First promo for "Agents of SHIELD" on ABC

Apparently aired last night:

Agent Coulson is back. And I’m trying to figure out who jumps out the window around the 12 second mark.

I was wondering if that was supposed to be Luke Cage, but I’m not so sure. The promo sounds like they’ll be looking for 2nd-tier supers, so maybe it’s a mutant they find along the way or something.

J. August Richards (Gunn from Angel) is supposed to appear in the pilot; that may be him. If so, Luke Cage could be a good match.

I would watch a show featuring Gunn as Cage.

IO9 is speculating that it’s Rage:

I’ll watch a show featuring Ming Na Wen as anything. Especially if Joss is producing. I really hope the studio gets it this time and doesn’t cancel the show because they don’t understand it.

I’ve been a fan of hers since 1988.

Have they explained how that’s going to work? The series appears to be set after the movie.

If the reports I’ve read are true, the explanation is pretty weak. (Spoilers, obviously.)

He got better. Everybody knows that the only person in the Marvel Universe that’s DeadDead is Uncle Ben.

Death by Origin. It’s the only certain killer in comic book worlds.

Dang it, I was hoping for a Coulson LMD.

My sense is that Whedon just really likes the actor*, and that when he was give the chance to made a SHIELD series, he insisted that it star him, plot contortions be damned.

  • Based on the fact that he was the only Avengers cast member to appear in Joss’s quickie version of Much Ado About Nothing.

I really hope the Avengers (other than Hawkeye and Widow) find out and tell Fury to go f himself.

They almost split after they found out about the weapons program…what will happen when they find out they can’t trust Fury further than not-Green Bruce could throw him?

It was obvious from the film. I called it in the theater. We see medics running into frame, and then we get a voiceover.

I don’t see how this is possibly a stretch or plot contortion, this is perfectly in character with what we know about Fury.

Yeah, but when Coulson finds out that Fury bloodied up his Captain America Trading Cards, which were in near-mint condition, he’s going to be pissed.

The short film Item 47, which was included with the Avengers Bluray, did suggest that Coulson was dead. That short featured Jesse Bradford and Lizzy Caplan as new characters and I wondered if they were being set up to be regulars on the T.V. show (which I’d have liked since I’d watch Lizzy Caplan read the phone book). Neither of them is mentioned in the Wiki article for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. nor are they mentioned on the imdb page.

The absence I find more surprising is Agent Sitwell who was portrayed by Maximiliano Hernández in Thor, The Avengers, the short films The Consultant and Item 47, as well as the upcoming Captain America: The Winter Soldier. He’s well established in the movie canon yet the actor doesn’t have the movie star gravitas to say no to a T.V. show were it to be offered.

The Wiki article does note the possibility of Cobie Smulders making the occasional appearance as Agent Hill.

Gwen Stacy? Too Soon?

Agreed. Complaining that the method of resurrection is “lame” when the movie practically spelled it out for us is completely missing the point.

It’s also very easy to fan- (or officially)wank. They just put Coulson into stasis until they could repair the damage, which turned out to be a lot less than it looked like because of the supernatural nature of Loki’s staff.

Easy peasy.

I don’t think that’s actually the explanation they’re going to use. I think that that rumor just started as a corruption of what we saw Fury actually do in The Avengers.