Agents of SHIELD Preview: A Team-up Forms out of Necessity in "Toldja"

Next Friday, it looks like Sarge (Clark Gregg) is going to be released from SHIELD custody to help Director Mack (Henry Simmons) and company take on the looming threat from the Shrikes. In a bone-chilling preview for "Toldja," Sarge mentions his list of demands as some people on the team still haven't wrapped their head around the fact their new enemy is a spitting image of their former boss.

Even as Mack himself says in the preview, after running tests, Sarge has the identical DNA of the late Phil Coulson, raising even more red flags on how this doppelganger was able to get to Earth, despite being an inter-dimensional traveler. Last week, Sarge mentioned the Shrikes were created by someone else, presumably the big bad for this season. The revelation allowed the writer's room to align SHIELD and Sarge's team on the same side, using the Shrikes as a common enemy between the two groups.

Speaking to Entertainment Tonight before this season first launched, Gregg admits he wasn't sure if he was even going to be involved with the show at first after his original character — SHIELD director Phil Coulson — seemingly died during the events of the Season Five finale, aptly titled "The End."

"We had this really wonderful end of season five -- the [season finale] episode was even called 'The End' -- and we had reason to believe that we were done," said Gregg. "We'd had these wonderful five seasons and a very tight family, and it was very, very sad. And then they called everyone up and said, we're actually gonna do two more short, 13-episode seasons, which is really the number we thought we always could do best at."

"I didn't know if it was going to involve me," Gregg added, "and if it was going to involve me, I thought it had to be something special, something very different. I didn't want to just kind of like, go, 'Oh, never mind, it turns out he was OK all along.'"

How long until Sarge screws the SHIELD team over? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Agents of SHIELD airs Friday nights starting at 8/7 p.m. Central on ABC.