SWORD Not Part of ‘Agents of SHIELD’ Season 5

Agents of SHIELD fans who had been hoping that the show could finally introduce S.W.O.R.D. are about to be disappointed.

In an exclusive interview with Brandon Davis from ComicBook.com, Clark Gregg put an end to fan speculation that S.W.O.R.D. would be part of the upcoming season of Agents of SHIELD. The reason? According to Gregg, Marvel does not have the rights to use S.W.O.R.D. in the series. You can check out the full interview in the video above.

“I don’t know that we have the rights to S.W.O.R.D.,” Gregg said. “But I don’t know that we have the rights to a lot of things and suddenly you see a version of them that’s a little different.”

Fans had been hopeful that S.W.O.R.D., the counterterrorism and intelligence agency that deals with extraterrestrial threats to world security in Marvel Comics, would appear in the upcoming fifth season following the dramatic cliffhanger reveal of Gregg’s Agent Coulson in space. However, Gregg said that just because S.W.O.R.D. wasn’t happening on the show that doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be adventures in space. While he didn’t give a lot of details, Gregg did reveal that fans could expect to see the Kree.

“You see us at a diner,” he said of the end of the season four finale. “You see a mysterious people show up and then you see Agent Phil Coulson in the dorm room from hell in space. That’s about all we know other than it looks like there’s going to be some space adventures in our future. You know, there might be some, the blue man group and by that, I mean some Kree might be in our future.”

The blue-skinned Kree have a long history with Agents of SHIELD. Nick Fury used Kree DNA as part of SHIELD’s TAHITI program to bring Coulson back after his death in Marvel’s The Avengers and the relationship between SHIELD and the Kree only deepened as Coulson and crew learned more about the Inhumans, who were created by Kree visitors to Earth thousands of years ago. The Kree even returned to Earth to stop the dangerously powerful parasitic Inhuman, Hive.

The Kree are also expected to be a major part of the upcoming Captain Marvel movie, which is inspired by the classic Avengers story “The Kree-Skrull War.” But with the Marvel Cinematic Universe getting a little cosmic and Agent Coulson having been such an important part of Marvel’s The Avengers, does this new Kree-Coulson connection mean that we’ll be seeing Coulson’s return to the big screen? Gregg said that while it’s not impossible, he really would be the very last to know and it would likely go down in a very Agents of SHIELD sort of way.

“I guess there’s always the chance, but I would be the last one they would tell about that,” he said. “It would be a midnight actual guys in black suits showing up at my house to get me.”

Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD will return to ABC this winter.