Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has been known to play the long game when it comes to its mysteries, and the show has kept one particular question unanswered for years now. Fans have been wondering ever since Season 1 just what was up with the Koenigs. Patton Oswalt has turned up on S.H.I.E.L.D. several times over the years, each time playing at least one identical Koenig brother. The brothers seemed just a little bit too similar to be entirely natural. Luckily, we'll soon learn the secret of the Koenigs when Oswalt returns to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in the not-too-distant future.
Patton Oswalt will reprise his role as a couple of the Koenigs in an upcoming episode. Billy and Sam Koenig will find themselves in a sticky situation when a plot to steal the mysterious Darkhold puts them directly in the path of killers, according to EW. They'll have to rely on Coulson and the other good guys of S.H.I.E.L.D. to come to their rescue.
The first Koenig appeared on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Season 1, when Agent Eric Koenig met our merry band of heroes at a secret base after they were forced to go on the run from Hydra. Eric met an untimely end courtesy of Grant Ward, but Oswalt turned up again as Billy Koening, who seemed to be Eric's twin. In Season 2, we met a third Koenig brother working for S.H.I.E.L.D. The three brothers have had similarities that seemed a little bit too close to have simply resulted from being raised together, and they once even mentioned that there were 13 Koenig brothers.
Although the comment was played as a joke, the idea of 13 Koenigs didn't seem all that far-fetched. In fact, it seemed pretty likely that somebody had created a whole batch of Koenigs to work as agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. The two most logical theories for how a baker's dozen of the same guy came to be were that somebody had perfected cloning or somebody had crafted some fantastic Life Model Decoys.
Given the plot of the second half of Season 4, I'd say that we can rule out cloning as the reason why there are so many Koenigs running around the various secret S.H.I.E.L.D bases. Life Model Decoys are currently causing a lot of trouble for Coulson and Co. Dr. Radcliffe invented his own version of L.M.D.s and is currently using them to try and steal the Darkhold from S.H.I.E.L.D. The Koenigs could return only to reveal themselves as androids who have been living and working among the agents for years. Assuming Billy and Sam haven't turned evil since we last saw them, they may be a reminder to the agents that not all L.M.D.s are necessarily murder machines.
If the Koenigs are androids, the next big question is of who created them. They've been around for multiple seasons now, which means that somebody had the technology to create realistic L.M.D.s years before Radcliffe managed it. Luckily, we don't have to wait too much longer to learn to secret of the Koenig brothers. Patton Oswalt returns to play Sam and Billy in the January 31 episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
You can catch Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET on ABC. Check out our midseason TV premiere schedule to see what else is on the airwaves nowadays.
