Clark Gregg Had Mixed Feelings About Agents of SHIELD’s Departure from MCU

Agents of SHIELD‘s seventh and final season starts next week and fans are eager to see how their favorite characters’ journeys will come to an end. During the show’s earlier seasons, the episodes stayed in line with the events that were happening in the Marvel movies, which means the show was considered MCU canon for a long time. However, after the end of season five didn’t fall in line with Thanos’ Avengers: Infinity War snap and season six made no reference to the events of Avengers: Endgame, people began to debate whether or not the show was still considered canon. While we firmly believe the show is still canon, especially after a new clip teased a connection to Endgame, there’s no denying the show has set its own course over the last couple of years. In a recent interview with Variety, Clark Gregg (Phil Coulson) was asked how he felt about the agents being unaffected by the Thanos snap. “Did you miss that connection at all? Or was that more of like a relief that you didn’t have to worry about it?,” Variety asked.

“I guess I did and I didn’t,” Gregg explained. “When you look back at Season 1, and you look at the way it crossed over with Hydra and took the handcuffs off our poor writers when everyone was like ‘What is this show?’ — and Sam [Jackson] and Cobie Smulders came to play — I thought that was really thrilling. I missed that part of it, but I also felt like Agents of SHIELD really continued to evolve. And once they got to Season 4, and there were three separate pods [of episodes] — Ghost Rider, LMDs, and the Framework — I thought this is what happens when these gutsy writers aren’t tied too closely to all that. They get to really just tear it apart and start it over with a new corner of the Marvel Universe every season, sometimes two or three times in a season.”

Variety went on to ask Gregg about the upcoming Disney+ shows and wondered if the actor ever thinks about what could have been. “Um. [Laughs] I don’t know specifically what kind of resources those [shows] are getting,” Gregg replied. “I will say, as someone who loves storytelling and television, it’s been exciting to watch — from Watchmen to Game of Thrones — what’s being done cinematically on what used to be called TV. So in fairness, the world really changed around us. I was always proud of us for being the first ones through the door in terms of the Marvel stuff, trying to bring that to a weekly television format. I feel like ABC did a great job of trying to adapt to us as we tried to adapt to them. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say boy, that would really be interesting to start the experiment over, doing 10 episodes or 12 episodes the way Tom Hiddleston told me he was doing [on Loki] with that kind of budget and that Marvel Cinematic production team. Although, it’s hard for me to even think about that, just because I’m so proud of what our crew and visual effects people and cast did within the constraints of our budgets and resources.”

Agents of SHIELD returns on May 27th.