“Marvel’s Agents Of SHIELD” Season 4: The New SHIELD Director
“Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD” is going to need a new Director in Season Four. We’ve come up with some plausible—and some not-so-plausible—options.
It was almost a one-off line, buried beneath an action-packed glimpse at the future of Agents of SHIELD while our cohorts tried to trap an elusive Daisy Johnson. They run down an empty alleyway to find they have lost her once again.
“Call the Director, we struck out again,” Coulson says to Mack as they lose their target.
That simple sentence (or two, depending on how you punctuate) speaks measures to what happens from the time Lincoln dies to them tracking down Daisy six months later. Which begs the question: Who is the new Director of SHIELD?
If your first guess was Mack, since he was acting Director when Coulson was otherwise detained, you were wrong. Mostly because Mack is right there next to Coulson, so why would they need to call him? Plus, he never did much when he was in charge to warrant Coulson’s ousting.
Here are some of our guesses for who could be the new SHIELD Director in season four. Please note: many of these should not be taken seriously. I imagine that Agents of SHIELD won’t spoil the surprise of the new Director until at least three or four episodes in. They will let the anticipation build in hopes that the reveal will be
Nick Fury
It’s the obvious answer since he was Director before he appointed Coulson, before SHIELD went underground, and before the Avengers fell apart. He was inexplicably absent from Captain America: Civil War and didn’t do much more than a cameo before that in Avengers: Age of Ultron, so what’s he been doing this whole time?
He could return to his beloved SHIELD and bring it back to its former glory.
Plausibility level? Dangerously low. Samuel L Jackson has shown up on Agents of SHIELD for a handful of cameos. I doubt we’ll be getting more anytime soon.
She wasn’t in Captain America: Civil War, but she was instrumental in getting Cap, Bucky and Black Widow back to Fury in The Winter Soldier.
Having Hill be the Director would also be a solid link to the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. With Nick Fury MIA (but still in contact with Hill, more or less), she is the next best option. Plus, Fury will still want a hand in SHIELD, and who better than his right-hand man?
The plausibility level of this is quite high, especially now that How I Met Your Mother is done and Cobie Smulders should have more availability. Plus it would be an easier casting choice to get than Samuel L Jackson, who seems to be in anything and everything.
Why not bring them back and make them head of the secret agency that kicked them out of their jobs in the first place? It would be such a way to bring them back, too, because no one would suspect it. With the new Director hiding in the shadows for those first few episodes, the anticipation would kill us.
And then, when Coulson finally has a meeting in their office, a real sit-down to talk about the state of the Daisy pursuit, the camera pans around to reveal our favorite bantering couple with Bobbi standing off by a window and Hunter pretending he’s all business sitting behind the desk.
The plausibility level is pretty low on this, but it would be a cool way to bring Bobbi and Hunter back into the fold (and I don’t think I mentioned it in that earlier article about them).
He signed the Sokovia Accords, so he didn’t have to “retire” or go on the run. And the Avengers are fractured. Aside from “running” Stark Industries–which, let’s be honest, Pepper is doing it all and he just shows up at events to be seen–what else does Stark have to do? Why not discover SHIELD still exists and try to resurrect it from the shadows?
Then again, he’d have to deal with the fact that Coulson’s still alive and that might be a tricky thing to work through.
The plausibility level is super low on this one. Sure, Robert Downey Jr. would probably be up for a quick cameo, but it would more than likely blow Agents of SHIELD’s budget for the season.
It’s more than likely that Agents of SHIELD will end up just going with some new face as Director and integrating them that way. But it might be more fun if it was a familiar face. My crazy options can get crazier (Stick from Daredevil? FitzSimmons? An LMD of Grant Ward?), so let’s leave it to the comments! Any Director votes?