No. No. NO! They better not trot this sad little ‘twist’ out. No one wants to see May go into uncomfortable Mama mode. Character development is fine, but this. . .HELL NO!
You don’t go far enough : Skye is Agents Coulson and May’s love-child 
Hey, comic book children, gotta love 'em. Skye is actually the daughter of Nick Fury and a gender-reversed clone of Bruce Banner, born in the 27th Century. and sheltered in the Forgotten Zone until the Chitauri broke Dr. Strange’s Silver Ankh of Maginoor, causing a cascade effect. Or that may be universe 19,998.
Have we ever met “the cellist”, who’s supposed to be Coulson’s girlfriend? Maybe she and Coulson are Skye’s parents?
Personally, I think she’s the clone of the daughter of Franklin Richards and Jean Grey from a parallel future dimension created by Mephisto.
After all, you shouldn’t overlook the most obvious answer just because it’s so simple.
You just made me realize that the entire Summers + Richards family tree is tied up by the X-Men and Fantastic Four IP – there really isn’t anyone left in the Marvel universe for them to put into a SHIELD show!
The Dating game is kind of well know for that, IIRC. From wikipedia:
The Carpenters? WTF?
I think it’s best if people stop evoking Joss Whedon when it comes to just about everything with this show. He signs off on the scripts–THAT’S IT. He doesn’t write, he doesn’t do anything else on the show.
While that is true, it’s also true for other Whedon shows in the past, so it’s not really a valid counterargument.
He didn’t actually WRITE for the majority of the other stuff either, but the same re-use of character archetypes and actor archetypes (so much so that he’s known for having a “stable” of actors that he hits up for new projects) is likewise present in his choices for writing and directing crew. That means that the same themes and overarching concerns with character development and plotlines - that “feel” of a show - even down to something like the snappy comebacks or unintelligible patter - are going to be showing up just like they always do, even if he never writes a word of it himself.
I think Joss’ involvement does appear to be somewhat lower than it has been for past shows. For Buffy season one, he’s listed as having writer or story credits on five of twelve episodes (and also director credits on one of those episodes). For Firefly, he’s shown as having writer or co-writer credits on five of fourteen episodes (and director on three of those episodes).
For Agents, he’s only shown as having directed and been one of the writers for the first episode (out of eight with information so far).
(I like the show. I’m still watching it. I’m liking the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe, most certainly including the parts Joss Whedon has been directly responsible for, but also lots of other parts he hasn’t been directly involved in.)
:eek: That actually crossed my mind. But the only real ‘evidence’ to this is the actress is half Chinese and Ming-Na is Chinese 
It would answer some questions though, like why they wanted to bring her along despite her behaving badly last epesode.
And Coulson did look pretty stricken when he saw Skye’s orphanage sheet in the “what are you hiding” scene a few weeks back. Almost guilty…
Although to be fair, they’re working his character as such that even if it was unrelated to him personally, he’d feel guilty about it because he feels responsible for SHIELD fucking people’s lives up.
I never even thought about the poor cellist - I bet she’s not Level 7, so she thinks he’s dead. I wonder if he ever checks in on her with all the super-spy surveillance stuff. Poor Coulson.
I have no reason to think Clark Gregg knows the truth about what happened to his character, so I don’t judge his reactions in scenes with the overall big surprise.
Sorry, I was unclear:
The first part of my post was in answer to the posters upthread supposing that Coulson was Skye’s father and May was her mother. There was a scene where Coulson confronted Skye in his office and forced her to confess that she’s searching for her parents in SHIELD because there are SHIELD imprints on the redacted documentation she found. I was saying that he looked guilty/stricken when he saw the paperwork, but that he would likely have looked that way even if he wasn’t her father, because of how his character is turning out. That scene has nothing to do with Coulson’s own death/mysterious whatever from the Avengers movie.
The thought of Skye hacking SHIELD to find out info on her (presumably deceased or otherwise unfortunate) parents then made me think about the poor cellist that we learned Coulson was dating in the Avengers movie - and now she, like most others, thinks that Coulson was killed in New York during the battle there.
Sorry for being confusing.
ETA: Gregg has claimed several times that he DOES know - so unless he’s having everyone on, or they actually lied to him… I’m running on the presumption that the actor at least knows some of what’s up.
Before the season started, the publicity for the show did everything but send tiny airplanes into peoples’ living rooms to skywrite the words “NOTHING IN THE SHOW WILL HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH MARVEL EXCEPT FOR THE MOVIES IT IS A COMMERCIAL FOR”.
They said it over and over and over again. So why are people complaining that the show isn’t dragging in obscure bits of Marvel trivia that 95% of the viewing audience wouldn’t get? They made it the whole point of doing the show. What, you didn’t believe them? The only Marvel stuff will be tie-ins to new and upcoming movies. In fact, the next two weeks will be like that. But nothing else. The series exists to sell people on the Marvel universe of the Avengers movies.
That has nothing to do with whether the series is good or not. It’s passable at best. But its goodness or badness can’t be judged on how Marvel it is.
And I’ll bet that Joss Whedon has as much to do with the individual episodes as I do.
I saw something that really surprised me today. I was in the check-out line at Target and I saw Clark Gregg and Ming-Na Wen on the cover of TV Guide. And I was, quite frankly, shocked.
They still make TV Guide?
She had dumped him already anyway- sure Stark had made a sentimental plea to “keep love alive”, but Coulson was resigned to it being over.
If she had known him for any significant period of time, she already knew that his job would take him away for long periods at a time sometimes with no notice (perhaps why she broke up with him). There wouldn’t have been any public announcement about his death. All she would know would be that she hasn’t heard from him in quite sometime- which could easily be a combination of his demanding job and the fact that they had broken up.
I see know reason to believe that she had ever gotten any notice of his death. I also highly doubt we’ll ever hear anything about her again. The only reason she existed in the first place was to make Coulson a more fully human character for the audience so that his death would even sadder.
Actually, it’s not. I don’t remember which episode it was, but Jane Espensen (I think?) did a commentary track where she mentioned that even in the episodes where Joss didn’t have a credit, he would write lines or whole scenes. People would tell her that a line from one of her episodes was a favorite, and she would sadly have to admit that it wasn’t hers, it was Joss’s.
I don’t know if the same is true of SHIELD, but it was for at least a few of “his” past shows. It’s not unique to Joss, either. As I understand it, that’s common for a showrunner to do.
ETA: On top of that, there are Jed and Maurissa, his brother and sister-in-law, and Jeffrey Bell, who did a lot of Angel, who are doing a lot of the writing on this one too. “Joss Whedon” isn’t really one man (at least not anymore), it’s more of a brand, or a team.
Exactly. No one could possibly expect that a show called Marvel’s Agents of Shield would have anything to do with Marvel.
Why, if it actually had something to do with Marvel, the show would start with that comic-book-page-flipping intro that Marvel uses on all their media.
Who could possibly expect something Marvel-related, when they’ve done so much to disassociate the show from Marvel?
edit: Heck, thank goodness they didn’t toss in actual Marvel characters – like, say Scorch or Graviton – that would have really confused people!
I don’t think Scorch is actually a pre-existing Marvel character–though I do agree with you.
The show is losing the geek battle because it doesn’t “feel” like the Marvel universe–even an early version before super heroes became common. It needs to fix that so the marvel comic fans champion the show and make it seem like it is important–that will spill over to the regular viewers.