Last night’s episode of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD turned Terance Shockley (John Pyper-Ferguson), a recurring character who is a member of the Watchdogs and a chief henchman for The Superior, into something closely resembling a classic Marvel Comics villain.
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Spoilers for the Agents of SHIELD episode “BOOM” follow.
In “BOOM,” the Superior sends Shockley to the offices of Senator Nadeer. Once an ally, the Superior feels that Nadeer has mostly outlived her usefulness. The Superior gives Shockley one of the pure Terrigen crystals that Dr. Holden Radcliffe kept from his time working for Hive. Shockley shatters the crystal in Nadeer’s office, releasing Terrigen into the air. Despite Nadeer’s brother being an Inhuman, Nadeer is unaffected by the mist. However, much to his own horror, Shockley undergoes Terrigenesis and explodes out of his cocoon with a massive blast.
Shockley’s blast kills Nadeer and her staff, but Shockley himself survives. After reporting to the Superior, Schockley allows himself to be taken into SHIELD custody, where he tries to explode and take out the Zephyr One. He’s jettisoned out of the aircraft just before he explodes. On the ground, his body reforms seemingly out of thin air.
Fitz and Simmons study the footage of Shockley and discover that he is vibrating his own molecules at a level that charges the with kinetic energy at an atomic level. His body that turns into a flammable gas that explodes and reforms as a solid after the blast.
This power set is exactly that of classic Marvel Comics supervillain Nitro. Nitro is not an actual Inhuman in the Marvel Comics Universe, but he did get his powers through a Kree experiment. Nitro’s real name is not Terrance Shockley, but Robert Hunter, and he’s been causing trouble in the Marvel Comics Universe since 1974. Nitro is responsible for some of the most notorious acts in Marvel Comics history, including the death of Captain Marvel and the Stamford explosion that set off the superhero Civil War.
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It is unclear why Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD created a character that so closely resembled Nitro instead of just using Robert Hunter, though it is likely that they simply didn’t want people to recognize who Shockley would become before he transformed, just as they hid Daisy Johnson’s true name until she gained her powers.
Either way, Shockley is off the board, for now, contained in a device that Fitz built to trap his gaseous form. Whether that’s the last we see of him or not remains to be seen.
Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET on ABC.
