Marvel Agents of SHIELD

[Miller]

@Prof.Pepperwinkle

Well, the movieverse does have LMDs as Tony Stark references it near the start of the Avengers, when he’s trying to avoid Coulson.

I’m not sure if Stark was referencing a real thing, or just making shit up to be a smart ass in that scene.

@sachertorte

My minor gripe is that they made a big deal about that guy being “level 6” and that being promoted to “level 7” meant he could now know that Coulson was alive.

And now Coulson is running around and all kinds of people who are clearly not “level 7” know he is alive.

Level 6 means they let you know what really happened on the helicarrier, including Coulson being stabbed. Level 7 means you know Coulson survived being stabbed. Level 5 means you never knew anything happened to Coulson in the first place.

If that’s too much of a stretch, Coulson’s revival was in the process of being set to a lower security clearance in anticipation of his new team taking the field, but the paper work hadn’t cleared yet in the first episode.

@Cayuga

I don’t understand all this feverish speculation about the nature of Coulson.

We never saw him die. We only heard Fury tell the others he had died — and Agent Hill admitted it was done to draw the Avengers together.

No, we definitely see him die. Before Fury calls it in, he has a scene with Coulson where he stops breathing in the middle of a line, and stares fixedly into the distance without blinking. He’s very much dead at that moment.

[Maus_Magill]

@gonzoron

Because being in Hoboken when you think you’re in Tahiti is not the sort of thing that requires an ominous “He must never know…”

Have you ever been to Hoboken?

[Telemark]

@Maus_Magill

Have you ever been to Hoboken?

I spent a week in Hoboken one night…

[Prof.Pepperwinkle]

@Cayuga

I don’t understand all this feverish speculation about the nature of Coulson.

We never saw him die. We only heard Fury tell the others he had died — and Agent Hill admitted it was done to draw the Avengers together.

Coulson said he was dead for 8 seconds and then revived. I believe him.

Then he says he was sent to Tahiti for R&R. Clearly there’s something about that stretch that is being kept from him — apparently that he wasn’t really in Tahiti. But that was after he was revived on board the helicarrier.

What reason is here to think he’s a robot or a Howard Stark experiment or anything else other than what he thinks he is?

Because we (or at least some of us) have a long, long history of comic book superhero geekery. What’s posted here is actually fairly tame. For instance, no one’s pointed out that the SHIELD comic book stories started out in Strange Tales magazine, which it shared with Dr. Strange, Marvel’s Sorcerer Supreme. And Coulson keeps saying Tahiti is a MAGICAL place…

[silenus]

Or the use of “magical” could be setting up Joss’ introduction of the Scarlet Witch in the next Avengers movie.

[tripthicket]

@silenus

Or the use of “magical” could be setting up Joss’ introduction of the Scarlet Witch in the next Avengers movie.

Not a bad theory. Last I heard it, and as I understood it, Wanda’s power was altering probabilities. What are the odds that Supervillain #1’s raygun will malfunction? poof Now it’s 100%! What are the odds that the floor will collapse under Monster #1? You guessed it: poof 100%. What are the odds that a deceased Coulson will spontaneously resurrect, even hours after death? Fury: “Get the Witch in here!” poof Coulson now heads up a new team of agents…

[Lightray]

Wanda’s power was originally probability control. She was trained by Agatha Harkness to control it, and ended up learning “chaos magic”. Since writers never could keep straight what Wanda’s mutant powers could actually do, everything she did became “chaos magic”, too. During A vs. X, Wanda’s “chaos” powers opposed the Phoenix force.

And now, finally, her mutant power seems to be “chaos magic” of some sort – her son*, Wiccan, basically has magic powers, and is said to have inherited her power.

All of which is way too complicated to go into for Avengers II. Her powers will be genericized. Since mutants are part of the X-Men IP, I’m guessing she’ll be shifted over to wholly being a magician of some sort.

• It’s complicated. Comics, everybody.

[JSexton]

@Cayuga

What reason is here to think he’s a robot or a Howard Stark experiment or anything else other than what he thinks he is?

Because that’s how storytelling works. They set up a mystery about it, with Hill’s ominous statement. There is a reason to write that in, and it’s unlikely for the reason to be simply a big fake out. (OK, it’s Whedon, so it’s possible, but it doesn’t feel like it.) The payoff for that mystery needs to be worth the setup and keeping it HIDDEN (but with references!) for multiple episodes. Therefore, it’s something fairly big and important, and the reveal of it will impact the plot. Simply being dead for a while doesn’t really do that.

