The 12 Best Love Stories in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
By Lacy Baugher
Adrianne Palicki and Nick Blood in “Agents of SHIELD”. (Photo: ABC)
Bobbi Morse and Lance Hunter
In the Marvel comics, Bobbi Morse is a SHIELD agent named Mockingbird. She’s pretty awesome in her own right, for starters. But she’s also very romantically involved with Hawkeye. To the surprise of no one, Agents of Shield didn’t exactly go with this storyline when they introduced Bobbi as a character. It’s not like the movie corner of the MCU was really going to lend the show Jeremy Renner. So, with no actual Hawkeye to work with, the show instead decided to give Bobbi’s storyline a bit of a makeover. They introduced a re-envisioned version of comics character Lance Hunter. And made him into Bobbi’s ex-husband, giving the two a complicated, dramatic history together.
This is the kind of thing – using a character to basically take the place of a different, more popular one in a story – that could go very, very wrong if handled badly. But Agents of Shield managed to make a couple that probably shouldn’t have worked at all into one whose exit from the series left us all in tears. The on-again, off-again pairing had great chemistry together. And whether they were mission partners, significant others or something in between, their relationship was uniquely compelling. Sure they snarked at each other constantly. They argued pretty much all the time. They were incredibly co-dependent. But it was always obvious just how much Bobbi and Hunter loved each other, no matter how messy things between them got. And the two of them have plenty of history together, that we’ve still yet to see explored, as well as trust issues for days.
The former AoS duo was supposed to get a spinoff back in 2016. Called Marvel’s Most Wanted, it would focus on the pair’s post SHIELD adventures. Unfortunately, ABC did not pick up the series last year. So Bobbi and Hunter are currently offscreen somewhere within the world of the MCU. But maybe we’ll see them return to Agents of Shield – or some other Marvel property – in the near future. Here’s hoping!