Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. will come to an end with its seventh season, and although it doesn't premiere until 2020, the head honchos have already promised that the show went big for its final outing. Season 6 ended on a cliffhanger that opens the door for a surprising guest star to return. Despite the fact that Season 7 has already finished filming, not a whole lot of hard details have emerged.
That said, executive producer Jeffrey Bell promised that the S.H.I.E.L.D. team 'swung for the fences" for Season 7, saying this:
I’ll say this: We swung for the fences in Season 7. And sometimes when you swing for the fence, you hit home runs…
Well, if S.H.I.E.L.D. was going to go out, it sounds like S.H.I.E.L.D. is going big! Season 6 ended with the good guys going back in time and giving fans good reason to speculate that S.H.I.E.L.D. and Marvel Cinematic Universe characters from days gone by -- like Peggy Carter of the late lamented Agent Carter -- could appear when Coulson and Co. drop by their eras.
Like Season 6, Season 7 will run for only 13 episodes, which is significantly shorter than the 22 episodes of the first five seasons. It sounds like S.H.I.E.L.D. intends to pack a lot into not a whole lot of episodes. Considering Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is a rare Marvel series insofar as it wasn't cancelled -- R.I.P. Marvel Netflix series -- the final season has the chance to tie off loose ends before the final credits roll.
Co-showrunner Jed Whedon agreed with Jeffrey Bell's comments to TVLine, elaborating about Season 7:
There are some bonkers episodes [coming]. [Season 7 features] some of our most purely entertaining episodes, and we hope people enjoy them as much as we did. We definitely swung for the fences.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has gone pretty bonkers with episodes in the past -- with a personal favorite of mine being the Season 6 outing that revealed Simmons' dark side and hooked her up with Fitz's dark side -- so it'll be interesting to see how the "bonkers" and "entertaining" episodes of Season 7 compare to episodes of earlier years.
So, did Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. hit a home run by trying to swing for the fences in Season 7? We won't find out for sure until new episodes begin to air next year, but there's at least a major reason to suspect that May will be one of the survivors.
Admittedly, it's entirely possible all the good guys will live to potentially return to the MCU in the future, but it can't hurt not to get hopes too high. This is the show that killed Coulson, after all, even if he did kinda sorta come back.
For now, you can relive the earlier seasons of S.H.I.E.L.D. streaming courtesy of Netflix, which hosts every episode that has aired so far. If you're more in the mood for some new (if non-S.H.I.E.L.D.) content, swing by our 2019 fall TV schedule and our 2019 Netflix premiere rundown.
