Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. aired its season finale. I enjoyed it, though I am with those who feel it didn’t live up to their expectations. It did, however, live up to its promises. The finale got me even more excited for Guardians of the Galaxy.
When the series was announced one its objectives was to open the Marvel Universe to only knew the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It had to show that what we saw on the big screen was part of a world that included secret organizations, weird occurrences, aliens, and super powers.
The show’s connection to the MCU goes all the way back to the first Iron Man movie in the form of Agent Phil Coulsen. The premier episode introduced us to Centipede which was a variation of Extremis, which we saw in Iron Man 3.
Thor: The Dark World had a more obvious presence on MAoS. The team was involved in the cleanup of the aftermath from the movie. They eventually encountered three different Asgardians, including Sif, played by Jamie Alexander. I’m happy to say her presence as a major player in an episode showed that Marvel won’t be afraid to bring people from the big screen onto the smaller one. By extension, we should also expect to see some of the small screen players jumping to the big screen.
As the season reached its climax we found out that the main story arc was tied to Captain America: The Winter Soldier. This was wonderfully done. No one needed to have seen either the TV show or the movie to understand the other, but events unfolded in such a way that both shows were that much more interesting when the connections were made.
This brings me to the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy. If you haven’t been keeping up with MAoS, be prepared for some *spoilers* if you keep reading.
The onscreen versions of the X-Men and mutantkind in general are firmly in the grasp of Fox. This severely limits not only what characters Marvel can include in the MCU, but what types of characters are available. Marvel’s solution is the Inhumans.
For anyone who doesn’t know who they are, the Inhumans are a branch of humanity that were genetically modified by the Kree, an alien race. At puberty an Inhuman is exposed to the Terragen Mists which activate their powers. All in all, the Inhumans are a simple, in-house solution to Marvel’s mutant problem.
Coulsen was brought back to life through a drug made from the bodily fluids of the corpse of a large, blue alien. The Kree were one of the races Sif listed as matching the alien’s description. This same drug kept Skye, one of Coulson’s team members, from dying. We have been told that Skye is more than she seems. Unravelling her mystery is likely going to be a major story arc for the second season.
Skye’s blood was used to synthesize a variant of the drug which was used to save Garrett, the major villain of the season. The drug obviously had more than a healing effect on Garrett. When he wasn’t fighting Coulson’s team or killing US Army generals, Garrett was gushing about his new-found understanding of humanity’s future. He even drew an odd diagram on a glass wall.
It should be noted that after Coulson took a close look at the diagram he started carving an even more elaborate version into a wall.
Guardians of the Galaxy has a strong Kree presence. We know that Ronan the Accuser plays a major role in the story. We saw Korath the Pursuer in the trailer. The modern comic book version of the Guardians started with some characters who had ties to Thanos, introduced at the end of The Avengers.
Everyone is assuming the Guardians movie will bring us that much further into an Infinity Gauntlet movie arc. That probably is its major goal. However, after seeing Garrett and Coulson’s diagrams in the MAoS finale, I think Guardians of the Galaxy is going to bring the Terragen Mists to Earth so that the population of supers in the MCU is going to grow dramatically.