Jeffrey Bell on Marvel's Agents of SHIELD Tying into Thor: The Dark World and Audience Expectations on Revealing Secrets

An in-depth conversation with the SHIELD executive producer about the series.

by Eric Goldman

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

This week’s episode of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD is a notable one, as it’s the first to tie more directly into the events of a new Marvel movie. Tuesday’s episode, “The Well,” finds the team heading to England, in the aftermath of Thor: The Dark Worldand what happened in Greenwich in that film.

I spoke to one of SHIELD’s executive producers, Jeffrey Bell, about “The Well”, what’s in the pipeline and the overall approach to Agents of SHIELD. The veteran of genre series like The X-Files, Angel (where he first worked with Joss Whedon), Alias and Spartacus, Bell also spoke about finding the right balance between serialization and “mission” episodes, as audience members begin to want answers more quickly than ever.

IGN TV: How quickly does this episode pick up after Thor: The Dark World and how do the SHIELD characters get involved in the story?

Jeffrey Bell: The simplest way to put it, and I think the most accurate way to put it, is that we air after Thor, and so we now know from the Thor movie that there was this spaceship that came to London and there was a battle and some stuff got torn up, and then everything sort of disappeared. So one of the things SHIELD does, as they did in the first Thor - you know, a hammer appeared in the desert and so SHIELD showed up to go, “What is this hammer doing in the middle of the desert?” So our team shows up in the wake of what happened in Greenwich, and we’re cleaning up. We’re looking for other Asgardian or alien -- we don’t use the words “dark elves” or anything like that -- but we’re looking for other alien material, because as we’ve learned from other episodes, if a Chitauri or somebody leaves something laying around, it can lead to trouble. So we begin looking for Asgardian stuff, and then it leads to a larger conversation about Asgardians, and in the episode we explore more of the history of Asgardians on Earth. We find an item that may or may not be Asgardian. As we try and get hold of that, it ties into the history of Asgardians here on Earth.

Clark Gregg and Brett Dalton in this week's Marvel's Agents of SHIELD.

IGN: Coulson was obviously in Avengers, but he was also in the first Thor movie, so I would think he has his own perspective on Asgardians, having had a couple of encounters with them at this point?

Bell: He does, and he has a very strong opinion about this sort of thing lying around. It’s a staff, and he was actually stabbed through the heart by an Asgardian — I don’t think Loki’s staff itself was Asgardian, but it was an Asgardian that killed him or knocked him down. So yeah, he has a very strong opinion about this sort of thing being out in the world and needing to take care of that.

IGN: It looks like some dark events might happen with Agent Ward, based on the previews we’ve saw.

Bell: I would say that’s accurate. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I would say the fact that we’re looking for an item that may be Asgardian and the fact that Ward seems, I don’t know, not really happy might have something to do with one another. What’s interesting about this story to us is, one of our characters is deeply affected by the case of the week in a profound way, and it brings up all sort of painful, personal stuff for him. It’s interesting for us to learn a little bit about him in that respect and also to see a character behave — someone who’s usually all about control — in a way that seems to be less than focused.

Agent Ward does his thing in Agents of SHIELD.

IGN: This is the first overt crossover to one of the Marvel movies. Did you have a lot of conversations about that, knowing that Thor was going to open a few weeks into your run, and how you might tackle that?

Bell: Oh sure, absolutely. Because we exist in the Marvel movie universe, we’re always talking to them about what characters we’re bringing in and what items we’re bringing in and the timing of that. So we thought the fact that Thor was coming out, it might be nice to have, if not an Asgardian crossover, a tie-in where you might learn a little something more about that than you would otherwise. The other thing that’s interesting for us is that the Marvel movie universe is deeply science-based, and our show is very science-based. Then you’ve got Asgardian stuff, which is, as they say in the movie, “magic is science that we just don’t understand yet.” But there are items and parts of the world that you can take license with on a metaphoric level to do things to your characters that makes it interesting. So we’ve done that.

IGN: Even before this episode was announced, the more we heard about Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and now certainly seeing the trailer to that film and how heavy the SHIELD tie-in is, it seems like that’s something your show will not be able to ignore. Would that be a safe assumption?

Bell: I would say that nothing happens in the Marvel movie universe that doesn’t affect us in one way or another. [Laughs]