Captain Marvel Ties Agents of SHIELD to MCU Movie Canon

Captain Marvel looks set to bring Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV series closer to the movies than ever before. When Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. launched back in 2013, it was essentially Marvel's flagship tie-in TV show, with a massive number of links to movies like Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Connections between Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Marvel movies have grown a little more distant in recent years, though, much to the dissatisfaction of viewers and actors alike.

Captain Marvel will be the ultimate test in just how continuity works in the MCU. The movie has more potential to contradict established Marvel TV canon than any other film Marvel Studios has ever made. It features a never-before-seen adventure in the history of Phil Coulson, whose backstory has been explored in detail in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. It also features an alien race known as the Kree, who have also seen significant development on the small screen.

Fortunately, the first signs are that Marvel Studios is actually working with continuity established by Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. The movie shouldn't be expected to overtly reference anything from the series, but the first trailer does hint that the aesthetics established by Marvel Television will be reproduced on the big screen.

This Page: How Coulson and the Kree Link To Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Page 2: What Does This Mean for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 6?

Phil Coulson's Role In Captain Marvel

Lee Pace as Ronan the Accuser in Captain Marvel

Let's start with the biggest tie-in aspect of Captain Marvel; the role that will be played by Clark Gregg's Phil Coulson. The film will be set in the '90s, and Coulson is a relatively new recruit to S.H.I.E.L.D. Hilariously, according to Gregg the movie will include Coulson and Fury's "meet-cute moment" - although he doubts Fury would view it that way. By the sound of it, Fury is initially irritated at the fresh-faced S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who's a fan of MC Hammer.

Surprisingly, it looks as though the movie will carefully avoid contradicting this aspect of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. While that series is set in the present day of the MCU, it's starred Gregg as a resurrected Phil Coulson, and as such has liberally explored the character's backstory. It's been confirmed that Coulson studied history at college, and focused on the importance of S.H.I.E.L.D. to world history. He attended S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Communications School, and his first mission was a minor op where he worked alongside Specialist Melinda May. Although it's possible dialogue in Captain Marvel will contradict this, at first glance this early Coulson adventure looks to fit perfectly with the canon. In fact, Gregg has suggested that Captain Marvel isn't "his first rodeo," but it is "one of the first." That distinction carefully avoids any issues.

The real challenge to continuity, however, will come if Coulson meets the Kree in Captain Marvel. In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 1, Coulson discovered that he'd been resurrected using a formula derived from a Kree body, an alien race he didn't recognize. Of course, his memory erasure of Project T.A.H.I.T.I. could easily explain that without any real difficulty.

Kree Architecture In Captain Marvel

The Captain Marvel trailer also included a shot of the Kree homeworld, the planet Hala. This comes from Carol's time in Starforce, the Kree taskforce she begins the movie a part of, so we can expect a closer look at the planet in the release film. Even from just this clip, Captain Marvel clearly presents the planet as a highly industrialized world with designs that match what we've seen in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D..

In season 2, the S.H.I.E.L.D. team stumbled upon an ancient Kree city hidden beneath Puerto Rico. They found their way there when Coulson realized he, and others affected by the drug GH325, were scrawling parts of a map. Crucially, in one scene Coulson and his team generated a 3D image of the map, creating a fantastical cityscape - one with a markedly similar architectural style to the one seen in the image above. Notice that the image of Hala includes several broad buildings, with large flat roofs; the 3D hologram in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. actually included one of those as well. They could easily be landing pads for small spacecraft, of the type we see Carol piloting in the Captain Marvel trailer.

Meanwhile, the strange hexagonal styles on the windows are similar to those seen in both Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Marvel's Inhumans. That series revealed that a group of ancient Inhumans live in an ancient Kree outpost on the Moon. While the overall architectural style there was very different - it was similarly blocky, but lacked the sense of elegance you can see in Captain Marvel - that can be explained away by pointing out that a Lunar base was presumably much more functional, designed for clinical efficiency rather than as a home.

Page 2 of 2: What Does This Mean for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 6?

Is There Anything Else Captain Marvel Can Do?

Captain Marvel will reveal a never-before-seen S.H.I.E.L.D. adventure from the 1990s, and there's evidence that the film will present a similar version of the agency as we've seen from the show. For example, in the scene above, you can clearly see that an alien spaceship - it seems to be a Kree vessel - is being approached by a human aircraft. The design appears to be that of an early Quinjet, and it's evocative of the Bus, the plane Coulson and his team used in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 1. Appropriately enough, Coulson told the team that the Bus was a design that was pretty popular with S.H.I.E.L.D. back in the '90s.

No doubt we're going to get a lot of insights into just how S.H.I.E.L.D. operated in the '90s, and what kind of tech the espionage agency deployed. At the same time, the structure of S.H.I.E.L.D. could change significantly once Nick Fury has taken over; it's probable that Fury's clash with the Skrulls will make him consider a more secretive approach, where knowledge is compartmentalized so as to ensure nobody has access to everything. Ironically, that compartmentalized approach would probably make life easier for Hydra, as they'd be able to subtly manipulate S.H.I.E.L.D. programs without being noticed.

What Does This Mean for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 6?

The last few years have seen Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. grow beyond the constant S.H.I.E.L.D.-Hydra infighting; seasons 4 and 5 have introduced android doppelgangers, complex theories of quantum mechanics, and even a new iteration of Ghost Rider. It's likely that season 6 will pick up where the last season left off. If that's the case, we're presumably going to see S.H.I.E.L.D. head into the depths of space to rescue Fitz, who's in cryogenic suspension aboard Enoch's vessel.

Season 5 introduced viewers to an alien Confederacy, a thousand-year-old alliance between alien races who are brutally militaristic and steal resources from other worlds. There are six members of the Confederacy; the rogue Kree house of Kasius, the Remorath, the Rajaks, the Kallusians, and the Astrans. Marvel carefully avoided identifying the sixth race, and as a result a common theory is that it's the Skrulls. That would certainly explain why dialogue suggested House Kasius had been ostracized from Kree society for generations due to their membership of the Confederacy; they'd have been working with the Kree's ancient enemy, viewed as nothing more than war profiteers.

If this theory is correct, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 6 could essentially follow on from Captain Marvel, developing the idea of shapeshifting aliens - but taking it in a completely different direction. It's interesting to note that Jeff Ward's Deke has been confirmed as a new series regular; he grew up in a timeline where the last survivors of Earth were ruled by the Confederacy, and thus presumably has met the sixth race. Meanwhile, the cast and crew are keeping very quiet indeed about whether or not Coulson will somehow return. If he did, he could well be armed with knowledge about the Skrulls that will prove essential for the rest of the S.H.I.E.L.D. team.

Despite the MCU's lack of TV crossover on the big screen in recent years, it's normally not a major problem. The respective stories are separate enough that there are no major universal contradictions, just missed opportunities. That all changes with Captain Marvel, where much of what happens in the movie will either be playing in a sandbox established by the show and impacting characters and events that have over a hundred episodes of development already. Past precedent definitely gives fans cause for concern, but it may be too soon to jump to conclusions. So far, Captain Marvel appears to be embracing what has come before from the small screen, and hopefully that's the case for the rest of the movie.