Jason O'Mara Cast in Agents of SHIELD

ABC and Marvel have cast Jason O'Mara (Complications, The Good Wife) in Agents of SHIELD as the new director. They have not revealed the actual name of his character. Personally, I was hoping May or Hill would be the new director. Jeph Loeb commented

Bringing Jason into the mix as the new director of S.H.I.E.L.D. forces everyone, particularly Coulson, to reevaluate their role in the agency. Jason has both the physical presence and acting dynamics that will connect with and challenge even the most loyal agent.

Avengers: Age of Ultron Review

First off, I am disappointed by the lack of any members of SHIELD Team 616 appearing in this movie. I'm not sure what they would have contributed to the plot, but Marvel can't keep them off the big screen forever. If Marvel were to put the SHIELD team in a future movie, it'd probably be an Earth-based one and they'd want to avoid stealing attention from any new characters that were introduced. So the only places they could appear are Cap 3, Infinity War, and Inhumans. Civil War and Infinity War seem pretty crowded, especially with the rumors that the Defenders are going to appear in Infinity War 2. I might just go on a genocidal rampage if Chloe Bennet doesn't get a leading role in Inhumans. Skye's arguably more of a main character in Agents of SHIELD than Coulson is and she's the one who connected the audience to the Inhumans.

Literally no part of this plot would have happened if Coulson hadn't tipped Maria off to the location of the scepter. Ultron only came about because Tony hijacked the AI from inside the Mind Gem. He wouldn't have gotten his hands on the gem if Coulson hadn't tipped the Avengers off to the location of Loki's scepter. This actually leads me to wonder if the Avengers know where that information came from. They would know Maria gave it to them, but do they know she got it from Coulson? If they do know he's alive, there was no indication of it in the movie.

The Avengers are now aware that something is up with the infinity stones. Thor said that four have know come into play in the past few years, which is too many to be a coincidence. To count them off, we have the Tessaract in Captain America: The First Avenger and The Avengers, the Aether in Thor: The Dark World, the Mind Gem in this film and The Avengers, and the Power Stone in Guardians of the Galaxy. It appears that Thor knows about the events of Guardians of the Galaxy, which means either there's some sort of communication going on between Nova Corps and Asgard or Heimdall saw the use of an infinity stone and informed Odin and Thor.

The mid-credits scene is very ominous. Thanos has stepped up his game to acquire the infinity stones and will probably be going after one in the next space-based movie (I mean, they can't all be on Earth). The only two such movie between now and Infinity War are Thor: Ragnarok and Guardians of the Galaxy 2. With two gems left to go, I'm predicting one each. In Norse mythology, Ragnarok is the day of reckoning for the gods of Asgard. Something with time travel capabilities could easily bring a civilization such as the Asgardians to their knees. I would love to the movie to be a Doctor Who crossover with the Time Gem turning out to be the Key to Time, but I don't think that's going to happen (someone write fan fic of it anyway, please). The other remaining gem is the soul gem, but I'm not sure how that would factor into Guardians of the Galaxy.

This movie cancels out the leading theory for why the Black Panther makes an appearance in Captain America: Civil War. In some of the promo material released for this movie there was an image of Steve's broken shield. Fans figured Ultron destroyed it and Steve will venture to Wakanda in the upcoming movie to get more vibranium. Well, it turns out the shield was only broken in a hallucination Tony suffered at the hands of Wanda. Marvel has confirmed that T'Challa will be appearing in the movie, so my guess is that Steve's hunt for Bucky will somehow lead him to Wakanda. Either that, or T'Challa wants the Avengers to make up for them damage his kingdom suffered during the fight with the Hulk.

One of Us Review

So it appears that Cal has similar history in the MCU and the comics. From what I remember of my reading after they revealed his and Skye's identities in December, he was experimenting with Dr. Jekyll's formula and developed super strength and mental instability. The main difference is that in the comics, Daisy got her powers from him, while in the MCU they came from her mother's side of the family (which is Inhuman in origin).

Raina and Cal have both been taken by Gordon in front of SHIELD. So not only are they now both in the same place, but Coulson knows someone else has a vested interest in them. I don't think Coulson's likely to realize that Gordon is an Inhuman anytime soon. He's more or less unaware of any other Inhumans out there. He knows there might be, however, since Vin-Tak mentioned these experiments took place thousands of years ago, so there could be millions of Inhumans by now, and there are several Diviners unaccounted for. The only problem is that Coulson is under the impression that you need to travel to the temple under San Juan in order to use the Diviner. That could be true and the Inhumans might have some secret portal there, or there could be another temple somewhere else. I still like the idea of an Inhuman city being somewhere in China.

