That is annoying, but like Christopher said, I guess it was kind of inevitable. Up until now they've done a pretty good job of making things more or less fit, but I don't see how they can this time. Thanos was invading in last season's finale, and I don't really see how you could possibly fit an entire season worth of story between him arriving on Earth and the Decimation. I wonder if they didn't tell the AoS team about the 5 year jump or if they did but the AoS team decided not to incorporate it? If the whole team got Snapped, then they could have just picked things right back up after they were returned and then gone on from there. They would have needed some time to adjust, but I could see that just being an episode or even just part of an episode before they got into the main story.
I can't help but agree. "The End" was such a perfect ending that it will be difficult for them to top themselves for the actual end in season 7 in any event. That's why I came up with the theory that I mentioned either up thread here or in the MCU speculation thread that, in my head-canon, breaking the time loop at the end of season 5 resulted in the creation of a new alternate reality where seasons 6 and 7 take place.
That sounds like a pretty good way to approach AOS from now. Marvel.com has started a series of "refresher" articles for each previous season of AoS. Season 1 Season 2
Yeah, that makes sense. They probably won't say or do anything to contradict such a mindset so it'll probably not be too hard to openly interpret the next two seasons in such a manner.
Well, cinematically speaking, outside of Spider-Man Far From Home there isn't going to be much forward motion on the MCU timeline for a couple years. The Cinematic entries in 2020 will be the prequel Black Widow movie and The Eternals, which is said to be set mostly in the distant past, although I imagine there might be some modern-day sequences. That said, I don't know what Disney+ will be bringing to the table in terms of forward motion to the timeline. Given that, Agents of SHIELD season 7 may well have already aired by the time the story begins to move forward on a cinematic level again.
Regarding the Disney+ shows: Feige did mention last month that the shows would be pushing things forward in the MCU and would have direct impact for the films, or something along those lines. I think the bigger question is when we'll be seeing each of the shows.
I'm kind of surprised they don't appear to be using any of them as a launch series alongside The Mandalorian.
From the above-linked article: Which is a bit surprising, because I thought the whole reason they held back the new season so long was to wait until after Endgame. But maybe there was a possibility that ABC could change their mind about that. But if that reality comes into existence pre-Snap, then it must be one of the realities Dr. Strange scanned, and that means it can't be a reality where Thanos lost. Or, no, wait, I'm wrong, it can. Strange scanned the futures that could proceed from that moment, in order to decide what option they could take going forward, and he found only one path where they won. If the AoS timeline diverged before that moment, then it was already a separate track and irrelevant to Strange's search. And per the temporal theory in Endgame, a timeline can't be overwritten, so any alternate version of events can only be a parallel timeline. So the timeline they're in now is alternate to the one where the Earth was destroyed. Except -- the Avengers timeline has to be alternate from the destroyed-Earth timeline too, since Earth isn't destroyed in Infinity War/Endgame. So that requires two non-Earth-destruction timelines, but the SHIELD team only made one time travel that succeeded in preventing the Earth's destruction. Therefore, it doesn't logically add up that the SHIELD team's time travel split them from the Avengers timeline. There would've had to be another time travel event that achieved that. What with the movie's shooting and production schedule, they probably haven't had enough time yet to complete any of them.
It seems like the big timeline snag is the alien council's information that Thanos was attacking Earth at the moment they were speaking to Talbot ("Weird stuff in New York," implicitly but not definitively linked to aliens, is pretty easy to massage away. When isn't stuff as weird as space-aliens happening in New York, never mind in the MCU?). I can think of a couple ways to stretch that out. Papa Kree could've been lying or exaggerating, implying Thanos was literally wreaking havoc on Earth at that moment when he really meant that the planet was high on his priority list, or he was fighting in a place that, from a cosmic perspective, was within Earth's sphere of influence, but which us planet-bound plebs would not consider to be Earth itself. The other idea I have is there was some other chronicled-or-not Thanos-backed attack on Earth going on, as in the original Avengers film. I don't remember what the last definitive timeline-marker was placing AOS relative to a movie (was it Civil War?), but I remember thinking last year that if they hadn't locked into the last few episodes of the season taking place concurrently with IW, they could've been set considerably behind IW. Still, it would've been nice if their mouths hadn't written checks their butts couldn't cash. Considering their movie tie-ins had gotten more and more thematic rather than plot-driven over the years (one of the best that comes to mind was echoing Dr. Strange's visual effects with the Darkhold stuff, though I remember people being very frustrated that the Thor 2 tie-in had taken that approach back in the beginning), I'm surprised that they were as bold as they were walking right up to IW without having any idea of what they'd be able to do to pay it off.
As mentioned above, they thought this was the series finale so that it wouldn't be an issue. And given their history of being The Show That Tied Into the Movies, I can't blame them for doing what they could to tie into the biggest MCU movie ever (until the sequel). I really don't think it's fair to blame them for not being precognitive. For me, by the way, the problem with the Thor: The Dark World tie-in wasn't that it was thematic per se -- it's that it was too coincidental. While they were cleaning up the mess from the Asgardian battle, they just happened to get involved with a problem caused by a completely unrelated Asgardian artifact that randomly happened to be found at the same time. If they'd established more of a cause and effect, had the artifact be left over from the battle or activated by it or something, then that would've worked better.
Honestly, as much as this sucks it's amazing something like this didn't happen years ago. During his post-Age of Ultron exit interviews back in 2015 Joss Whedon kept reiterating that "as far as the movies are concerned, Agent Coulson is dead." ...in pretty much every freaking interview. And then when Whedon left Marvel Studios for more CGI-mustachioed pastures, the SHIELD/movie crossovers became far more thematic in nature. Presumably because Tancharoen & Whedon and Bell's main contact in the movie division was no longer there to give them accurate intel. I agree with @Christopher that another timeline created by the events of Season 5's finale doesn't make complete sense, but I'm willing to squint to get it there in my head. As long as Seasons 6 & 7 are able to pull a Justice League Unlimited and beat the post-script season curse I'll be happy as hell. It isn't the show's fault that it got Perlmuttered despite their best efforts.
I can dig this. It's disappointing that we won't get an in-depth exploration of the Snap on the property best equipped to do just that, but it's also understandable. Ah, well.
Although that was something that always made sense. Productions in different media have different audiences. A lot of moviegoers don't watch the shows. So even without the corporate split, it made sense to design a storyline that could work on two levels at once: as just the movies by themselves, and as the movies and TV shows together. That's what Whedon meant -- that the movies' narrative had to be able to work as if Coulson's story had ended conclusively in The Avengers, for the benefit of that portion of the audience that only knew the movies.
Something interesting... The new, Endgame-spoiler-laden Spider-Man: Far from Home trailer has revealed... Spoiler: Listen, bud ...that the Snap opened up the multiverse. So maybe there's already a built-in MCU explanation for the discontinuity in AoS. (Also maybe setting up an Into the Spider-Verse tie-in?)
Indeed. I expect... Spoiler: Far From Home trailer that reveals a lot about the film...maybe The Elementals are from an alternative universe but Mysterio isn't, pretending he is for whatever reason. Maybe as far as Fury as actually The Chameleon in disguise to cover for the fact that Fury isn't able to tell that Mysterio isn't from an alternative universe.
The new information revealed in the Far From Home trailer does give us an easy way to explain AoS not tying into Endgame.