YMMV / Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

The TV series

A-F

• Abandon Shipping:
  • SkyeWard seemed to be setting up to be the Official Couple of the show, and with it, a lot of fans began shipping it. Then Ward was revealed to be a HYDRA Agent and a complete Manipulative Bastard with entitlement issues concerning Skye, leading some to abandon it. Happens In-Universe too after Skye shoots him; Ward seems to abandon his quest to earn her love and instead decides to focus on helping Agent 33 with her issues.
    • Canon in the Framework though, as Skye and Ward are together as agents of Hydra and are living together.
  • The formerly Fan-Preferred Couple of Ward/Simmons went the same way, and for the same reasons.
  • History repeated itself with Fitz and Mack. The Reveal that Mack was a spy for another faction of S.H.I.E.L.D. and developed Fantastic Racism toward the Inhumans has caused many to abandon it, though Mack's Rescued from the Scrappy Heap noted bellow and the fact he was only working for another faction rather than a group like HYDRA avoided it becoming as big a deal as the above. Season 3 has had the two spend more time interacting with others and reduced their shared screentime, which has weakened support for it.
• Actor Shipping:
  • Despite SkyeWard having been sent to the bottom of the ocean, as seen above, Chloe Bennet and Brett Dalton are still a relentlessly popular couple for having enormous chemistry together. Behold.
  • There are also those who ship Elizabeth Henstridge and Iain De Caestecker, especially after their characters' Relationship Upgrade.
  • Chloe Bennet and Dove Cameron have gotten a fair amount of this, thanks to their chemistry together and how well the actresses got along on set. Cameron giving an interview where she admitted to "girl-crushing" on Chloe certainly did nothing to dispel this.
• Adorkable:
  • Enoch's social skills are... subpar, to say the least, and yet he's so hard-working and earnest that it's hard not to love him.
  • After Daisy wakes up in the Framework and sees Ward in bed, she instinctively extends her arm out to quake him (though she fails as she doesn't have her powers there yet). He interprets this as a "thing they do now", and adorably mimics her.
• Alas, Poor Scrappy:
  • Even after Gonzales spent so many moments acting like an unsympathetic strawman and expressing racism toward gifted people, many felt sorry for him when he's brutally murdered by Skye's mother when he was, for once, genuinely trying to ensure peace between S.H.I.E.L.D. and Inhumans.
  • Those who couldn't get into Lincoln's character will feel really bad after his Heroic Sacrifice in the Season 3 finale.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Ward. There's been a split of opinion on if Ward is really just a victim of abuse who's in desperate need of support for him to get past his darkness and ultimately redeem himself, just as much of an abusive, selfish, irredeemable, manipulative bastard as Garrett was who doesn't understand or care about the extent of how much he's hurt others, or a complex Anti-Villain . His constant lies muddy things further, as it ends up being unclear until Season 3 if he was really abused by his family or if he's just a violent bully who blames them for his issues rather than accept them (until Thomas says that yes, they were abusive, but, Grant himself was just as bad, if not worse). The split of opinion continued up until Grant's eventual death. The reverse however became a more common opinion with the Framework version of Ward in Season 4 being a true SHIELD agent who was undercover in HYDRA and it being revealed that Victoria Hand rather than Garrett rescued him from prison after committing arson and it truly made a difference in who he actually became later on. Even Coulson and Skye/Daisy at least confirm that their perception of Ward based on the very realistic possibility of who he could've been with the right influence in his life probably changed as a result.
    • Ward's relationship with Kara, due to how ambiguous it is from his end. Did he recognize her as a kindred spirit who had endured similar hardships to him and wanted to help her overcome them the way he did, or was he taking advantage of a confused and vulnerable woman who had no one else to turn to in order to shape her into an Undyingly Loyal weapon the way Garrett had done to him? Regardless of whether he had ulterior motives in helping her or not, did he truly love her, or was it an act? His reaction to her death in the Season 2 finale shows that, at the very least, he did care about her deeply, but that hasn't stopped the debate over what his true motives were—or at least what they may have been at first. That said, his helping Kara to capture and torture Bobbi had no personal benefit to himself and truly was done as a means of helping Kara to "heal" as he did killing his family of Asshole Victims.
  • Was Christian Ward telling the truth in his confession about making Ward torture their younger brother Thomas, or just saying anything that might get Ward to stop? It's revealed in Season 3 to be the former.
  • Hunter's repeated comments about his ex-wife, Bobbi Morse. Was their marriage really that bad, or is he still hung up because he's still in love with her? Given she's far more amicable when she appears, it makes it clear that it's a case of Unreliable Narrator. It's eventually clarified to be somewhere in the middle: The marriage was bad, but Bobbi wasn't the sole one responsible for their problems as Hunter's insecurities, if not unfounded, were a major cause of tension for them.
  • Is Gonzales (and by extension, the rest of his faction) a smug hypocrite who only distrusts Coulson because he has alien blood inside of him, or a man with differing views on how to run S.H.I.E.L.D. with legitimate complaints about Coulson's leadership? After the reveal that the main sticking point is the 'Theta Protocol', a still-unrevealed secret project Coulson has hidden from everyone (including May) that is believed to be a new base for superhumans, this now extends to a split on if Coulson is right to keep secrets as he's the leader of a spy organisation and 'real' S.H.I.E.L.D. are over-reacting to breadcrumbs, or if (as a spy organisation themselves) Gonzales' faction is right to be suspicious of a secret of such scope given the trouble with HYDRA (who'd similarly been keeping big secrets that turned out to be pretty dangerous). In-universe, May and Simmons start off with the former mindset, but once the evidence piles up they seem to start siding with the latter.
  • Did Cal actually mislead Raina about what Terrigenesis was or did she just jump to conclusions about what she would become? Cal was rather cold about her fate but a key facet of Inhumans from the comics is that they are discouraged from planning ahead where the transformation is concerned because what will happen can't be predicted.
  • Is Hive a Well-Intentioned Extremist who goes too far in its desire to make the world a better place, or is it a selfish monster who wants to enslave humans and Inhumans alike? Many of Hive's actions support the latter interpretation (its satisfaction with the Primitives, being willing to drain all of Daisy's blood, trying to turn as much of the human population into Primitives as possible), but its final moments hint towards the former being just as likely.
  • Although he certainly meant well, Lincoln's Heroic Sacrifice can actually be construed as being somewhat selfish, given that he effectively robbed Daisy of ''her'' right to atone for her own sins (in her mind, anyway) and essentially close the book on her story, which she fully intended to do. This is partially what puts her over the Despair Event Horizon (along with actually losing Lincoln).
  • Just how evil is James now, anyway? His selling out his fellow Inhumans to the Watchdogs certainly seems like a Face–Heel Turn, but consider that being freed from Hive's "sway" was so traumatic for Daisy that it sent her into a Heroic BSoD lasting for a third of the season, and she had a whole team of people who love and support her. Considering the fact that there literally hasn't been a single Inhuman who interacted with him in a non-hostile way except for when he was under Hive's sway, are his actions those of an Ungrateful Bastard who should have been careful what he wished for, or a Jerkass Woobie without the support structure to make rational choices?
  • In "The Return", when Ophelia threatens Fitz that they will build a life together whether he wanted to or not, she either meant that they will build a new life as a couple as they did in the Framework, or she intended to rape him to procreate and literally create a life.
  • Regarding the Darkhold, did it actively corrupt the people who read it, or is that just what naturally happens when you dangle godlike power in front of someone?
  • In Season 5, Deke with betraying Daisy and selling her to Kasius; is he really playing the long game, and that in doing so he put Daisy in with Kasius' other Inhumans, giving her a much better chance of taking him down and freeing Jemma? Or was he just selling her out to cover his own ass without any care for what happens to her? Given he also made a profit on this, was this just for the profit, or was he serious in his concern and wish to prevent her actions from having blow-back on everyone else on the Lighthouse?
  • At least currently, is the accusation that Daisy destroyed the earth in this timeline true, or is this being falsely attributed to her thanks to the erasure of history causing facts to be muddled up? At first, it seems to just be Deke's belief, but given Kasius, his guests, and Fitz all refer to her as 'Destroyer of Worlds', there is some chance it may be correct. And if so, why would she do such a thing?
    • As of "The One Who Will Save Us All", the show seems to have confirmed that Daisy did not destroy the world, and it was Talbot-as-Graviton who did it. Daisy got the blame because Graviton's existence was not widely known and Daisy was caught on camera heading towards the place where the destruction later begins..
• Angst? What Angst?:
  • In "Yes Men", Coulson gets understandably agitated at how nonchalant Skye is when being told the news that the serum used on both of them is of alien origin, and neither of them knows if it has any kind of side effects.
  • In the same episode, Ward is notably not very affected by being raped, both in mind and body, by Lorelei, nor does anyone seem to really comment on this. In fact, it's May who seems the most bothered by all this, and it's Ward she's angry at. It could be a mix of his training by Garrett and his own villainous behavior.
• Anvilicious:
  • With the introduction of the Watchdogs in Season 3 comes all the usual "racism is bad, okay?" stuff from their portrayal in the comics. We even hear someone explicitly compare the Inhumans to illegal immigrants.
  • The Agents of Hydra arc in the fourth season gets very heavy-handed at times with comparisons between the fascist alternate reality Hydra regime and the then-current Trump administration, incorporating tongue-in-cheek references to real-life events and slogans such as “Make our society great again” and “Nevertheless, she persisted”. These references are only for the benefit of the audience, as the show (and most of the MCU at large) otherwise never refers to Donald Trump at all.
• Applicability:
  • As noted by a few Tumblr users, the show's treatment of the Inhumans in Season 3's first episode — ordinary people secretly hiding a separate side of themselves who, when they eventually become who they really are, are met with fear, bigotry, and distrust (some of which can become internalized), along with picking a new name for themselves, and referring to their change as 'transition' — is very applicable towards the transgender populace. Daisy's name change even has Coulson, her father figure, struggling to get used to calling her by her chosen name, something many parents often do in real life.
  • Before this, Daisy's first becoming an Inhuman has a lot of parallels to a young person coming to terms with discovering they're gay. At first, she's terrified of what others will think, hides it best she can, only confides in a single close friend who discovers her secret and tries to console her, while another friend expresses bigotry towards people like her without knowing she's one. She expresses a lot of self-hate over it all, and her attempts to control her powers cause her to unintentionally self-harm, which eventually causes her to need urgent medical attention. When her secret is revealed, she overhears her friends talking about it behind her back, with some sounding a little bit bigoted. Eventually, she comes to accept this aspect of herself through help from others like herself and the acceptance/support of her friends, and eventually gains enough confidence to be open about it.
  • An alternative interpretation suggested on a WordPress.com blog suggested that Daisy first becoming an Inhuman had more parallels with someone who has Asperger's Syndrome rather than being gay/bisexual, and that Inhuman was really a metaphor for autism spectrum disorder. The blog's author did not have Asperger's Syndrome, however, and he is something of The Spook.
• Arc Fatigue:
  • The 'Real S.H.I.E.L.D.' arc from Season 2's second half, which turned half the cast against one another and argue over Coulson's leadership (and, while set up as a Good Versus Good, was undermined by turning the anti-Coulson side into racist hypocrites), and only served as a way to give everyone else something to do while Skye went through her Character Development into Daisy Johnson with the Inhumans.
  • Grant Ward's character arc in general, particularly with reasons not to just take him out for good wearing thin and arguably only surviving as long as he did because of Plot Armor (and being a blatant Draco in Leather Pants). Some believe that his character only stuck around as long as he did just to keep the "Stand With Ward" fanbase around — which is not helped by how Season 2 didn't really do much with him, besides granting him enough Alternative Character Interpretation that it allowed fan sympathy to really take off.
  • The Reveal of General Hale being part of HYDRA in Season 5 seems to have elicited this response from some viewers. On one hand, the fact that she answers to backers from a splinter faction of the Kree does put a new angle on it. Conversely, though, it immensely cheapens and basically invalidates the supposed impact of all the S.H.I.E.L.D. characters' efforts and successes in rooting out and dismantling HYDRA around the globe throughout Seasons 2 and 3.
  • The mystery behind why Sarge from Season 6 is identical to Coulson. Everyone just keeps questioning it with zero forward progress until a lot of fans started suspecting there would never actually be an answer, and it was just a cheap excuse to keep Clark Gregg on the show. Eventually answered late in Season 6, with 'Sarge' being revealed as a non-corporeal being who took control of a copy of Coulson's body, which was created and sent back in time to a far corner of space when Coulson closed the rift to the 'fear dimension', which contained the energy from the 3 Monoliths of Time, Space, and Creation. There was no progress because Sarge needed to learn the truth of who he really was from Izel, the person he was chasing. There were hints that Sarge wasn't just an Identical Stranger because he used phrases Coulson has used.
  • The absurd frequency with which Fitz and Simmons get separated for various reasons to the point that they spend much of Season 6 on the receiving end of Yank the Dog's Chain, and by the season finale, they're separated yet again, this time around between different periods.
  • Related to the above, but Fitz's absence in Season 7, which lasts for all but the last three episodes. Alex McLevy from The AV Club has found it disappointing that what he calls the show's biggest emotional investment (Fitz and Simmons' relationship) has been squandered in the series' final hours.
• Ass Pull:
  • Jiaying being revealed as the ultimate Big Bad of Season 2 has been met with this reception by some people, as they found it a bit unbelievable that she was still alive after being vivisected! And with just one minor scar on her face too.
  • Lash being able to cure Daisy of Hive's influence. It came completely out of nowhere. Especially since his 'purpose' until that point was very clearly to kill Inhumans, it's pretty obvious he was meant to either destroy Hive or otherwise just keep the Inhuman population down so Hive wouldn't be able to raise an army. He accomplishes neither of these and is immediately killed once he cures Daisy, despite having been nearly unstoppable all other times.
• Award Snub: Chloe Bennet was nominated for a Kids' Choice Award in 2015, but bizarrely Clark Gregg was not. 2016 upped the ante by nominating both Bennet and Ming-Na, but still paying dust to Gregg.
• Badass Decay: The Kree in Season 5. In both Seasons 2 and 3, a single Kree is a One-Man Army with one going toe-toe with Lady Sif and another that gave Daisy a hard time even with her powers. But in Season 5, the Kree are about as expendable as any other Mook and can be killed by human weapons, something that the Kree in the previous seasons could have shrugged off.
• Base-Breaking Character: Has its own page.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Some viewers consider May's No-Holds-Barred Beatdown of Ian Quinn this, given the events of the episode prior.
  • And she does it again to Ward in the Season 1 finale. She even lampshades it herself.
    May: I think I've waited long enough for this. *WHAM!*
  • Coulson blasting Garrett with the 0-8-4 in the Season 1 finale, making Garrett go from Not Quite Dead to Deader than Dead.
  • And before that, Mike launching a rocket straight into Garrett's chest, then stomping on his head with a cry of rage.
  • Fitz lowering the oxygen levels in Ward's cell, so that Ward would experience what he did when Ward tried to kill him was a particularly dark Moment of Awesome for those who had hoped Fitz and/or Simmons would attempt revenge on Ward.
  • To a lesser extent, Simmons gets her turn when she looks Ward in the eye and says with utter seriousness that she'll kill him if they ever meet again.
  • Skye gives the audience one when she shoots Ward several times in the chest without a second thought as soon as he gives her a second to herself.
  • In "Aftershocks", Coulson and the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D. induce an Enemy Civil War in the upper leadership of HYDRA, killing off all of Daniel Whitehall's Co-Dragons in a matter of minutes and leaving only Baron von Strucker as the Big Bad over in Europe.
  • Though it wasn't the focus of the argument, the scene in "Who You Really Are" when Fitz points out to Simmons that she's lied to him, abandoned him, and generally treated him pretty badly all season, and that her anger at him for lying to her once (and only to protect someone else) is extremely hypocritical under the circumstances, is quite satisfying.
  • Subverted in the Season 2 finale. After 2 hours of being a Manipulative Bitch fans were ready for Skye and Cal to lay the smackdown on Jiaying. But then Cal ends it quickly by snapping her neck. Justified as he really did not want to kill his wife and only did it to protect their daughter.
  • Though cut short, Bobbi also got another, when she escaped from Ward after several hours of torture and beat the holy hell out of him until Agent 13 intervened and turned the fight around. The fact she was Defiant to the End when they were about to kill her, robbing them of the pleasure they could have gotten from it, helps matters.
  • In "Maveth", over the course of the episode, Coulson shoots Ward in the lung, punches him several times, and then kills him by crushing his windpipe with his artificial hand. Played with though in that, while many are happy it happened, there's debate on if someone else besides Coulson deserved the kill more.
  • Watching Lash utterly No-Sell his confrontation with Hive, and then rescuing Daisy was quite simply glorious.
  • For the second season in a row, Fitz gets to kill The Dragon in "Ascension." With an invisible pistol.
  • In "BOOM", there's no denying a sense of satisfaction watching the thoroughly unlikable racist Tucker Shockley undergoing Terrigenesis, with a Terrigen crystal he specifically brought to see if Ellen Nadeer was an Inhuman — followed promptly by the equally unpleasant Senator Nadeer suffering a swift Character Death when Shockley unleashes his new explosive powers.
  • Daisy blasting AIDA out the window of the Triskellion with her powers in "All the Madame's Men."
  • After seeing Aida/Ophelia essentially making the entire Team Coulson through a living hell using the Framework, being almost always ahead of them and finally deleting the Framework just out of sheer spite, seeing Ghost Rider reducing her to running away scared and eventually obliterating her was deeply satisfying.
    • Shortly before that, AIDA sadistically kills the LMD Simmons in front of Fitz just to emotionally torment him is followed about five minutes later by the real Simmons unloading into her with a machine gun. She even lampshades it.
    Simmons: I just really wanted to do that.
  • At least three moments in "Fun & Games": 1) Jemma slicing Kasius' throat (although he sadly survives), 2) Fitz rescuing her and Daisy from the Kree in epic fashion and 3) Fitz and Jemma having the most epic Reunion Kiss ever, and her accepting his proposal, while escaping from the Kree.
    • Also in "Fun & Games": Abusive Jerkass slave-driver Grill being crushed under a gigantic boulder by Flint.
  • In "Best Laid Plans", after nearly eight straight episodes of watching the arrogant Kree bastards Kasius and Sinara lord their power over the human prisoners on the Lighthouse like self-proclaimed gods, it is incredibly satisfying to watch Sinara disposed of quite permanently in a painful fashion and the look on Kasius' face when he realizes how magnificently Yo-yo and Mack have Out-Gambitted him, blowing up his Inhuman breeding program and freeing the captive people of the Lighthouse in one fell swoop.
  • It's even more satisfying an episode later when Mack finally kills Kasius in extremely gruesome fashion, seconds after Simmons hits him with the most satisfying dose of karma imaginable with a piece of his own hearing probe into the ear.
  • Episode 100: Fitz and Simmons get married! And it's about goddamn time.
  • As controversial as her decision was, some people cheered when, after tormenting, threatening, and mutilating our heroes sadistically and without remorse, Ruby gets killed when Yo-Yo slices her throat with her own chakram.
  • It is very satisfying to watch the dawning horror sink in on Qovas's face when he and his ship get blown to smithereens by the very same missiles he fired at the Lighthouse.
  • Viro the Controller from "Window of Opportunity" is such a cruel, abusive slavedriver that it's downright delightful to see Fitz trick the bastard into flushing himself out his own airlock.
  • After five-and-a-half seasons of the writers seemingly writing every episode by asking "Hmm, how can we torment Fitz and Simmons today?", (especially when, in their last meeting, they were torn apart again after only a few seconds of seeing each other), it is immensely cathartic to see Enoch free the two of them from the Chronicom mind-prison and teleport them to safety.
• Character Rerailment:
  • A minor case with Mack in Season 3's "The Watchdog"; when introduced a big deal was made about Mack not liking violence despite his stature, strength, and fighting ability with him mostly being a mechanic, but as the show went on he became a field agent and was regularly fighting alongside Daisy and Bobbi and co. "The Watchdogs" brings back his mechanic side while also when asked about it, admitting that he still hates violence, despite his proficiency with it.
  • The Framework arc introduces an alternate world with its own version of Grant Ward, who acts much like the Ward in the first few episodes, being a heroic soldier type with a desire to do good, rather than the Manipulative Bastard he revealed himself as later. As this is merely an imitation of the original Ward, it lacks the cold-hearted nature that allowed him to become such a bastard and so he acts much like how the original Ward only pretended to be. It also helps that this version of him was picked up in juvie by Victoria Hand instead of Garrett.
• Complete Monster:
  • Season 1: John Garrett, seemingly a jovial S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, is truthfully the Clairvoyant, the mastermind behind the Centipede Project. Tasked with creating an army for HYDRA, Garrett brainwashes and experiments on superpowered individuals to create assassins and super-serums, while implanting his many soldiers and unwilling operatives with bombs to execute them for failure or disobedience. Two notable victims forced into committing massacres include Akela Amador and Mike Peterson, with the latter's son abducted for extra leverage once he's mutilated into a cybernetic Deathlok. Despite his cheery demeanor, the Clairvoyant has no loyalty or empathy, as demonstrated when he tortures Coulson and fatally wounds Skye to learn the truth behind T.A.H.I.T.I.; frames and murders a paralyzed man; guns down several groups of agents and frees countless supervillains during the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D.; and grooms Grant Ward into his murderous, undyingly loyal spy, while nearly killing him to further his plans before ordering him to kill his friends, Fitz and Simmons, to prove he's not weak. Upon extending his own life, Garrett plans to create thousands of Centipede soldiers enslaved with explosives—supported by a vast network of "employees" whose loved ones are held hostage to ensure their loyalty—to facilitate world domination.
