Yahoo News Agents of SHIELD season 6: Everything you need to know
Warning: contains spoilers for Agents of SHIELD season five.
Agents of SHIELD looked certain to end with season five before a last-minute renewal from ABC for season six.
The final episodes of season five took place at the same time as Avengers: Infinity War and like we predicted before it aired, they didn't feature THAT moment from the movie's climax, but that doesn't mean it didn't deliver its own shocks.
So what can we expect from season six? We're glad you asked.
Agents of SHIELD season 6 cast: Who's coming back?
Let's get the pretty much guaranteed returns out of the way first, so that's Chloe Bennet as Daisy Johnson, Henry Simmons as Mack, Elizabeth Henstridge as Jemma Simmons and Natalia Cordova-Buckley as Elena 'Yo-Yo' Rodriguez.
And now we get into the trickier ones.
The season five finale saw Daisy stop Graviton, but at the expense of using up the Centipede Serum that could have saved Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) who has been dying slowly from his original Avengers injury, following his deal with Ghost Rider.
He decided to leave with Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen) and go to Tahiti, and Gregg isn't sure he'll be back for season six. "My understanding is that Phil Coulson is no longer alive," he confirmed, although the showrunners weren't quite as definitive.
"What we do think is that there's an emotional impact with everything that happened this season and we would never wanna undercut that," Jed Whedon outlined. "That being said, our show's founded on a man who had been killed in the movies, and Clark Gregg is the foundation upon which our show is built."
So we'll perhaps see Coulson in season six, but maybe in flashback form or given season five's timey-wimey narrative, maybe the team will go back in time and meet a different version of Coulson. His possible exit also means that, maybe, we won't see May again, although we hope that doesn't prove to be the case.
Another return that is up in the air is that of Iain de Caestecker as Leo Fitz after his devastating death in the season five finale – or, more accurately, the devastating death of 'future' Fitz as he didn't get transported to the future with the team at the start of season four.
He took the long route, so in the current day timeline, Fitz is still out there in space in suspended animation and the end of season five saw Simmons vow to find him.
Adrian Pasdar's time on the show also seemed to be at an end as General Glenn Talbot (AKA Graviton) literally got blasted into space by Daisy in the finale. However, Whedon has been teasing that we might not have seen the end of him.
"This is Marvel, and even more, it's Agents of SHIELD," he joked. "I know we see him floating in space, but he's Graviton, so you never know… Chances are he might not be super dead."
We currently don't know what happened to FitzSimmons' grandson Deke Shaw (Jeff Ward) who came from the future, but maybe now doesn't exist as the team were successful in preventing the future destruction of the Earth. "I think it really is a mystery. Did he disappear or did he walk away?" co-showrunner Jeffrey Bell told EW.
Agents of SHIELD season 6 premiere date: When can we expect it?
ABC's renewal of the show wasn't without its downsides as they confirmed it'll be shorter run of 13 episodes, compared to the usual 22, and we'll have to wait until summer 2019 for it to return, rather than late 2018 as we could have expected.
E4 airs the show in the UK and usually waits until after its midseason break in the US to premiere it, meaning they can run it uninterrupted, but with a shorter season, perhaps UK audiences will get to enjoy the show at roughly the same time as the US.
Agents of SHIELD season 6 plot: How does season 5 set it up?
The delayed release date for season six actually helps the show as it means that Agents of SHIELD will return after Avengers 4 has been released. Given that the show definitely takes place in the MCU, the events of Avengers 4 will affect Agents of SHIELD so it's a good thing to not have to worry about continuity.
Depending on how Avengers 4 resolves Infinity War's cliffhanger, we imagine we'll see a time jump at the start of season six so that it takes place after the movie. This means that the relatively clean slate of season five's finale can be helpful as it'll allow the new season to be a soft reboot of sorts.
Before the show was renewed, Whedon hinted that they'll have to "figure out" how Avengers 4 affects Agents of SHIELD. "It'll depend on what the season looks like and our air dates and all that. So, yeah, that's a bridge we'll have to cross," he outlined, with Bell calling it a "classy problem".
We've already gone into depth about what we can expect in season six, but largely we'd expect the earlier stages of it to focus on the search for Fitz and how SHIELD operates under the leadership of Mack.
Marvel's Agents of SHIELD airs on ABC in the US and on E4 in the UK.
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