New images from Agents of SHIELD Season two and showrunners talk characters and story

 We posted the first image of Peggy Carter in Agents of SHIELD yesterday (here) but it looks like that was only the tip of the iceberg.

First up, here’s the new cast image:

The other images, below, courtesy of Cinemablend and show us Adrian Pasdar as Colonel Glenn Talbot and his wife, Carla Talbot (Raquel Gardner). It also shows us Brian Patrick Wade playing Carl Creel, The Absorbing Man. And yes, that is also an image of

Talbot and Creel fighting in hand-to-hand combat.

Continues after pictures:

In other SHIELD news, Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen spoke to CBR about the new characters that will appear this year.

Tancharoen said: “Well, we’re very excited to have the beloved character, Mockingbird, on the show. Adrianne Palicki was a perfect fit for the role. She was someone we pictured from the beginning. It’s thrilling to have a nice, sort of skilled, sexy spy in the mix. And I think with the handful of characters that we have added to the show, it’s just to illustrate what the new S.H.I.E.L.D. may look like. Coulson is operating with limited resources, so he has to bring people into the fold. So it may feel like we’re expanding a lot, but really, the people that you will see are basically the people we have at our disposal.”

Whedon goes on: “We used to be a ragtag group in a huge machine that was churning. Then, they were agents who had support. Now, that we have less, we sort of see all of them. So while our cast is getting bigger, it’s actually because S.H.I.E.L.D. is getting smaller, we’re using every resource we can.”

Speaking about the Movie and TV ties, he said: “Well, obviously, we all exist in one universe, and if we didn’t, we could have any character we wanted. We could kill them and do what we wanted with them. It is nice that we’re all in one universe, so when we get something, it does have weight. It does exist in the Cinematic Universe and we’re in constant communication with features, and there’s a database of what they’re using, what they plan to use, what we can and can’t use. We just try to carve out our little spot, and Mockingbird’s a good example of someone who we can really lean on as a major character.”

Tancharoen: “The show was basically born out of what has been already established in the Cinematic Universe, so as much as we have benefitted from having characters that you’ve seen in the film[s] appear on our show, there is always a possibility for the reverse. So we do think that all our characters have potential to crossover at some point and there’s always that possibility, and Mockingbird is a nice, exciting new character for us to have that does have crossover potential.”

Whedon: “[Henry Simmons is] another new face. He’s going to show sort of the — one of the things that we’re doing is that now that all of S.H.I.E.L.D. is sort of under one roof, you see parts of it that you wouldn’t necessarily have seen last season. And he represents that. He’s a mechanic. He’s sort of the hands-on, blue-collar aspect of S.H.I.E.L.D. that we didn’t get to see much of last year.”

But will they tell us what’s coming this year? “We will not tell you a thing! Yes, we have some very fun characters to play with, and some known actors filling those roles. So we’re thrilled with what we’ve been able to pull off so far, and with the footage coming in, we think the audience will be pleased.”

Tancharoen: “Towards the end of the last season, we were very much living in a serialized version of the show [And] Season Two will be starting with from that point and answering a lot of questions that we queued up through the season and at the end of Season One.”

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. returns Tuesday, Sept. 23.

UPDATED: Synopsis of  episode 2.02, “Heavy Is the Head”:

“Heavy is the Head” – Hunted and running out of solutions, Coulson puts his team right in the line of fire in the hopes of saving them all. But with General Talbot, Hydra and Creel all on the attack, can they possibly survive? Meanwhile, a mysterious Doctor (Kyle MacLachlan) harbors some dangerous secrets that could destroy one of our core team members.

“Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” stars Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson, Ming-Na Wen as Agent Melinda May, Brett Dalton as Grant Ward, Chloe Bennet as Skye, Iain De Caestecker as Agent Leo Fitz, Elizabeth Henstridge as Agent Jemma Simmons and Nick Blood as Lance Hunter.

Guest starring are B.J. Britt as Agent Antoine Triplett, Adrian Pasdar as Brigadier General Glenn Talbot, Ruth Negga as Raina, Henry Simmons as Alphonso “Mack” Mackenzie, Wilmer Calderon as Idaho, Kyle MacLachlan as The Doctor, Brian Patrick Wade as Carl Creel, Simon Kassianides as Sunil Bakshi, Carolina Espiro as waitress and Cutter Garcia as bartender.

“Heavy is the Head” was written by Paul Zbyszewski and directed by Jesse Bochco.