  • Season 2: Dr. Werner Reinhardt, aka Daniel Whitehall, is one of the heads of HYDRA and a true believer in Johann Schmidt's cause of eliminating The Evils of Free Will. Whitehall has performed horrific human experiments since World War II, testing how quickly people died after touching the Obelisk. In the 1980's, Reinhardt brutally tortured and eviscerated Skye's mother, Jiaying, via surgery to obtain her powers of lasting youth. With his newfound longevity, Whitehall mentored future generations of HYDRA sleeper agents, artificially inseminating one girl for the "Destroyer of Worlds" super soldier project. In the present, Whitehall brags about mastering the art of keeping victims conscious while performing gruesome and invasive surgeries without anesthesia; brainwashes people, including loyal S.H.I.E.L.D agents, into becoming his slaves; frames S.H.I.E.L.D. for killing sprees he himself organized; and ordered the Bus shot down, despite Ward promising mercy, after forcing its passengers to surrender Skye. Whitehall's goal is to use the Obelisk and the city it leads to in order to create a Weapon of Mass Destruction, which he will use to kill millions, if not billions of people. In his final appearance, Whitehall plans to torture Skye to death and force her father to watch.
  • Season 5: Sinara is the quiet yet ruthless Dragon to Kasius in his horrific dictatorship over the remnants of humanity in 2091, aiding him in farming Inhuman slaves to be sold off or forced into Gladiator Games. Kasius' chief troubleshooter, enforcer and executioner, Sinara hunts rebellious elements—particularly the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents prophesied to save humanity from the Kree's wrath—and murders whomever displeases Kasius with stoic sadism, bashing in skulls or impaling her victims. Sinara handles the regime's bloodshed with the express purpose of enabling the cowardly, ineffectual Kasius to focus on his schemes to gain power and keep humanity oppressed using the persistent threat of extinction, with Sinara personally overseeing his "Renewal" rituals wherein human slaves are periodically forced to kill one another to breed terror and submission. Though seen by Kasius as his loyal lover who saved his life years ago, Sinara cares most for his viciousness and ambitions to raise them both to greater glory; Kasius' submissiveness to his hated brother drives her to almost join the latter in disgust of his weakness, with only the bloody act of fratricide restoring her respect, and she later disobeys his orders by trying to kill Quake to sate her bloodlust.
  • Season 6: Pachakutiq is the Greater-Scope Villain behind both Izel's galactic rampage and Sarge's vicious crusade to stop her. A hate-filled demon from another dimension, Pachakutiq sought to escape his realm to spread terror and suffering with his people, instructing Izel to use the Monoliths to summon him a physical form. However, when Izel failed, Pachakutiq suspected her of stealing his glory and possessed a clone of Coulson to vengefully pursue her, inadvertently scrambling his memories. Pachakutiq's resulting amnesiac identity, Sarge, is influenced by the demon into hunting Izel throughout the centuries by using whatever monstrous means necessary, murdering his followers when they're inconvenient and nearly killing hundreds of thousands with an atom bomb as collateral damage. Izel, meanwhile, continues his plan to assemble an army of hosts ripe for possession, unleashing her Shrike to devastate entire planets and reduce billions of beings to hollow shells. An entity synonymous with "the death of everything", Pachakutiq revels in the carnage of his actions upon retaking control of Sarge's body, promising the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents that he will handpick spirits to ravage their souls for eternity as he prepares to unleash his fellow demons upon the galax.
  • Season 7: Sibyl, the Chronicom Predictor, leads the Hunters in their invasion of Earth's past. Forming an alliance with HYDRA, Sibyl fast-tracks Project Insight to kill the Avengers while they're still children, having her Hunters kill and steal the faces of both loyal S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and Mack's parents. Sibyl survives an explosion that destroys her Hunters and convinces a lonely programmer to construct crude replacements, killing him once they're complete and providing knowledge of the future to Nathaniel Malick. With her help, Malick recruits killers destined to die because of S.H.I.E.L.D. and lays siege to the Inhuman sanctuary of Afterlife, subjecting the inhabitants to agonizing power-stealing processes. Sibyl later makes contact with the Chronicom fleet and orders them to obliterate every S.H.I.E.L.D. base on the planet, intent on repeating the process upon being transported back to the primary timeline, and threatens to enslave Coulson out of annoyance with his constant interference. While rationalizing her invasion as an effort to save her species from extinction, this is little more than Sibyl's coldly logical belief that Chronicoms are superior and more deserving of survival over humanity.
• Continuity Lockout: Despite spinning off from a movie series with seven films in it as of December 2013 (and still growing), the show does a pretty good job of averting this. Characters are mostly independent of the movies, and while callbacks are made to specific events and characters in the MCU, with at least one episode explicitly set in the immediate aftermath of Thor: The Dark World, the overall effect on the show is small. When the effect is larger (like with the pilot and Extremis), it's explained so that you don't have to have seen the movies to understand.
  • The episode "Turn, Turn, Turn" is tied to the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which was released a few days prior. The film explains the sudden resurgence of HYDRA, though the episode still makes sense without watching the film. It does, however, heavily spoil the film, including the ending, and subsequent episodes build on this.
  • The Season 1 finale requires a bit more knowledge of the events of the film, in particular why Nick Fury has gone underground, and why he isn't wearing his trademark eyepatch anymore. The significance of him showing his blind eye also makes more sense after seeing what he does with it in the movie.
• Crack Pairing: Thanks to the Framework, a canon one in FitzAida. Fan reaction ranges along Sick and Wrong.
• Creepy Awesome:
  • Grant Ward is pretty damn creepy due to his manipulative tendencies and excellent ability to completely mask his personality, but he's also a skilled combatant on par with Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Brock Rumlow in terms of skill. As a result, Ward's heel turn, and his refusal to redeem, is beloved by fans (outside the Stand With Ward fans that wanted a redemption arc) for just being an entertainingly chilling villain.
  • Also, Skye's father, Calvin Johnson, AKA Mr. Hyde. The man is completely insane and exceptionally violent (he's introduced dripping with other people's blood), but he's definitely entertaining to watch, in large part because of his insanity.
  • Hive. Despite barely speaking, he's managed to become one of the most terrifying threats the show has presented, in large part because of Brett Dalton's uncanny and unnerving ability to play psychopaths really, really well.
  • Lash; the unstoppable demon thing who No Sells both Inhuman powers and ICER bullets.
  • Ghost Rider. His appearance and transformation are particularly terrifying in this version, and he's an extremely brutal vigilante killer, but fans love his badass demeanor, driving skills, cool, very convincing look. The Hell Charger itself doesn't hurt. He's also easily one of, if not the strongest character in the show so far, and everyone is absolutely terrified if he's gunning for them. This includes the Big Bad of Season 4, Aida, who runs away terrified anytime he makes an appearance. In fact, the final problem for the team is not about how to kill Aida, but about how to stop her from running away before Ghost Rider could grab her.
  • Aida is very unsettling but very well-liked for it. Her later Madame Hydra persona continues this; now (virtually) human, she adds a far more human touch on Aida's unsettling feelings of resentment, while also playing The Baroness role perfectly.
  • The Framework arc gives us the Alternate Universe versions of May and Fitz, being dedicated HYDRA loyalists with no qualms beating innocents to a pulp and tormenting and torturing Inhumans, including Daisy, after they uncover the truth about her. The latter more so, as while the former realises she's on the wrong side and betrays HYDRA, the Framework!Fitz acts as The Dragon in the arc and becomes one of the scariest villains the show has ever had.
  • Kasius and Sinara have a level of unsettling calm that directly contrasts with most other Kree in the MCU thus far, which, combined with their casual bloodthirstiness and cruelty towards the surviving humans makes them both incredibly creepy and menacing in the best way.
  • The Remorath are horror film material, violent alien assassins who hunt their prey in self-generated darkness.
  • Talbot as Graviton, whose first onscreen moments are to slaughter the aforementioned Remorath in chilling and bloody fashion.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • John Garrett, the Clairvoyant, spends every scene he's in after his identity is revealed dancing over the line like it's not even there at all.
  • Calvin Johnson wiping the floor with two HYDRA mooks that Whitehall sets on him? Awesome, but terrifying. Cal immediately getting a look on his face that screams "aw shucks, not again" and then wiping off Whitehall's desk with his sleeve while saying he's sorry? Hilarious.
• Designated Monkey: Some fans think this of Deke Shaw. Throughout the final three seasons, the character is The Friend Nobody Likes, and with the exception of Simmons and Mack, almost everyone treats him with indifference or even contempt. Fans think this is strange considering that even though the character started his journey in the series by betraying the heroes, he still had a lot of Character Development. Moments like the characters lamenting that Deke is the grandson of Fitz and Simmons or when in the series finale, Daisy promises to rescue Jemma and forgets that Deke was also kidnapped, becomes almost sadistic (and is even worse because Deke is in love with Daisy ). The series ends with Deke sacrificing himself, staying on the original timeline, becoming chief of SHIELD of that timeline, and being fondly remembered by the other characters ... but the fact that the series did not show a more detailed farewell between them and Deke did not even have appeared in the final 10 minutes dedicated to the individual farewell of each character, make fans think it was too little, and too late.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Though they never confirmed it for Ward, the show did acknowledge awareness of Borderline Personality Disorder for Bakshi. Ward shows the same characteristics that Morse named for Bakshi, namely instability and excessive attachment to certain relationships (Garret and Skye).
• Die for Our Ship: It's safe to say that most fans aren't happy seeing Aida/Madame Hydra and Fitz are a couple in Framework, along with the implication of Murder the Hypotenuse to Framework!Simmons. This is an Intended Audience Reaction, of course, as Aida is called out by Radcliffe for brainwashing Fitz and she's definitely meant to be seen as evil for it.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Grant Ward. The second he was revealed to be the mole for HYDRA, his more dedicated fans attempted to rationalize his every action. His abusive childhood and grooming by Garrett have given a lot of his fans fuel to defend his actions, causing many to accuse the main cast (and the writers) of mistreating 'an abuse victim', despite the fact that said 'abuse victim' has emotionally manipulated, tortured, and abused many of the cast, as well as killed several of their friends and loved ones. Weirdly, he's twice been offered redemption and both times responded by crossing the Moral Event Horizon, and when he appeared to be seeking redemption in Season 2, it quickly became apparent this was out of a desire to corrupt Skye to make her love him and was just part of his obsession with her. Despite this, a large number of fans still blame the main characters, especially Coulson for handing him over to the US military (despite this being the legal thing to do) and Skye/Daisy for not loving him (despite all the abusive crap he did to her that would realistically result in rejection).
  • Skye's parents Jiaying and Cal. Thanks to their extremely sympathetic Tragic Villain backstory and their actress/actor magnificent performance, many fans are willing to forget the many crimes they committed during the course of Season 2. Jiaying especially, even though during the final 3 episodes she was shown to be a condescending Manipulative Bitch who considered normal people, including her husband, inferior. Most of her actions were rationalized by her fans and the entire war with S.H.I.E.L.D. that she started was blamed solely on Gonzales. The rest of her villainous actions were blamed on Whitehall since it was repeatedly mentioned that she was a genuinely kind and loving woman until he tortured and vivisected her. Cal sadly comments that his wife's good heart was torn out.
  • In Season 5, when Fitz' Doctor persona resurfaces, many of his fans began trying to justify his Cold-Blooded Torture towards Daisy and argue that he was right in his assertion it was the only way, despite how easily he could have avoided such a sadistic method to do so, which leads to the Ron the Death Eater treatment Daisy got in return. Though he was having a psychotic break, it seems to be mostly used as a means to justify anything amoral he does, not unlike how the Stand With Ward fans used his childhood abuse and Garret's grooming to justify his atrocities.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: See here.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • Best exemplified in the episode "Providence", where the scenes with the heroes at their Darkest Hour are interspersed with what the bad guys are up to. Quite a few fans found the baddies more fun to watch.
  • Ward! It's really saying something that critics and fans alike complimented the show for not trying to redeem him and turn him good.
  • Gideon Malick, as played by the late, great Powers Boothe, sells the role of HYDRA leader with an enormous amount of gravitas, enough to intimidate even Ward despite being a Non-Action Big Bad.
  • Hive, as the original creator of HYDRA, is a pretty evil bastard, being a twisted squid-faced parasitic cult leader who brainwashes Inhumans and devours regular humans. He's also easily one of the coolest threats the show ever faced and one of the best villains in the MCU.
  • Ruby Hale, due to being a solid Evil Counterpart to Daisy and the interesting dissonance of being a complete psychopath who also happens to be a snarky teenager with attitude problems.
  • The Remorath are terrifying. They're basically Baraka clones who literally bring darkness with them wherever they go. Although their leader, Qovas, doesn't get to do as much fighting, Peter Mensah's performance makes the character suitably menacing, and then there's his giant, incredibly badass Cool Starship.
  • Talbot as Graviton. Very scary powers. Also, totally awesome powers.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: The showrunners' explanation that Season 6 takes place one year after Season 5, yet also takes place "Pre-Snap", wasn't well-received, to say the least. This is because this would create one big Continuity Snarl, as the finale of Season 5 was explicitly mentioned to take place around the same time Ebony Maw attacked New York in Avengers: Infinity War.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception:
  • It's Agent Coulson, thank you very much. Since Season 2, it's become Director Coulson.
  • As of Season 3, it's not Skye, it's Daisy.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • One with Arrow, which can easily be summed up as "Marvel vs. DC: Live-Action TV Edition". This has expanded to include Arrow's spin-off, The Flash (2014), as well as Gotham.
  • During Season 1, fans weren't very happy with How I Met Your Mother taking up so much of Cobie Smulders's schedule, as they claimed that the show forced her into a smaller role than intended.
  • With the Netflix Marvel shows. Many fans of the Netflix shows look down on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and view it as the weak link in Marvel's TV line-up, while a number of AOS fans argue that the Netflix shows are so different in tone and subject matter that it's unfair to compare AOS to them.
  • Now between fans of Vlogger Logan Paul and Agents fans, thanks to how vocal they were in shipping the two. Things got worse however after the two briefly got together-then-separated, with many of his fans now harassing Chloe over Insane Troll Logic that's led many to assume she cheated on him and/or thinks she's too good for him/his fans. Thanks to their continued harassment (which leads to Chloe disabling comments briefly, something she never did prior when dealing with trolls) fans of the show and her do not have kind words to say about Paul or his fans.
  • With The Orville, due to Adrienne Palicki's role on it that many fans suspect kept Bobbi from returning in Season 5 along with Hunter.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • The very last scene of Season 2 where Simmons is sucked into the Kree weapon resulted in three major theories that make for some fun fics during the hiatus: she would be turned into an Inhuman, she would be sent across the universe to hang out with the Guardians of the Galaxy, or she would be sent back to the time of Agent Carter. The "across the universe" part became canon as of the stinger of Season 3's first episode.
  • The final third of Season 4 is set in the Framework, a computer program where everyone has been cured of the biggest regret of their life, with quite unexpected consequences. What would any other MCU character experience inside?
    • For that matter, what happened to these various MCU characters within the Framework's Alternate History?
  • Season 5 features a return appearance by Hunter, revealing that he and Bobbi have been Walking the Earth as mercenaries, just like they were going to do in their spinoff show before it was cancelled, implying that everything they were going to get up to on that show is still canon.
  • Season 5 reveals that within only a year after Team Coulson stopped Aida, the Earth was cracked in half and what was left of humanity were enslaved by the Kree, the exact details of how this happened are a little fuzzy ergo Timey-Wimey Ball. This is all apparently happening during the events of Avengers: Infinity War, half of the Avengers either off-world or had the means to escape the planet around this time, so what happened to all of them in this Bad Future? Did they find Thanos and kill him like in Avengers: Endgame? Did the Blip happen in this timeline? If not, why not?
• Fan Myopia: Fans of the show, and even some of the actors themselves, are very outspoken on their wishing for the show to be acknowledged by the movies, or even doing a crossover with them. They fail to realize that only a small percentage of the average MCU movie fan has heard of, let alone watched the show, and would be quite confused about Coulson's survival, HYDRA, and S.H.I.E.L.D. still being active years after the events of Winter Soldier and more. To put this in perspective, the show's American viewership was about 4 to 8 million people per episode depending on the season. A single mid-level MCU movie could expect to sell over 30 million tickets in just the US and Canada,^note The second Iron Man film for example sold 40 million. and be proportionally more popular than the show internationally.
  • On the other hand, this stance holds a lot less water now that several other TV-to-movie crossovers have happened in the intervening years. Plenty of Role Reprises have now cropped up, like Edwin Jarvis and Peggy Carter showing up in person for Avengers: Endgame, and Carter again as her "Captain Carter" variant in Multiverse of Madness, and Black Bolt from Inhumans^note a series usually regarded as one of the worst in the MCU, in contrast to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as another variant of himself also in Multiverse of Madness, not to mention The Kingpin from Daredevil returning in the newer (and explicitly canon) Hawkeye, and then Matt Murdock himself showing up in Spider-Man: No Way Home and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and then getting his own rebooted or retooled upcoming series in the works. Clearly, Marvel Studios are not averse to weaving elements of their older TV series into their newer productions ... as long as it's a series that the producers like.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Dad Supreme" for Coulson seems to be emerging.
  • A few have taken to calling the series "Interns of S.H.I.E.L.D.", due to the mostly college age-looking cast.
  • After Ward's season 1 Face–Heel Turn and season 2 Beard of Evil, Reddit users have started calling him Beardy McTraitorson.
  • The mysterious symbols that Garrett and later Coulson began doodling have been nicknamed "Kree math".
  • "Lime Ward" and "Black Ward" for Lance and Antoine, respectively.
    • Similarly "Black Simmons" for Mack, when Simmons was absent from the show and Fitz spent all his time hanging out with Mack instead. Amusingly, the guy who plays Mack is actually named Simmons.
  • The Slicing Talons◊, Cal's team of gifted humans, is either fan-nicknamed "Angry Dad's Psycho Squad" or "Brotherhood of Evil Gifted Humans".
  • "Bull"-S.H.I.E.L.D. for Robert Gonzales' splinter faction of S.H.I.E.L.D.; it also goes by the nickname of HuffleS.H.I.E.L.D. as well. In reference to the name of the actor who portrays its leader, it is also called Olmost-S.H.I.E.L.D..
  • Thanks to Skye in "The Dirty Half Dozen", Raina is now Sonic.
  • Some viewers have dubbed Alisha, the Inhuman with Me's a Crowd powers, the Ginger Ninja (because Mack did so first)
  • Ward's HYDRA faction in the early Season 3 is either "HYDRA Junior" or "HYDRA-wannabe", because their agents are not only consisting Baron Strucker's son but also generally being unconvincing or petty thugs who aren't even dressed sharply, being seemingly unprofessional (at point Ward sheepishly warned them when they recklessly handle crates that may contain explosives), their base is a warehouse, their motivation is to cause chaos for S.H.I.E.L.D. to handle (aside from Ward's personal motivation for revenge), and they apparently lack weaponry and manpower (to the point that Hunter attempted to infiltrate them by giving them weapons). They are also apparently not so connected with other HYDRA factions, especially the Inner Circle that includes Gideon Malick. They are also not only curb-stomped by two S.H.I.E.L.D. agents but also by Malick's faction later, to the point that they're eventually forced to merge into Malick's faction, with Ward being Demoted to Dragon. Bobbi also calls them "Ward's little HYDRA dynasty". Even their version of HYDRA symbol looks dirt cheap!◊
  • Once Ward's corpse was possessed by Hive during season 3's mid-season finale, some fans have opted to call him SquidWard.
  • Kree Reapers, the Kree who are responsible for the creation of Hive, are called "Kreeapers" or "Kreeators".
  • James/Hellfire is Australian Gambit.
  • The second arc of Season 4 (LMD) features alternate versions of several characters to which fans have given various nicknames.
    • LMD May is LMayD. Which even the official social media for the show has acknowledged!
    • The rest of the team is "Coultron", "iMack", "Directonator", and "Skyenet"^note  Which gains new relevance with the room full of her/them, though LMD Fitz lacks a cool name.
  • The third arc of Season 4 (Agents of HYDRA) also features alternate versions of several characters which fans have given nicknames to:
    • The Framework version of Fitz has several names: Evil Fitz, Fritz^note Framework Fitz, FrameFitz, Fitzwork, and (once he ascended to the head of HYDRA) Fitzler.
    • The Framework version of Ward is known as FrameWard or GoodWard.
    • The Framework version of Agent Triplett is known as FrameTrip.
  • Season 5 throws the team into space and introduces Deke, played by Jeff Ward. He quickly earns the nickname StarWard, thanks to his helmet making him a Suspiciously Similar Substitute for Star Lord. Another nickname for him is SpaceWard for obvious reason or RealWard because his actor is actually named Ward.
    • When the Vrellnexians were first advertised, fans started referring to them as "Demodogs". When it was established that the humans called them "roaches", the nickname "demo-roaches" became popular.
