Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Cast & Key People
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Our Review
The show that outlived its movie tie in and grew into its own strange, excellent thing. Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) returns from the dead to run a small team of specialists. Daisy/Quake’s hacker to-heroine arc (the show’s long game protagonist), the Fitz-Simmons science twins whose love story survives torture, time, and space, investigating the post-Avengers world’s strange cases.
The first half season is a network procedural trudge building to Winter Soldier‘s HYDRA reveal, the midseason pivot that saved the show. By seasons 2-3 it’s doing long game Marvel (the Inhuman… the Terrigen outbreak, the secret war arcs), season 4 delivers a triple run of Ghost Rider, LMDs, and the Framework (a virtual reality Hydra utopia, one of the best Marvel TV stretches), and seasons 5-7 (time travel, space, a chronologically baroque final victory) got weirder and more confident every year. Outliving the movies’ continuity became its superpower.
Verdict: Watch it, push through the first ten episodes; the payoff run is one of TV’s great mid series transformations.
