Agents Of SHIELD Is Being Removed From Canon By Marvel?
Agatha: Coven of Chaos is rumored to remove Agents of SHIELD from the MCU.
The ABC series Agents of Shield was one of the MCU’s earliest forays into tying its TV and movie universes together before the Disney+ flood of Marvel shows. While the canon status of the show has always been a bit contentious, it seems like Marvel might be moving toward officially de-canonizing it with the upcoming series Agatha: Coven of Chaos. According to Murphy’s Multiverse, there’s a rumor that says the series will reveal that Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha Harkness has had possession of the Darkhold for hundreds of years.
MCU fans who haven’t tuned in to Agents of Shield or The Runaways were introduced to the Darkhold in WandaVision and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where it was harnessed and subsequently destroyed by Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff. However, the Darkhold previously played an integral role throughout the fourth season of Agents of Shield until Robbie Reyes aka Ghost Rider eventually took the book through a portal at the end of the season. Of course, if Agatha had possession of the Darkhold for hundreds of years, this season wouldn’t have been possible.
Then again, it’s entirely possible that Marvel could also opt to solidify Agents of Shield as canon by saying that Agatha Harkness had possession of the Darkhold for hundreds of years, except for a brief period where she lost it. This could be a winking reference to AOS fans if Marvel doesn’t want to take the events of that show completely off the table. It’s also entirely possible that Marvel doesn’t care one way or the other about canonizing or de-canonizing that series, leaving things up to fan imagination instead.
It would be strange for the MCU to write Agents of Shield off entirely, especially since so many of the early seasons tied directly into the events of the film side of the MCU while also having appearances from numerous MCU characters. For instance, Samuel L Jackson appeared in the series as Nick Fury, Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill, Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter, Jamie Alexander as Sif…the list goes on. An episode of the series even directly led into the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron.
While Agents of Shield had an expansive cast of characters, let’s not forget that it also starred Clark Gregg’s Phil Coulson, who was introduced in the first Avengers film. In its first season, the series was also impacted by the reveal in Captain America: The Winter Soldier that Hydra infiltrated the SHIELD organization for decades. Other MCU films were also directly referenced multiple times throughout the series, with the events of those films affecting the storylines as well.
Eventually, the final season of Agents of Shield revealed that the series took place in an alternate timeline, but the events of that timeline often match up to the main MCU timeline. The MCU has now firmly established that the multiverse exists, so the easiest thing to do would say that the series is canon, just in a different part of the multiverse. Or, you could not care about what’s canon and what’s not and just watch what you want.
