Agents of SHIELD Finale Makes One Major Reference to Avengers: Endgame

Ever since the series launched, following the events of Marvel’s The Avengers, fans of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD and Marvel itself has tried to convince the wider world that the show really does take place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The first season had close ties with Captain America: The Winter Soldier and guest appearances by characters like Lady Sif (Jaimie Alexander) and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) — but it never fully seemed like Marvel TV and Marvel films were on the same page. In the series finale, which aired tonight on ABC, Agents of SHIELD made one more grand gesture at being a clear part of the MCU.

How so? Well, it has to do with time-travel.

We know, you’re shocked.

Agents of SHIELD‘s final season has been dealing with time travel, and it’s been unclear if they’re following the same rules as Avengers: Endgame. During the latest episode, the team was adamant about protecting Jiaying to ensure Daisy would be born, which left some fans wondering if they were following time travel rules similar to The Terminator or Back to the Future, where time travel can impact the future left behind by the time-travelers, rather than creating an entirely new timeline like Marvel’s time-travel does.

It turns out they were, though, and the time-travel designed to keep Daisy alive, was intended to impact the new timeline. The result, though, was that some members of the team were left in the old, unchanged timeline, while others were in the changed one.

Enter the Quantum Realm, the dimensional plane introduced in Ant-Man and the Wasp and used by the Avengers in Avengers: Endgame to travel back in time and prevent the murder of half the universe by Thanos. And it popped up in this week’s series finale of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, as Fitz was in the original time line and traveled through the Quantum Realm to get to the new timeline. Then, they used it to create a bubble to send them all back (plus all the chronicom ships), essentially resettling them in their “original” universe rather than the new one created during the final season stories.

For more details, you can check out our own Jamie Jirak’s detailed rundown of where each major character from Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD ended up following tonight’s series finale.

What did you think of Agents of SHIELD‘s series finale? Let us know in the comments!