Nobody was. It was organized into different cells. "Cut off one limb and two more shall grow in its place." (Although it really should be "one head" for the mythological reference to work.) What I mean, though, is that the divergence point is apparently the end of The Winter Soldier. As we learned in TWS, Hydra had been quietly infiltrating SHIELD for decades. At the time of the movie, Alexander Pierce was the highest-level Hydra operative within SHIELD, and he was responsible for Project Insight, the algorithm that would've let Hydra identify and assassinate all potential threats to their power (including President Ellis, Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, and Stephen Strange for some reason), giving them free rein to take over SHIELD and the world openly. What we appeared to see at the end of the episode -- the former SHIELD headquarters still intact and overtly displaying the Hydra symbol -- implies that we're seeing the world that would've resulted if Project Insight, and thus Pierce, had succeeded.
Anyone here who hasn't seen It's a Wonderful Life should watch it sometime in the next six weeks (season be damned). It's all about the unintended, retoractive consequences of getting what you wish for. It's a basic story premise that's been used many times, including in TNG's "Tapestry".
Pfft! Those hacks were all just pulling a reverse on 'A Christmas Carol'. They just switched the ghosts for a wingless angel and John de Lancie. Hmm...so I wonder who it's going to be here? Cyber ghost Radcliffe, or cyber ghost Not-Ada?
Apologies, was meant in tongue n cheek but honestly I haven't seen you make a positive remark about it.
That would make sense if this were an alternate timeline, but it's actually a manufactured reality. I suppose we could blame Aida's emotional naivete, but she was savvy enough to fix Bahrain for May (or was that Radcliffe's idea?). What might be interesting is if the next arc involves Aida constantly trying to tweak the Framework and always getting bad results. That's perfectly understandable-- it's the HYDRA part that doesn't ring true. Of course, this was meant as a teaser, so I'm sure they have something up their sleeve. I have a friend who tracks TV ratings as a hobby, and she reports that SHIELD is pretty much getting CW-level ratings. I'm not very optimistic. But, again, why didn't Aida correct for these things when she tweaked the Framework? It will be interesting to see if Ward-- and Daisy, for that matter-- are SHIELD or HYDRA.
Under the theory that Agent May went into the Framework first and everything had to be retconned from her experiences as others were added. She finally succeeded in stopping a rogue Inhuman without killing her so perhaps that is the point where Inhumans become public in the Framework long, before the Battle Of New York. I have an alternate theory the Fritz LMD seemed to be a Sleeper just like LMayD and may have been first however that would change the Framework. We are getting into NuBSG territory with their Cylons working for both sides.
Maybe Hydra is there to act as the evil enemy that Shield agents can fight against without feeling unsure about their being evil. Shield knew that Hydra was evil and should be destroyed, but lately they haven't always been sure who is the enemy. Some inhumans are good, some are bad; some politicians are good, some are bad; some LMDs are innocuous and some are under the spell of the Dark Hold -- it isn't always totally clear who are friends and who are foes. In the Framework things are more straight forward and easier to discern.
It looked like May was a HYDRA agent in the framework, so I really don't understand what you're saying.
If I may, that Agent May in the Framework is undercover SHIELD agent in Hydra just as Bobbi was when she was introduced on the show.
I disagree with both of these for the same reason. The Framework has been described as an accurate simulation of the entire world, and Aida talked about having to restart the simulation to accommodate each new set of changes in the captives' pasts. That tells us that it's not a mere VR game environment or something that's being arbitrarily programmed in real time. It's a simulation, which means that has its initial conditions defined and then is allowed to run on its own in accordance with the rules it's programmed to follow, evolving naturally from those initial conditions. As I mentioned before, I think that's why it's ended up being so different from what Radcliffe intended -- because the changes in the initial conditions led to unanticipated changes in the simulated outcomes. The only way to force a desired outcome in a simulation is to keep changing the initial parameters until you tune in the results you want -- but the more complex the simulation, the more chaotic the results and the harder it is to select parameters that give you what you want. So, yes, it is analogous to an alternate timeline in that it simulates how history would have unfolded if certain things had happened differently in the past. Effect does follow from cause in a logical way, because that's the whole point of a simulation, to see what effects a given set of conditions would produce. And because it's a detailed simulation that's effectively indistinguishable from reality, that's exactly as complex as the real world, that means it isn't necessarily more straightforward.
^ I agree with that to a point, but the one example we were given of one of the changes that was made in the environment was that it was the mother and not the girl who was controlling people in Bahrain...that was changing the conditions of the event in a way that time travel couldn't account for.
And the Framework has a specific purpose: To make life less painful. At least for this set of characters.
Yeah there's bound to be some malleability to the logic as much of the changes are going to depend more on the subject perception of reality and how they "wish" certain events had gone instead, no matter how impossible rather that what's objectively true. Case in point: the girl in Bahrain. There's no way that could have turned out as May wished without fundamentally altering the variables. I'm just guessing, but I suspect some of the more bizarre twists like May working for Hydra in place of SHIELD, Coulson being a bigot and Ward being Daisy's squeeze are more the result of these "wishes" interacting with one-another and the system trying to compensate for the contradictions than anything specific to those individuals. It's pretty much a classic "be careful what you wish for" scenario.
But that's no different from an alternate-history story like "What if Hitler had won WWII?" or "What if Africa had colonized the Americas before Europe did?" The point isn't whether the granular details of the change are things that actually could've happened; the point is to explore what the plausible aftereffects would have been if a certain change had happened. And of course, many alternate universes in fiction are even more implausible in their setups, like the Mirror Universe in Star Trek. But they're still treated as real environments whose events have real impact on the characters. What I'm saying is that, since the Framework has been carefully defined for us as a completely accurate and lifelike simulation of the entire Earth, that suggests that the writers' intent is to have it behave like a parallel reality rather than just a VR game. The situations the characters encounter will represent what would have happened in reality if certain details had been different. Not only is this in keeping with the nature of a simulation, but it's more dramatically meaningful, because it means the characters' alternate lives will be paths they potentially could have taken if things had been just a little different, rather than being just arbitrary changes that have nothing to do with who they are as people.