Following the season finale of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. several interviews with the show’s producers have been posted. Here are some highlights:
How did it work: Were you asked by Marvel to get the characters from point A to point B or told 10 things that needed to happen?
Maurissa Tancharoen: It wasn’t really, These 10 things need to happen. There was one major headline, which is, Captain America 2 happens, and that’s going to happen to S.H.I.E.L.D. As far as everyone’s character arcs, that is something that was definitely designed by us and Joss and [executive producer] Jeff Bell.
Jed Whedon: One of the things we faced that was an interesting challenge and made the season a little bit of a puzzle is they don’t cement the airing schedule until a couple months before. Not to mention, security-wise, we’re saying the words HYDRA, revealing this stuff, and shooting these scenes weeks before Captain America premieres. So we were very eager to get those airdates to know which episode would come right before and which would come right after.
The show has tons of effects and gadgetry, the things we’ve come to know and love about Marvel movies, but you’re doing it on a TV scale. Was there anything you wanted to do and for financial or logistical reasons, couldn’t?
JW: We have to build from the idea of story first. Yes, we wanted to have a Helicarrier in every episode [but] we have 50 times less money and time, so we have to pick and choose our moments. I will say that every story starts with the kitchen sink in it.
MT: And then we slowly strip it away.
JW: We get to the point of, What do we need for the story to be told, and how can we change these sequences to be from the point of view of the characters? That’s something we talk about a lot. If a monster is landing on a car, instead of showing the whole monster leaping through the skyline, we want to be in the car with the character having that experience. It works for our show, but also on a budgetary and time level. It helps us avoid these big effects by personalizing them and making them more visceral.
MT: Our eyes are now more open to the reality of how big or how small we can go. Granted, our visual effects are stunning, but I think now that people actually know our characters, the moments that have stood out to them are between our characters.
Marvel.com: Now that you’ve reached the end of the season, would you say that it shaped up in much the same way you originally envisioned?
Jeffrey Bell: We knew where we wanted to end the show from early in the season. And we knew that we had to play a lot of our story cards down until “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” We’re grateful that people liked the way that the show is resolving. Some things we couldn’t have predicted, like the character of Raina. Ruth Negga showed up and we just fell in love with her and found ways to use her beyond our initial conception, and that was terrific. Bill Paxton’s portrayal of the Clairvoyant was more awesome than we could have ever imagined, and so we leaned into him whenever possible. We had no sense really of how people would react or how Brett would do when we revealed [Ward’s] true nature, and the way people have reacted to his character and the performance that Brett Dalton has done for that has been beyond our imagination.
What we did expect, and what we were grateful for, was our other actors just being fantastic. Clark [Gregg] leading the way [with] Ming-Na [Wen, with] their relationship and the complexity that was there. Taking Coulson from a company man to a man without a company to a man without anything, and yet him having hope, the whole thing was pretty terrific. Watching Skye and Fitz and Simmons–not just as new actors, but as characters that didn’t have a lot of field experience–grow and develop and mature and become S.H.I.E.L.D. agents that we believe you understand and accept as worthy of being S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. I think all those have been gratifying, and the things I talked about earlier were bonus.
Jeph Loeb: And then on the other side, on the Marvel side, it was an incredibly exciting year. This was our first live action television series ever. We had a huge hand up with Joss Whedon coming onboard at the beginning, a spectacular cast led by Clark Gregg, who brought a humanity and a power to his role that was delightful and everything that we could want and more. We were a big giant show that went up against the two biggest shows on network television, “NCIS” and “The Voice,” and held our own. And in the current climate of television, that is an extraordinary achievement. I think everybody, but in particular the cast, the producers–Jeff, Jed [Whedon], Maurissa [Tancharoen], Garry Brown–and an extraordinary writing staff…just cheers, and if I was Oprah I’d buy them all a new car. But I’m not Oprah.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: I know that it’s hard for you to speak at this point about where things are going next season, but obviously, all characters have a certain planned trajectory — so can you at least speak vaguely about how the events of the finale are going to impact the show going forward?
JEFF BELL: We hope we brought certain relationships to a conclusion and opened new doors. And Fitz had said big words to Simmons, and so what will that mean? And Coulson has a new job and we, the audience, know things about Skye, that Skye herself doesn’t know yet. And so we’re hoping that we’ve suggested either new threads or threads that have been in the background moving more to the front. And Mike Peterson is like Cain, wandering the earth…
Am I right to assume that’s not the last we’ve seen of Deathlok?
