With Disney+’s Daredevil: Born Again bringing back Charlie Cox and his Netflix co-stars for a new series—following Cox’s Matt Murdock reprise on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law—the question’s come back around again. In an interview with ScreenRant, Marvel Television’s Brad Winderbaum was asked about the canon status of two of the ABC series: SHIELD and Agent Carter.
So for Agent Carter I’m not aware of anything they could bring into canon that doesn’t already fit. We got (human) Jarvis in Endgame, so he’s already canon. But Peggy Carter’s life is pretty vague, and possibly different after Cap’ went back in time, so we can just call that canon now.
As for Agent’s of SHIELD, the later seasons take place in a virtual world, the far future, the far past or an alternative timeline. So you either ignore or multiverse them.
For the earlier seasons, they either track with the MCU or do their own thing that doesn’t conflict.
Now, if you’re asking, should we bring these characters back? Sure.
Quake is the obvious one. She’s an Inhuman so that’s a small wrench but post-Secret Wars we can just call her a mutant and be done with it. Or if you want to do Mutants vs Inhumans you can still make that work, we even met Black Bolt in Multiverse of Madness.
There are plenty of SHIELD agents to bring back. The main timeline has sorta fucked itself with Secret Invasion and we only have Nick Fury at the moment. Have him go recruit some old agents. Hell have the Hawkeye family come out of retirement.
I forget exactly when AoS broke step with the main MCU. It was sometime after Winter Soldier came out, which I think was still in S1 of AoS. They didn’t go into the virtual world, past/future/alternate timelines until S4.
So I guess there’s 2 or 2 and a half seasons, really, that would only need to be reconciled. I think I’m remembering that right, anyway. Haven’t seen it for a few years.
Yeah, that’s about right, but season 1 is monster of the week until it lines up with Winter Soldier and SHIELD falls. So no conflicts there.
The only real conflict would be Inhumans, which is more or less the season 2/3 plot.
I highly doubt we’ll see Inhumans since we have Mutants and no one is talking about the Inhumans show that bombed and only aired half a season.
BUT, if we’re going to reboot a world and have Mutants, let’s just have Mutants. In fact we’re already doing that. Look at Kamala Khan, she’s an Inhuman, but in the MCU a Mutant.
Shield and Carter were great, and the Cavalry was super fine
The new quote by Marvel’s head of streaming Brad Winderbaum:
“It’s exciting for me to think about how to square those ABC shows with the canon,” he said. “That, to me, if you know me and the way my brain works, that is fun territory to imagine.”
That might be a non-answer, or might it indicate that Brad is already working on something ABC-adjacent?
It kinda sounds like how the comics work. Sometimes there are inconsistencies. Whatever you’re reading is the most canon, and everything else is secondary, but still canon. It’s fun to square them with each other, but ultimately they are both canon.
Also, AOS left a lot of stuff vague intentionally so they could be retconned. For example, they reference an event which is obviously supposed to be the black order landing in NYC, but that completely messes up the timeline. But they don’t directly say what it is, so if you ignore what it’s implied as, then it’s fine.