  • "Frozen Fitz", "Fitzsicle", or "Leocold" for Main Timeline Fitz that was frozen in Enoch's ship and the team is intending to retrieve after the death of Time Traveller Fitz at the Season 5 finale.
  • The main cast of heroes is never referred to, in-universe as "Team Coulson"; the closest would be something like "Coulson's team". Regardless, "Team Coulson" has been universally accepted by the fandom as the group's name.
• Fanon: Though it's never explicitly stated which Howling Commando is Trip's grandfather, most fans assume it's Gabe Jones since he was the only African-American Commando introduced in canon at the point the fact was revealed and Trip uses "General Jones" as an alias in "Shadows".
• Fan-Preferred Couple: SkyeWard continues to be Daisy's most popular ship despite Daisy ultimately ending up with Sousa in the final season and Ward proving to be a Romantic False Lead and moreover a HYDRA plant who commits all manner of atrocities and dies in Season 3. While the following did cause a lot of people to abandon the ship, the characters having gotten together briefly in the first season had created a situation of naturally building fan investment that then was too difficult to kill after they sunk it, and moreover the Grant Ward of the Framework reality became a semi-popular replacement with people who liked their chemistry and didn't want to ignore the atrocities committed by the real world's Ward, which also sustained the ship.
• Foe Yay Shipping:
  • Daisy and Ruby pretty much writes itself:
    • Ruby is very... Intrigued by Daisy Johnson, and behaves rather flirtatiously to her before their fight, even telling her "you're much prettier in person." Her obsession with defeating Daisy is written as The Only One Allowed to Defeat You, but some viewers have taken it as obsession of a rather different kind. She later admits that Daisy was 'all she ever wanted', which is... Interesting word use.
    • In turn, Daisy empathises with Ruby, since Ruby is barely out of her teens and was raised to be a killer. When Ruby undergoes the Destroyer of Worlds process, Daisy tries to talk her down and before-hand, expresses interest in instead recruiting Ruby in the hopes of helping her move past her HYDRA upbringing. Yo-Yo stops this, however, by killing Ruby before she can complete her transformation into the Destroyer, and Daisy is horrified as she believed she was actually getting through to her.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • As to be expected, while there's hostility between the fanbases thanks to the Marvel/DC rivalry, generally the fandoms of Supergirl (2015) and Agents is actually quite positive, thanks largely to the Agents cast being very supportive of the show and the similarities between the two shows' with regards to pushing female superhero representation. During Agents' "Dubsmash Wars" with the leads of Agent Carter, Melissa Benoist even appeared during one of Agents' Dubsmashs (the Dubsmash in question was of "Why Can't We Be Friends?", appropiately enough).
  • Similarly, the fandom gets along great with that of the Wonder Woman film, with many drawing positive parallels between Diana and Daisy, despite the Marvel/DC points.
  • There is considerable overlap of cast and crew between Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and a higher-profile Disney sci-fi series, The Mandalorian. Agents fans enjoy both recognizing familiar faces and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. gaining renewed attention from the larger Star Wars fandom.

G-L

• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • Skye/Daisy is very popular with viewers in China, where her actress was a minor pop star under her birth name of Chloe Wang. A number of Asian-American viewers similarly praise her for giving a positive role model for Asian-Americans and for being the first modern live-action Asian superhero.
  • Fitz-Simmons's near-universal popularity with UK audiences probably has more than a little to do with the rarity of hearing regional^note Glaswegian and South Yorkshire, respectively British accents on other American TV shows; so to have one-third of the show's main cast not only British, but (mostly) avoiding Received Pronunciation, is quite refreshing. Also, seeing British characters portrayed as young, attractive, and protagonists all at once on American TV is still pretty rare, which again adds to their appeal.
  • By Season 2, adding Nick Blood as Lance Hunter, another Brit with a non-RP accent, who's also a badass Deadpan Snarker, is naturally popular with Brits for the same reason.
  • Similar to Daisy, Ghost Rider has been highly praised by Latin-American fans for being a prominent Hispanic superhero, particularly one as iconic as Ghost Rider. Yo-Yo and Joey both got similar praise to lesser extents (Joey's actor in particular, Juan Pablo Raba, had been well-known in Latin-America as a Colombian telenovela actor).
• Growing the Beard:
  • "FZZT" is generally regarded as being the first episode where we truly saw how emotionally impactful the series can be, and received high marks for showing that Fitz-Simmons were much more than paired comic relief. Not to mention showing us how goddamn amazing Iain de Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge are when the show gives them material that's up to their standards.
  • It seems to be almost universally agreed that the show really started to get good in the final third of Season 1, when the plot line of Captain America: The Winter Soldier starts having an effect on the show. The premise of the show is largely retooled as a result of the events of that film, and among other things, it drastically affects the pace of the show for the better. Season 2 picks this up, and so far has been pretty strong and well-received because of it. Fittingly, by the time Season 2 rolls around, both Fitz and Ward have in fact been growing some actual facial hair.
  • Season 4 has been getting high marks from all TV critics and fans especially after the uneven response to Season 3, in part due to Ghost Rider showing up and the writing structure changing, eliminating the filler for the most part. "Self Control" is considered a highlight and one of the best episodes, if not the best of the series.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In "The Hub," Ward asks Fitz a series of disturbing and vague questions including "How long can you hold your breath underwater?" Becomes a lot sadder following the finale.
  • Simmons' comment about Fitz always getting knocked out in "Yes Men" is a lot less funny after the Season 1 finale.
  • One crossing over to Arrow. Sara Lance's Canary has been compared to Mockingbird due to the look and the staffs. The latter appears on screen two weeks after Sara's death. Then flipped around (though to a less severe extent) when Sara is revived and given a spin-off from her show, while Bobbi is written off for a spin-off that gets cancelled.
  • Elizabeth Henstridge's Bad "Bad Acting" during the climax of "Purpose in the Machine" turns out to have a purpose at the end of "4,722 Hours".
  • In "Yes Men", Lorelei uses her Compelling Voice to enslave and have sex with Ward, which is glossed over and never mentioned again. A few years later, Jessica Jones (2015), also set in the MCU, had Kilgrave, who committed rape-by-mind-control, but took it more seriously, while the show itself delved into this theme again with Hive, who mind controls both Daisy and James, among other Inhumans, which, like with Jessica Jones, is treated seriously and the resulting traumatic effects shown in great detail.
  • The relatively light-hearted first season, had Agent Simmons—primarily a scientist—as a horrible liar, as shown in an episode where she has to infiltrate SHIELD headquarters to save Ward and Fitz from a suicide mission, only to be caught by a superior. After stumbling through several lies and a failed seduction attempt, she goes "Screw it" and knocks him out with a tranquilizer gun. This is all played for laughs. Months later, the second season opens with Simmons infiltrating HYDRA. While the previous mishap at HQ was one of the funniest moments in the series, Simmons's inability to lie under pressure led to Skye being genuinely concerned for her safety. Fortunately, it all worked itself out.
  • "Tahiti. It's a magical place." Now that we've seen what those magical memories were implanted to cover up.
  • Furthermore, as of "T.A.H.I.T.I.", we now find out the full meaning of "Tahiti": It's the code name for the place where the mysterious blue alien who provided the drug that revived Coulson is being held. And by "provided" we mean "literally had the drug sucked out of its body". A "magical place" after all. Next episode, Sitwell asks about Tahiti, and Coulson's response has changed: "It sucked."
  • In the same episode, Garrett remarks that they don’t have to worry about the Clairvoyant finding the Guest House. Of course they don’t; Garrett is the Clairvoyant.
  • Coulson increasing the number of seconds he was dead with every retelling becomes this once we find out he was dead for days.
  • Nick Fury giving Coulson the Bus to fly around in? Starting to look like something Fury did to assuage his own guilt at ordering the whole "refusing to let Coulson die" thing. Especially when he goes on about what a "really nice bar" he had installed.
  • As for Director Fury, Dr. Streiten, Maria Hill, and May, possibly among others, hiding the circumstances behind Coulson's resurrection? Now it looks like they didn't want him to find out because of the possibility that there may be a Double Agent among them who wants to use this information to further Centipede's activities, and are going to any means possible to prevent said Double Agent from learning said circumstances. They were right.
  • In "End of the Beginning", Garrett mocks Sitwell for having never been injured in the line of duty, when even Skye (a newly-installed Level 1 agent) has taken "two in the gut" while on a mission. Between this episode and the next, Sitwell gets destroyed in a head-on collision with a truck in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Sure, he was revealed to have been working for HYDRA, but still... The timing. Not to mention Garrett's also HYDRA, in fact he's the much-talked about head of Project Centipede, The Clairvoyant, so he was being a dick and Tempting Fate on his own guy!
  • Quite possibly the entirety of Season 1 after the revelations at the end of "Turn, Turn, Turn" that Ward has been a HYDRA agent all along. It seems his "good" actions were done simply to endear himself to various members of the team in different ways: training Skye, jumping out of a plane to save Simmons, teaming up with Fitz, having sex with May, etc.
  • Coulson comments that, considering Ward's background, it's a surprise that his situation isn't worse. It turns out that it is worse, but not just due to his family.
  • In "Seeds", Skye takes comfort in having S.H.I.E.L.D. as a family. As of "Turn, Turn, Turn", S.H.I.E.L.D. had been revealed as a puppet for HYDRA, all its secrets are gone, and S.H.I.E.L.D. itself is dissolved.
  • As of "Turn, Turn, Turn," the line "You're the worst at following orders!" has become this. Since Garrett is actually the Clairvoyant, he's literally the worst at following S.H.I.E.L.D.'s orders.
  • Every single time that Coulson confides in May about his worries that there's more to his resurrection become this when it's revealed in "Turn, Turn, Turn" that she knew the truth the entire time.
  • Ward's line to Coulson, "I can only imagine how painful this must be for you, sir, betrayed by someone you trained and believed in," becomes much harsher after we find out that he's been Garrett's Dragon this entire time.
  • Coulson screaming to be allowed to die while they were conducting the T.A.H.I.T.I. procedure on him becomes this after the revelation at the end of "Nothing Personal" that he used to be in charge of the project. In fact, he was so horrified about the results that he recommended it be shut down, or else he would resign S.H.I.E.L.D. It may not have been just the pain, but the firsthand knowledge he had about the consequences of what they were doing to him that made him prefer death.
  • Early in Season 1, Brett Dalton did a photo shoot in which he cuddled a puppy. Fast-forward to "Ragtag" in which Garrett tries to get Ward to kill his dog.
  • Coulson's reaction to seeing the blue alien in "T.A.H.I.T.I.", as of "Nothing Personal", seems to be the result of bad memories of his time overseeing Project T.A.H.I.T.I. appearing to come back to him briefly.
  • In "The Hub", Coulson stated that when he sends a team in with no extraction plan, he takes care to inform them of that first. Turns out a violation of this rule by S.H.I.E.L.D. was what started Garrett on his way to HYDRA, which only serves to make Coulson all the more cunning in hindsight.
  • The first scene of "The Beginning of the End" sounds like a discussion between a HYDRA "true believer" working for Cybertek and a mercenary who doesn't mind working for the bad guys if they offer a good enough "incentives program". Turns out the "incentives program" that nobody had ever turned down was kidnapping a family member to ensure recruitment, and both men were being controlled in this way.
  • Less than a week after the Scottish Independence vote failed, the Season 2 showed Fitz (who's Scottish) separated from Simmons (who's English) and completely unable to cope, with the team explicitly saying he'd gotten worse since she left. Of course, considering that the series started filming its second Season 2 months before this is just a coincidence.
  • Two episodes after Trip is shot during a mission and is nearly killed by Skye's father, he dies in front of Skye.
  • Remember when Coulson warned Skye that she may not like the truth about her parents? The truth is, her mother was abducted by then-disguised HYDRA agents and then murdered by vivisection by a war criminal who had rotted in prison for 44 years, and when her father found her mangled remains he then proceeded to go on a massive killing spree, triggering his Start of Darkness and putting him on the path to becoming the MCU equivalent of Mr. Hyde. THEN, she found out her mother was actually alive and leading the Inhumans. Happy ending right? Nope. She had by this point mutated into a genocidal psychopath who thought the best way of saving her people was starting a war with S.H.I.E.L.D. and killing all normal humans. Sound familiar? In the end, her mom was killed by her dad and her dad had his memory wiped.
  • Skye's line about how S.H.I.E.L.D. never leaves a man behind is pretty harsh when you consider that that's exactly what S.H.I.E.L.D. did to Kara and Garrett, resulting in their bitter hatred of the organization.
  • In the second installment of this series, a main character meets up with a long-lost parent who reveals to them they have powers. They get along famously until it's revealed that said parent is a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, who crosses the Moral Event Horizon with an evil plan trying to make the whole world like them. When the child refuses to be part of this plan, the parent tries to absorb them. Also, the child's mother is killed by the father. This plot is almost exactly what happens in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.
  • All the discussions about sacrifices to "It" in "Maveth" and preceding episodes were vague as to why HYDRA was sending them, or whether "sacrifice" was even just a euphemism. It really was killing them—to take over their bodies as a new host.
  • The Stinger of "4,722 Hours" — At the time, it was presumably meant to show that Will had survived, and was waiting for Fitz and Simmons to come back for him. Come "Maveth", and it's revealed that that shot was actually of It possessing Will's dead body, unless Will was only mortally wounded at the time, or he acquired the leg wound and died in some later encounter with It, in which case it's the last shot of him still among the living.
  • The Season 3 episode "Parting Shot" sees Bobbi and Hunter disavowed from S.H.I.E.L.D., effectively serving as a Poorly Disguised Pilot for Marvel's Most Wanted. However, not two months after the episode's air date, the project was ultimately scrapped.
  • The Running Gag of the Season 1 about psychic powers that do not exist sounds a bit macabre now, in light of the horrible things seen at Jessica Jones (2015). Even more if we consider that, by the time Coulson was saying this, Jessica was probably under Kilgrave's control.
  • Making the Inhumans Early-Bird Cameo in this show far before the "main" Inhumans show^note it was originally planned as a movie before being taken off the slate by Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige, and a series was rushed together by means of Executive Meddling from Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter is even aired seems to have backfired, considering Inhumans was quickly deemed the MCU's biggest creative failure.
  • Garrett suffered through several gruesome surgeries to turn him into Deathlok, and is killed immediately after another one. A few years later, Bill Paxton died from complications of a surgery.
  • Similarly to Bill Paxton, in his last episode, Gideon Malick remarks "I never thought my last rodeo would be with S.H.I.E.L.D." Malick would end up being Powers Boothe's last major on-screen role before passing away in May 2017.
  • Remember when Fitz defended Skye from any kind of Fantastic Racism attitude after she's revealed to be Inhuman in Season 2? In Season 4, inside Framework, he is the one who pulls the Fantastic Racism on her and threatens her for merely being a potential Inhuman.
  • The show specifies in a newspaper headline that Peggy Carter died at age 95, just like Stan Lee would a few years later.
  • When the Framework is deleted at the end of Season 4 Mack holding his daughter as she cries that she doesn't want to die, only for her to vanish from his arms. Sound familiar?
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • Kyle MacLachlan's performance as Riley's father in Inside Out is plenty moving on its own, but even more so given that it came immediately after seeing him in this show as a father desperate to reconnect with his daughter.
  • The LMD of May saying she's exactly where she belongs at the end of "The Laws of Inferno Dynamics" is played for maximum creep value to lead into the mid-season cliffhanger. But then it's revealed in the next episode that she has a perfect copy of May's mind and thinks she's the real thing, meaning that actually is what May would say about the team.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!:
  • James Hunt of Den Of Geek was unrelenting in his hatred of the show before handing off reviewing duties to someone else. Commenters spent as much time criticizing Hunt as they did discussing the show, especially since they believed that his dislike of it made him blind to an uptick in quality. Commenters were particularly unsympathetic to the way he ended his run as show's reviewer, saying that angrily declaring "I'm out" isn't the mark of a professional or even a mature adult.
  • Oliver Sava from The AV Club has gotten on some fans' bad sides for continuing to mostly find the show mediocre. In particular, he complains about its uninspired visual palette in almost every review, to the point that most commenters are wondering why he even bothers to bring it up anymore, and if he really thinks he hasn't made his point yet.
  • Kiel Phegley of Comic Book Resources, who handles the recaps for the show, who is regularly met with criticism in the comments for his reviews of the show, as he takes an extremely negative stance on the show. In particular, the fact Phegley complains whenever the show follows a common trope while also complaining whenever they subvert one instead, making people question what exactly he wants the show to do, while also frequently describing scenes in the show inaccurately to serve his complaints (such as omitting details that explain why events happen, so he can complain that they had no explanation). This got so bad that when he made a review that noted some positives, readers questioned if he was secretly replaced.
  • The nerdy feminist site The Mary Sue is not well thought of by fans of Daisy's character, for its treatment of her and Chloe Bennet during Seasons 1 and 2. In particular, many fans felt that the reviews of the episodes were overly antagonistic towards Bennet and Daisy/Skye, attacking the former's acting skills and accusing the latter of being a Creator's Pet, which many found hypocritical given the website supposedly protested against such unfair treatment of female characters and actresses that usually comes from mainstream nerdy sites. The website changed its opinion of her during Season 2's second half and the reviewer responsible for the harshest treatment had since left, but the website is still a sour point for some.
• He Really Can Act:
  • Brett Dalton was criticized for being bland, and being little more than a handsome face, as Ward when the series first launched. Then came the twist and his characterization suddenly had a new spark, revealing that the initial restrained persona was a deliberate choice, similar to how Anna Torv was criticized at the beginning of Fringe before she got to break loose as Bolivia. This goes double for when Ward is killed and his body is possessed by the Inhuman HYDRA worships. In just a few seconds of screen time, doing nothing but standing and looking at the camera, Dalton is able to make perfectly clear that this is not Ward anymore.
  • FitzSimmons were criticized early on for being little more than nerdy comic relief, until "FZZT" forced both of them to deal with Simmons being infected with an incurable disease. The two of them were highly praised for the episode, especially for Fitz' agony at watching Simmons perform a Heroic Sacrifice, even if obviously didn't stick so early in the show.
  • For people not yet sold on Patton Oswalt's acting, Billy furiously confronting Ward about his killing Eric really helps.
  • As noted above, Chloe Bennet received extremely harsh criticism for her acting in the Season 1, particularly since she played the role of the Audience Surrogate at first. After Skye got some character development, though, many critics changed their tunes and by the time she'd fully accepted her birth name of Daisy Johnson, most viewers were on her side.
  • Luke Mitchell was considered rather bland and uncharismatic by many critics and fans, but his emotional final goodbye with Daisy and the dignity of his final moments together with Hive received almost unanimous praise.
  • Although never considered a bad actress, Mallory Jansen's role in the early episodes of Season 4 was little more than standing around as a sexy emotionless robot. By the end of the season, she sold viewers on not one, not two, but four versions of the same character, all with distinctly different personalities but similar enough to feel familiar. This was especially true in the final arc of the season, where she pulled off the character's abrupt mood switches so well that her Freak Out over Fitz' rejection was considered genuine Nightmare Fuel when it could easily have come off as Narm.
  • Any lingering doubts anyone had about Elizabeth Henstridge and Iain De Caestecker's acting ability were obliterated in Season 4, especially during "Self Control", with the scene of LMD Fitz trying to convince Jemma that he's human considered both heart-wrenching and horrifying. Then in the Framework arc, Fitz appeared as The Doctor, an incredibly disturbing evil version of himself. Elizabeth got to show off her acting chops to believably sell The Woobie during that arc. Just try not to cry watching the scene where Simmons watches Fitz tell AIDA, he'll never love anyone except Jemma, at least until that scene takes a serious turn for the worse.
  • While her acting ability was never really disputed, Natalia Cordova-Buckley got to show how good she can be in the opening scene of "The End" where she nearly breaks down in front of the team over the nature of the Stable Time Loop and having to sacrifice Coulson to save the world.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In the pilot episode, Skye tries quoting Voltaire's famous statement, "With great power comes great responsibility." — which was made famous by being attributed to Spider-Man. Three years later, Spider-Man officially joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
  • A piece of fan art casting characters from the Disney Animated Canon as The Avengers features Mulan as Black Widow. Here, Mulan's voice actress, Ming-Na Wen, really does play a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, Melinda May.
  • One of Ming-Na Wen's most notable previous roles was Chun-Li in the live-action Street Fighter movie. Her stunt double on the show is martial artist Samantha Jo, who portrayed Chun-Li in an episode of the Ultimate Fan Fights web series.
  • One of the most important plotlines established via the third quarter of Season 1 is the betrayal by one of the team's own, Grant Ward, who turns out to be one of many HYDRA operatives infiltrating S.H.I.E.L.D. from the inside. Two months later, one of the most important plotlines in WWE's wrestling program involves an ultra-popular paramilitary-styled trio called The Shield which is betrayed and disbanded by its "architect" Seth Rollins, who in fact looks like he could be a relative of Ward's, in favor of Big Bad faction The Authority. Both Ward and Rollins enter the ranks of their programs' central antagonists following these events.
  • As noted below, Skye has constantly been accused of being a Mary Sue by detractors. Come "The Only Light in the Darkness", it's revealed that, before she started calling herself Skye, the name given to her at the orphanage where she lived was Mary Sue Poots.
