Time travel has been all the rage in the MCU, ever since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. Naturally, it was Tony Stark – the man who made his first Iron Man armor in a cave with a bunch of scraps – who discovered how to travel in time, and he established some loose rules. Since then, the Multiverse Saga has continued to explore time travel, using it as the basis for branching timelines and realities to boot. It’s all coming to a head in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, the Multiverse Saga’s explosive ending.
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In general, the MCU has tended to treat time travel as a convenient plot device rather than anything else. Movies and TV shows have frequently dabbled with completely different models of temporal mechanics, at times insisting that patently different phenomena were actually the same thing all along. Some of the stories have been good (the best was undoubtedly Loki), but it’s not really been all that satisfying. Ironically, because of these flaws, Marvel Studios have never quite managed to beat a Marvel Television time travel story that actually predated Endgame.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 5 Dove Deep Into Time Travel
Exactly eight years ago today, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 5 launched what is still the MCU’s best time travel story to date. Designed as an MCU tie-in to Avengers: Infinity War, this kicked off with Agent Coulson and his team stranded in a dystopian future timeline where the world had shattered apart. The last remnants of humanity lived in a controlled environment that formed part of the asteroid field that had been Earth, ruled by the alien race known as the Kree. This is the kind of story time travel is made for.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 5 does absolutely everything right. It’s a perfect blend of temporal mechanics with quality character development, because the S.H.I.E.L.D. team learn that one of their own – Chloe Bennet’s Quake – is responsible for the destruction of the world. They are trapped in a time loop, the past and present feeding off on one another, and they desperately attempt to figure out how to change things and save the world. Naturally, the obvious answer (simply killing Quake, so she can’t go back) is off the table.
This story was all the more remarkable, though, given the fact it dared to deal with some pretty heavy concepts in terms of temporal mechanics. Fitz, for example, doesn’t buy into the multiverse theory; he insists that time is fixed, which makes breaking the time loop impossible. Simmons, in contrast, refuses to believe there is no hope. Some characters, struggling to understand the reality they were dealing with, oscillate between believing there is hope of change and they are somehow “invincible” because their own futures have been foreseen.
It’s easy to mock those kind of contradictions, but it was actually deeply refreshing. Fitz and Simmons are scientists, understanding the crazy reality they’re living in through a scientific lens, but the rest of the S.H.I.E.L.D. team felt out of their depths. They aren’t reading textbooks of quantum mechanics, they are living it, and they simply didn’t have the intellectual ability to navigate it. These contradictions only deepen the sense of tension, a wonderful narrative technique.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Foreshadowed the Multiverse Saga
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 5 did not destroy the world in the end, of course. The time loop was broken, the dystopian timeline averted, and in so doing this Marvel Television show predicted the entire Multiverse Saga. In the end, it turned out that there are key moments in history where the timelines can branch out in different directions, where decisions can be made that decide the future’s course. It’s exactly the model Marvel Studios would shift to with Loki‘s branched timelines – and Marvel Television got there three years earlier.
Marvel Studios, however, has never quite managed to follow its time travel rules in a consistent manner. What’s more, the short-form format – shorter TV shows and movies – has never provided an opportunity to tell such a character-rich story. Some characters have adapted to the multiverse with an almost absurd ease, while other stories have simply used it as a convenient plot device to create a “what if” reality. Looking back at Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 5, it’s hard not to conclude that Marvel Studios has wasted the potential of time travel.
Thankfully, the story is not over. The Multiverse Saga is building to a climax in Doomsday and Secret Wars, two epic stories that are nonetheless closely related to one another. It’s a last chance for Marvel to redeem the time travel rules in a character-rich story that requires an epic scale. It remains to be seen whether even the returning Russo brothers can pull it off, and finally equal or beat Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
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Image Courtesy of HBO Max
