Clark Gregg Talks Inhumans Being Introduced in Agents of Shield

After a LOT of buildup, Agents of Shield delivered on it’s season 2 arc by truly and definitively introducing Inhumans to the Marvel Universe at large. Now the question is, what’s next?

Clark Gregg, aka Agent Coulson, talked about the back half of the season and what it all means for his character.

Easily the big question was how the introduction of the Inhumans would affect the show and the goal of Coulson’s mission. He answered about what he might expect to happen:

“Hard to say. I don’t know yet. We haven’t shot enough that I really have a good answer for that. What I like about it is, it’s not your typical origin story. All along S.H.I.E.L.D. has kind of been about protecting people from what they don’t know about, which often means people who are on the index — people who have powers because they’ve been kind of mutated or given powers by technology or Hydra or various alien artifacts. Inhumans represents a different chapter.

At least in the comics, the Inhumans, they’re a race of people who’ve been transformed. They’re mutants, more or less. I’ve always loved that part of the comics. They’re people who have evolved differently, and that generates a lot of fear. Some people want to annihilate them. Some people want to lock them up. Some people want to register them. Some of them become superheroes. Some of them become monsters. I find that particularly germane. Are we going to accept the people who are different, or are we going to try to wipe them out?”

Then of course there’s the immediate impact on Coulson himself, as Skye is very much like a daughter to him, and the price of her becoming an Inhuman was actually quite high.

“I think the first thing we’re going to deal with when we come back is he led everyone to this place with the writings. He found this submerged, several-thousand-year-old alien city. It turned out to be like an incubating factory that turned his own most beloved protégée — his surrogate daughter — into something else and got one of his team members killed. That’s not going to be easy on his new team, which has some people who he knows and trusts and some people who are much newer to him.”

We’ll be here to see how this all breaks down when Agents of Shield returns March 7th!