  • Adrianne Palicki's previous comic book outing was the Wonder Woman (2011 pilot). That makes it kind of chuckle-worthy when she and Simmons are saved by an invisible jet in her first episode as Bobbi Morse. Then there's the fact that, notably, in something of a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, in the Wonder Woman pilot, Wonder Woman at one point pulled out two metal batons to fight thugs with, just like Mockingbird does in the show and comics.
  • The MCU's inability to use the word "mutant" becomes pretty amusing with the reveal that Skye is Daisy Johnson, a character who in the comics was originally believed to be a mutant before it was discovered her powers were due to the serum her father used to become Mr. Hyde.
  • In "Aftershocks", Lance jokes that all Radio Shacks are secret HYDRA bases. The company announced its bankruptcy a couple weeks before the episode aired. Later, Radio Shack also made an appearance in Captain Marvel (2019) (taking place in 1995) in a scene featuring young Fury and Coulson.
  • Kirk Acevedo (Agent Calderon) and Jamie Harris (Gordon) appeared in Season 2 as, respectively, a fantasy-racist Jerkass and a friend and ally to said fantasy minority. Both of them appeared in the rebooted Planet of the Apes films a few years earlier as very similar characters to the ones they play here. ^note  Harris was in Rise as the kind security guard, Rodney, and Acevedo was in Dawn as the scummy Jerkass Carver.
  • In the Season 2 finale SOS, upon seeing Jiaying's plan in action, Mack states that he thought his mom was crazy for watching Fox News. In July 2015, the MCU's main news network, WHIH News, created a Twitter account. The third account it followed? Fox News.
  • By the time "Who You Really Are," which dealt with an amnesiac Sif, aired, Jaimie Alexander had been cast as an amnesiac on Blindspot.
  • This show's fandom has traditionally had a rivalry with that of Arrow's. Both Season 4 of Arrow and Season 3 of S.H.I.E.L.D. are running concurrently, and in both cases the Big Bad happens to have the same name: Hive. It almost feels deliberate when the post-winter mid-season premier has a flashback indicating the deaths of at least one character, much like Arrow's infamous grave scene in its Season 4 premiere. Taken even further towards the end of the seasons when both Hives' big evil plan involves launching giant missile attacks.
  • Mack calls the Secret Warriors "the Power Rangers", featuring Skye (Daisy), Mack, and Joey. Coincidentally, since Disney owns Marvel, and the show as well, it also used to own Power Rangers. There was a Sky in Power Rangers S.P.D., a Mack in Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, and in the Japanese Counterpart, Super Sentai, there was a Joe, all of which were Power Rangers.
  • In Avengers Assemble there was a villain with The Virus. His master plan was to take a ship, go to the high atmosphere and release the virus, to infect all the world with it. The heroes allowed him to do it, making sure that he left no other selves on earth, and then blasted the ship to outer space in a no-return flight. Sounds familiar?
  • In Season 3, James started using a chain while fighting, with fans immediately comparing it to Ghost Rider's hellfire chain. In Season 4, not only does Robbie Reyes become a recurring character, he fights and defeats James with his own chain, even keeping it afterwards.
  • Considering all the Alternative Character Interpretation debates around Grant Ward's actions, it's amusing to see him brought back in the Framework as a member of La Résistance against HYDRA—his first appearance seems to be that of an unambiguously good person operating as The Mole to protect his girlfriend.
  • Actress Briana Venskus portrays Recurring Extra Agent Piper on a Marvel show, and she also portrays Recurring Extra DEO Agent Vasquez on Supergirl (2015), another background-character member of a secret government organization, only this one's DC instead of Marvel. That oughta make for some interesting crossover/alternate universe theories.
  • Kyle MacLachlan's role as Mr. Hyde in this show becomes even funnier when in Twin Peaks: The Return, he plays both Cooper and his evil doppelganger, who wears his hair long and is incredibly Ax-Crazy just like Mr. Hyde in the Season 2 finale.
  • Looks like Coulson wasn't wrong about◊ HYDRA's soap. It's even colored blue!
  • Deke's attraction to Daisy becomes funnier after it's revealed that he's Fitz and Simmons' grandson from the future, because Fitz also was attracted to her way back in Season 1. Considering that even Deke's mother (who is also Fitz and Simmons' daughter) thinks Daisy is cute, one can't help but think that Fitz's attraction to Daisy is genetic.
  • Gabriel Luna playing a remorseless killing machine in a season with killer robots (not to mention Terminator references aplenty) is quite amusing when it was announced in April 2018 that he would soon be playing a Terminator.
  • When the show first started, easily the most common theory on how Coulson could be back was that he was an LMD. This turned out not to be the case, but the show later did have a storyline with LMD copies of the whole cast, and he actually is one in Season 7.
  • In one of the shows bloopers, Clark Gregg breaks character asking what show he is in and where Julia Louis-Dreyfus was, a reference to The New Adventures of Old Christine, a show that he starred in alongisde her. Years later, Dreyfus would appear in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier as Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine.
  • This show more or less used the Inhumans as replacement for the Mutants, since they were not allowed in the MCU at the time. Comes Ms. Marvel (2022), and it turns out that Kamala Khan, one of the most well-known recent Inhumans in the comics, is actually a Mutant in the MCU.
• Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: Biospecialist for Simmons/Ward and BioQuake for Simmons/Daisy.
• I Knew It!:
  • Half of the fandom knew Bobbi Morse was working for Coulson ever since they first mentioned she was 'Head of HYDRA Security'; the other half were hoping this would be the case and dreading the idea of it not being so. So, when it was leaked that this was indeed the case, people weren't surprised, though were very relieved.
  • People also guessed that Mockingbird would be Lance's often-mentioned ex-wife since about the second time he mentioned her; it helps that he mentioned she was friends with Hartley, who as a high-ranking member of SHIELD, would likely have known Bobbi, given Bobbi's apparent popularity within SHIELD.
  • Also during Season 2, there were two theories being called out: firstly, that the mysterious aliens involved in the backstory were the Kree, thus setting up a plotline concerning the Inhumans; and secondly, related to that, that Skye was not a Canon Foreigner at all but someone from the comics proper, with the most prominent guess being Daisy Johnson/Quake, which by extension would make her Axe-Crazy father Calvin "Cal" Zabo/Mister Hyde. By the mid-season finale, both these theories were revealed to be true.
  • After Winter Soldier, people went back over the MCU with a fine-tooth comb, looking for potential HYDRA infiltrators. "Among Us Hide..." explains a plot point in The Avengers. Remember that guy on the Council who Fury was talking to? He was HYDRA. He convinced them to launch the nuke, probably not to contain the threat, but to kill off all the Avengers before they could become a problem.
  • Quite a few fans correctly guessed that Andrew Garner was Lash.
  • When he first appeared, a few fans guessed that James was probably J.T. James, AKA Hellfire of the Secret Warriors. Then he gets his powers in his next appearance and this is confirmed.
  • Most people were expecting that it was Lincoln who would die in the Season 3 finale.
  • In the lead up to San Diego Comic-Con 2016, promos for Season 4 showing a flaming chain were spotted. Some sites reported that this was likely just hinting at the return of Hellfire, but a number of fans correctly guessed it was actually Foreshadowing the arrival of Ghost Rider. (Though technically, both did happen)
  • Although the end of The Man Behind the Shield would lead the viewer to believe that Coulson, Mack, Mace, and Daisy had been replaced with Life-Model Decoys and only Fitz and Simmons knew, a few fans correctly predicted that Fitz himself had been replaced by a LMD; some even predicted that "Skyenet" was actually the real, flesh-and-blood Daisy.
  • Quite a few people guessed that Jemma would wake up in the Framework buried alive, while others correctly predicted Aida would become the Framework's version of Madame Hydra.
  • Many people theorized Deke was directly descended from Leo and Jemma in some way from his earliest appearances; "The Real Deal" confirmed they are his maternal grandparents.
  • In Season 7, many fans theorized that Fitz and Simmons had been away from the team for much longer than it appeared in the time between being rescued by Enoch at the Lighthouse and Simmons saving the team at Izel’s temple and that they’d had a child during that time. The series finale confirmed that they had discovered Jemma was pregnant while building the time machine and then spent about four years living on the Zephyr out in space with their daughter before going back in time to rescue the team.
• Informed Wrongness: Elena is given a What the Hell, Hero? moment by both Daisy and Mack when she killed Ruby when she couldn't control the Gravitonium, when Daisy said she could have talked Ruby down. However, this falls flat when S.H.I.E.L.D. as its track record of having to put down individuals like Scorch or Donnie Gill when they couldn't control their powers. And unlike those previous two, the Gravitonium is far more destructive and Ruby is already not in the right state of mind to be able to control it. So from a pragmatic standpoint, its far safer and reasonable to put Ruby down rather than risk mass destruction.
• Iron Woobie:
  • Both May and especially Coulson have become this as the series moved along; Coulson specifically has had it rough in the second half of Season 1 but they chug along.
  • By the time she returns to the team at the end of the "Ghost Rider" arc, Daisy certainly qualifies. Notably, she only really breaks down when dealing with Coulson's death in late Season 5 and May's almost-death at the end of Season 6.
• It Was His Sled:
  • Ward being a traitor is a pretty well-known fact now thanks to it coming to light when the show first began to Grow the Beard. Describing Ward's character without mentioning this is difficult, and given how important he is to the show, it's hard to talk about the cast without bringing it up.
  • 'Skye' actually being Daisy Johnson, and an Inhuman. Given the boost of popularity the character got when this reveal happened, as well as her being the main character, makes this probably the most well-known secret in the show after the Ward reveal.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Miles Lydon is a Rising Tide hacker whose actions in "Girl in the Flower Dress" caused the deaths of a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and a superpowered man who was tortured for his gift. Despite not being directly responsible, Coulson forces him to wear a tracking bracelet that makes him unable to use technology for a fixed period of time or he'd go to jail. Then Coulson strands him in Hong Kong with nothing but the clothes on his back and a bracelet that turns him into a Walking Techbane, which would mean that he'd have to use a proxy to contact any buddies for help.
  • Grant Ward cements it by the time he appears in "Shadows", if he hadn't already done so in the final stretch of the previous season.
  • Grant's brother Christian. Whatever he was, he was still a victim of the same abuse Grant was.
  • Cal. As much of a monster as he's been, he just wants to reunite with his daughter after she was taken from him, and avenge the brutal vivisection his wife went through. We later learn he experimented on himself to gain power like his Inhuman wife so he can be more effective in searching for Daisy, but doing so damaged his mind and left him with deadly impulse control and anger issues. He ultimately opts to redeem himself and goes through T.A.H.I.T.I., meaning that, after all he went through, he not only doesn't get to be with his daughter, but now he doesn't even remember her.
  • Raina. All her life, she was told she was supposed to be something special, something divine. Even "angelic", as she calls it. So when Skye came out of Terrigenesis physically the same as before while Raina became a reptilian humanoid covered in thorns, she did not take it well. She even nearly commits suicide before Gordon saves her.
  • Lance Hunter: He may have only initially joined S.H.I.E.L.D. for the money, but he did so at the behest of some close friends who died very soon after their introduction to the series. And the only friends Hunter really has left are Bobbi and Mack, who throughout their friendship have been continually lying to him, and he's sick of it.
  • In a lesser example, Fitz in the Season 2 is very cynical, brooding, and quick to snap at people, but given he was brain-damaged, lost a lot of motor skill, and was separated from their best friend, who he was in love with, it's understandable he'd be frustrated with the world. There's also the fact he's somewhat socially awkward, made worse by the brain damage, and so he can't quite connect with most of the team, which greatly frustrated him even more.
  • The Inhumans. All they want to do is live in peace, but they have to live in isolation because they know organizations like HYDRA will want to hunt them down so they can be experimented upon or be forced into being their foot soldier, and they don't trust S.H.I.E.L.D.'s "index" because they see it cut from the same cloth of Fantastic Racism. Unfortunately for the Inhumans they are led by Jiaying, a woman who was unlucky enough to be experimented on by HYDRA and the experience warped her enough that she was ready to attempt genocide on all humans to keep the Inhumans safe — and she's able to convince most of the Inhumans to believe that as well.
  • Glenn Talbot. Despite all the people he's killed and the damage he's done as Graviton, it's hard to forget that he has genuinely good intentions in wanting to protect the world from Thanos and company. He was kidnapped and tortured by HYDRA for six months into confessing all of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s secrets to them, a fact that clearly weighs heavily on him. His mental conditioning forces him into seeking HYDRA's agenda against his will — something his own wife unwittingly inflicts on him — and when he finally breaks through the brainwashing, he tries to kill himself. It's clear that, as much as he thinks himself to be in control, the warring voices inside the Gravitonium have had an adverse effect on his already fraying sanity and exacerbated many of his worst impulses. The ultimate irony comes from the fact that injecting himself with Gravitonium and becoming the Destroyer of Worlds is driven by a genuine desire to save his friends in S.H.I.E.L.D. and pay for his mistakes.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A number of fans who had no interest in the show or had previously abandoned it began watching it when Ghost Rider joined the cast. It's not uncommon to see bloggers and reviewers say that they wished he'd get a Spin-Off so they could just follow him without the actual S.H.I.E.L.D. characters.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships:
  • Many if not most fan discussions on the subject (particularly after Skye/Ward got thoroughly sunk at the end of Season 1) seem to start off not with "Which couple do you ship?", but "Who do you ship Simmons with?"
  • Adding to the above Ensemble Dark Horse, even before her first appearance, people were already shipping Mockingbird with everyone. Hawkeye and Simmons are the most popular (due to being the canon-Official Couple with the former in the comics, and being a biologist just like the latter), but Skye and May are also rather popular. The only exception is Coulson, likely due to him being the Team Dad. When she does appear, Bobbi/Simmons intensifies thanks to some Les Yay, though Hunter/Bobbi also gained plenty of fans due to Bobbi being the ex that Hunter was talking about.
• Les Yay: The looks that Bobbi gave to Jemma at the end of "A Hen in the Wolf House" prompted a couple of dozen Slash Fics within a week of its airing.
• LGBT Fanbase: They even have their own hashtag: #superqueeros.
• Like You Would Really Do It:
  • "T.R.A.C.K.S." ends with a mortally wounded Skye stuck in a hyperbaric chamber. Even with Joss involved, like they're going to kill somebody who had enough time to already be established as one of the main characters that early.
  • "The Only Light in the Darkness" has a tense scene with Eric Koenig drawing a gun on Ward when he's suspected of being a HYDRA agent. No points for guessing the odds of Ward being outed and his plans foiled.
  • "A Hen in the Wolf House" introduces HYDRA's head of Security, Bobbi Morse, well-known in the comics as the superhero Mockingbird. Almost no one actually thought she'd be HYDRA. Similarly, two episodes before that, Simmons was teased as having undergone a Face-Heel Turn and joined HYDRA, but given she was by far the least-threatening member of the team, besides Fitz, no one bought it for a second.
  • "Aftershocks" features the apparent deaths of May and Coulson in quick succession. Yeah, good luck with that. Of course, the very next scene reveals this as a ruse, so it probably wasn't intended to really trick you. May even gives Coulson grief over his lame last words.
  • That's twice now that the show made Simmons look like a traitor, the previous time being the previews for "Making Friends and Influencing People". In "Afterlife", she appears to switch sides to the "real" S.H.I.E.L.D. only to bait-and-switch them with Fury's toolbox and send the real one with Fitz.
  • The Season 2 finale featured Coulson attempting a Heroic Sacrifice to save Fitz and Mack. Naturally, he wasn't killed off.
  • "Uprising" includes a scene where a Magical Defibrillator fails at a critical moment thanks to an EMP, which puts May in real danger of getting Killed Off for Real. She ends up making it thanks to a last-minute magnetic power source.
  • "Lockup" makes it look like Simmons could be fired for failing a lie detector test. Despite tripping up on the last question, she's still able to assure Director Mace that he can trust her—and at a crucial moment for him and S.H.I.E.L.D., yet.
  • "Deals With Our Devils" has Coulson, Fitz, and Robbie spending most of the episode trapped in a space between dimensions with the risk of getting sucked into another dimension that it's implied to be Hell. By the end of the episode they managed to return and are all home safe and sound, and the Rider is still inhabiting Robbie after temporarily leaving him for Mack during the episode.
  • Coulson is mortally wounded in "Farewell, Cruel World!" He barely makes it out of the Framework with his life. Particularly suspenseful seeing that the last real-world person to die in the Framework died in real life, too.
  • The reveal in the middle of Season 5 that Coulson is dying and doesn't want to seek any treatment was met with this by some fans. It's subverted in the finale when Coulson doesn't take the Centipede Serum and apparently dies, only for Yo-Yo to perform CPR and resuscitate him while Fitz gets a building dropped on him and dies elsewhere, making you think that there was a Bait-and-Switch for the character death which had been getting hyped up with Coulson, only for it to be immediately double subverted when the agents set off to find the new alternate timeline counterpart of Fitz that is frozen in deep space, and Coulson goes off to Tahiti with May to retire and subsequently die.
• Love to Hate:
  • Grant Ward is considered a great villain by some fans and that's why these fans want to see Team Coulson take him down.
  • AIDA has been highly praised for her role in the Framework arc as a totally despicable yet understandable Baroness, with many viewers applauding Mallory Jansen's acting ability and despising her for her emotional abuse of Fitz and Simmons in equal measure.
  • Kasius and Sinara are both incredibly cruel and sadistic bastards, but are also incredibly smug, smooth, and stylish while doing it, which makes them both very entertaining and very easy to dream of vicious karmic punishments.
  • Ruby is played to perfection by Dove Cameron as a violent sadistic, Bratty Teenage Daughter, which makes her both extremely hiss-worthy and very fun to watch.

M-Q

• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Grant Ward is the most personal foe Team Coulson ever faced. Introduced as the apparently stony but caring new recruit to Coulson's team, Ward bonds with his allies and assists them in all manner of successful missions, before being revealed as a deep cover HYDRA agent who has been playing his team all along. Twisted by his childhood abuse and surrogate father John Garrett, Ward is a cold, calculating machine with genuine affability towards enemy and ally alike, who has dedicated himself to "helping" others from the constraints of morality and the past. Ward regularly alternates between sworn enemy of Team Coulson and a necessary evil they ally with to take on bigger threats, always thinking several steps ahead and evading any attempts at capture or justice. After the loss of more than one loved one on the battlefield with S.H.I.E.L.D., Ward assumes control of HYDRA and weeds out many of the weakest links to create a formidable rival to S.H.I.E.L.D., before coming face-to-face with Gideon Malick himself and working with the man to travel to Maveth and return Hive to Earth. In the end, Ward views all of his suffering—including his approaching death—as a welcome necessity to finally finding his place in the universe as part of HYDRA's "grand plan."
  • Enoch is a Chronicom anthropologist sent to record human evolution. Learning of an extinction-level event that will occur in the near future, Enoch kidnaps the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and sends them to the year 2091 in order to prevent the end of the world. Later assisting Leo Fitz in reuniting with his friends by cryogenically freezing him, Enoch and Fitz infiltrate the Kree Inhuman auction to save the latter's teammates, Enoch sacrificing himself so S.H.I.E.L.D. can return to the present. With the timeline changed, Enoch helps Fitz go on the run, before reluctantly betraying both him and Simmons to the Hunters when informed they want to learn how to time travel in order to save Chronyca-2. Later rescuing his friends, Enoch defeats a Hunter sent after him before stealing his skin to infiltrate the Chronicom forces and once again save FitzSimmons. Having stolen a Chronicom Time Stream, the three spend years preparing to stop the Hunters, returning to the time they left to put their plan into motion. Secretly scattering throughout history pieces of a time machine later used to contact Fitz and successfully execute the rest of their plan, Enoch ultimately sacrifices himself once more so that S.H.I.E.L.D. can escape a time loop, dying content that he is and always has been their friend.
  • Season 2: Jiaying is the mother of series protagonist Skye/Daisy Johnson and the leader of the Inhuman community known as Afterlife, who developed a grudge against humanity after being tortured by Daniel Whitehall for her immortality. Jiaying uses her husband Cal’s desire to re-assemble their family to bring Skye into the fold. Cal works with Whitehall with plans to betray him, who dies at the hands of Coulson. When Skye’s distaste for Cal’s creepy behavior prevents the reunion, Jiaying plays off her teammates' fear of her newly developed Inhuman abilities. She has her right hand man Gordon bring Skye over to Afterlife. Introducing Daisy to her new home, she trains her to see her powers as a beautiful thing. When Jiaying discovers the Monolith on the Iliad, she plans war with S.H.I.E.L.D. and lures them with peace talks, even offering Cal as a trojan horse prisoner. She pretends to negotiate with Gonzales, only to kill him with a terrigen crystal. She wounds herself, and has Afterlife strafed to begin a war. To conceal this deception she murders the prophetic Raina, unaware Daisy was watching. She then goes to the Iliad and kills Oliver to demonstrate the terrigen crystals. Jiaying threatens to put them in the ship’s vents unless Weaver expands the S.O.S. beacon, to lead S.H.I.E.L.D. into a trap. Confronted by Daisy, Jiaying declares her intent to spread the terrigen gas worldwide, feeling that it would be the only way to keep Inhumans safe.
