[  FAN SUBMITTED ARTICLE  ]

What to expect from Agents of SHIELD

The Agents of SHIELD TV show is set to begin in a few short months. We’ve already seen the trailer with alien technology and a mysterious character played by J. August Richards jumping out of fiery buildings, but everybody’s screaming for more. Fans have speculated that Agents of SHIELD will follow a Buffy-style “villain of the week” format, building up to a larger “big bad” or some kind of conspiracy. Superheroes and Aliens are all around the MCU—the Rising Tide blog, Iron Patriot and Avengers toys show that. So what can we expect in such an ambitious Marvel show? Let the unbridled speculation begin!

• Last year Marvel released The Avengers Prelude: Fury’s Big Week comic series showing what happened before, during and after the Marvel movies before The Avengers came out. Towards the end of the series, Agent Coulson is walking into SHIELD headquarters and passes a series of rooms with interesting things inside. At the end of the issue, Coulson proceeds to testing the Destroyer gun he later uses in The Avengers.
  • We first see Whiplash’s harness. During his battle with Ivan Vanko, Tony Stark destroyed the bootleg ARC Reactor, and it looks like SHIELD scientists are using an outside electrical source to power the whips that are part of the harness. Presumably SHIELD retrieved the harness from the Monaco authorities upon Vanko’s arrest at the Grand Prix.
  • The second room contains what appears to be a holographic representation of a wormhole. Specifically, Thor’s Bifrost to Asgard. When the Warriors Three and Sif came to Earth looking for Thor, the wormhole signature appeared on the radar of the SHIELD team at the Hammer site. Traditionally known as an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, SHIELD is apparently looking for a way to travel between planets (or planes) in the Nine Realms. Since the Rainbow Bridge was destroyed at the end of Thor, there is no contact between the two worlds. Since Jane and Co. were given SHIELD access codes in order to find Asgard, Fury is continuing to develop Thor as a contact. In the Thor Dark World Prequel comic, Jane Foster tries to create her own wormhole to Asgard but the machine failed.
  • The final room is one of a figure in a glass tube and a screen that states “Project: Mr. Blue.” This figure is Dr. Samuel Sterns, who was in contact with Banner under the alias Mr. Blue. Sterns may be able to cure Banner and has many samples of his blood. At the end of the Hulk movie, Sterns is knocked into one of his machines by the newly-turned Abomination, resulting in an open wound on his head. Banner’s mutated blood is shown to drip into the wound, transforming Sterns into the Marvel villain The Leader. When we next see Sterns in Fury’s Big Week, his intelligence is greatly increased, and he has a large head for his bigger brain. Agent Romanov proceeds to shoot Sterns in the knee and places him in SHIELD custody. Perhaps SHIELD is trying to harness Stern’s gamma-enhanced intelligence for their own uses?
• In the Marvel One-Shot: The Consultant, Agents Coulson and Stillwell discuss that the World Security Council wants to have Captain Emil Blonsky, AKA The Abomination, in The Avengers Initiative. He’s still in General Ross’ custody and is a war hero. Blonsky is unique since he was given a variation of the Super-Soldier serum that created Captain America, but then mutated further by infusing Banner’s blood into his own system. Is he human again? Can he change back and forth into the Abomination? If he is human, is he still a Super-Soldier? Tim Roth, the actor who played Blonsky, has been on TV before—he starred in two season of Lie To Me
• Speaking of the Super-Soldier Serum, the Hulk deleted scenes shown that Ross is responsible for a number of “Super-Soldier experiments gone haywire.” It would be cool to see SHIELD agents going after these unbalanced soldiers.
• Holographic Forensics. Pioneered by Tony Stark in Iron Man 2 and , this involves using holograms to systematically go through a crime scene and find forensic clues. There’s evidence of Coulson and the team using holograms in the Agents of SHIELD trailer.
• In The Avengers, it’s shown that Hawkeye and Black Widow are part of Strike Team: Delta, a SHIELD tactical unit sent to hotspots like Budapest. Any chance we’ll see Strike Teams Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc? Speaking of Hawkeye and Black Widow, SHIELD personnel files show they’re Level 7. Do they know that Coulson is still alive?
• Since the Mandarin has been shown to be a fake, a figurehead, there’s no way all of 10 Rings terrorist organization is faked. After all, they kidnapped Tony Stark and decimated Gulmira in the first IronMan. There have to be some remnants of the organization still around. And, since we brought up the real Mandarin (Aldrich Killian in Iron Man 3), all of the Extremis soldiers can’t be dead. Tony cured Extremis for Pepper, but not everybody was around to be cured.
• As Item 47 showed, some bits of Chitauri technology got out. I would think SHIELD couldn’t have gotten to all the alien tech. It was shown in that One-Shot that the tech can be repaired, used, and reverse-engineered to deadly results. As hinted to in the SHIELD trailer, J. August Richards’ character may be powered by such alien technology. Also, SHIELD has custody of Loki’s scepter, which is the last earthly source of the Tesseract.
• We know that SHIELD started off as the Strategic Scientific Reserve during WWII, and combated HYDRA and the Nazis. Perhaps the show can show flashbacks to this time period to bridge the gap.
• And some final speculation: I hope that the entire show is not just about finding and stopping alien technology that dropped to earth during the Battle of New York. As the rumors of Avengers 2 show, maybe we’ll have some mutants running around (they just can’t be called mutants). Personally, I had a thought about a guy who built his own Iron Man armor and caused havoc—the “Brooklyn Iron Man” sounds good in a newspaper headline. I would love to see an evil corporation as bad guys—Whedon is known for doing this with Wolfram & Hart or Dollhouse’s Rossum Corporation. After all, SHIELD has resources that Buffy’s Initiative could only dream of, and look at what they did to the supernatural world.

I guess we’ll see if any of these guesses are true come September!