I think at the end of the day, I feel bad for Agents of SHIELD.

A show that was partially spawned into existence because the fans got so attached to a minor, pseudo joke, background character killed in the first Avengers movie that they filled out petition after petition to bring him back. Because this is more or less comics baby, nobody stays dead (except… actually everyone who made up that list has come back in one way or another so… no one). So, they obliged, and instead of making it a one off, or letting it do its own thing from the start, they chose to tie it into the mainline MCU continuity. A choice that would become… complicated.

(One of these days I’ll probably do a whole series about my various MCU thoughts and opinions, but for now, let’s focus on this as our taste tester)

For those who don’t remember, the season one pitch of Agents of SHIELD was: Agent Phil Coulson, freshly back from the dead, leads an elite, if offbeat,  team into the field to handle all the interstellar/odd/seemingly mundane with an underbelly ordeals when the supers can’t. Sure, there are references to the movies: Maria Hill and Nick Fury appear in cameos in the first two episodes, one of the first major overarching cases is dealing with another attempt to make super soldiers using a cocktail of things that includes gamma radiation (like what made the Hulk) and the Extremis formula from Iron Man 3. Also there are two whole cases dealing with Asgardians and one of them is implied to have been the result of the events of Thor: The Dark World. The MCU is there, just off screen.

And, while I’ll cop to being in the possible minority about this, I liked this pitch. I love working with and playing around in, for lack of a better word, the mundane people who have to work for these big organizations in otherwise spectacular worlds. It felt like playing in the metaphorical gutter space of a comic. And it was a compelling case of the week style storytelling in a superhero world. The cast of characters were fun and interesting, and I was excited to watch them bounce off each other as we explored new locales, fought evil, and bonded as a team!

Then the MCU blew up its whole premise.

Now, some would argue that the writers of Agents of SHIELD knew all along that Captain America: The Winter Soldier was coming. I think they’re sort of wrong, but that’s not the point.

Again, for those who need a refresher course, The Winter Soldier said “hey, HYDRA (fictional nazis) have been inside SHIELD all along and we have to stop them from usurping the entire organization and in the process dismantle SHIELD entirely.” And all Agents of SHIELD can do is go “okay, well… shit. Who on our team has been HYDRA all along?”

There options were:

1. The fan favorite the show was built around
2. A pair of scientists with no prior field experience before the show and are Pack Bonded, Do Not Separate
3. Two women of color (one our point of view character with no prior ties to the organization and the other an in-org retired field agent played by the beloved Ming-Na Wen)
4. The white special ops guy who, even from episode one, has been described to some extent as the only bullet you’ll ever need

You go with option four. Nevermind the fact that it craters one of the show’s best dynamics (even if you don’t ship them in a fan capacity, Skye/Daisy and Ward in the early seasons are magnetic to watch, Chloe Bennet and Brett Dalton both have incredible chemistry with each other), the writers want their cake and eat it too by introducing the idea that he might’ve actually just been brainwashed with abuse and torture from a stagering young age and then have him get involved in Way Worse Shit!

Anyway, you’re starting to see why a lot of people left after season one or early into season two, including myself. To the show’s credit, they do try to find their footing again and in the process end up with some Truly Wackadoo (technical term) places. Even getting to the Darkholm before Wandavision did.

But that wasn’t what a portion of the audience came to the show for. We could get these over the top storylines anywhere. The feeling of being more grounded in the grind of trying to keep an operation like this runninging when there aren’t big, climactic superhero battles at the end of every season.

In a different version of the timeline, the answer to “how do we continue the show as is while maintaining the illusion of canon compliancy” would be to make the team the Sole Survivors, no one bothered to go after one little strike team with only two and a half real combatants doing what some would perceive as menial research. Have them still trying to fulfill their mandate without SHIELD’s resources. You could theoretically still have Ward groomed to be HYDRA by Garrett and then just have him defect, have it not work, let him say no.

But that’s just wishful thinking.

By having to make this show canon compliant to the rest of the MCU, it had to carve chunks off and mutate itself into not being the show audience originally came for. And, because the MCU at that time hadn’t really decided to integrate the shows into the mainline movie-verse, most of its compliance wasn’t rewarded with anything substantial. 

All for it to be declared non-canon in an official reference book, which is some ironic hilarity that I can’t help but giggle about.