Yeah, this is the kind of discontinuity that I expected would happen eventually once the movie and TV divisions split up. That pretty much left the TV division in the same boat as those of us who write tie-in novels -- the continuity only flows one way, we aren't always in the loop about what the main guys are doing, and they're free to ignore or scuttle our plans at any time. In a case like that, all you can do is the best you can. They've managed to fake it up to now, but
Endgame's filmmakers took it in a direction that made things pretty much impossible for the TV division to cope with.
Maybe shouldn't have mentioned Thanos attacking New York/Earth near the end of Season 5 then should you, Jeph.
To be fair, AoS has always been the show that tied directly into the movies while the other MCU shows did their own things. You can't blame them for trying to be true to their groove. It's not their fault that movie studios today have become so insanely secretive and paranoid about spoilers that they won't even tell their own creative partners what they're doing. Hell, if anything, it's
our fault, the audience's, for getting so hypersensitive about spoilers that studios have come to think they need to guard their secrets as jealously as the CIA. (I mean, come on, people, the novelization of
The Empire Strikes Back spoiled who Luke's father was a month before the movie came out, and it didn't hurt the movie.)
Audiences complain when tie-ins (since that's essentially what the TV shows are) fail to maintain perfect consistency with their sources, but they don't appreciate all the factors that make it extremely difficult for the creators of one ongoing project to stay perfectly current and consistent with what the creators of another ongoing project are doing at the same time. It's been tried before and has always failed sooner or later -- the Dell
Babylon 5 novels, the
Star Wars Expanded Universe, etc. The only way to keep the tie-ins consistent with the original is if they're from the same creative team. So once the MCU TV shows ended up divided from the movies, this was bound to happen eventually.
Maybe we should just think of this as the
What If...? season of AoS. "What if... Thor Had Aimed for the Head?"