Absolutely NO Avengers spoilers here… or Agents Of SHIELD spoilers past S02E19 “The Dirty Half Dozen”
But for those who have seen Avengers: Age Of Ultron, and who also follow Marvel’s Agents Of SHIELD, is there a reason to wait for Avengers before continuing with Agents Of SHIELD?
Note open spoilers about Captain America: Winter Soldier and last season of SHIELD below…
The reason I ask is because of CA: Winter Soldier… If you’d continue watching Agents Of SHIELD before seeing the movie, you would have gotten a huge spoiler that Nick Fury wasn’t actually dead… a big plot point in the movie. While I’d love to watch this week’s Agents Of SHIELD (episode S02E20), burning a hole in my DVR, I probably won’t see Avengers till at least this weekend, and would rather wait than spoil something…
I just read today that the reason the movie gives very little attention to Agents is because of infighting. Apparantly Joss was upset with the t.v. series bringing Coulson back.
That seems highly unlikely, given that Coulson’s return in the show was Whedon’s idea to begin with. It sounds like the media is running with a (mis)quote from one of his AoU interviews, in which he expressed minor regret about bringing Coulson back in the context of watching the first Avengers film with his kids. With the benefit of hindsight, he admitted that he now feels like knowing that Coulson isn’t permanently dead takes some of the sting out of Coulson’s sacrifice in that film. He expressly does NOT shit on the show (he helped create it, after all) - it’s part of a larger discussion during the interview about the impermanence of death in the Marvel movies, and how Whedon (again, with the acknowledged benefit of hindsight) would prefer to let the dead lie if he could do it over again.
I suspect the reason the movie and the show are increasingly divorced has less to do with infighting and more to do with the show’s mediocre ratings. Marvel has a vested interest in making sure that their massive blockbuster films don’t rely on knowledge from a show that only a miniscule fraction of their audience actually watches.
I agree. It’s not the “Holy crap, it’s Hydra!” moment that Shield would have spoiled from CA, but they definitely give away a large chunk of the plot and a cool surprise moment.
Yes, there are references to the movie in the most recent episode of AoS. I’ve not seen the movie yet, so they were a bit jarring (there’s no real leadup in previous episodes and wedging them into the TV show’s timeline was fairly awkwardly done, IMO) and they do spoil at least one apparent major plot point in the film.
I disagree. Depending on one’s tolerance for spoilers, SHIELD has very light spoilers, and I didn’t find any ‘surprise’ moments in AoU, unless you’ve avoided every trailer and commercial. So if you’re the type who goes all rage-monstery over any tiny pseudo-spoiler, wait. It small spoilers that really don’t spoil anything don’t bother you, watch in any order you like.
The most recent AoS episode references AoU as more-or-less “well, that was dramatic, but now it’s over” without being specific at all. There is at most one tiny spoiler-ish element in AoS (and I honestly don’t think it’s that big a deal):
AoS sort-of explains where Nick Fury gets a helicarrier, after the implication they’d all been destroyed or decommissioned in the previous Captain America movie - it had been secretly but implausibly kept in reserve by Coulson, somehow, presumably using a magical supply chain comparable to what Gonzalez was using to preserve his carrier
…but that element isn’t really plot-critical, anyway, just a handy bit of deus-exing that could have been casually covered in any number of alternate ways. If anything, the movie’s use of the element weakens an ongoing plot element of AoS, in the sense of:
A SHIELD helicarrier plays a major and visible rescue role, yet after the events in Winter Soldier, SHIELD was supposed to be officially disbanded, forcing Coulson and company to operate underground and stuff. It’s unclear how the public is going to react to finding out that they were just lying low, and keeping major military assets in reserve
If you really want to keep in strict sequence, see episode 19 of AoS, then AoU, then episode 20, but the stories aren’t so closely intertwined that it’ll much matter.
Having seen “Scars” and Age of Ultron, I’d say the order doesn’t really matter. Yes, there is a reveal in AoU that is explicitly shown in “Scars”, but it was kind of cool knowing about the reveal going into the movie.
“Scars” is slightly more spoilery than the episode after Thor: The Dark World (where they were cleaning up the mess in London briefly) but far less spoilery than Winter Soldier.
To be absolutely pure, avoid “Scars” until you see the movie (which was great BTW) but the emotional impact isn’t lessened IMO either way.
Unfortunately, I think you’re right, and that this is a vicious circle of sorts. The best episodes of the show so far have been the crossover plot with ‘Captain America, Winter Soldier’. I for one wanted more tie-ins with the movies. It makes no sense for Fury to have come out of hiding with a freaking Helicarrier and not return as director of SHIELD, or at least have some explanation of it! It makes no sense that all that Ultron shit was going down over at least a couple of days or longer and Coulson’s team had NOTHING to do with trying to help.
Creating a shared universe for all the movies and shows has been something that has enriched all of them, and I think more crossovers would boost the ratings, but more and more Agents of SHIELD seems to be getting orphaned.
Two comments on that - as Tanbarkie said above, Marvel never, ever wants to get to the point where people even think you have to keep up with any TV show in order to watch the movies. So the movies will do what they want, and the TV shows will have to be happy with the crumbs. Two, the movies are filmed way, way before the TV show scripts are even written - AoU was filmed from Feb to August 2014. Even if they wanted to, it would be unbelievably difficult to really intertwine plots between the two. At best, the TV show producers/writers will get to see the movies before they’re actually released, and try to tie into them if they want, and pull in the occasional guest star, but there’s no way the producers of the TV shows will ever get input into the movies themselves.