  • Season 3:
    • Andrew Garner is a psychologist and an Inhuman researcher who becomes an Inhuman himself. Developing an urge to transform into the monstrous Lash and kill other Inhumans, he keeps up appearances with his colleagues at S.H.I.E.L.D. Lash is able to evade detection from both S.H.I.E.L.D. and the ATCU who are unwittingly providing an Inhuman army for HYDRA. Cornered by HYDRA assassins, he transforms into Lash and kills them, and sets the store ablaze to cover his tracks. Upon being discovered by May, he kidnaps her and takes her to an abandoned Culver University building. Cornered by S.H.I.E.L.D. and the ATCU, he is able to overpower them until May uses there former relationship to talk him down and get him into containment. Finding himself in HYDRA's custody, he talks Simmons into setting him free. After protecting her from HYDRA, he proceeds to slaughter the Inhumans that they were holding in stasis. After spending months on the run, Garner hands himself into S.H.I.E.L.D. to take one last shot at taking out Hive. He attacks Hive, fighting off his Alpha Primitives, and sets Daisy Johnson free from his influence. Dying from being stabbed In the Back by Hellfire, Lash carries Daisy to safety in his final moments.
    • The man once known as Alveus, upon Kree experimentation, was forever transformed into "Hive." Through sheer intellect and force of will, Hive drove the Kree from earth, rallying all Inhumans to his side in the process, and though banished from earth by treacherous followers, Hive nonetheless laid the groundwork for the formation of HYDRA, the death cult organization that has haunted the world for centuries after. In the present, Hive manipulates himself back to earth with help from Gideon Malick, and immediately amasses a small following of Inhumans. Using Malick before murdering him once he outlives his usefulness, Hive stays one step ahead of S.H.I.E.L.D. throughout the series, even turning Daisy Johnson to his side and using her as a mole. Though driven temporarily insane, Hive is revealed to have exaggerated even this as a plot to be captured then use S.H.I.E.L.D.'s own devices to enact his final plan of turning a chunk of humanity into Inhumans so as to create a perfect, peaceful paradise. Hive's final moments are spent calmly reflecting that he truly wanted what was best for Inhumans, and dies realizing and admitting that perhaps humanity isn't as deserving of destruction as he once thought.
  • Season 6: The Chronicom Hunter Malachi is The Dragon to Atarah in her efforts to undo the destruction of their homeworld. Assigned to capture Fitz and Enoch to figure out how they successfully changed Earth's future, Malachi lies in wait at their final destination and efficiently adapts his plan when instead confronted and captured by S.H.I.E.L.D., escaping to contact the other Hunters when they locate Fitz and teleporting away with him in the ensuing chaos. After Atarah recklessly traps FitzSimmons in a mind prison so the pair can recreate their time travel technology, Malachi decides it would be best to first conquer a new homeworld as a backup and kills Atarah for her incompetence, reassigning the remaining Chronicom Anthropologists across the cosmos to Hunters to swell their forces and hunt the traitorous Enoch. Malachi uses copies of FitzSimmons' memories to begin his invasion of Earth by attacking the Lighthouse, using the stolen knowledge of S.H.I.E.L.D. protocols to effortlessly massacre his opposition. Standing in stark contrast to his superior's Stupid Evil methods, Malachi's strategies allow the Chronicoms an almost total victory ruined only by the failures of his allies.
• Memetic Badass: May is one in-universe, with various tall tales of how she got nicknamed The Cavalry.
  • Surprisingly, as of Season 5, Agent Davis is starting to become one as well, thanks to the Running Gag about the unbelievably amazing story of how he survived his fight with AIDA which the audience never gets to hear.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Somebody really wanted our initials to spell S.H.I.E.L.D."
  • Fans saying that the real reason Fitz loves Simmons so much is because he's after the sandwich she made in "The Hub", with some even jokingly claiming it's a Cargo Ship.
  • "I rode a horse today!", the only visible post from the "Norse paganist hate group" in "The Well." Subjected to further mutation after "Repairs", which involves a story of May riding a horse.
  • "Tahiti, it's a magical place." This phrase has even been accompanied on at least a couple of occasions by a cartoony image of Coulson wearing a grass skirt and lei and playing a ukulele. After The Reveal, "T.A.H.I.T.I. was a magical place, but it sucked."
  • It's common for people to give Ward a bunch of overly manly nicknames like "Agent Rockfist Ironchest." As of Season 2, Reddit has dubbed him Beardy McTraitorson.
  • The following episode, "Providence", gives us a delightfully snarky response to HYDRA's two-armed salute.
    John Garrett: Put your arms down, Kaminsky, you look like a West Texas cheerleader at a pep rally."
  • There's also the meta "Fifty. Years. Old," referring to people's disbelief at Ming-Na Wen's age.
  • After The Reveal came with Ward's true allegiance, many people came to indicate him for being responsible for an event, regardless if it's real or fictional (Ward is responsible for X event).
  • Fans sometimes joked that Coulson isn't really upset about the truth behind his resurrection. He's just upset that following his "death" in The Avengers, his Captain America vintage cards have been damaged by Nick Fury.
  • "All this excitement fried their circuits. Their cooling systems kicked in, and they're recharging their batteries."^note Common fan excuse to explain the Koenig brothers' prolonged absence, taken from one of their joke explanations to Agent Trip regarding the other's absence. It's bad enough as they didn't appear at all in second half of Season 2 and first half of Season 3, and after that they didn't reappear again until Season 4
  • After Mack's sudden choking out of Hunter to prevent him from discovering the existence of Real S.H.I.E.L.D., fans joke that Mack's solution to any problem is to choke Hunter out, even if Hunter isn't part of the situation.
  • "THAT'S NOT HER NAME!", usually brought up whenever Daisy's referred to as "Skye.".
  • On certain imageboards, due to Grant Ward's initial blandness, Agent Triplett (who seemed to fill the same niche on Garrett's team) became "Black Ward." This led to nearly every character becoming some version of Ward (i.e. Hunter was Limey Ward, Lincoln was Electric Ward, Deke is Space Ward, Star-Ward, or RealWard^note Since "Jeff Ward" is the actual name of the actor who plays Deke, etc.) to the point that /co/ developed the Sephirothic System of Twelve Divine Wards.
  • After Mack made his Shotgun-Axe, fans began joking that the weapon, not Yo-Yo, is his One True Love.
  • Agents of HYDRA was one of the most horrifying story arcs in the series, but Odin damn us if we don't admit that it was a Fountain of Memes:
    • Referring to the Framework as Aida's self-insert fan fiction.
    • "I'd like to report a subversive."^note Coulson's line for alerting HYDRA to Jemma's existence, which is used to argue against an opinion on forums.
    • "The soap made me do it", and jokes involving soap in general, after Framework Coulson expressed his theory about HYDRA's "mind control soap".
    • Referring to Project Looking Glass as a "3D printer" to make Aida a body.
    • After Aida's Woman Scorned moment on Fitz, jokes ranging from how she doesn't take being Friendzoned quite well to "From the scale 1 to Aida, how bad do you take rejection?" Another joke is addressing how Fitz needs to learn a better way to break-up his girlfriend in order to prevent her from becoming Psycho Ex-Girlfriend.
  • "Daisy is Thanos?"^note When the Season 5 premier revealed that Team Coulson had been sent into the future where Earth was destroyed, fans assumed that this was the result of Thanos winning in Avengers: Infinity War, the trailer of which had premiered two days earlier. When the second part of the premier revealed that it was actually Daisy, most fans had trouble accepting that, with either outright denials or jokingly suggesting that Daisy was actually the Mad Titan in disguise.
  • "Unknown" being used when you don't know know the answer to a question, after Enoch uses it when he doesn't know the answer to a question, particularly regarding the Lighthouse's origins. Also something of a Snow Clone of the "Unclear" meme from The Flash.
  • "I am a Kree, as I have always been, brother."^note Enoch's humorously deadpan attempt to bluff his way past a Kree guard, which amazingly manages to actually work despite bordering on Refuge in Audacity.
  • "That doesn't seem physically possible."^note After Kasius takes the Odium and shouts "I'M GONNA BEAT YOUR BODY WITH YOUR OWN SKULL", many quoted the Red Vs Blue line that Tucker said when Church said Texas had beaten Jimmy to death with his own skull. Helped by another Red vs. Blue-like moment in the same episode: Deke saying "SON OF A BITCH!" as his final words.
  • After Enoch and Noah both died heroically (in back-to-back episodes, no less), it's not uncommon to hear jokes about whether making a Heroic Sacrifice is an inherent part of Chronicom programming.
  • Many people have followed in Elena's footsteps after "Principia" by making "missing arm" jokes.
  • After it was confirmed that Deke was FitzSimmons' grandson in the 100th episode, jokes erupted that Deke's Belligerent Sexual Tension with Daisy was an attempt to make Fitzskimmons canon in some form or another. Similarly, after a Fear Dimension manifestation of Deke's mother commented that Daisy was cute in the following episode, fans began joking that his attraction to Daisy must genetic.
  • "Fitz Club".^note Following The Reveal in "The Devil Complex" that Fitz had a psychotic breakdown where he hallucinated the Doctor from the Framework and removed Daisy's inhibitor against her will, fans compared it to The Reveal of Fight Club. Also caused a resurgence of the "making soap" meme from the Agents of HYDRA arc.
  • "You filthy calamari Mata Hari." ^note What Talbot calls General Hale when he finds out she's a traitor, widely considered to be one of the best lines in the entire show.
  • "g n s f S. I. L.".^note When it was confirmed that the show had been renewed for a Season 6, most fans have assumed that it would take place post-Infinity War since the MCU timeline passes more or less in Real Time. Fans hit on this as the new nickname for the show as the result of Thanos obliterating half the universe in the ending of Infinity War.
  • "I think my leg is broken."^note These are Fitz's last words after blood loss due to debris falling on him. For some bizarre reason, this has been repeatedly compared to one of Peter Parker's memetic lines "I don't feel so good", while being disintegrated due to Thanos's Badass Fingersnap, due to how tragic the moments were.
  • Jemma yelling, "Where is the sun?!" from the episode 4,722 Hours gets used in memes relating to Daylight Savings Time.
  • Pretty much everything out of Enoch's plasticky mouth has been turned into a meme or a gif, but particularly popular ones are "I have taken bold action."^note After he saved FitzSimmons from his fellow Chronicoms following a potentially TV-breaking Offscreen Moment of Awesome. and "Embrace me!"^note Immediately following his moment of triumph, as the three of them need to be huddled together for the portable teleporter to whisk them away to safety..
• Misblamed: If you see anyone complain about anything on this show, chances are the blame is put on Joss Whedon. The problem with this is that Whedon has only directed and written for one episode (the pilot episode), and after that has had no involvement with the show outside of being credited as a co-creator, so he has virtually no control over any of the problems that fans have with the series.
• Moral Event Horizon: See here.
• Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize: Double subverted. The writers pulled a fast one by revealing that Brad Dourif's character (Thomas Nash) was not the Clairvoyant; however, the Clairvoyant happens to be portrayed by another big-name actor, Bill Paxton.
• Narm: Some of these can be considered Narm Charm, depending on how you see it.
  • At the end of "Seeds", Coulson goes into full-tilt Character Shilling mode for Skye, complete with an eye-rolling speech about her restoring his faith in humanity. It feels especially awkward placed in an episode that's mostly been focused on Fitz, to boot.
  • In Season 2, after HYDRA is out in the open, they seem to have developed a newfound obsession with putting their logo on everything, painting it on the walls of their offices and even issuing HYDRA jackets. It may be a handy shorthand for cluing the audience in, but it still looks silly for the terrorist organization that managed to stay secret for seventy years to suddenly be walking around in team jackets. Of course, given that this was normal behavior for them when they were part of S.H.I.E.L.D., it's likely just an old habit that's dying hard, but it's still narmy. Then Simmons is undercover at HYDRA and they reveal that she and the other HYDRA scientists have black lab coats. You know, as opposed to common white lab coats, in case you forgot HYDRA was evil.
  • In "Face My Enemy," one of the show's all-time best fights is preceded by the inevitable bouncing you get from May in a flimsy nightgown thrashing around to loosen a rope.
  • In "A Hen in the Wolf House", Bobbi's fights in the episode are generally well-received, though a number of people have complained about the hair-flip at the end of the first fight for being unnecessary. However, just as many have commented on how it helped sell the scene, being somewhat in-character for her.
  • "One of Us" has Cal recruit a small team of Gifted humans to get revenge on Coulson and on S.H.I.E.L.D.; one is a hacker, one has super strength, and one has a powerful and incapacitating scream. The sole woman of the group, Karla Fay Gideon, has razor blades for fingernails, having implanted them herself so she could kill her abusive boyfriend. While this would certainly make her "special", it certainly wouldn't make her Gifted outright. What makes this doubly ridiculous is that S.H.I.E.L.D. went to all the trouble of fitting her with thick, unwieldy metal finger guards so that she couldn't go around cutting people, instead of just going the simple route of having her razors removed in the first place.
  • There are several occasions where Dr. List says the infamous HYDRA salute "Hail HYDRA" with hilariously casual tone without any sign of Large Ham whatsoever.
  • The reveal that Theta Protocol is the Helicarrier Fury uses in Age of Ultron. It just begs the question of why the hell Coulson treated it as such an ultra-top secret thing rather than something the new director of S.H.I.E.L.D. would be fully expected to be doing, and comes off like the only reason he didn't tell anyone was he didn't want to spoil the movie.
  • After a fair amount of build-up the reveal of Cal's "Hyde" form is pretty goofy. It's basically just his normal look with different eyes and long nails. But Kyle MacLachlan's Large Ham performance made it very entertaining to watch.
  • Even after her real name is revealed, almost all characters keep calling Kara Palamas with her S.H.I.E.L.D. codename: Agent 33. Sure, perhaps not many people know her name, full name or last name. But this is particularly bad because Coulson considered her to be one of the best and brightest of S.H.I.E.L.D., so logically he should've remembered her real name. Yet, he keeps calling her that name to the point she not-so-happily reminded him she doesn't work for S.H.I.E.L.D. anymore. Bobbi and Ward are exceptions. They called her Kara.
  • During Fitz's rescue of Simmons in "Purpose in the Machine," the wind blowing around doesn't seem strong enough to be literally blowing her back, leaving us with the impression that she's just too lazy to take a few steps forward and make things far easier for everyone.
  • Also from "Purpose in the Machine", the English castle's Steampunk mechanism for keeping the Monolith portal open has gauges made in Cleveland. Whoops.
  • Andrew describes turning into Lash for the first time as "I lashed out." It's not clear whether he's making a deliberate pun, but either way it's pretty silly to hear.
  • After Daisy's vision of someone's death with a gold cross necklace nearby, the last couple episodes have the necklace introduced, and the team basically plays hot potato with it in a desperate attempt to keep the suspense up.
  • Every single second of this ad promoting Ghost Rider, from the cheesy performance to the vertical video.
  • The show presents the name Ghost Rider as forming on the streets after he becomes an urban legend despite the rarity of witnesses to see either the ghost or the car. This becomes foreshadowing. The "rider" part also makes some sense as of "The Good Samaritan", where it's revealed Robbie Reyes is actually a Legacy Character and the original Ghost Rider, likely Johnny Blaze, does indeed drive a motorcycle.
  • Daisy's excessive eyeliner in Season 4. It's supposed to show that this is a darker, broken version of the character after the Trauma Conga Line she went through in Season 3, but really, it just makes her look like an Emo Teen. Later she lampshades this by mentioning it among the many bad decisions she was making during this time.
  • The Darkhold, an Expy of the Necronomicon, looks like a brand new and cheap children's book despite being supposedly hundreds of years old, and, even through it's stated that it has the power to render itself in its reader's language, the helpful "DARKHOLD" written on the front in nice scrolling lettering really deflates any dread one could get from it.
  • In "Broken Promises", Mack's response to the reveal of the LMDs is "The robot apocalypse is finally here". Um, Mack? We already had that.
  • Fitz (a scientist, albeit not incapable to defend himself) underestimating Agent Davis (a seasoned field agent and member of May's Strike Team) in "The Man Behind the Shield" is a bit silly when you take into consideration that it's the show's way in telling us (and Davis himself) that Davis is not part of the main cast and thus doesn't have Plot Armor. It comes up again in Season 5, where Piper is the only one interested to know how he survives his deadly encounter against AIDA... And the main "heroes" apparently don't bother to ask.
  • Jemma's breakdown in "What If..." towards Coulson as a teacher comes off as far more silly than dramatic, given her hysteric attitude.
  • Jemma unloading a clip into Aida is both cathartic and awesome... But some some people might have to resist the urge to giggle when they see what the recoil is doing to Jemma's chest...
  • Jemma is able to perfectly wipe off gold paint covering the entire upper half of her face with a dry towel. It calls to mind the tar gag from Last Action Hero.
  • Kasius' threat to Mack "I'm gonna beat your body with your skull!" One wonders if Mack would say "This doesn't seem physically possible."
  • In Season 5 finale, Coulson's last message to his team has him saying "I've lived my life surrounded by heroes, none bigger than you." Heartwarming and Tear Jerker, yes, but it's borderline Damned by Faint Praise when you think that the show is never recognized by MCU movies and, if Coulson was referring to the heroes from movies, audiences can't help but thinking that those heroes are still bigger than any of the S.H.I.E.L.D. heroes. To be fair, saving the Earth from complete destruction is the biggest feat the Avengers had achieved at that point and the team had just accomplished it too. Also, Coulson has been spending time with his team for years. While the Avengers are heroes, Coulson's team is his heroes.
  • The numerous references to Ghost Rider in Season 6. They never pay off in any way with him returning like you'd think, so it ends up just coming off as the show's crew being very insecure about this season and desperately reminding us of their best-loved storyline as much as possible so we'd give it a chance.
  • From "Inescapable": Realizing you're trapped in a Mind Prison with your Evil Counterpart? Terrifying. Said Evil Counterpart being backed up by a half-dozen Mooks doing a stompy march with itty-bitty steps? Kind of sucks the fear out of the scene.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • "Eye Spy" contains such lovely Eye Scream sights as poking needles into eyes, pulling eyes completely out of people's heads, and severing optic nerves. In-universe as well as out. Fitz looks like he's fighting the urge to be sick when it comes to his part of Akela's operation.
  • "The Hub" has Simmons extracting a data storage device from a fellow Agent's sinus cavities through his nose with a fiber-optic device. We see an x-ray of the process rather than a direct fleshy view, but it's accompanied by appropriate squishing noises.
  • Garrett ripping out General Jacobs' rib, then stabbing him to death with it.
  • May getting a metal hook teleported through her leg, and then slowly yanking it out.
  • The astonishingly nasty way the Shrike kill their human hosts.
• No Yay: Everything involving the way Kasius interacts with Jemma, as he violates her personal space and talks to her in a softly intimate tone, praising her beauty, stroking her face, and promising horrible punishments to her if she steps out of line.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Daisy's new haircut in Season 3 got criticism at first for not being as short as she typically has in the comics (usually boyish short). However, Daisy's hairstyle, while defaulting to boy-cut, has been depicted differently, sometimes only slightly shorter than her show style, sometimes long and feminine, depending on the artist and how much they care for consistency. She's also began growing her hair out in the comics, though mostly to tie in with the show.
  • The handling of the Secret Warriors in Season 3 was criticised for greatly under-using the concept, with focus instead being primarily on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s continued war with HYDRA and the team itself doing little in the story, before disbanding under tragic circumstances. Of course, in the Secret Warriors comic this was based on, the titular team were likewise a very minor focus, with the bulk of the plot following Nick Fury's private war with HYDRA (aided by the remains of S.H.I.E.L.D., much like Coulson's S.H.I.E.L.D.), and the Secret Warriors themselves followed a similar path of running few operations before disbanding under tragic circumstance. The show made changes to the finer details (such as changing some of the players and greatly increasing Hive's importance), but a lot of the main points are similar (the remains of S.H.I.E.L.D. working off-the-books, fighting HYDRA who are aided by the creature Hive, one member of the Secret Warriors betraying the group, leading to the death(s) of some of the team, and Daisy going through a Heroic BSoD that makes her briefly quit, but ending with HYDRA being basically destroyed).
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Nick Fury chews out Coulson for wrecking the plane at the end of "0-8-4". Subverted though, as he returns for the Season 1 finale and it's for much more than one scene.
  • Mack from "The Asset", a stereotypically redneck truck driver who turns out to be a highly trained S.H.I.E.L.D. agent.
  • Patton Oswalt as the nerdy Coulson Fanboy named Agent Eric Koenig. He's a two scene wonder as of the Season 1 finale, and becomes an Ascended Extra following that.
  • Tsai Chin as May's mother in The Stinger of "The Only Light in the Darkness."
  • The first Ghost Rider, implied to be Johnny Blaze, in "The Good Samaritan".
  • Patrick Warburton as a hologram of former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Rick Stoner in "All the Comforts of Home".
• Pandering to the Base: The Framework containing a Grant Ward who was recruited by Victoria Hand rather than Garrett, allowing him to grow up to become a hero rather than a villain. It's obvious pandering to the still sizable contingent of Ward fans and apologists, with some even suspecting they'll somehow bring him back to the real world when the arc is over.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Just as in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, virtually any S.H.I.E.L.D. agent you or the heroes have trusted up until now could secretly turn out to be a HYDRA operative. So far, this has been true of Sitwell, Garrett, and Ward. This trope was invoked in-universe in the episodes "End of the Beginning" and "Turn Turn Turn", with both Hand and Coulson becoming paranoid of people they have trusted up until now.
