Agents of SHIELD‘s journey into the Framework has been one surprise after another from the start. The first of those surprises came when Daisy Johnson hacked her way inside and discovered that her Framework self is dating Grant Ward and that both she and him were agents of Hydra.
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However, things weren’t all that they seemed. Ward soon revealed himself to be a mole within Hydra fro the SHIELD resistance. Since then, he’s acted with Daisy’s best interests in mind and has shown himself to be a loyal member of SHIELD.
That’s a far cry from the Grant Ward that Daisy knew in the real world, where he was a double agent inside of SHIELD working for Hydra. Ward isn’t the only person whose Framework life is quite different from their real life, but the differences tend to be the result of AIDA having changed something about their history within the Framework.
In last night’s episode, “All the Madame’s Men,” Agents of SHIELD finally revealed what changed to make Ward loyal to SHIELD instead of Hydra in the Framework. In the real world, Ward’s troubled childhood and adolescence came to and end when he was arrested for burning down his parents’ family home, unaware that his brother, Christian, was inside.
Ward would likely have been tried as an adult and sent to prison for years when Agent John Garrett of SHIELD showed up and recruited him. Ward saw Garrett as the first person to ever believe he had worth, and that made Ward unwavering in his loyalty to Garrett. As it happened, Garrett was also and agent of Hydra working within SHIELD, and so Ward followed down the same path.
In the Framework, Ward’s childhood seems to have gone mostly the same way. The big change came from who recruited him out of prison. In the Framework, it wasn’t Garrett but Victoria Hand who saw worth in Ward, and that seems to have changed everything. The loyalty Ward felt towards Garrett in the real world was instead transferred to Hand and SHIELD in the Framework. As Ward explained in an earlier episode, the only reason that Ward stayed on as an agent of Hydra was because he saw Daisy’s scan results revealing she was an Inhuman and wanted to be in a position to protect her.
Considering how “All the Madame’s Men” ended, it seems possible that Ward may have his last heroic stand before Agents of SHIELD Season 4 is through. Then again, AIDA has also come up with a way to create new human bodies, so perhaps there’s hope for Framework Ward to live on in the real world after all.
Agents of SHIELD airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on ABC.
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