In the episode “What They Become,” Cal (Kyle MacLachlan, left) tells his daughter Skye (Chloe Bennet) that her real name is Daisy. (ABC/Kelsey McNeal)
S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Bobby “Mockingbird” Morse (Adrianne Palicki, left) is keeping a big secret from fellow agent and ex-husband Lance Hunter (Nick Blood), and the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D., but we don’t know what it is yet. (ABC/Kelsey McNeal)
Raina (Ruth Negga), has been transformed by the alien artifact, and seems to have no loyalty to either S.H.I.E.L.D. or Hydra. MARVEL'S AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. ABC/Kelsey McNeal)
By Andrew A. Smith
Tribune Content Agency
Dec. 18, 2014 -- Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has stopped being a follower in the larger Marvel Universe. Now it’s establishing concepts for use in the movies, instead of just sweeping up after them.
If you haven’t been following the show – which wouldn’t be surprising, as a number of fans dropped off during the stodgy first season – Director Coulson (Clark Gregg) and Agent Sky (Chloe Bennet) have learned that their lives had been saved by an experimental serum derived from a dead, blue alien. Coulson, and some others “infected” by the alien serum, have been forced to scribble strange glyphs on any available surface, glyphs which turned out to be the blueprint of an alien city somewhere on Earth. Meanwhile, Skye’s father Cal (Kyle MacLachlan), who takes “bipolar” to a truly prodigious level, is in pursuit of Skye (whom he has never met), and is in possession of an alien artifact that allows “the worthy” entrance to the city – an artifact he has given to Whitehall, the head of Hydra. (The artifact kills anyone who touches it who isn’t “worthy.”) Also working with Whitehall is Grant Ward, a turncoat S.H.I.E.L.D. agent with deadly hand-to-hand combat skills and has, like Skye’s father, a creepy obsession with Skye.
That’s a lot to take in, but the mid-season finale Dec. 9 managed to not only wrap most of these plot points up in a neat, pink bow, but added new ones. And those plot points promise a leap into the broader Marvel Universe, with substantial impact on movies yet to come – especially one called The Inhumans, scheduled for 2018.
If you’re a comics fan, you probably already know where I’m heading with this. And if you’re not, settle in for “Inhumans 101.”
Back in the 1960s, comics legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced a band of mysterious superhumans on the run in the pages of Fantastic Four. They turned out to be the royal family of a hidden race called the Inhumans, who had been chased out of a hidden city in the Himalayas called Attilan after a palace coup.
Each of these characters had a different super-power, and as it turned out, so did everyone in Attilan.The Inhumans were a product of genetic tampering by a blue, alien race known as the Kree back when we were all Neanderthals. Inhumans are generally born normal, but come into their genetic inheritance at adolescence, when they are exposed to the mists emitted by the Terrigen Crystals in a ceremony called Terrigenesis, which activates their Inhuman DNA. Think of it as a bar mitzvah where the honoree might end the party by growing wings or developing acid breath.
The Inhumans have long hidden themselves away from humankind, because … well, wouldn’t you? We’re a pretty violent and unpredictable species, and Inhumans tended not to breed rapidly. Eventually, unable to tolerate human pollution, the Inhumans moved Attilan to the moon.
Recently, the mad demigod Thanos of Titan invaded Earth. (He’s the big purple guy seen in the post-credits scene in Avengers.) As Thanos was about to destroy the planet, the Inhumans leader carried out a desperate Hail Mary, in which he blew up a “Terrigen Bomb” that infused our atmosphere with the Terrigen mists, which activated recessive Inhuman genes planetwide. (Hey, the Inhumans hid themselves away, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a little hanky-panky here and there through the millennia. We may be a violent and unpredictable species, but some of us are kinda cute.)
Instantly, thousands of people all over the world were encased in cocoons, and later emerged as Inhumans, each with a different super-power – and the potential to help protect our planet from Thanos. This has freaked out the regular humans, who have reacted with our standard set of tools: fear, paranoia and violence. Even though these Inhumans were created as our protectors! You might even say they are feared and hated by a world they’re sworn to protect.
If that sounds familiar, it should – it’s been the X-Men’s tagline for years. In fact, the Inhumans of the post-Terrigen Bomb Marvel Universe are following almost to the letter the “hated outsiders” path blazed by the X-Men. But why would Marvel need two sets of characters that are interchangeable?
Good question. But there’s a good answer: Marvel Films doesn’t have the movie rights to the Marvel Comics characters the X-Men. Marvel Comics sold those rights to Twentieth Century Fox for peanuts back in the ‘90s, when the publisher went through bankruptcy. Now they’re a gold mine, so Fox isn’t giving them up. Which gives Fox the movie rights to virtually all mutant characters in Marvel Comics, even those who have spent a long time as Avengers, such as Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch.
So to have those characters in the Marvel Films, they’d have to be called something else. Something that isn’t “mutants,” but is equally … inhuman.
Which appears to be the path Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are on in the comics. And the post-credits scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier appears to give the formerly mutant duo their powers through that old stand-by, Nazi experiments. So we will have Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch in Marvel Films, and the capacity for large numbers of super-powered characters who don’t need origins. We just won’t hear them called “mutants.”
What’s that got to do with Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.? Well, the Inhumans origin story is pretty much what we’ve been watching this season:
* S.H.I.E.L.D. has already established that the blue aliens whose blood saved Coulson and Skye are the Kree, who gave the Inhumans their powers in the comics. (A live Kree, “Ronan the Accuser,” appeared in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie.)
* S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra converged, in the mid-season finale, on a hidden city. Hidden cities are big with the Inhumans.
* The alien artifact broke open to reveal crystals that look exactly like the Terrigen Crystals in the comics, that emitted a mist like in the comics, that induced the two recessive Inhumans in the room (Skye and Raina) to grow cocoons. So, without using the word: Yep, Skye and Raina are Inhumans.
* Except Skye’s name isn’t Skye – it’s “Daisy,” as revealed by her father when they finally met Dec. 9. I’m guessing she’s meant to be Daisy Johnson, a comics character with seismic powers who served, briefly, as director of S.H.I.E.L.D. As for Raina, there’s a character in The Savage Land – Marvel’s Jurassic Park, hidden under Antarctica – named Raina, a feral killer who isn’t very prominent. But I suspect she soon will be. After all, while Daisy’s Terrigenesis left her looking normal, we never got a good look at Raina (who escaped).
As for Daisy’s father Cal – well, he’s calm and rational one minute, exploding with homicidal rage the next. That sounds kinda like Marvel villain Mr. Hyde, whose secret ID is Dr. Calvin Zabo. The comics character drank a serum of his own creation to become Mr. Hyde, much like his literary forebear. But I’m guessing our TV version will have a different approach, what with all those Kree serums, Super-Soldier experiments and alien crystals lying about.
Will we get full-blown Terrigenesis at some point? Will there be more Inhumans than Daisy and Raina? Will there be another hidden city, maybe named Attilan? If we do, it will probably happen in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. when the show returns March 3 – a show finally living up to its potential.
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Replies
Creatively I guess it's a good way to fill in a lot of blanks between movies. Reverse Star Trek in a way, where the seasons of Next Generation served as background for the films and the original series served to introduce the characters that were used in later movies. I wonder does this mean that all of the mutants in the comics will now be retconned into being inhumans?
Sounds crazy but why not use that origin for Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch?
Mr. Hyde is an odd choice. He has nothing to do with aliens, Kree, blue, or otherwise.
They would fit into the hidden city idea, and you'd have the deviants as villains.
Perhaps they're going to connect the Kree and the Celestials in some way?