SPOILER Dies in 'Agents of SHIELD' Season 5 Finale

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD fifth season finale aired tonight, and it came with a few casualties.

SPOILERS for Agents of SHIELD, "The End," follow.

Going into this episode, the SHIELD team had a choice. They could use the last dose of Centipede serum to save Coulson's life, or they could use it take out Glenn Talbot.

The episode instead goes for a third option. Agent May destroys the Kree odium, removing the option to kill Talbot. She gives the Centipede serum to Coulson, but he doesn't take it. Instead, he sneaks it into Daisy's gauntlet before she confronts Talbot.

Daisy does her best to talk Talbot down, but he's too far gone. He tries to absorb Daisy into himself and add her power to his own. That's when she notices the serum in her gauntlet. She takes it and uses it on herself, boosting her powers enough so that she can easily defeat Talbot, quaking him into orbit where he dies in the vacuum of space.

However, Talbot wasn't the only one to fall. The reverberations of Daisy's fight with Talbot caused a chunk of building to fall down on top of Agent Fitz. Mack and May dug him out, but he was too badly wounded and bled out in front of them.

However, the SHIELD team still has hope. Earlier in the season, it was revealed that Fitz froze his body in stasis and allowed it to be taken into outer space so that he could eventually catch up with his friends who were sent to the future by the Kree monolith. Now that the timeline has been altered, the SHIELD team plans to find Fitz wherever he may be and wake him from his stasis.

Finally, there's Coulson. Even though he refuses to take the Centipede serum, Coulson does not die in this episode. He comes close, but Yo-Yo is able to bring him back with chest compressions. Instead, Coulson retires from SHIELD, leaving it in Mack's command. He and May are left in Tahiti -- the real Tahiti this time, not Project TAHITI -- where the two of them will live out the few days, possibly weeks, that he has left.

While this is an appropriate end for Coulson, it also provides just enough wiggle room for the Agents of SHIELD writers to find a way to bring him back next season.

Agents of SHIELD will return for its sixth season in the summer of 2019.