BELL: We hope to find other stories for him. He’s terrific.
JEPH LOEB: And a large part of that has to do with the fact that he’s played by J. August Richards, who, from the pilot, gave humanity to the character of Mike Peterson and through the various transformations and evolutions, finished his story so far. But like any origin story, there are still twists and turns to come.
Did you ever toss around the idea of killing Ward?
Bell: We love all our actors, so no one is ever casually killed — even Bill, who only came in for six episodes. It was very hard because we love him as an actor and we love the character. It’s a big deal to do that. There were so many other ways to create pain, sorrow and conflict. We love Dark Ward. We love the way Brett Dalton is embodying that character. There’s more story for our characters by him being alive than if he had died.
Loeb: The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) has done things that are far more heinous than anything Grant Ward has ever done as far as we know, and yet, at the end of the movie, you’re rooting for him to come back on the side of the angels. There’s a tradition in the Marvel Universe of our villains turning out to be heroes at the end of the day. Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch started out as villains and became Avengers on the publishing side. There’s also the fun of sometimes your heroes team up with the villain to go after something that’s even worse, so there’s a lot of story left in Grant Ward, including the ongoing question, which is: Who is Grant Ward? The fact that we’re having that conversation, though, is so fascinating to us because Ward was certainly one of those characters that at the beginning of the season people never would’ve guessed this is where we were going to go at the end of the season. It’s that kind of twist that we’re going to continue to look for with all of our characters [in Season 2]. What is good? What is evil? What is evolution? Those are all really good questions about where we’re going in the future.
Is there really no redemption when it comes to Ward?
Bell: One of the things that Dostoevsky talks about is that no character was too high to fall and no character was too low to be redeemed. Crime and Punishment began with a person going out and consciously becoming a cold-blooded murderer and it took 800 pages and an epilogue before the person finally asked for forgiveness.
Loeb: If you can believe it, Dostoevsky was Hydra.
Bell: You just spoiled Season 2. But that’s the beauty of it. I really do believe that no one is too pius to fall or too far gone to be redeemed in some way. Jaime Lannister on Game of Thrones did terrible things and now I feel so bad for him because his sister won’t kiss him. Isn’t that weird? Does she not love him? He lost a hand! It kills me that I care. We want to do that with Ward; we want him to kiss his sister, metaphorically speaking.
Let’s talk about the performance of Bill Paxton over this course of episodes, and the range he showed from first seemingly being a fun, down-to-Earth, good guy to the very creepy place he was at in the finale. How much did his presence mean to the second half of the season for both of you? Both having an actor of his caliber added to the mix, and also representing a real supervillain for the team to face?
Jeph Loeb: It meant a lot. In fairness, we knew where we were going — the reveal in “The Winter Soldier,” and how that was going to dramatically affect our cast. We always had the Clairvoyant in our pocket — if you go back to the early episodes, you can see it’s all laid out there — and it just came down to, “OK, when we start to introduce this guy, who’s he going to be?” The writers came up with this fantastic character of John Garrett, who exists in the Marvel Universe, and we went on a hunt. The good news is that at the top of the list was an actor by the name of Bill Paxton, and he read the script and said, “I’m in.” It literally was that fast. It was one of those very strange, wonderful moments, of where you create a character, hope that a certain actor is going to play that character, and he does so with aplomb.
Bell: Part of what we did to attract him was we let him know coming in that he was the Clairvoyant. With that knowledge, he said, “Well, then I’m going to be everybody’s best friend.” The comic book character is also a larger than life, complicated character, who has a very questionable background. So we knew that the DNA of somebody who could do questionable things was there. But what Bill brought to it was a joy that we could not have expected. Watching him and Clark as old pals who are very different characters, but respected each other, was a lot of fun. Watching him hide in plain sight and react — “What, Victoria Hand is the Clairvoyant?” — was terrific. What we couldn’t imagine was where he took it in the last episode, which was, for us, a delight.
And it was even revealed that the show’s John Garrett was also a cyborg, much like the comic book character.
Loeb: All of it was there from the very beginning. We knew about the Deathlok project, Garrett’s original ties to it, and all of that. We went to the source material, and it helped us out enormously. But the execution of it is the thing that we’re most proud of, and that falls in the capable hands of our writing staff and our executive producers.