[SuperNelson]

@Cayuga

What reason is here to think he’s a robot or a Howard Stark experiment or anything else other than what he thinks he is?

Think of it as Chekhov’s Vacation. In Tahiti. It’s a Magical Place.

[silenus]

I’m going to call it now, just in case: Joss pulls a fast one and the eventual payoff to the whole bit will be

Coulson took a vacation and rehabbed in Tahiti. Maybe he got laid. That’s it. Total misdirection - there is no there there.

[aNewLeaf]

Rewatched the first episode- I think FitzSimmons is telepathic and they don’t know it yet.

[Little_Nemo]

@silenus

I’m going to call it now, just in case: Joss pulls a fast one and the eventual payoff to the whole bit will be

Coulson took a vacation and rehabbed in Tahiti. Maybe he got laid. That’s it. Total misdirection - there is no there there.

I’ll admit that would be funny.

[Bozuit]

We have threads for each episode too. I’m not sure what the standard is here, but can we use one or the other?

[aNewLeaf]

I plan to use all the threads.

My best ongoing Coulson Hypothesis:

[spoiler] He’s immortal. Not like an Asgardian, more like Lazarus Long, his cells don’t age due to random mutation.
He really did die on teh helicarrier, for a few seconds. And if he’d been anywhere with a less-awesome medical team he would have stayed dead. But they patched the hole in his heart (the physical one) and sent him off to Magical Tahiti for rehab. Rehab in a SHIELD facility is more or less like rehab on Tellus Tertius, there’s a lot of naked women sunbathing. It’s a magical place.

The show then is about the metaphorical hole in his heart.
We’re going to see Coulson Can Wait plus The Many Loves of Philip Coulson with a bit of Touched By a Coulson.

[/spoiler]

[glee]

Just like in St. Elsewhere’s final episode , the whole thing is Coulson’s dream just before he dies. :eek:
And Coulson previously went to Tahiti on holiday, so that gets included.

[silenus]

Nah. Joss wouldn’t do that to us.
Mainly because we see him at conventions and would spit at him if he did.

[aNewLeaf]

@glee

Just like in St. Elsewhere’s final episode , the whole thing is Coulson’s dream just before he dies. :eek:

Oh, I said that too. Two votes now for “dying dream Coulson”!!

The series will end with him telling Fury “use the cards… they’re vintage”

[Intergalactic_Gladiator]

@aNewLeaf

Oh, I said that too. Two votes now for “dying dream Coulson”!!

The series will end with him telling Fury “use the cards… they’re vintage”

Or even:

“use the cards… they’re vintage. But try not to ruin them.”

[WordMan]

How Agents of SHIELD's ragtag crew will become a family

FYI - Interesting interview with one of SHIELD’s showrunners, Jeffrey Bell (what’s his relationship to Jed Whedon + wife with interesting name?)…

A couple of quotes - kinda spoilery (stepping back and looking at what’s playing out) so proceed at your own risk:

One of the things we’re doing with Coulson, specifically, is: Here’s a guy who’s always been a company man who’s always toed the line. And then he died in the Avengers and he came back — and we know from the first episode that there are people within SHIELD who know that something else happened. And suddenly, we have a question of what happens to the company man when the company has been keeping secrets from him. [This secret, which], over the course of the season, comes out in stages is one of the ways we’re dealing with the question you’re asking about.

and

So I think along the same line, there’s a certain paranoia with a government that can’t cooperate. There’s a government that’s shutting down because they don’t agree. I think any time you have a large institution whether it’s SHIELD. or the C.I.A. or the F.B.I… It was weird to write Alias and go, “Hey, the C.I.A., we’re the heroes.” It’s weird. And so we tried not to do that, but to say “Sydney Bristow is a hero and she does this stuff.” Sometimes, she was in conflict with the agents she was with and other times not. Its not so much that we’re trying to say that SHIELD. is good or bad but I think when you have a giant corporation that has the kind of power and secrecy that it does, there’s opportunities to tell all types of stories. And the thing about us being our little small “bus group” is we can be the warm friendly version of that when we need to be. But if we need to call in the big guns, because something truly terrible happens, we have them in our back pocket.

So that’s how the Flying Bus Team fits - a small group of good guys who may regard SHIELD or parts of it as the bad guys. And the Truth About Coulson™ will likely be part of the forming of a rift…

[AtomicDog]

Tonight’s episode: Sunfire?