Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. have faced a lot of bizarre and dangerous situations, but in season 5 outer space could be their final frontier. After a critically acclaimed 4th season in which the Agents saved the world from AIDA (Mallory Jansen), and then the series was in turn saved from cancellation by ABC's parent company Disney, S.H.I.E.L.D. returns for a 2 hour season premiere at 8pm on Friday, December 1st. S.H.I.E.L.D. takes the place of Marvel's Inhumans, which completed its 8 episode run in early November.
Fans in the United States can watch S.H.I.E.L.D. live on ABC or catch up the next day on the ABC app and on abc.go.com. Fans in Canada can catch our heroes on CTV. Internationally, fans subscribed to Hulu or Amazon can also watch episodes of the new season, as well as catch up on the prior four seasons. Netflix has seasons 1-4 available, but season 5 likely won't be seen on Netflix until the season is over in mid-2018.
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Footage of season 5 was screened at New York Comic Con in early October, building great anticipation for the return of Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) and his team. Marvel released the first 17 minutes of the season 5 premiere online yesterday as well. Not only was it a fun glimpse into what's to come this season, the premiere footage opened up a whole slew of questions. The Agents have never been placed in a predicament quite like the one they find themselves in.
When season 4 concluded, the S.H.I.E.L.D. team was gathered in a diner enjoying a well-earned moment of closeness as the family they've become. They saved the world from AIDA's attempts to bring her HYDRA-dominated virtual reality into existence, but they had also resigned themselves to turning surrendering to the federal agents hunting them. Sure enough, those agents, led by an unnamed bald man who appears to be an alien Kree posing as a human, arrived at the diner, freezing Coulson's team in place and literally plastic bagging them for transport via a Kree monolith. When Coulson awoke, he was on some sort of vessel with an asteroid belt outside the window - obviously in outer space.
From what we've seen so far, season 5 picks up with the expected chaos and bewilderment as Coulson, Mac (Henry Simmons), Yo-Yo (Natalia Cordova-Buckley), May (Ming-Na Wen), and Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) each find themselves and each other on board what appears to be a freighter and space station of some kind. Answers as to how or why are not easily forthcoming, as Virgil, the lone member of a group called the True Believers able to offer some explanation, is amusingly knocked unconscious and then killed. The Agents soon find they're not alone on this vessel which is strewn with humanoid corpses - alien creatures called Roaches are also hunting the people on board.
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Though we don't see Agent Daisy Johnson AKA Quake (Chloe Bennet) in the first 17 minutes, we know from the season 5 trailer that Daisy is also stuck in space with her fellow Agents. It's Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) who is apparently still on Earth; he must have been the one who was left behind at the diner counter. Virgil later noted to Simmons that he was sorry that Fitz couldn't join his friends on this trip. We also know some new characters will debut in season 5.
The 17 minutes of footage really whets the appetite and signals season 5 will be Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s most daring and unpredictable season yet. There's no telling what'll happen next, which is an exciting proposition for fans of the 'heavyweight champions' of Marvel Television's indomitable flagship series.