“Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD:” Let’s Not Bring Grant Ward Back

Agents of SHIELD can possibly bring Grant Ward back to reality in the form of an LMD. As much as we love Grant Ward, we don’t think it’s a good idea

Grant Ward is very dead.

Grant Ward is very dead on multiple occasions.

And yet, I still love every time he manages to pop up. Even name mentions get me, because he was such a good bad guy. He started Agents of SHIELD as your stock SHIELD agent, but then Captain America: The Winter Soldier happened, and our world got turned upside down. It was the best. Everything that followed came at a maddening pace with twists and turns fit for the twist the show gave us on Ward’s allegiances.

And I’m here to say: Let’s keep Grant Ward dead.

If you peruse some of FanSided’s other websites, then you may have caught Steve Lam’s article over at Bam Smack Pow about bringing Grant Ward back as an LMD, especially now that we’ve seen there is some semblance of his consciousness remaining in some form. It’s a very good possibility, especially if it’s this “better” version of Ward and not the Hydra/Hive one.

Image Courtesy of ABC for Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD

But that might not be the best idea for Agents of SHIELD.

Firstly, if you bring back Grant Ward, and you don’t do it correctly, there’s the potential to lose the character’s value. Everything he did before doesn’t quite stick, it lessens the impact of everything that came before. Since this will be a “better” version of him, do his prior actions still count?

Second, will all of our SHIELD compatriots really be cool with this? Think of how much Ward has done to all of them. Sure, Daisy, Simmons, Mace, and Coulson have seen this “good” version from the Framework, but will Mace and Coulson’s real minds remember anything from the Framework?

Real Coulson straight-up killed Ward all the way across the universe. Mace doesn’t know anything about the old Ward, so he can’t quite count. Ward literally dropped Fitz and Simmons out of the sky. It caused crazy brain damage to Fitz for half a season! And even though Daisy is okay with him in the Framework, she knows it’s not the actual Ward. The Hydra one. The crazy Hive one.

They already brought Ward back once, and it was him as a husk for Hive. It made sense, as he was a good host body for Hive on that planet and a great way to freak out our SHIELD agents. Bringing him back again, albeit in a different regard, still feels like it’s been done.

I love Brett Dalton. Everything he has brought to this iteration of Grant Ward works so well and is very much the SHIELD agent he should have been in the first place (you know, had he not been a double agent).

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But leave it alone. Let this good version of Grant Ward fade away with the Framework. And please, #NoWardRedemptionArc.