  • To make things creepier, thanks to Season 2 revealing HYDRA has brainwashing technology, now even previously trusted and loyal agents willing to die for S.H.I.E.L.D. can be turned into loyal assets that HYDRA can control as easily as any other asset. They keep their basic personality, but they become morally twisted into serving HYDRA regardless. The scary part is that it also makes them ruthless and remorseless, as shown by Agent 33 being willing to go along with a plan to kill Coulson's team, and attempts to kill May when fighting her, given she was introduced practically spitting in Whitehall's face.
  • And in Season 3, Hive, the Inhuman parasite that HYDRA was created to bring back to Earth, takes HYDRA's brainwashing a step further. Once fully empowered within a dead human host, Hive is able to dope up his fellow Inhumans so that they feel artificially happy and connected and desire to serve him. The scope of this brainwashing is initially lesser in number, as it only applies to those who are compatible with Terrigenesis, but most if not all of those people happen to be 96% of the ones with the superpowers. So if your best friend can melt steel with his bare hands or your sister has a sonic scream, you better hope they never encounter anyone who's supposed to be dead, otherwise they could very well secretly be involved in an apocalyptic cult entirely capable of obtaining the power to achieve their aims.
  • In Season 7 the main antagonists are a group of aliens that can kill people and assume their identities, meaning that S.H.I.E.L.D. has to be wary of virtually everyone they come across, who could really be a Chronicom in disguise. Hell, even their common, non-impersonated forms appear human!
• Player Punch: The destruction of the Framework in Season 4 finale. The characters we've grown to know (Trip, Not-Evil-Ward, Coulson's students, the kids Mace died to save), gone. A whole world of people were unceremoniously erased because Aida was throwing a temper tantrum. Worst of all, was the deletion of Hope. This show has killed children before, but watching a ten year old pleading with her father to make it stop and sobbing that she doesn't want to die was next level.
  • The Reveal that the Doctor was actually Fitz himself in "The Devil Complex". Watching one of the nicest and most beloved characters in the team strap his teammate to a lab table and perform incredibly painful, invasive surgery on her, against her will, for the greater good is an agonizing shot in the heart for longtime fans of the series.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: Several. Fitzsimmons (Fitz/Simmons, and pretty funny in that it's an actual in-series nickname), Skyeward (Skye/Ward), Skimmons (Skye/Simmons), Skoulson (Skye/Coulson), Philinda (Phil/Melinda), Fitzward (Fitz/Ward), Mayward (May/Ward) and Trimmons/TripSimmons (Trip/Simmons). Season 2 also introduces Simmorse (Simmons/Bobbi Morse), Fitzmack (Fitz/Mack), Huntingbird (Hunter/Mockingbird), Traina (Triplett/Raina) and Mackingbird (Mack/Mockingbird), and sees the somewhat belated addition of Skitz (Skye/Fitz). In the wake of Skye's Meaningful Rename, several of the above ships are being hastily recommissioned. Wardaisy is being floated by the Skyeward faithful, poor Skitz is being saddled with Ditz.
• Presumed Flop: The show was written off by many viewers given the first season's average reviews, declining audience numbers, and something of a displacement in the MCU, losing the attempts to connect to the movies and popularity compared to the shows that led to The Defenders (2017). Yet reviews sharply improved by the end of the first season and continuing to pick up after, and the series held steady viewership that put it on-average with similar shows and on average with the network it was on. The "huge drop off" of viewers is more owed to how ridiculously high the viewership of the first few episodes was.
• Questionable Casting: In Season 2, Tim DeKay was cast as Ward's older brother, Christian, who was first seen in a flashback in "The Well". In that flashback, the two brothers are played by actors only two years apart in age. In the present, DeKay is at least twenty years older than Brett Dalton. Of course, besides the age gap (which itself can be justified by the two being Older Than They Look/Younger Than They Look respectively), most haven't had a problem with his portrayal of Christian, at least. Later, Thomas confirms that Christian was significantly older than himself and Grant, indicating that the past flashback was either retconned or was just Ward's perception of what was going on.

R-Z

• Replacement Scrappy:
  • Some consider the Watchdogs this to HYDRA, as during Season 4 they fulfill HYDRA's former role as S.H.I.E.L.D.'s main rival (in fact, it's said that many of the Watchdogs' mercenaries are former HYDRA), but lack HYDRA's history and complexity, instead being simply motivated by Fantastic Racism and implied far-right values, with far less reach due to being limited to the states^note they do, at some point, get funding to take their assault global, however that's not seen as making things any better as it just makes them more apparently a stand-in for HYDRA, and a leader that many found generic and boring. The show quickly starts playing directly into this, with him being shown as a pathetic Big Bad Wannabe when he and Coulson finally meet, and his motivation is treated with bemusement before he's soundly beaten by Daisy.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • A common complaint about Grant Ward was that he was stiff and boring. That all changed with The Reveal that Ward is a HYDRA agent who had been deceiving the team the whole time. Since then many fans have declared now find Ward much more interesting, and that it opened him tons of backstory and acting potential. Also helps that his real personality has more of a (dark) sense of humor than the stoic persona he affected.
  • Skye attracted a lot of ire from fans accusing her of excessive Character Shilling coupled comments on a weak performance from her actress. Then came her discovery of Ward's treachery with a well-acted scene from Chloe Bennet expressing her grief and horror, followed by pretending she's still fooled by him and going along with him, staying one step ahead of him most of the time, and delivering to him a couple of well deserved "The Reason You Suck" Speeches. Then Season 2 having her develop into an Action Girl, and actually showing her develop rather than having it completely happen off-screen, plus the reveal that she's an Inhuman, and the MCU version of Quake.
  • 'S.O.S.' appears to have rescued, or at least begun the rescue process on, Mack, who reveals hidden depths of badass when the Iliad is taken over by Jiaying's crew. In Season 3, he's completely out of this territory and once again a fan favourite, due to his friendship with Daisy.
  • When Lincoln was announced as joining the main cast, a large number of fans objected due to his perceived dullness of a character. The show proceeded to make him The Woobie, and revealed he suffers from depression and has at least once tried to kill himself (and is implied to have tried this more than once), making him less of a Flat Character.
  • The Watchdogs' "Superior", Anton Ivanov, as noted below, was considered a weak and generic Russian mobster cliché with many deriding his weak explanation for his hatred of Inhumans, considering him a poor replacement for HYDRA's many leaders. However, fan reception became more positive after Daisy destroyed his body and AIDA turned him into what's apparently the MCU equivalent of MODOK, controlling many LMD duplicates of himself. Generally, people found him to be far more interesting this way, especially as it meant he was now a near-unkillable army of robots.
  • Following his infamous Jerkass Ball as a sexist hypocrite towards Peggy back in the Agent Carter episode "SNAFU", which made him very divisive among fans, many felt Agent Daniel Sousa was redeemed with the Ship Tease between him and his Second Love (not counting his Disposable Fiancée from Season 2 of Agent Carter). Daisy Johnson is much more pure and healthy with much more natural chemistry compared to his prior fandom-wise ill-received flawed and somewhat forced one between him and Peggy due to it being ruined by his Madonna-Whore Complex at the time that gradually began their irreversible Ship Sinking and eventually derailed them as a result.
• Ron the Death Eater:
  • The Grant Ward fandom is somewhat infamous among the rest of the fanbase for doing this, especially the 'Stand With Ward' movement. Particular targets are Coulson (for rejecting Ward, surrendering him to the US military, and later killing him on Maveth), Daisy (for rejecting his romantic affections and shooting him when given the chance), and May (for beating the crap out of him and, later, leading him to kill Kara). Though it's true that they all hate Ward, he was the one that manipulated them all for months and betrayed them to HYDRA, never mind all the times he kidnapped and tortured them and/or their friends. It leads to a strange situation where people are calling for him to be forgiven because he was an abuse victim, yet refuse to forgive the others despite suffering abuse from him.
  • Bobbi already got this before she appeared from fans of Hawkeye/Black Widow due to being seen as an obstacle for that (being Hawkeye's canon primary love interest in the comics), but after she appeared in the show, there's some still holding grudges against her. Later, she and Mack both receive this to a much worse extent when it comes out they're part of a secret faction of S.H.I.E.L.D. keeping oversight over Coulson's team, with some acting as if it's as bad as Ward's betrayal, despite it being more close towards May's when she was revealed to be keeping tabs on Coulson for Fury, while also ignoring that a big part of their decision was Trip's death because of Coulson's decisions. Then again, any Hawkeye-related couples were sunk after Avengers: Age of Ultron revealed Clint has a wife and children.
  • Bobbi also got this from some devoted Ward apologists, due to the reveal about her sacrificing Agent 33's location while undercover in order to protect her cover, in large part to rationalize why it was OK they tortured her, to the point some have compared her actions to Alexander Pierce's plan in Captain America: The Winter Soldier^note they seem to describe Pierce's plan as 'sacrificing millions to save billions', when in actuality Pierce wanted to kill millions to bully the rest of the world into submission to control it, which is considerably different than Bobbi's actions. The fact Bobbi had no idea that Kara, or anyone else for that matter, was in the safehouse when she gave up its location, and the fact she only did it to protect another safehouse that she knew did have agents inside, seems to be ignored.
  • On the inverse, Ward has been getting this from some sections of the fanbase, who decry him as a Nazi^note despite neither he nor HYDRA itself believe in any Nazi principles; HYDRA itself may believe in Fascism, but Ward has considerably different reasons for working for them monster because of his HYDRA thing. While he's far from a good guy by the Season 2 and only gets worse by the end, he's still far more complex than just a brutish villain like some act like he is, in fact that interpretation robs him of his greatest evil asset and charm.
  • While he surely had his flaws, including a strident streak of Fantastic Racism, some people love to give off the impression as if Commander Gonzales was the biggest scumbag of the entire MCU.
  • Mack after the aforementioned reveal about his connection to "Real" S.H.I.E.L.D. and his Fantastic Racism towards the Inhumans. For reference, he only opposed Coulson because he blamed Coulson's lack of accountability for why he got possessed by a Kree entity and Trip's death (and had previously witnessed Coulson's alien blood-induced mental breakdown and saw how dangerous he is), and his 'Fantastic Racism' amounted to "not liking alien technology"^note which kicked off after his aforementioned traumatic possession and "being annoyed when someone with superpowers they can't control doesn't tell them about them even though it was putting everyone at risk", ^note which other characters expressed without getting similar hate, mostly because he was vocally angry about it yet the way it's often described, he sounds like an irrational Commander Contrarian.
  • Daisy again in Season 5, after Fitz has her knocked out, strapped to a table, then painfully undergo involuntary invasive surgery without anaesthetic to reactivate her powers, completely destroying her friendship with Fitz. Some of Fitz's fans really give her no empathy with all this and act like her being angry with him is unreasonable and a case of her being a Designated Hero, even though the show makes it clear that we're not meant to think her anger is rational. What's more, Fitz's behaviour is justified for being the result of his brain trauma from Season 1 and what he experienced in the Framework, yet Daisy isn't given any slack for, at worst, blasting him into a wall, despite undergoing torture at his hands, for which he expresses no remorse for.
  • Fitz has gotten this a lot since the latter half of Season 4, where he's given full blame for both the Framework arc and the atrocities he committed in the virtual world as "the Doctor", with some arguing that he should be held fully accountable. Later, his surgery to remove Daisy's alien Restraining Bolt has resulted in many viewers decrying him as a Complete Monster, while ignoring that his mental health was deteriorating under extreme stress and he was still not free of the brainwashing he received from the Framework, with the "Doctor" persona reemerging.
• Rooting for the Empire:
  • Some people root for Gonzales and "Real" S.H.I.E.L.D., mainly because they believe that they're right about Coulson's actions and behaviour. This became less so when Gonzales became increasingly bigoted against Inhumans, which some fans accused of being the show's attempt to undermine their very real complaints.
  • Many people root for Jiaying and the Inhumans, as they feel that S.H.I.E.L.D.'s actions in the Season 2 finale are the very same as the reason Captain America decided to previously wipe out S.H.I.E.L.D. in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and that of 616-Iron Man's in Civil War.
  • Ward and HYDRA have a surprisingly large number of supporters in the fandom who would apparently jump at the chance to join them, as showcased in the 2015 SDCC panel. As the cast noted, it appeared they have a lot of 'dark souls' in their fandom.
  • Thanks to Gideon Malick and Hive, HYDRA's followership has gotten even bigger.
  • Although it's obviously impossible for him to get the chance, a number of fans sympathize with Talbot after he becomes Graviton and feel that he is absolutely right about the need for extreme measures to stop Thanos and his forces. Also, he's pretty damn badass, too.
• Saved by the Fans: The decision to include Phil Coulson as the face of the series was influenced by the "Coulson Lives" fan movement, who lamented his Too Cool to Live status in The Avengers.
• The Scrappy:
  • Gabriel Reyes had an uphill battle due to Lorenzo James Henrie having played Chris in Fear the Walking Dead, who the fans hate for his whiny, self-righteous attitude. In this show, his reaction to learning his brother is Ghost Rider plays completely into that feeling, leading them to hate him here too despite his attitude being arguably more justified in this situation.
  • The Superior, aka Anton Ivanov, has been the target of a huge amount of hate after he has been talked up as a huge, mysterious and powerful figure and then turned out to be a generic Russian mobster archetype villain. The show quickly starts playing directly into this, with him being shown as a pathetic Big Bad Wannabe when he and Coulson finally meet.
  • Kora, Daisy's never-before-mentioned sister. She could have been a pretty interesting character, but her only appearing in the show's final few episodes means a whole season if not two of character development has to be squeezed into that time, making her personality and motivation an incomprehensible mess entirely dependent on what's more convenient for the scene you're currently watching.
  • Nathaniel Malick, the villain of the last season. An overly petty and sadistic manchild, Malick was hated for having an incredibly stupid and confusing (and blatantly false) motive; acting like an arrogant Smug Snake who legitimately believed the much more advanced invading alien race worked for and would give him the planet once they took over; and for just in general being the show's final villain instead of another member of their fantastic Rogues Gallery, readily available through the season's time travel Plot Device.
• Ship Mates:
  • A lot of fans of the show feel the dynamic neatly divides into shipping Coulson/May, Skye/Ward, and Fitz/Simmons.^note It doesn't hurt a bit that the cast have all to some degree come out in support of this combination. It gets complicated towards the end of Season 1 with the introduction of Audrey Nathan and The Reveal that Ward is The Mole, but a lot of fans still seem to ship two out of three going into Season 2.
  • Skimmons and Fitzward shippers went hand in hand during Season 2, although some of the latter seem to have defected to Fitzmack after Ward's betrayal.
  • Fitzmack and Simmorse seem to be sailing together, too.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: The ship wars in this fandom can be vicious. Probably the most volatile is the Skyeward (Skye/Grant Ward) vs Coulskye (Skye/Phil Coulson) rivalry, with plenty of hate and mudslinging on both sides.
• Shocking Moments:
  • Ward shooting Victoria Hand at the end of "Turn, Turn, Turn," along with the HYDRA reveal on a meta level since the show is drastically more serious and different from then on.
  • Skye becoming the MCU version of Quake and Trip dying in "What They Become."
  • Coulson killing Ward by caving his chest in in "Maveth," which allows Hive to return to Earth in the final moments of the episode.
  • To anyone unfamiliar with the Ghost Rider, seeing Robbie's head burning off to reveal a cracked, flaming fucking skull in "The Ghost."
  • The establishing shot of the Framework in "Self-Control," where Daisy is dating Ward, Coulson is a schoolteacher spreading anti-Inhuman propaganda, Jemma is dead, and May works for HYDRA.
  • The agents, with three groups in three different places, simultaneously realizing that the White Monolith transported them through time rather than space as they thought, coupled with a Wham Shot of a destroyed Earth in "Orientation."
  • Yo-Yo meets her future self in "Past Life," who informs her that the agents are in a Stable Time Loop, and that Coulson is dying and his death is directly connected with the end of the world.
  • Talbot infusing himself with Gravitonium and becoming the MCU version of Graviton in "Option Two."
  • The Season 6 teaser ends with a Wham Shot of what seems to be a very much alive Coulson.
  • Immediately after May dies in "New Life," Simmons comes out of nowhere and apparently begins the process of resurrecting May before bringing the agents onto a new and improved Zephyr One, which promptly uses a phase-harmonic teleportation device to transport the agents back to the 1930s, and then brings out a hyper-advanced LMD of Phil Coulson, complete with Coulson's brain download from before his passing, effectively bringing him back for the final season of the show.
• Signature Scene:
  • Season 1: Ward shooting Victoria Hand at the end of "Turn, Turn, Turn".
  • Season 2: Skye undergoing Terrigenesis in "What They Become" and her Oner fight scene in "The Dirty Half Dozen".
  • Season 3: Fitz's breakdown in front of the Monolith in "The Laws of Nature" and Bobbi and Hunter's farewell in "Parting Shot".
  • Season 4: "Self-Control" can rival "Turn, Turn, Turn" as the series signature episode. Whether it's Fitz and Simmons thinking that the other is an LMD, Daisy vs. LMD Mace, LMD May blowing up the Playground, and the final Wham Shot of the Framework revealing a world ruled by HYDRA, everyone who watches the show has a signature scene from this episode. "All the Madame's Men" has Coulson's epic speech on the HYDRA news broadcast, widely considered one of Clark Gregg's best acting moments. "The Return" also has Fitz and Aida's conversation in the containment unit, and Aida's mental breakdown after he rejects her.
  • Season 5: The Reveal that the Doctor is a hallucination of Fitz in "The Devil Complex" and Talbot becoming the MCU version of Graviton in "Option Two".
  • Season 6: The shot of Sarge stepping out of his truck and then walking out from behind it to reveal that he has the exact same face as the now-deceased Phil Coulson as he promptly shoots Agent Fox.
• Slow-Paced Beginning:
  • Season 1 received a lot of complaints for being slow and dull, thanks to being constructed largely as a Prolonged Prologue for Captain America: The Winter Soldier. A lot of the first half of the season feels like the show is treading water, since the writers weren't allowed to foreshadow the HYDRA reveal and thus couldn't really hint at the true nature of the villains beyond vague allusions to the fact that they were bad and meant trouble for the heroes. When the film's release got closer, it picked up considerably. Season 2 features a whole new confidence level from the writing team, letting the show cover its own major events in the MCU rather than waiting for the next film before it can latch on to the big stuff, and Season 3 ups the ante even further, telling a story with a grander scale than any other MCU property except perhaps Thor, to the point that you could make a good case that the show is now the most required viewing to properly understanding the MCU's ongoing story.
  • This has become more prominent with the frequent fan consensus that the show has spiked in quality by a ridiculous degree as of Season 4, and maintained that level of improvement all the way into Season 5.
• Special Effect Failure: The show is pretty good about avoiding this (see its entry on Visual Effects of Awesome) buuuuuut:
  • Once Mike Peterson starts overusing his powers in the pilot, the composition of the effects becomes obvious.
  • In Fury's first appearance on the show, the make-up for the scars around his missing eye are crudely drawn on and have none of the texture seen elsewhere.
  • Ward's dramatic mid-air rescue of Simmons in "FZZT" is clearly shot in front of a green screen, in comparison to a similar mid-air rescue in Iron Man 3.
  • In "The Bridge", Coulson keeps turning Lola's steering wheel even though the green screen background shows him driving down a straight road.
  • "Yes Men", for the most part, has very passable effects, with the exception of one scene at the beginning of the episode where Lorelei shoves her previous newlywed slave twenty feet. The effect ends up just looking cheap, and the fact that those few frames appear to be noticeably sped up just makes it look worse.
  • The scene where Lola flies in "Nothing Personal" is clearly shot in front of a green screen and the CGI for the landing is obvious.
  • In the Season 1 finale "Beginning of the End", when Garrett punches Coulson, sending him flying across the room, Coulson's body seems to break the laws of physics.
  • Gordon's Eyeless Face makeup is a bit inconsistent episode-to-episode, shifting in design and shape from each appearance, as well as going from eerie to downright silly depending on the setting (it's often better in low-light exterior shots).
  • Cal's long-awaited transformation into Mr. Hyde in the Season 2 finale. In the comics, Hyde is a huge, muscle-bound abomination akin to The Incredible Hulk, but the show didn't have the budget for that, so instead he looks normal except for a hilariously deformed face and crazy hair. At least Kyle MacLachlan gave an entertaining performance.
  • During Fitz' breakdown in the Season 3 premiere, the door he kicks open is very obviously a prop. The monolith also visibly wobbles when he strikes it, as though it's made of rubber and not several hundred pounds of stone.
  • In "Closure" Jemma endures horrific torture at the hands of Ward and Giyera. Exactly what they do to her is mostly left to the imagination, but it involved a lot of screaming. But we do get a glimpse of her once it's over, and... She has a small cut on her cheek. That's it. The effect was so jarring it caused some viewers to wonder if Ward had somehow staged the whole thing and she hadn't really been tortured at all, even though we outright see him beating her at one point.
  • In "Let Me Stand Next to Your Fire", a fireworks shop is set ablaze by — in Mack's words — "two fire dudes". The fireworks that ignite are obviously wooden dowels painted red. Two successive zooms show us the wood grain in excruciating detail.
