Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD was at its best when it ignored the MCU

Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD was hindered by the larger MCU. When it finally broke free, it was able to become its own thing—and the show we deserved

The hype when Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD premiered really hurt it. Everyone came in expecting Marvel characters to pop in and out every other episode, and for the show to have tie-ins to the larger film universe.

For that first season, the show was more or less a procedural drama with cool technology and passing mentions of familiar-sounding comic book things. The hype almost killed it on arrival. Because it only gained traction once Captain America: The Winter Soldier premiered. When they could reveal that Grant Ward was Hydra the entire time. Then everything made sense and fell into place. Ward became such a good villain alongside Bill Paxton’s John Garrett.

The episodes that casually tied into the greater MCU weren’t necessarily a bad thing; they just seemed a little off. It was cool to see FitzSimmons cleaning up after the events of Thor: The Dark World, but it felt unnecessary and made you feel as though you had to go see the movie opening weekend or the episode would spoil it.

Marvel never seemed to care about tying the television shows into the movies. They didn’t even need to do it in a big grandiose way. The simplest example I always give: In Ant-Man when Darren Cross introduces some people from Hydra wanting to buy his shrinking tech, it could have easily been Brett Dalton’s Grant Ward standing there. The actors they used didn’t even have lines. It wouldn’t have made a difference, but Agents of SHIELD watchers would have had their glorious moment of it all tying together. To freak out in a dark movie theater in sheer excitement.

And when they finally did it in Avengers: Endgame, it made us Agent Carter fans absolutely lose our minds. Even the series finale’s minimal mentions to the MCU were fine (the form of time travel, Fitz’s casual name-drop of the Quantum Realm)—and that’s all it ever should have been. The shoe-horning of dropping Thanos’s name into things at the end of season 5 just felt weird.

Once Agents of SHIELD left behind the greater MCU, it really shone—and I don’t just mean ignoring Thanos’s snap for the last two seasons. Think of all of season four, when we were introduced to Gabriel Luna’s Ghost Rider. When life model decoys finally became a thing. When they lived the back-half of the season inside the Framework.

We got deeper cuts from the comics. Robbie Reyes’s Ghost Rider was a welcome addition. Aida became Madame Hydra. Jeffrey Mace became The Patriot. We even had a look at a version of Hellfire. Heck, the show did a better version of Inhumans than Marvel’s Inhumans!

None of these things mattered in the grand scheme of the Cinematic Universe. Agents of SHIELD got dark and weird and ignored the MCU and it was for the better.

And it never should have been this way, to begin with.

Marvel TV is changing once more. Everything has migrated to Disney+ (give or take Marvel’s Helstrom on Hulu) and we’ve been told they’ll need to be watched in order to follow along with the greater MCU. Everything else has been canceled (sorry, Cloak and Dagger).

We can only hope Marvel has learned their lesson from their treatment of Agents of SHIELD. Because it could have been that good from the start.