A newly-released clip from Agents of SHIELD season 7 has explained its time travel - and it actually helps to understand the Multiverse concept seen in Avengers: Endgame. Marvel's Agents of SHIELD is heading for its seventh and final season, and the stakes are higher than ever before. The SHIELD team appear to be engaged in a sort of 'Time War' with an alien race known as the Chronicoms, who are attempting to rewrite history and remove obstacles that would prevent them from conquering the Earth.
Fortunately, the SHIELD team are no strangers to time travel. In Agents of SHIELD season 5, Coulson and his team were blasted into a dystopian future timeline in which Earth had been destroyed. They eventually learned they were caught in a time loop, and they successfully broke it, saving the planet from being shattered like an egg by Quake's amplified powers. In the aftermath, Fitz and Simmons figured out how time travel works, manipulating the flow of time in ways that would make Tony Stark blush. Indeed, their knowledge may well outstrip the Chronicoms', too.
Time travel is a tricky concept for any show to handle, given temporal mechanics are largely theoretical. Agents of SHIELD is helped by the fact its heroes are working it out as they go along, which means scientists such as Fitz, Simmons, and their grandson Deke (who originates from the averted timeline) are given plenty of opportunities to figure it out. Understanding the importance of time travel to the plot, Marvel Television deliberately released a clip from Agents of SHIELD season 7 before the premiere that outlined the basic principles.
Agents of SHIELD's Time Travel Explained
The Agents of SHIELD team appear to have arrived in 1931, in the middle of the Great Depression, during the construction of the Empire State Building. The Agents of SHIELD season 7 clip sees the team walking through the streets of New York, reeling in amazement as they experience another time period. Quake is amused to note a part of her had expected the world of the 1930s to be in black-and-white, and then expresses concern about the butterfly effect. As she points out, "Just being here, walking down the street, we could've already changed the course of events." Fortunately, Deke insists that's not something to worry about. "The butterfly effect is just one aspect of the Multiverse branch theory," he explains. "Personally, I subscribe to the timestream idea... Imagine time is a stream, right, and we were sticks that were thrown into it." The stream isn't impeded by one or two sticks, but if too many are added, it creates a dam and the direction of the water is changed forever. "So, as long as we can avoid that," Deke adds, "we should be able to splash around a little bit and we're all good."
As noted, this is a pretty standard piece of time travel exposition, of the kind seen in every franchise that dabbles with time travel; Avengers: Endgame had two similar expository scenes, delivered by the Hulk and the Ancient One. These weren't entirely consistent, in large part because Marvel Studios changed their temporal mechanics partway through production for story purposes. Ironically, though, Agents of SHIELD's quantum mechanics have been a lot more consistent. The show runs with the Multiverse theory of time travel, in which there are many parallel worlds, with branching timelines created by key decisions. Time travelers can inadvertently create new diverging branches to the timeline - but now, Deke posits the changes must be major in order to have such an effect. In truth, in narrative terms this is probably the only way Agents of SHIELD could tell a time travel adventure like this; the past can still be changed, meaning there are real stakes, but every minor action won't create a new timeline, giving the various characters freedom to act.
Agents of SHIELD Fits With Avengers: Endgame's Multiverse
This actually fits remarkably well with the theories of time travel seen in Avengers: Endgame. There, the Avengers traveled to the past in order to acquire the Infinity Stones and use them to reverse the snap in 2023. The Ancient One warned the Hulk that removing an Infinity Stone would create a whole new branching timeline. According to the Ancient One, this was uniquely characteristic of the Infinity Stones, which she claimed create the flow of time itself. But frankly, she appears to have only been speaking half-truths, because the MCU is confirmed to be further developing the theory of the Multiverse through Phase 4 and beyond; Loki is expected to use the Tesseract to time travel in his Disney+ TV series, while Doctor Strange 2 literally bears the title Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
Oddly enough, if the MCU does indeed follow the same model of time travel as Agents of SHIELD, this may help resolve a major problem with the movies. At the end of Avengers: Endgame, Steve Rogers embraced his "Happily Ever After" by traveling back in time to spend the rest of his life with his beloved Peggy Carter. Even the writers and directors of Avengers: Endgame disagree over just how that works in terms of time travel theory. Did Steve Rogers create a new branching timeline when he traveled back, or was he part of the main continuity all along? The answer, most likely, depends on the scale of the changes he made when he returned to the past. Was Steve Rogers' mere presence enough to create a new branch, given he would have dramatically changed the life of Peggy Carter, director of SHIELD? Or would a branch only have been created if he elected to make a major change, perhaps by uprooting Hydra decades before the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, or else rescuing Bucky from cryogenic suspension and brainwashing?
-
It will be interesting to see how Agents of SHIELD season 7 builds upon the theories of time travel espoused by Deke. After all, with the exception of Fitz and Simmons, the SHIELD team are as new to time travel as the audience - which means they may well get things wrong. This clip from Agents of SHIELD season 7 will most likely be the first crucial expository scene, helping set up the first arc, but it probably won't be the last one.