Ten years ago today, Marvel rewrote the history of one of Captain America‘s greatest foes in what’s still probably the biggest retcon the MCU has ever seen. There’s a sense in which Hydra defines Captain America, especially when it comes to the MCU; Steve Rogers was created by a super-soldier experiment that originally began under Hydra, and his most iconic adventures have seen him go up against their forces. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is still considered one of the best MCU movies of all time.
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The Winter Soldier is also probably one of the most important movies when it comes to the MCU’s overarching narrative. It revealed that S.H.I.E.L.D. had been compromised from the start, with Hydra infiltrators working to achieve global supremacy through an organization supposedly dedicated to protecting the world. Captain America made the hard call, choosing to expose Hydra’s presence and trigger something of a civil war inside S.H.I.E.L.D. What’s more, this naturally had a massive impact on the MCU’s first TV show – Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Redefined Hydra
The Winter Soldier‘s Hydra reveal upended everything viewers expected Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to be. It explored the fallout of the Hydra reveal, as the last S.H.I.E.L.D. loyalists (led by Clark Gregg’s Phil Coulson) worked to reform their organization and protect the world from Hydra factions. One of Coulson’s own team, Brett Dalton’s Grant Ward, was secretly a Hydra agent all along. Fast-forward to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 2, and Coulson wound up in a race against Hydra to procure the ancient powers of the Inhumans.
Ten years ago today, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 3, episode 8 finally revealed how closely connected the Inhumans were to the history of Hydra. In an unexpected but thrilling history lesson, Gideon Malick (played by Powers Boothe) revealed the truth to Ward; that Hydra was five thousand years old, originally a cult dedicated to the worship of the powerful Inhuman known as Hive.
“Thousands of years ago, an Inhuman was born on this planet that was destined to rule it, so powerful, so fearsome that others were consumed with dread, and so they banished it from the Earth, sent it through the portal to a distant planet. Hydra was founded with the sole purpose of engineering its return.”
According to Malick, Hydra had taken many forms over the millennia, and even more names. They were sworn servants of the Inhuman named Alveus, or Hive, who had been created by the Kree over 5,000 years ago as leader of their armies – but who had rebelled against them. The Inhumans traded one master for another, the Kree for Hive, but ultimately won their freedom when they banished the creature from Earth. Hydra’s cultists dedicated themselves both to bringing him back, and to restructuring the world so Hive could more easily take control upon its return.
The Red Skull had not created Hydra, nor in truth had he ever really led it. He had, rather, partnered with it in his own pursuit of power. Like all Hydra agents, he believed the true power lay in the depths of space, in cosmic beings whose existence was cloaked in mythology. That was the reason the Red Skull pursued the Tesseract, the fabled tool used by Odin himself. It’s surely no coincidence that the power he sought was actually the Space Stone. Had Hydra ever managed to master the Tesseract’s power, they could have used it to bring back Hive.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Hydra Retcon Made Them Even More Dangerous
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. trod a careful path when it came to retconning Hydra. On the one hand, Hydra’s retconned origin undoubtedly made the organization even more terrifyingly dangerous, a conspiracy that ran all the way back to the dawn of civilization itself. It also neatly tied Hydra in to the looming Inhuman threat, given it wasn’t long before Hive did indeed return to claim control of Hydra and try to dominate the entire planet. Appropriately enough, Hive – who possessed the bodies of others – wound up taking Grant Ward’s cadaver as his host.
That said, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 4 subtly rewrote this whole new origin once again. In the comics, a controversial story had seen Captain America become a Hydra leader. This led to intense debate over whether Hydra was distinct from Nazis, with the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. retcons used as an argument they weren’t the same thing. Season 4 was a direct response to this, with a virtual reality world where Hydra won, and a brilliant line from Elizabeth Henstridge’s Jemma Simmons: “For the record – Hydra? They’re all Nazis. Every one of them. Don’t you let anyone forget it.”
Rather than lessen the Nazi influence on Hydra, the MCU instead subtly rewrote the racial supremacist ideology of the Nazis and made it a historic threat to civilization for over 5,000 years. It made the continuation of that threat in the present day, both of Hydra and neo-Nazi movements, all the more remarkable. By extension, Steve Rogers and all his allies were simply the latest generation standing against this evil. That’s something Captain America would definitely have been willing to get behind.
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Image courtesy of Focus Features.
