Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. began as a TV spinoff of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Clark Gregg reprising the role of Agent Phil Coulson from the movies. The only issue is that Agent Coulson died in The Avengers, but this is a world based on comics, so resurrection isn’t that big of a deal.
Over the next several years on ABC, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. proved that it could stand on its own, getting better with every season and developing its own very twisty plot. How twisty? Well, Coulson died again in season 5, but Clark Gregg came back as a new, evil character named Sarge (really a non-corporeal entity named Pachakutiq possessing a copy of Counson). And then he died, and now Gregg is back for the seventh and final season as a Life Model Decoy (LMD) — an advanced android — that mimics Coulson in every way.
And did I mention that the agents and their allies are currently stranded in time trying to prevent an alien invasion of Earth? Like I said, it’s twisty.
With all these characters dying and being brought back to life, is there any space for romance? Fans have long been pulling Coulson to get a happy ending with S.H.I.E.L.D. employee Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen), who has her own complicated backstory going on: after being injured in season 6, she was put into stasis, and when she recovered, she had no emotions, although she can feel other people’s emotions by touching them.
Speaking to Syfy Wire, Gregg tried to trace the strange journey of the “Philinda” ship. “It was really clear early on that there was some chemistry between them, but they really had been friends,” he said, “and then later we got to see this episode when they worked together early on, where you could tell that Coulson had a crush on her, she didn’t quite take him seriously.”
"Definitely, there was something. I think the fans pushed for it more than anything else because there’s a vocal group of people who just like, as you identified it, the “Philinda” ship. They just like the chemistry between them and the fact that they’ve known each other [for a long time], and also the number of difficulties and blocks that have to keep them from ever realizing this."
As we detailed above, he’s not kidding about those blocks. “It was some time in Season 5, it was the first time you ever saw them kiss. Did they kiss when they were robots? I think they might have kissed when they were LMD’s once. Or one of them was an LMD.” It can be hard to keep track. For the record, when they kiss the first time, May is an LMD and Coulson isn’t.
And of course, it only got more complicated from there. Given that Coulson isn’t teeeeeechnically Coulson anymore, not to mention everything Melinda has gone through, Gregg thinks that any hope for a happy ending with this pair is “optimistic”:
"[Y]ou know she finally gets this guy and they finally kiss, and he’s dying, you know. And then all of a sudden she makes peace with that and they have this kind of nice happy ending on his way out. And then there’s this evil version of him and she wants to kill him more than anybody. She shoots him in the head. It’s definitely a little much to have him back once again.I think in a way it’s a lot more challenging to have a version of Coulson that seems very much to be Coulson’s life force in this super-advanced LMD. That’s harder for her in many ways than the evil guy walking around pretending to be Phil."
Fans may just have to pin their hopes on the Fitzsimmons ship instead.
Gregg also talked about the show more generally, getting away from the bonkers storylines to remember how it all began. “It was an adventure to come back every season and end the season without knowing for sure if you were going to come back and then be really attached to the people you were in the trenches with trying to take the show, make it our own,” he said, “trying to find a way to make it work on ABC in a time when Game of Thrones and Netflix shows were becoming the flagship of what people wanted to watch.”
It is definitely impressive that the show managed to carve out a niche for itself when people were straying away from Netflix TV, and when other Marvel shows like Daredevil and Jessica Jones were getting the axe one after the other. “I’m so proud of what the writers and the production team did in terms of keeping our heads down and looking at what we were allowed to use and making the most out of it and letting us continually toss out everything, even if it was working, and start over.”
As for how the show might end, would it not be a kick for the Avengers still left standing — Hawkeye, Hulk, Thor and others — to find out what Coulson had been up to while they were fighting Thanos this whole time? “The part of me that just is Phil Coulson has him in there, he very much wants to explain,” Gregg said. “But that said, every time I say that there’s a headline that says, ‘Clark Gregg wants Phil Coulson to meet the Avengers.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that would be cool, but I wouldn’t trade the journey that happened instead.”
"I wouldn’t trade what you described as Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. having 130 episodes to become their own separate thing within the Marvel universe, that I think if someone watches the seasons on Disney+ eventually, I think it stands up pretty well. So I’m grateful for what it is, I’m happy to end it here, and I will never not take a phone call from someone who has an idea about how he might become part of another moment."
New episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. run every Wednesday on ABC!
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