Clark Gregg on the future of Coulson, as well as the future of S.H.I.E.L.D.

For those viewers who stayed with the ABC series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., they were rewarded with some major bombshells towards the end of the season, both in terms of storylines as well as fun cinematic synergy that would make any devoted fan geek out with total gleeful delight!

Clark Gregg, who plays the once dead, twice alive Agent (now Director) Phil Colson, had a chat with IGN regarding where both the show, as well as his character might go for the show’s second season. As fans remember, the events in both Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Captain America: The Winter Soldier left everyone breathless with the revelation that HYDRA had been running things from on high, and now everyone has to wonder, where does it go from here?

Gregg confirmed that the show was going to take a bolder, and “guerilla” take regarding the S.H.I.E.L.D. organization given everything that has happened in the show, and that this to say regarding the new status of S.H.I.E.L.D.:

“That’s a really interesting point just because what’s been clear to me is that
the Agent Coulson who’s running this team post-Captain America: The
Winter Soldier, post-Hydra, post-being killed and brought back to life with
something in him he doesn’t understand… He’s a very different Coulson than
the guy who everyone knew. A lot of people who knew him in the old days
say, “He’s different.” I think you would have to be different having gone
through that stuff. So I think he’s reinventing himself and re-understanding
himself as a person anyway, which is probably really necessary to taking in
the new environment and figuring out what SHIELD ought to be in a way that
it doesn’t get rotten again …

Well, Coulson got to watch himself pre-memory wipe describing why he
thought the whole Tahiti Project was a bad idea. He was talking about all the
things that were happening to the people they were using on it and why he
suggested they can the whole thing – and looked pretty shaken while he was
saying it. So I’ve got to suspect that some of the stuff he saw and some of
those patients have some version of the stuff that’s going to happen to him.
So we go from having no SHIELD at all, with a director on the run, to a tiny
Guerrilla SHIELD with Agent Coulson at its head, and maybe not in his own
right head. That sounds fun. That sounds like an interesting Season 2.”

While many people found the first season of the series to not live up to the excitement that had been crafted in the Marvel movies that had been started with Iron Man, it is agreed that given the direction the movies were going to go it would be necessary to use the first part of season 1 to simply lay the ground by presenting the viewers with more standalone episodes of a procedural nature, only to really let loose with a phenomenal final third of the series that had many detractors eating their words.

Gregg also touched on the proposed idea of having the series run continuously for the second season, only to have a brief break when the highly anticipated Agent Carter series is set to premiere:

“I think it’s a great idea. I think in the present age of TV, nobody wants to go
down two weeks here, three weeks there. I don’t like it. I don’t think our fans
liked it. It didn’t let us keep the momentum going with the story. It’s been
amazing to watch how much the show clicked into gear, first of all, after the
events of Winter Soldier, but when we got to run 10 episodes without a
break. You can download the season of so many shows on Netflix in one day
— who wants to take a two-week pause? I don’t!”