  • "The End" has some pretty great visual effects all-around, but one point where they clearly ran out of budget and had to cut corners can be seen when Talbot lifts Daisy into the air so he can piledrive her into the ground. The background during this scene looks like rather unconvincing green screen. Again, the visual effects in the episode are good, which is why this scene comes across as visually-jarring.
• Spiritual Successor: The "Agents of HYDRA" arc from Season 4 is probably the closest to a live action adaptation of House of M, despite replacing Mutants with HYDRA. Both arcs feature an Alternate Universe in which everyone seems to have their greatest wish, only one person knows about the real world (or in the case of "Agents of HYDRA", two), and the characters have to escape and stop the Alternate Reality from taking over the real world.
• Spoiled by the Format:
  • Zigzagged. The Season 1 finale wraps up most of its drama at about the 45 minute mark — Garrett is dead, Ward is captured, Fitz and Simmons are alive, Deathlok and his son are free — leading one to expect that in the last 15 minutes, there will be a The End... Or Is It?, or a Diabolus ex Machina. When the show comes back from commercial, the viewers see Garrett get back up, climb into the cyborg-maker chair, and declare he's unstoppable—only to be vaporized mid-sentence by Coulson. After that is the scenes of Raina meeting with Skye's father and Coulson writing out the same alien language Garrett was earlier in the episode, acting as Sequel Hooks.
  • For some fans, the death of Agent Triplett at the end of the Season 2's midseason finale "What They Become" was no surprise because B.J. Britt had been credited as a guest star throughout the front end of the season, indicating that he wasn't in enough episodes to trigger a regular cast credit.
  • Averted in the Season 2 finale, where the spinoff featuring Bobbi and Lance would have spoiled the suspense about their survival... Except it had been cancelled with enough time to do a quick reshoot to kill them off instead.
  • Played straight as Elizabeth Henstridge had already been announced to still be part of the main cast in Season 3, meaning whatever that Kree weapon is doing to Simmons doesn't include killing her.
  • In the first half of the first half of the Season 3 finale, Hive is captured. As it may be easily suspected, the story does not end at that point.
  • Given the "LMD" subtitle on the second third of Season 4, no one bought that the entire LMD storyline would be wrapped up in its first episode.
  • The opening credits of "No Regrets" spoil the return of Triplett in the Framework, as his actor is credited in them.
  • Similarly, The Reveal in "All the Comforts of Home" that Deke was taken back in time by the Monolith, not killed is ruined by his actor's appearance in the credits only a few minutes beforehand.
• Squick:
  • The entirety of the surgery involved with Coulson's revival, especially the spider-legged robot probing his exposed brain.
  • During the battle at the Norway safehouse, Bobbi does a very nice spin through a HYDRA assassin who had just turned to dust.
  • Ward's death. The way Coulson slowly crushes his ribcage, combined with the cracking sound, is just unsettling.
  • In the Season 4 finale, Ghost Rider takes out a random LMD by shoving a running drill into its eyeball. Onscreen. Granted, it wasn't a human casualty, but still.
  • In the Season 5 premiere, May gets teleported into a metal hook through her leg. Which she has to remove, slowly.
  • Virgil's death in the first episode of Season 5. The roach's claws tear through his face from behind.
  • The show's level of violence in general has gotten much messier in Season 5, as we get to see characters have their throats slit, killed by shards of stone to the head through the eyeball, decapitated, and rather gruesomely impaled. Granted, the vast majority of the blood spilled is blue and Kree, so it's not quite as gruesome as it might be otherwise, but it can still be rather jarring at times.
  • The Doctor/actually Fitz performing invasive surgery on Daisy against her will is almost as visually agonizing as it is emotionally agonizing.
  • Keller's fate after being given a Mercy Kill. You can see the skin on his arms sloughing off and turning to crystal.
• Stoic Woobie: Thanks to the events of Bahrain, May has high-functioning PTSD. Don't expect her to complain about it.
• Strangled by the Red String: Season 3 potentially had two of these with Coulson and Rosalind and Daisy and Lincoln. Coulson and Rosalind were just getting to know each before Ward kills her. Coulson reacts like he's lost his soul mate even though he barely knew the woman, and it drives him to personally and brutally kill Ward (though it's implied that it was also the last straw for him after letting Ward get away time and time again to continue hurting him and his team, especially since Rosalind was the first person he even tried to start a romance with after Audrey). With Daisy and Lincoln, Lincoln was only with S.H.I.E.L.D. because of Daisy, but they never had a chance to act on their feelings before Lincoln sacrifices himself to save the world from Hive in the finale. This hurts Daisy so much that she leaves S.H.I.E.L.D. and becomes a vigilante.
• Strawman Has a Point: In "Love in the Time of HYDRA", Gonzales, the leader of the other S.H.I.E.L.D., makes some serious accusations against Coulson's S.H.I.E.L.D.: that they're being overtly secretive, that they're not accountable to anyone but themselves (which is why people can't trust them), and that their actions seem to be driven by Coulson's personal agendas. The thing is, all of these claims are, to some extent, true, and Lance admits as much.
• Take That, Scrappy!:
  • Considering Skye was the biggest Base-Breaking Character at the start of the show, May giving her a dressing down over coming to her about her search for her parents in the middle of an operation in "The Bridge" could count as this for those who don't like the character.
  • Coulson gives Lincoln a "The Reason You Suck" Speech listing several things fans had complained about in "Watchdogs." He gets it even worse in "Failed Experiments," where everyone keeps pointing out how useless he is, and what would seem to be his big heroic moment of going against orders and becoming a guinea pig for a possible cure for Hive's infection turns out to be pointless when it doesn't work, and then forces him to be imprisoned for his own good when it wrecks his immune system.
  • Fans who hate Agent Daniel Sousa were delighted to see Deke (The Friend Nobody Likes of all people) deliver A "The Reason You Suck" Speech to him after Sousa chewed out Agent Simmons for a time travel mishap, calling him out for his unjust harshness towards her and pointing out he isn't the only one who got plucked from his old life.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • A number of fans on Tumblr have been expressing this at the end of Season 2, primarily because of Skye officially becoming Daisy Johnson and Ward fully embracing his dark side, insisting the show's overall plot has changed too much.
  • Many Ghost Rider fans aren't happy that he drives a car rather than a motorcycle. Though it's downplayed with the reveal that he's a Legacy Character and the previous Rider (presumably Johnny Blaze) did have a motorcycle.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Trip gets a decent amount of development after arriving late in Season 1, and his being a descendant of a Howling Commando offers plenty of good material to mine. In Season 2, he doesn't get as much screentime as the other members of the team, then gets killed off in the mid-season finale. BJ Britt himself says he thinks the character was "cut short" and had tons of untapped potential.
  • Casting Lucy Lawless as Isabelle Hartley and then killing her off in her first episode before she gets to do much of anything. Particularly disappointing given how badass she is when we later see her in action (in flashbacks) in "One Door Closes", along with the fact that she could have been the first openly LGBT character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (a distinction that would go to Jeri Hogarth in Jessica Jones (2015)), given her comics counterpart's known relationship with Victoria Hand.
  • Mack's little brother Ruben appears for one episode, where it's shown he clearly has an incredibly strong bond with Mack and a mirror to Mack's own struggles with Fantastic Racism... And then he's never been so much as mentioned since. Especially since the Ghost Rider arc heavily features Robbie Reyes' relationship with his own younger brother, and yet this is never brought up even when Mack hosts the Spirit of Vengeance.
  • Werner von Strucker allowed us to learn more about his father (himself one of the biggest victims of this trope in the MCU) posthumously and his relationship with Ward served as a parallel to the latter's relationship with Garrett in Season 1. By his 3rd appearance, he's become a target of HYDRA and left comatose by the end, with no indication of when he'll wake up. Zig-zagged when he returns in Season 5, where he's developed a super-human memory and becomes one component of a budding supervillain team and one-half of a villainous couple with Ruby Hale. Unfortunately Ruby accidentally kills him when she's unable to control her new-found Graviton powers.
  • Rosalind Price and Banks are both promptly killed off one episode after they're finally confirmed to be on the good guys' side. Rosalind's death in particular is an utterly textbook case of Stuffed into the Fridge, and many fans have called it a nakedly obvious attempt by Jed Whedon to replicate the magic of Jenny Calendar's death on his brother's show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the big difference being that the real power of that scene was its serving as proof that the show would not be pulling any punches with Angel's Face–Heel Turn and he was completely evil now, a line that Rosalind's killer Ward had long since crossed by this point. Some of it is Real Life Writes the Plot as Constance Zimmer has a regular role on another show, but surely there was a better way to do it.
  • Ward in Season 3. Following the end of Season 2, he's taking control of HYDRA and planning to rebuild it into a dangerous meritocracy and opponent to S.H.I.E.L.D., but it never got the chance, only succeeding in kidnapping/recruiting Werner von Strucker and killing off some of HYDRA's old guard. Instead, Gideon Malick, one of HYDRA's top leaders and one of the few who know HYDRA's true origin as an ancient cult who worship a lost Inhuman monster, ends up being the main threat in the first half of the season, while Ward becomes The Dragon to him, and is eventually killed off by Coulson, in revenge for the above-mentioned death of Rosalind. Hurting matters is how this leaves gaps in the character arcs of Daisy, Fitz, Simmons, Bobbi, Hunter, May, and Andrew, who Ward had hurt in a serious manner previously and never got their final comeuppance on him.
  • Many people feel that Mike Peterson/Deathlok should be in the team or even receive his own spin-off series since his tragic backstory and Nice Guy status make him one of the most heroic characters in the entire series.
  • Stephanie Mallick, Gideon's equally evil and ambitious daughter. She gets one episode's tag scene devoted entirely to introducing her, and then only appears in one more episode where she's killed at the end as punishment for Gideon's betrayal of his brother.
  • Tucker Shockley and Hellfire have not been seen since they were each respectively taken into custody, despite how useful it would for the team to have men on their side (albeit untrustworthy men) who have the insanely valuable power of making things explode with a touch.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Season 2 revealed that Simmons was undercover as a mole in HYDRA. Not only did this give a lot of plot to Simmons, but also showed viewers a deep inner working of HYDRA, all with the looming of threat of Simmons being captured or even brainwashed. Two episodes later, they also revealed that Bobbi Morse was also a mole only for their cover to be blown and Simmons and Bobbi to escape back to S.H.I.E.L.D.
  • Overlaps with They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character, but the adversarial relationship between Grant and his older brother, Senator Christian Ward. Not only was Christian's abuse the reason for Ward's Start of Darkness, but flashbacks and conversations with Ward hype Christian up as being far more evil than himself as well as someone who could be a significant threat to both Ward and S.H.I.E.L.D. When Ward goes to hunt him, the viewer was probably expecting a deadly cat-and-mouse game that could easily last for at least a couple episodes. Instead, Ward finds and captures Christian easily in the beginning of the next episode, forces him to confess to his crimes, then kills both Christian and their Abusive Parents offscreen. Then again, that's not an unrealistic portrayal of what could logically happen when a highly experienced secret agent trained in infiltration and assassination goes rogue and decides to close a chapter of his personal history. It's later revealed by Thomas Ward that both Christian and Grant were abusive and cruel to him, making Thomas the Abel to both Christian and Grant's Cain. This does provide some closure to the arc, but a lot of fans still find that it wasn't enough.
  • The 2nd half of Season 2 sees Cal assembling a team of supervillains to get revenge on Coulson. Cal had been a threatening, highly dangerous villain throughout the first half of the season and a lot of hype was made over this being the first Legion of Doom in the MCU. They last one episode; Cal is taken away by Gordon and the rest of team is recaptured. Many fans were annoyed, feeling the plotline had a load of potential and gave Cal a better role than a helpless prisoner who later gets Demoted to Dragon to his wife Jiaying.
  • Played with concerning the Secret Warriors; after half a season of build up it appeared that all we were getting were Daisy, Lincoln, and Joey, with the rest of Team Coulson's usual field team as backup, which is quite disappointing, and the only subsequent member to join after that being Yo-Yo, with the team doing very little before Lincoln is killed and Joey quits. Somewhat justified though, see Older Than They Think.
  • After the show went to the trouble across two and a half seasons of setting up Daisy, May, Fitz, Simmons, Bobbi, and Hunter as having legitimate claims to the honor of being the one to kill Ward, just one episode before it happens the show rushes in a completely stock Collateral Angst plot for Coulson so he can do it.
  • After the Fantastic Racism Mack struggled with in Season 2, he gets infused with the Robbie Reyes' Ghost Rider spirit in in "Deals With Our Devils," only for the spirit to return to Robbie at the end of the episode. Having Mack stay Ghost Rider for a while could've lead to some great development as he gets a first hand look at what people with powers go through.
  • Ellen Nadeer shoots her own brother and dumps him into the ocean, where we see him undergo a second Terregenesis. Despite the fascinating possibilities of him being the first Inhuman to go through Terregenesis twice, as far as we know he's still lying at the bottom of the ocean. What makes this even more baffling is that the writers clearly haven't forgotten about him, either, he later reappeared in the Framework arc... But never again since.
  • Many people hoped that Project Looking Glass, a machine that allowed Aida to build a living body and transfer her consciousness into it from The Framework, would be used to also bring back Trip, the good version of Ward, or Mack's daughter Hope. Unfortunately, nobody else got to use the machine but Aida.
  • The Framework Arc in its entirety is an absolutely fascinating Alternate Universe Arc which explores how life would be different for the Agents if they lived under completely different circumstances. Most notably, a lot of fans feel that the good version of Ward telling Skye that she is an Inhuman would have been intriguing enough to be the setup to its own plot, but since the real-world Daisy had replaced Framework Skye at that point we only get to see it from the main universe Daisy's point of view. There was also a lot of potential for other characters to reappear under different circumstances, such as Stephanie Malick, who was unceremoniously killed by Hive just to establish how evil he was. Since HYDRA in the Framework hates and fears Inhumans, the potential reveal to Framework HYDRA that they were founded to worship an Inhuman could provide a lot of tension. Since Aida deletes the Framework in the Season 4 finale, we never get to see any of this happen, even after Ward talks to Daisy about getting his version of Skye back in an emotional scene.
  • In a more minor case of "they wasted a perfectly good fight scene," "Best Laid Plans" features an act break on the Zephyr's gravity turning off as Daisy and Sinara are about to fight, leading to quite a letdown when we only get a few seconds of zero gravity fighting between them before May is able to turn it back on. We can probably blame the show's budget troubles for this.
  • Despite the same episode featuring the return of nearly every major villain whose actor is still alive, Grant Ward is bafflingly and completely absent from "The Real Deal" when it would be the ideal place for Brett Dalton to get a cameo as the team's most well-known and infamous arch-nemesis.
  • Also in "The Real Deal", General Hale's group discover that Deke is genetically related to Fitz and Simmons in the wham moment that reveals this fact to the audience... and then Hale never brings up learning this in any subsequent episode. Even when Coulson is trying to convince her that he and his team have been to the future, which this fact would help prove.
  • Some fans are a bit disappointed by the announcement that Season 6 will air in Summer 2019 for two reasons — the first being that there can't be a Captain Marvel tie-in in March, and the second being that it won't explore the fallout of the ending of Avengers: Infinity War.
  • To rub salt into the wound, the Season 5 finale has absolutely no main character get disintegrated by Thanos's Badass Fingersnap, which was deemed a wasted opportunity to tie this show into Avengers: Infinity War despite the previous episodes beforehand containing continuity nods towards that movie. Furthermore, it's been confirmed that the Season 6 premiere is set a year after the events of Avengers: Endgame, meaning that the heavily-speculated story possibility won't be happening at all.
    • However, the first episode of Season 6 strongly suggests that the story is actually taking place in 2019, one year after season 5 (several references to S5 events being "one year ago"). Meaning that the season IS occurring in the gap between Infinity War and Endgame. What, if anything, will happen with this is yet to be seen.
    • And then played straight again when it was revealed that Season 6 takes place both Pre-Snap and one year after Season 5, which not only means that the Snap is not featured but also creates one hell of a Continuity Snarl.
  • The series as a whole could easily be subject to this trope. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. went out of its way, particularly in the early seasons, to respond to and reference the events of the MCU films and their various aftermaths. Not once did the films ever acknowledge the existence or actions of the characters in Agents beyond subtle easter eggs, with even the return of the original Helicarrier in Age of Ultron being ascribed to some "friends" by Nick Fury^note who had even shown up in person in the TV series, multiple times, and none of the Agents characters present in any capacity (though Kevin Feige did point out the connection to the show in an interview at the time). Even in the Grand Finale crossover of Endgame, it was Edwin Jarvis from Agent Carter who got to appear for a single line, and none of the characters from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (to say nothing of ignoring the other Marvel TV properties like Cloak and Dagger, Runaways, and the Netflix series). Granted, a lot of this was due to strife behind-the-scenes between the film and television sides of the Marvel production empire, but even after the split was resolved and new Marvel series were made, the revived S.H.I.E.L.D. was basically replaced by S.W.O.R.D. for WandaVision and ignored entirely in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (except for, again, a background easter egg).
• Trapped by Mountain Lions: Ward and Agent 33's abduction of Mockingbird has nothing to do with the main plot, and only exists to keep Bobbi and Hunter out of the S.H.I.E.L.D./Inhuman war climax of Season 2.
• Unexpected Character: Even after Marvel got the rights to Ghost Rider back, the lack of any mention of him in the plans for Phase Three made the announcement of his appearance in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. quite a surprise. Specifically, the fact that they chose Robbie Reyes—the most recent incarnation of the character—over Johnny Blaze (or even Danny Ketch) surprised many.
  • Zigzagged with Johnny Blaze himself. While he's the most prolific Ghost Rider, and many expected him to appear in the MCU after Marvel got the rights back, his appearance as Robbie's predecessor and the one who empowered him took everyone by surprise.
  • Agent Daniel Sousa from Agent Carter joining the main cast in Season 7 due to time travel. And ending up in a relationship with Daisy, which previously would have been a Crack Pairing since they lived in different eras.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • Jiaying. Even though killing Gonzales and later trying to kill Daisy was supposed to turn the audience against her, the worldwide reaction to Inhumans in Season 3 more-or-less validate her beliefs.
  • Grant Ward. He was an unrepentant murderer in service to HYDRA and had numerous Kick the Dog moments throughout multiple seasons of the show, but the amount of focus devoted to him right up until his death ended up making him a massive Draco in Leather Pants and resulted in an entire movement of fans Rooting for the Empire because Evil Is Cool. Fortunately, his Good Counterpart in the Framework in Season 4 showed the audience how heroic Ward could have been if his life had been different. Also, many fans didn't share the team's appalled reaction at Ward's killing his Abusive Parents, given that they were abusive.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Simmons during the Framework arc. Yes, she is trapped in a world completely alien to her, and she is correct about the Framework being a simulated reality, and that everyone is running on limited time, but she doesn't even consider that to the people living there (whom she brushes of as just pieces of data) it is indeed very real, and her approach of just telling Mace and Ward — without any real proof other than her say-so, and expecting them to just believe, is a little frustrating. Coulson himself pointed out that Mace and the others didn't have his previous tampering to help him break through the illusion. She comes off as especially mean when she calls the fight against HYDRA, led by the resident versions of Jeffrey and Ward, meaningless, and her insults toward Ward also just seem to go into plain Irrational Hatred territory as this version of Grant Ward has shown himself to be a good enough man who genuinely loves Daisy/Skye and even apologizes for his deceased real world counterpart's terrible actions. Also, when Ward makes the valid point that Jemma not letting him take the shot was what got Agnes killed, Simmons tries to justify her actions by saying the real Fitz would have never done it.
• Unpopular Popular Character:
  • The team themselves, who almost never get any recognition in-universe for their actions and suffer constant Hero with Bad Publicity status at best, but maintain an incredibly devoted fanbase out-of-universe.
  • Grant Ward deserves his own spot here. Fans love him for being evil, badass and manipulative, but the characters hate him for being evil and manipulative.
  • Hive takes this to an extreme degree, thanks to the whole "absorb all Earth into my hive mind" thing he has going, but is beloved by fans for Brett Dalton's chilling performance and being one of the best villains in the entire MCU.
  • Similarly, Gideon Malick. Bad, bad dude. Awesome character, and the late Powers Boothe will be greatly missed by many.
  • Cal. Even his own daughter thinks he's a monster, but Kyle MacLachlan makes the character impossible not to like and root for even when he's carving chunks out of somebody.
  • Ghost Rider. Even his allies are terrified of him, but fans love him because he's fucking Ghost Rider.
  • Nobody on the team is much a fan of Enoch, thanks to his awkward grasp on human interaction and totally emotionless manner, which is exactly why the fans think he's hilarious.
  • Played with in Season 4 when S.H.I.E.L.D. goes public again and Daisy becomes Famed In-Story thanks to Mace's positive PR for her as the 'face' of S.H.I.E.L.D. — briefly, she's given a lot of recognition for what she's done, but then Anton and Aida frame her for Mace's death and Talbot's near-assassination (at least in-part as payback for Daisy kicking their asses previously) so now, not only are S.H.I.E.L.D. public enemy number one, but Daisy in particular is accused of being a dangerous terrorist and the 'face' of this rogue group of criminals.
