Warning: SPOILERS for Marvel's Agents of SHIELD Season 7, Episode 4 - "Out of the Past"
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Marvel's Agents of SHIELD season 7 has sent the secret agents into the 20th-century history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe - and it's telling a richer, more complex time travel story than Avengers: Endgame. In Agents of SHIELD's final season, the team led by Director Alphonso "Mack" MacKenzie (Henry Simmons) and a Chronicom/Life Model Decoy hybrid of Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) are chasing after alien Chronicoms trying to wipe SHIELD from existence.
Avengers: Endgame was the grand finale of Thanos' (Josh Brolin) Infinity Stones saga and it was also a time-travel romp through important moments in past MCU movies. The Avengers split into four teams and traveled to 2012 New York City during the Chitauri invasion, Asgard in 2013, and to the planets Morag and Vormir in 2014 in order to retrieve the Infinity Stones. Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) were also forced to make a side trip to Camp Lehigh, New Jersey in 1970 to heist the Space Stone and Pym Particles. Tragically, Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) sacrificed her life for the Soul Stone and Nebula (Karen Gillan) was kidnapped and replaced by her 2014 self who was loyal to Thanos, but otherwise, the Avengers' time heist went remarkably well with no known damage done to the MCU timeline.
As exciting and entertaining as Avengers: Endgame's time heists were, Agents of SHIELD is eclipsing the superheroes with deeper storytelling and a more consequential immersion into the past. The first four episodes of Agents of SHIELD season 7 have taken our heroes into 1931 New York City, where they encountered a young Wilfred Malick (Darren Barnet), who will be Hydra's future leader, smuggling the Super Soldier Serum that created Captain America. Next, SHIELD arrived in 1955 New Mexico, where they inadvertently proved Area 51 does have aliens and they met Agent Carter's Daniel Sousa (Enver Gjokaj), whose death in Los Angeles is a key event in SHIELD history. Mack even made the controversial call to save Sousa's life while preserving his historically-recorded death so that Sousa gets to join the SHIELD team from the future.
But what truly sets SHIELD's escapades in the MCU's past is the level of infiltration they're engaged in, which is much more dangerous and more fascinating than what fans saw in Avengers: Endgame. After all, all the Avengers from 2023 really had to do was stay out of the way, let events play out, and swipe the Infinity Stones (though it got more complicated than that). For their part, the Agents of SHIELD have to immerse themselves in the past and interact with important figures like Malick and Sousa without damaging the timeline while experiencing genuine culture shock thanks to how people behaved in the past.
The temptation to alter history, exhibited by Daisy Johnson (Chloe Bennet) when she ordered Deke Shaw (Jeff Ward) to kill Malick, is understandably overwhelming. After all, they know what terrible things will happen and SHIELD could save millions of lives if they eliminated Hydra at the source, but they can't because it would be calamitous to the timeline in ways they can't imagine or predict. Thus, SHIELD is faced with greater ethical dilemmas than Tony Stark meeting his dad Howard (John Slattery) or Steve Rogers tempted to see Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) in 1970. Thus, Agents of SHIELD season 7 creates greater food for thought about the many problems of the past that persist to this day. By taking advantage of having an entire season to delve into their time travel adventure, Agents of SHIELD is already making the most of the genre.
Agents of SHIELD is also diving headlong into the fact that, demographically, their team is problematic when inserted into the '30s and '5os. After all, Coulson's group is comprised of an African-American, two Asian women, and a Latina woman. At every turn, Mack, Daisy, Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen), and Yo-Yo Rodriguez (Natalia Cordova-Buckley) have had to face how "racist and sexist" the past is to women and POC. The social relevance of the Agents' facing intolerance, racism, and sexism is even more powerful given current world events, which is all the more remarkable for how prescient Agents of SHIELD turned out to be since season 7 was produced a year ago. But, thankfully, what Agents of SHIELD's journey into the past is really saying is that while many things, unfortunately, haven't changed, the Agents themselves are living proof that the world can and does get better.