Agents of SHIELD Producers Wrote Season 5 as Series Finale

At San Diego Comic-Con, fans had the opportunity to say goodbye to the flagship TV series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe when they learned that Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. would be ending after next year’s seventh season. But many fans will tell you they’re happy to get to that point, because it seemed like the show would have been cancelled over a year ago.

Producers Jeph Loeb and Jeff Bell came to the ComicBook Studio at Comic-Con last week to discuss the ending of the long-running series, revealing that they planned for Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to be finished when they wrote the Season 5 finale.

“We were finishing Season 5, it very much felt like that was going to be the end,” Loeb explained.

“We wrote it as a finale, we wrote it as a series finale with Coulson going— you don’t think you’re gonna have a Season 6 when you send your lead character to die on an island with the woman he loves, and have the rest of the people fly away,” said Bell. “We thought that was a really good ending.”

Added Loeb, “It was very satisfying in many ways, then we got a call from the network. They said, ‘We just love this. Do you have a great idea for a Season 6?’”

“And we said, ‘Nooooo,’” Bell said with a laugh.

“And so Jeff and [showrunners Maurissa Tancharoen and Jed Whedon] went away and huddled with writers and came back. We talked and they had a really cool idea,” Loeb explained, saying that’s what fans are watching currently on Agents of SHIELD Season 6.

“You didn’t want to buy back what happened to Coulson. That seemed like a cheat, it seemed like it took away from everything we had done. So this idea of him coming and being someone who looks like Coulson but does everything exactly the opposite, and for our characters to have to deal with that, for our fans to have to deal with that, and for Clark [Gregg] to play that — we all got real excited in a way that we thought it’s not the same, it’s something new.”

The studio apparently liked it so much that they decided to move forward with Season 7, and the producers agreed — but only if they could end the show.

So while fans might have gotten a satisfying conclusion when Agents Coulson and May took their trip to Tahiti, they’ll be getting so much more when Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. concludes next year.