Agents of SHIELD‘s season 7 finale writes around Avengers: Infinity War – but it’s hard to conclude the series is still canon in the MCU timeline. When Marvel Television launched Agents of SHIELD in 2013, it was essentially the official MCU tie-in TV series. The first season oriented itself almost completely around the movies, with a well-received arc centered on the Hydra reveal in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. As time passed, though, the connections between Agents of SHIELD and the MCU movies became more distant. Even the show’s stars admit that was for the best. This separate approach didn’t really cause any problems for Agents of SHIELD, because it was separate enough from the movies that the SHIELD team could be viewed as just dealing with non-Avengers threats.
And then came Avengers: Infinity War, the MCU’s 10-year-anniversary celebration that ended with the biggest event in the history of the shared cinematic universe – the snap. Thanos clicked his fingers, and half the life in the universe vanished instantly. Marvel Television naturally wanted to get in on the act, and so – in a smart twist – they portrayed Thanos as a background presence in Agents of SHIELD season 5. Agents of SHIELD season 5, episode 20 was concurrent with Thanos’ attack on New York City at the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War – but, surprisingly, the snap never happened.
In truth, there was a simple reason for the absence of the snap; the showrunners believed season 5 was going to be the end of the road (the season 5 finale was literally called “The End”), and they wanted their story to finish with a sense of optimism. So they blurred things a little, meaning viewers would have to suspend their disbelief just a little in order to imagine everything was still part of the same universe. But Agents of SHIELD got renewed for two more seasons, and has only now ended; the snap still hasn’t been dealt with. How has the show handled it?
Agents of SHIELD Has Carefully Avoided The Snap
Agents of SHIELD seasons 6 and 7 ignored Thanos’ snap, choosing to completely avoid dealing with it. Behind the scenes, there was a simple reason for this; there were no real lines of communication between Marvel Television and Marvel Studios by 2018, meaning Agents of SHIELD‘s writers had no idea what the movies were planning. “Just looking at it from a very practical place, which is, what the world looked like post-snap, [it] was not something we had seen yet,” Marvel Television’s Jeph Loeb explained in an interview in 2019. “We were already shooting.” And so Marvel waved the problem away by suggesting all the TV shows were pre-snap.
This argument took viewers by surprise, though, because it didn’t appear to make sense given the timeline. Previous seasons of Agents of SHIELD could be dated quite precisely, with the most recent explicit connection between in season 3, where Captain America: Civil War‘s Sokovia Accords became a major plot-point. Various episodes had stated exactly how much time was passing in-universe, meaning season 5 really should have been concomitant with Avengers: Infinity War. And season 6 actually kicked off after a one-year time jump, making matters worse. Season 7’s time travel plot technically avoided the issue, for the most part, simply by virtue of the SHIELD team being in the past; but the season 7 finale caused further problems.
Agents of SHIELD Season 7’s Final Scenes Cannot Fit With Avengers: Infinity War
The Agents of SHIELD season 7 finale ended with another one-year time jump, revealing the future of the various SHIELD team members now they’d gone their own way. This was a bright and optimistic future, with Mack serving as the new Nick Fury of a revitalized SHIELD, complete with a fleet of Helicarriers. SHIELD had clearly expanded into the stars, because Quake was now captain of Zephyr Three, serving as one of humanity’s “galactic ambassadors.” And May was head of the new SHIELD Academy, which had been officially named after Phil Coulson. The problem is that, following the show’s own timeline, this should be in 2020. There’s absolutely no way to reconcile this with the bleak post-snap world seen in Avengers: Endgame, and it’s difficult to see the resurgent SHIELD sitting out either Avengers: Endgame‘s third-act battle or Spider-Man: Far From Home‘s Elemental monsters.
The Agents of SHIELD Season 7 Finale Offered A Solution – The Quantum Realm
The Agents of SHIELD season 7 finale did, however, resolve the issue – although in a more subtle way than most viewers would realize. It featured one last MCU reference, the Quantum Realm, which Fitz revealed could be used to navigate the timelines. This was perfectly in keeping with the MCU’s portrayal of the Quantum Realm in Ant-Man & the Wasp and Avengers: Endgame, but its use in this manner – to cross between different timelines – served as a subtle hint the show now exists in a separate timeline to the MCU. It is one that is mostly similar to the movies, but that clearly diverged more and more as time passed, until finally the snap did not happen at all.
No doubt some viewers will object to this, because in Avengers: Infinity War Doctor Strange explored 14,000,605 timelines and found only one in which Thanos was defeated. But it’s important to remember the last confirmed connection between Agents of SHIELD‘s timeline and the mainstream MCU’s was the beginning of Infinity War, when Thanos’ forces first arrived on Earth. Presumably things played out differently in the SHIELD timeline, perhaps with Doctor Strange escaping capture by the Black Order, meaning the Avengers were united at the Battle of Wakanda. They may well have paid the ultimate price to defeat Thanos in this timeline, though, given the Chronicoms identified SHIELD as the only possible threat to their conquest of Earth – and never once mentioned the Avengers.
In truth, this is the simplest solution for Agents of SHIELD. It is still loosely connected to the MCU, albeit more loosely than ever before, because it exists in a completely separate timeline where the snap never happened. But the characters can still make the jump to the movies, should Marvel Studios ever wish to do that; because the MCU’s Phase 4 is focused on the Multiverse, with Loki and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness both exploring that concept. For now, though, it’s best to consider Agents of SHIELD‘s season 7 finale as final, simply because the ending was so satisfying.
