What to Expect in Agents of SHIELD Season 3
Okay, we’re finally days away from the Season 3 premiere of Agents of SHIELD where I have to say I honestly didn’t think we’d make it this far. I think what makes it worse is Marvel’s spoilerphobic tendencies that apparently extend to television. Once again, we’re in the dark about a lot of things beyond vague plot details about the numerous plot lines that they have to address sooner or later. Either way, there are a few things we can expect from the new season.
Since Marvel does feel okay talking about this, I’ll start with the Secret Warriors. If they have an entire poster devoted to it, the team’s bound to play a role even if someone could have guessed from the folder Easter egg in the finale. However, the executives have been pretty tight-lipped about the team beyond the fact that they will happen. Bottom line is, don’t hold your breath for anything to be even brought up until the winter finale. Sure, they might drop a reference here or there, but the show has to save something for people to keep watching. A superhero team, if it can fit in the budget, has to fall under “big finale spectacle.”
That being said, I’m still wondering on the kind of team we could get. They’d likely be recently turned Inhumans (or NuHumans…I’m calling them Inhumans) instead of super-powered offspring (obviously), but that doesn’t answer who they’ll be. I’d like more of the comic characters to appear, but this show loves its original characters. I won’t be surprised if a few of the members turn out to be newbies as well, though I still hold out for Jerry Sledge and Yo-Yo Rodriguez in terms of practicality. Why go out of your way to create new backgrounds and powers when you have the rights to some of the easiest powers to portray on TV? Then again, if Mike Peterson is at all an option, screw the Secret Warriors and put him in front. Heaven knows they’ll be a lot of bodies to press.
That doesn’t even count the characters they actually announced. We’ve got Constance Zimmer as the finally-named Rosalind Price, Head of ACTU (not to be confused with the sill-ignored SWORD or HAMMER). We’ve got Matt Willig as the Inhuman Apocalypse Lash. We’ve got other random characters that are honestly hit-or-miss for me in Andrew Howard as an agent named Banks and Juan Pablo Raba as a new Inhuman named Joey Gutierrez. I could probably spend a paragraph each talking about what their roles could mean for the new season, but after both previous season openers, there’s almost a fifty percent chance that some of them will be dead by episode 3. The only one guaranteed to last past that is Lash, and, considering SHIELD’s track record with season villains, it doesn’t look good for him past episode 10 or 11.
I am curious about Lash though. He has an only-the-strong-survive mentality when it comes to Inhumans which definitely contrasts with the ideal trying-to-save-everyone mentality of Coulson and Daisy Johnson (That’s her name now apparently). There are still some questions though, like would he be a new Inhuman or was he just a guy waiting until his time came to rise to the surface? Is he part of his own tribe of Inhumans or was he one of those guys in Afterlife who was probably rejected for Terrigenesis in the first place for being obviously sketchy? Either way, he’s going to hate SHIELD off the back and the random Inhumans even more, but the answers to those questions will determine what he wants.
It’s probably not a good thing that I waited this long to mention the actual main characters of the show, but I could have spent an entire other article describing what their positions are at this point. For starters, May and Simmons are still gone, never mind that one of them was eaten by a rock. Nothing’s known about when or how they’ll return except for the fact that they will come back. May has to because…come on. I’m not even going to try and guess how they bring Simmons back though. I’ll just throw out alien portal. I’ve seen that theory around, and I guess they could try to think about it.
Not to mention the fact that we now have two extra characters to work with now. I’m all for seeing more of Mack and his attitude and arms, but Lincoln is…there. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt since it took me fourteen episodes to get used to Hunter, but the fact that he’s a character further dividing the plot is already putting him low on my list, though admittedly not as low as Ward. The fact that they’re both main characters now protects them from the chopping board, so we might get some decent backstory and at least one more winning line from Mack.
Meanwhile, Bobbi will still be injured, and Fitz will be on the search for Simmons. Both of these are fairly predictable especially since we’ve seen very little of where they’re going. Like Simmons, I’m not going to touch Fitz’s plot until she comes back, but Bobbi’s different. She’s a biochemist herself in the comics, so I would love for them to touch on that if she is, or wants to be, out of the field after saying she “can’t do this anymore.” Of course, mark my words, no matter what she says or what she does, Bobbi will return to an action scene and not just because there may be a spin-off attached to it (please no). She begs to be moving, and to be called Mockingbird.
On the bright side, Quake’s officially a thing now with at least one scene in the opening episode to prove it. I’m not a fan of the name change, but the fact that we’ll be seeing more superheroics is almost worth it. It will be weird to see Hunter, Mack, and Daisy as the new field team even though that will probably last three episodes tops before something terrible happens. Either that or the Secret Warriors team develops faster than we’d think. While I actually would want someone to die by the end of this season, the less I talk about Ward and his new Hydra startup the better…unless it involves Daisy physically kicking his ass since she hasn’t had a chance with her new skills yet.
Bottom line is every season of SHIELD feels like a new kind of reboot. There’s nothing from the previous season that could possibly predict exactly what’s going to happen next. One other thing I guarantee will be me not knowing what could happen in the finale until the penultimate episode. On the other hand, I’m still psyched. It’s exciting to not know what happens next, even though that makes this a lousy recap. It would probably help if I just post the preview again.