• The Un-Twist:
  • In Season 2, Simmons isn't actually working for HYDRA, but is a Reverse Mole for Coulson. The show itself actually seems to acknowledge that no one would buy it, revealing the truth before the episode that introduces her working there is even halfway over. The same goes with HYDRA's Head of Security as they already hyped her up as being Bobbi Morse/Mockingbird, a character fans knew wouldn't be a villain.
  • The Koenig brothers are confirmed in Season 4 to really be just identical siblings—no sci-fi concepts like LMDs or clones play into it. However, they were involved in the original LMD program — as engineers.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: While the Season 1 was riddled with low-quality CG and Special Effects Failure, the show's FX has slowly improved ever since and is now producing kickass visuals on a weekly basis.
  • Doctor Debbie burning to death from the inside out in the fifth episode, with her skin turning black and crumbling to Ash while screaming and trying to get away, is both stunning FX and absolutely horrifying.
  • The Gravitonium in the show's third episode uses CGI to its advantage in its depiction of a bizarre polymorphic substance that's not of this world. Likewise with the Monolith.
  • The May vs. disguised Agent 33 early on in Season 2. They had Ming-Na Wen fight herself, in one of the best one-on-one brawls in the whole show, and the effect is flawless.
  • Although it's nothing more than the California Desert with a CGI alien sky and a blue night filter, all of the scenes on Maveth look convincingly not of this world.
  • Deathlok's cybernetic leg unfolding itself from storage and attaching itself painfully to his body is on par with any of Tony Stark's Iron Man suits in terms of robotic FX quality, as is Garrett's robotic reassembly into a Frankenstein-monster like Cyborg, for at least the few scant seconds before he's unceremoniously disintegrated.
  • Carl Creel's transforming abilities, full-stop. How do they get a man turning his skin to wood, rubber, or concrete to look so damned realistic?
  • Everytime an Inhuman uses their powers, full stop. Skye's earthquakes, Lincoln's lightning blasts, Yo-Yo's super-speed, Joey's metal-melting powers, Hive turning his skin to dust mite-like parasites, Hellfire's burning chain... The list goes on and on.
  • The show's prosthetic makeup team is quite good, starting with the horribly scarred Mike Peterson, the surprisingly-convincing old-age makeup for Daniel Whitehall, and the transformed Raina in Season 2, but Lash looks absolutely incredible. The Practical Effects they use for his makeup are on par with Kurse or the Uruk-Hai. The Painful Transformation of Andrew Garner into Lash is also nothing less than convincing, despite the fact that they're played by two different actors who look nothing alike.
  • Every shot of somebody being slowly disintegrated by a splinter bomb.
  • Almost every shot of the Bus, but especially its dramatic demise in "The Dirty Half-Dozen", with the invisible plane turning visible in flashes and explosions from the HYDRA missiles, slowly becoming completely opaque as it falls to the ground in flaming pieces. After doing without the S.H.I.E.L.D. quinjets for Season 1, the Team now uses Quinjets extensively throughout Season 2 and 3 and they look as good as anything in the MCU. Then we got the even bigger and cooler Zephyr One in Season 3.
  • Hive's Game Face in "Ascension" is motion-capture FX on par with the movies. It's very convincing, and the CGI manages to still convey emotion while looking almost nothing like a human face.
  • Robbie's transformations into Ghost Rider, first seen in "The Ghost." Especially the moment where the flames consume his head and melt away his face when he first powers up.
  • Yo-Yo's power show in "The Laws of Inferno Dynamics" are visually amazing, looking almost on par with Quicksilver from both Avengers: Age of Ultron and X-Men: Days of Future Past.
  • Shockley reconstituting his body after becoming an Inhuman. The crew were clearly very proud of the effect with how long the camera lingers on it, and quite justifiably so.
  • The scene where Daisy finds a whole room full of Daisy LMDs in "Self-Control." You'd really believe that Chloe Bennet has a dozen or so identical twins.
  • The effects in Season 5 are nothing short of jaw-dropping. The extremely realistic and well-animated alien "roaches", the beautiful shots of the space trawler in flight, and the exploded Earth outside the windows are easily on par with the cosmic MCU films like Guardians and Ragnarok, if not superior. Making it all even more impressive is that this is after the show took a highly publicized budget cut.
  • We get a glorious close-up of one of the Roaches in "Together or Not at All" and while it's only on screen for a few seconds at most, it looks insanely good for network television CGI.
  • We get a shot of a secret hangar opening in the ocean, with all the water pouring in, and it looks at least as good as the shots of the Raft in Captain America: Civil War.
  • Qovas' Cool Starship looks amazing especially when it gets blown up.
  • What happens to the people who get stabbed with Sarge's knife (exhibit A: Agent Keller) is as visually stunning as it is graphically unpleasant.
  • The Grand Finale of the series, "What We're Fighting For", features a sequence in which all the major players travel through the Quantum Realm, and the visual effects quality of the scene rivals what's shown in the films themselves.
• Wangst: It's kind of hard to bear Raina's constant whining about her physical change after the Terrigenesis and feel sorry for her when you consider she largely brought it on herself.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?:
  • Given the Marvel logo, the fact that it's network TV, the TV-PG rating, and the 8:00 time slot, many parents probably weren't expecting the sheer amount of Fanservice, not to mention the fairly realistic depictions of violence and its aftereffects. This notably includes the badly beaten Coulson undergoing interrogation in "The Magical Place". The flashback image of him with the top of his skull removed, undergoing brain surgery by a scary-looking robot, was unexpected as well. Especially since he was awake and begging them to let him die at the time. And there's Scorch roasting Debbie on screen during "Girl in the Flower Dress". These could be the same parents who didn't see any of the films in the MCU, but assumed that since they're based on comic books, there couldn't be anything adult-themed in them, regardless of the PG-13 ratings. In part as a reaction to this, the show was moved to the slightly more mature 9:00 time slot for Season 2. In addition, up until "The Things We Bury", all episodes had been rated TV-PG; ABC apparently decided upon previewing that one that it was too violent and gory for TV-PG, so it's the first episode of the series to be rated TV-14.
  • On the other hand, in the UK it not only remains in an 8:00pm time slot for Season 2 — and yes, Channel 4 does get the scissors out a lot — but the mid-season finale "What They Become," which was shown on Boxing Day (that's December 26th, for those who don't know), aired an hour earlier than usual at 7:00pm.
  • Season 4 does away with this entirely by placing the show at 10:00 PM. If this doesn't give a sufficient hint, the first scenes of episode four show partial nudity of Daisy and Ghost Rider killing several Watchdogs in a gruesome manner. Season 5 continues this in earnest with some pretty gruesome death scenes (including two that deal with heads either being impaled from behind with claws or imploding), things you wouldn't expect to see on a broadcast network TV show at all, let alone for children.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?:
  • Mike's rant at the end of the first episode can be seen as a parable on race and class relations and/or the Great Recession.
  • On the other side, Skye and Ward's dialogue in episode two could be seen as a Take That! to middle class radicals who seem oblivious to the fact that their pet causes often involve the very sort of violence they claim to hate.
  • Ian Quinn from Episode Three. A wealthy businessman with libertarian leanings, he despises government for regulating business and hoarding new discoveries, yet he turns out to be just as dangerous as the government itself.
  • The situation with Miles in Episode Five can be seen as a jab against hacktivists who preach about freedom of information, but won't hesitate to sell said information for a quick buck.
  • The Inhuman plotline(s) have been used for analogies on both hatred towards immigrants and also bigotry towards LGBTQ folks.
  • The Framework reality in the final third of Season 4 has so many references to current American politics it cannot be called parallel, but more of a deliberate Take That!. At one point, in response to how HYDRA is normalized in the Framework reality, Simmons tells a kid that all HYDRA are Nazis "and don't you ever let anyone forget it." This has been said almost word for word regarding the alt-right movement in real life.
  • The Framework reality has also been interpreted as metacommentary on the Marvel Comics Secret Empire storyline, which has been extremely controversial for having Captain America join forces with HYDRA after he's made to believe he was a HYDRA mole all along (HYDRA is well-known in-universe and out for its ties with Nazism, and Captain America was conceived as an anti-fascist hero by two Jewish comic book creators), with the justification from comics writer Nick Spencer for this being that HYDRA aren't really Nazis. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. obviously disagrees.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: The Season 3 finale has a succession of characters passing around a prominently featured cross necklace before Lincoln takes hold of it for good, and the camera makes sure to focus on it during his Heroic Sacrifice. The dialogue makes the intent possibly even more obvious:

  Daisy He's paying for my mistakes.
  Coulson: No. He's paying for all our mistakes.

• WTH, Costuming Department?: Possibly how Season 5 has balanced the drop in its budget with its increased special effects, the costumes look a little cheap - more so with masks than anything, as Deke's space helmet (as well as the one Fitz wears), Ruby's combat mask, and the LMD mooks' faces all look like they were ordered from a paintball site more than anything.
  • Nathaniel Malick's 'villain' outfit is a a set of fingerless gloves and an oversized trench coat. There's no reason given for why he suddenly swapped to that specific look, and instead of making him seem more menacing, it comes across like an ill-fitting Matrix cosplay with a dash of hobo.
• The Woobie:
  • Mike has a lot of problems (lack of work, previous injury, implied marriage trouble, experimented on). He starts down the road to Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds before The Team intervenes. Then he goes back because of Rania's manipulation. Mike seems to be the universe's chew toy. To make things even worse for Mike, he now has a cybernetic eye and kill-switch like Akela did.
  • Akela Amador. She was forced to watch her team die and remained imprisoned in a cell at the bottom of a mine shaft for four years while blind in one eye. When she was finally rescued, her "rescuers" implanted a cybernetic eye into her head which they used to send her on missions and controlled her with the threat of a kill-switch in the eye. She has to ask for permission to sleep. Her entire life post-capture is one long string of Nightmare Fuel.
  • Hannah Hutchins. A genuinely good and kind person, plagued by guilt, hated by an entire town for an accident that wasn't her fault, and tormented by an unseen force that she's convinced is demonic and she thinks God has abandoned her. She could really use a hug. Happily, Skye gives her one at the end of the episode.
  • Coulson himself, after what we were treated to in "The Magical Place." Dead for days, then revived through unknown means and sent to surgery at least seven times, losing his will to live and having to get his memories replaced with Tahiti so that he could go back to normal. Then having to live through a portion of the revival again in order to find out what happened at all. Also, it turns out that his dad died when he was just a kid, and his mother died recently as well. Top it all off with the fact that he's lost any chance to be with the woman he loves, something that's broken her heart as well as his, and there's no question that Coulson now falls firmly under the category of Stoic Woobie. Oh, and as of "Turn Turn Turn", Garrett and Ward turned out to be traitors, and as far as he knows, Nick Fury, a man he admires, is dead. (Actually just faking it, but again, Coulson doesn't know that.) "Providence" piles even more on him. With S.H.I.E.L.D. falling apart, Coulson is trying to cling to whatever hope he can, which comes in the form of a message supposedly from Nick Fury. When it seems to lead to nowhere, however, he goes off on a rant that being part of S.H.I.E.L.D. still means something, and you can tell this is less for his team and just him trying to hold onto that last bit of hope. Thankfully, that faith is rewarded. His left hand also gets cut off near the end of Season 2, while he is saving the humans on the Iliad from a Terrigen crystal. In Season 3, he has managed to adapt to being disabled in such a manner, but he explicitly states he is having trouble adjusting to it.
  • Ward counts as a Stoic Woobie, as does May. Ward for the Abusive Childhood at his brother's hands, May for her regrets over her past as a field agent.
  • Skye. She spends her childhood shuffled from one foster family to another, giving her the notion that no one wants her. When she finds out the truth that S.H.I.E.L.D. purposely shuffled her to keep her hidden, she's faced with the possibility that some of them might have wanted her but couldn't. Her current "foster family" is a precarious situation and May regularly gives her a hard time up to and including a harsh lecture, thus giving her the appearance of a "Well Done, Son" Guy. In Season 2, she finds out that her birth father is Ax-Crazy, her birth mother was butchered by HYDRA, and she has earthquake powers that she cannot control, thus making her a danger to herself and others. In Season 3, she ends up being swayed by Hive, killing and injuring several people under its control, being drained of an unhealthy amount of blood, then dealing with the psychological backlash of being freed before losing Lincoln when he pulls a Heroic Sacrifice to stop Hive. In Season 4, she's alone, hated as the terrorist "Quake" because of her actions against the Watchdogs and in constant pain physical pain because of using her quake powers without her gauntlets, in addition to lingering guilt over Lincoln's death.
  • Fitz spends most of "Turn, Turn, Turn" frantically worried about Simmons and having to remind everyone else that she's still unaccounted for. He breaks down in tears when faced by a firing squad and told he'll be forcibly recruited to HYDRA (after being shot in the kneecaps and watching the rest of his team executed). Finally, he has no choice but to fatally shoot a HYDRA agent because he can only lay hands on a real gun, not an ICEr, during the final fight. Despite a very sweet reunion hug with Simmons in the aftermath, it's clear that he's pretty traumatized by the end of the episode. He retains his Woobie status over the course of the next few episodes, too, suffering from a severe case of Cannot Spit It Out around Simmons, who seems to have transferred most of her attention to Agent Triplett. He finally breaks in "Nothing Personal" when he finds out that Ward is a HYDRA operative. And then in the finale he comes closer to death than anyone else, after Ward tried to drown him and Simmons, and they were only able to MacGuyver up a single-person escape plan. At the end of the episode he's explicitly still alive but suffering the effects of cerebral oxygen starvation. The guy just cannot catch a break. Things don't improve in Season 2 either: he's conscious and, at first glance, not that badly off, despite having pretty severe nominal aphasia, mild paranoia, and aggressive outbursts, but it turns out that he's hallucinating Simmons, who left hoping that separation from her might cure him, but it's only made him worse, to the point where he can no longer differentiate his fantasy of being with her and slowly recovering from the reality where he's alone, unable to work, and slowly declining into complete madness. Even the other members of Team Coulson look on him as The Woobie by this point. This is added to by Jemma getting sucked into the monolith in the Season 2 finale — something, which we see in Season 3, is haunting him and forcing him to chase many unfruitful leads. He manages to get Simmons back, but she later reveals that she had a relationship with the man she met on the alien planet. Fitz, despite being deeply saddened by this, does everything he can to help her go back to find him. Season 4 is actually kind of strange in that he starts out in a good place: he's in the lab, he has a new friendship with Radcliffe (implied to be a substitute father-son relationship), and most importantly, he's in a romantic relationship with Jemma. However, helping Radcliffe refine Aida forces him to conceal it from Simmons, which leads to minor strain when she finds out. While they easily get past that, Aida then appears to come to life after reading the Darkhold to save Fitz from Hell, and she's put down. He's suspicious, so he investigates Aida's memory core, and discovers that Radcliffe sent Aida to steal the Darkhold, leaving Fitz betrayed by yet another close friend. Oh, and Season 4 also reveals that Fitz's father abandoned him and his mother when he was ten, after spending those formative years telling Fitz he was worthless and would never amount to anything, which explains where most of Fitz's self-perception issues come from. After the Framework arc, he retains all the memories of the atrocities he committed as the Doctor, leading to an overwhelming sense of guilt. To make matters worse, the trauma plus the brain damage he sustained causes the Doctor persona to manifest during Season 5, forcing him to perform morally questionable acts on his friends. As a result, he alienates Mack and Daisy and imprisoned for his crimes. At times, you seriously have to wonder if the One-Above-All has it out for Leo Fitz.
  • Just to fully tick everyone off, Simmons becomes The Woobie herself in the final episode of the first series, after spending most of the episode thinking she was going to die, then not quite managing to get her "best friend in the entire world" out unharmed. Season 3 sees her suffering from her long-term exile on Maveh and the problems of losing the boyfriend she met there while watching Fitz be an exemplary friend by trying to get him back for her. Season 4 drives a wedge between her and the rest of Team Coulson (except for Fitz, sort of) because of Director Jeffrey Mace's restructuring of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the lie detector tests.
  • Donnie Gill, oh so much. Because he's extremely smart, he had difficulty making friends, with his only friend being a fellow S.H.I.E.L.D. academy student named Seth. Both are manipulated by Ian Quinn into developing a weather control machine, which results in Seth getting killed, and Donnie being imprisoned. Because he now has cryokinetic powers, HYDRA has their eyes set on him, and brainwash him into organizing a mutiny. Donnie manages to break free from the brainwashing and flees to Morocco, but HYDRA pursues him there. Finally, when he's brainwashed once again and under orders to kill May and Hunter by freezing the barge they're on, Skye shoots him, seemingly killing him. However, they Never Found the Body, so there's still a chance that he ultimately lived.
  • Skye's mother ended her life at the hands of the same sadistic bastard she suffered from 44 years earlier, going through unimaginably horrific experiments to extract the secret of her immortality. When it was over, her body was left unrecognizably mangled and simply dumped in the woods... Or so we were led to believe until "Afterlife" showed her alive but not well. The experience left her a paranoid, vicious Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds because she sincerely believes that her entire community will go through what she did unless she commits genocide on muggles.
  • Gordon, the Inhuman introduced in Season 2. Terrigenesis left him with no eyes, teleportation, and clear Power Incontinence, which is so distressing he's brought to tears, only he can't actually cry because he doesn't have eyes anymore. He's come to terms with it by the main timeline thanks to Jiaying's mentoring.
  • May. "Melinda" finally shows us what she went through in Bahrain, and it is not pretty. Forced to kill a young girl driven insane by an uncontrolled Terrigenesis while she herself was planning to be a mother soon? Yeah... That's worse than the worst of the WMGs on the subject. Worse, it turns out the girl would have been responsible for a massacre resulting in discrimination against Inhumans reminiscent of the Nuremberg Laws if May's attempt at a Cooldown Hug had worked, so the already-horrific turn of events that happened was actually better in the long run. Just a horrible no-win scenario.
  • Lincoln joins the "people who desperately need a hug" group in "A Wanted (Inhu)man". Not only is he a fugitive due to the ATCU's Inhuman witchhunt, but the general public believes him to be an "alien terrorist" which he has begun to believe about himself. His Only Friend, who is implied to be his AA sponsor, turns on him and Lincoln accidentally causes him to have a heart attack. All of this is on top of his backstory, which includes at least one suicide attempt.
  • The May LMD has all of May's baggage mentioned above, and tops it by fully believing that she's the real May, being a perfect duplicate of her brain patterns. She has no idea of the evil purpose she was created for, which will inevitably lead to a heartbreaking reveal. Just seconds after kissing Coulson, who she was programmed to subconsciously get closer to, she gets her hands on the Darkhold, and her programming kicks in, causing her to pull a gun on Coulson. Then, after Radcliffe gets the Darkhold, he abandons her to her fate. S.H.I.E.L.D. only spares her the incinerator because Coulson doesn't want to risk losing anything left of May if the original is dead.
  • Season 5 was not so kind for both present and future Yo-Yo either. She gets trapped in the future with the rest of her team, before being brutally tortured by the Kree by having her arms sprayed by liquid nitrogen. Then, she meets her future self, who was mutilated, killed and forcibly brought back to life repeatedly by Kassius. Future Elena then gets her throat slit by Kasius to spite Mack. Just as things seemed okay for her once they returned to the present, she gets her arms sliced off by Ruby, just like her future counterpart. After all she had been through, she breaks down and losing all hope that the Bad Future could be averted. Fortunately, Jemma was there to comfort her and overcome her Heroic BSoD.
  • Although Deke spends most of Season 6 acting like an Upper-Class Twit (although he does have a job as a new-wave Elon Musk-ian tech firm CEO, all his "inventions" are either stolen S.H.I.E.L.D. designs or illegal future-tech, so he does precious little actual work), near the end of the season, after putting up with yet another "The Reason You Suck" Speech from Fitz, he completely loses it and goes on a tirade explaining his entire worldview: he grew up in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, his home doesn't even exist anymore, all his friends and everyone he knew are erased, the woman he had a crush on thinks he's a loser (and when he went out and became rich and famous and came back, she still thinks he's a loser), his new best friend was a spy, his new girlfriend was a psycho (and his new new girlfriend was even more so), and his grandparents either hate him or don't take him seriously enough to even share important events in their lives (like the fact that one of them died. Though he got better. Technically.) In an instant, any Scrappy overtones that might have festered over the first three quarters of the season evaporate, and it's impossible not to feel bad for the poor guy.

The Comic Book

• Crack Pairing: In the first issue, Fitz invites May to a date. And she accepts. Hm, what? Crosses into Big-Lipped Alligator Moment as it is then never referenced, and seems to have just been to tease the fact Fitz was working as a double agent at the time.
• I Knew It!: The identity of the "Iron thief", the man that stole and hacked an Iron Man armour, and used it to steal secret information from the Pentagon. It was Grant Ward, a character that they'd already announced was going to show up, so him being the Iron Thief wasn't hard to see coming.
• Strawman Has a Point: Coulson was fired from S.H.I.E.L.D. during Civil War II, but kept working on his own. He discovered that a Senator was smuggling weapons, and entered to his house with Fitz and Daisy (who were also turned into rogue agents). The senator was not impressed: not being an agent, Coulson cannot arrest him. He's not an agent of the law, but just a burglar with a gun trespassing into a private house, which gives the senator all the legal right to shoot him down. The senator has a very fair point.

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