I was hoping Bobbi and Mack would turn out to be working for SWORD. In ten movies, we've seen surprisingly little of SHIELD's sister agency. At this point, with SHIELD down, I'm beginning to think we're not going to see them at all. I am, however, intrigued by this group's claim to be the "real" SHIELD. That would imply that either they're staying true to SHIELD's roots (while Coulson somehow isn't) or that they have the official backing of world governments while Coulson has only the unofficial support of General Talbot. I'm rather curious to see how many resources the two SHIELDs have compared to each other. It's possible that this new one has control of several major SHIELD bases and significant manpower, compared to Coulson's one old base and several dozen agents. I think they only way they could have taken that many facilities is if other intelligence agencies let them or if they somehow managed to wrest them from Hydra without other agencies ever finding out about them.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier Review

If I had to pick a spot right now, this is probably number 3 or 4 on my list of favorite Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. Numbers one and two are Iron Man and Captain America: The First Avenger (please don't make me pick an order) and I can't decide if I like this better than Iron Man 3. My least favorite will probably always be The Incredible Hulk. I mean, it's just of couple of giant green monsters destroying a city. It's not even a unique plotline. Scientist creates dangerous thing, military tries to acquire dangerous thing.

If you haven't seen the movie, do not read past this point. This point right here, at the end of this sentence. I wasn't really expecting to ever see Hydra again. Let alone for them to be running SHIELD. If the good guys are actually the bad guys, then who are the bad guys? Are they actually the good guys? Are there actually any good guys at all (other than the Avengers and the cast of Agents of SHIELD)? For eight movies and one TV series, we've thought we were rooting for the good guys. Turns out the paramilitary clandestine government agency has plans for world domination.

The end result of this movie seems to be that SHIELD no longer exists. That of course, raises the question of how they're going to continue a TV series named Agents of SHIELD. My guess is that it's not going to be totally disbanded, but is going to be restructured and come under closer supervision. It'll probably undergo a lot of organizational changes and maybe even get renamed, but I doubt SHIELD will go away completely. Whatever happens, we'll probably have to watch Agents of SHIELD to find out.

It appears that the Winter Soldier is going to be in the next Captain America movie as well. All the previous villains have been defeated in the course of a single movie (although Loki did sneak back). This guy, on the other hand, is going to be in at least two movies. In fact, if he does remember who he is, he might just join the Avengers. He'll probably help them track down whatever remains of Hydra. Either that, or he'll be defeated in the next Captain America movie. However, that isn't for another two years, so we'll have to wait and see what happens.

I was actually expecting this movie to tie into the Clairvoyant plotline in Agents of SHIELD. I guess I thought the movie would take place between last week's Agents of SHIELD and this week's. The writers probably didn't want to pick up on a plotline that not everyone will have seen. They don't want to make it so you have to watch the TV show to understand the movie. There's also the matter of wasting the movie resolving a plot that could easily be resolved in the next episode. This week's episode will probably pick up where last week's left off. The events of the movie probably won't be mentioned until next week.

I'm glad we got to see more of Natasha Romanoff (aka the Black Widow). She and Hawkeye are the only Avengers not to have their own movie so far. They were both introduced prior to their appearances in The Avengers, but they still lack the same amount of character development as the other heroes. This is the closest Natasha has come to her own movie. She definitely gets more screen time than she did in Iron Man 2. I read somewhere that Marvel has an idea floating around for a Black Widow movie. That would be excellent, providing they didn't recast her. They've recast characters before, and it would be a shame to recast someone just as they're getting their own movie. Thankfully, I haven't heard any talk of doing that, I'm just hoping that they won't.

Apparently, SHIELD tried to copy the Iron Man flight-suit technology. That seems the only explanation for the Falcon's wing-suit/jetpack thing. It's a rather primitive version of the Iron Man technology, but it does get the job done. I can see SHIELD deploying a whole battalion of these guys into combat operations, or using them to insert special forces behind enemy lines. Something that small is bound to be low-observable just by default. It's interesting that they seem to have scrapped the program after one man got shot down.

I had to go home and look up the name of the two new characters from the mid-credits sequence. According to Wikipedia, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch are going to be joining the cast of Avengers: Age of Ultron. I'm interested to see which side they're going to be on. They're probably going to be working for Hydra. Supposedly, in the comics they're good guys, so they might switch sides. I guess we'll have to watch the movie to find out.