson. they’ll be just one of the antagonists the team tangle with this year. “We will have some new villains that you will recognise from the comics, and we’ll have some old familiar faces that you’ll be happy to see return,” Whedon teases. “our antagonists have gotten more and more complicated over the years. obviously, hydra is a clear bad guy, and easy to fight. But what we’re facing now is this push and pull about the perception of inhumans, and what it is to be different, which is topical,” he says with a smile.
“it seems like shielD is always fighting for every person’s right to live with happiness and dignity. Yet there are persons against that, and they are coming from within and from people they trust and it’s becoming much more of a grey area because the people who are fighting inhumans believe they are trying to save humanity. they’re not in it for the wrong reasons. if someone really believes they are doing good, that’s a much more grey area because if they believe in that, you have to find a way to save both humanity and inhumanity. i think our antagonists couldn’t be more complicated to date, but they become even more personal.”
for fans who loved the Ghost rider arc in season four, fear not. as it turns out portal jumps or space locales aren’t exactly deterrents to a spirit of vengeance. “We’re happy that he exists in our world,” Whedon enthuses. “i think it’s safe to say we haven’t seen the last of him. We’re not going to be telling Ghost rider stories right away but that doesn’t mean he’s not in the mix. last we saw him, he walked into a portal into another dimension so at any point he could walk out of one.”
in the meantime, Whedon and tancharoen are eager for audiences to invest in Daisy/ Quake’s evolution after her heroic choices in the season four finale. the pair acknowledge the moment where she stepped up to assuage fitz’s guilt was a turning point for her. “after a year where she started out not wanting to be anywhere near [shielD], and pretty sure that everyone around her gets hurt, she ends the season having to go in the framework with only one friend, having to pull everyone out and in the end saying, ‘no, we’re a team.’ she’s no longer doubting her place in the world and is accepting her role, a little bit, as a leader.”
“it’s very clear over the course of four seasons that coulson sees her as someone with the potential to be a leader and he’s been grooming her to be that this whole time,” adds tancharoen. “she stepped up to the plate at the end of last season, and we will continue along that path this season. and perhaps the why of it all is something we will address this year.”
the middle of season five will also see Agents Of SHIELD reach its 100th episode, a milestone for any show that manages to make it to that number alive. the showrunners are tight-lipped on the episode’s specifics, but tancharoen does share that “the goal will be the recognition of our own mythology we’ve
Daisy is no longer doubting her place in the world
developed over the past five seasons. When we first started, people were hoping, or expecting us, it to be something that was directly tied to the [Marvel studios] movies. i feel like over the course of the years, we’ve solidly created our own world, with our own characters that have merit. if anything, the story for our 100th will definitely be a way of celebrating that.”
Where the story goes after that is also a mystery as the show’s renewal each year has been far from a given for the production team. five years is a great run for any series, but the duo says they haven’t designed this year’s arc with closure in mind. “our approach to every season is we are aware there is a possibility we will have to tie it up,” tancharoen says frankly. “it’s always a mystery to us until we get that phone call that says we’re picked up. Going into our fifth season, we are fully aware that we are in a very fortunate situation that not many shows make it this far, especially these days.”
Whedon adds, “i think you can tell from the last season, we were definitely shooting for a season five as we left some serious cliffhangers. We’re always ready to tell more. it’s a lot of story to keep interesting but now we feel like we have a lot of great stuff in mind and are so excited about this season. i think we’ll approach the end cautiously optimistic. What we don’t want to do is have the series end without it being satisfying. so we’ll try to build it two ways. if it feels like it’s the end, we’ll make a satisfying end, but we’ll keep going until they tell us to stop.” tancharoen laughs, “Yes, until they throw us out of our offices!”