Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD season 6 may have a subtle connection to Spider-Man: Far From Home. Launched in 2013, Agents of SHIELD is Marvel Television’s flagship series, and it’s long had a reputation for being the official tie-in TV show. Over the last few years, Marvel Studios and Marvel Television have become a little more distant, and as a result Agents of SHIELD has shifted to thematic tie-ins rather than explicit ones.

Season 6 is something of an odd one, in that it’s difficult to work out how it connects to the main MCU chronology at all. The end of season 5 was concurrent with Avengers: Infinity War, which means the SHIELD team should currently be operating in a post-Thanos world where half the life in the universe has disappeared. Unfortunately, Marvel Television didn’t know enough about the movies’ plans for the post-snap MCU, and so they basically had to ignore the biggest event in the franchise’s history. Marvel TV boss Jeph Loeb has insisted that there is a solution, but in interviews has stressed that this isn’t a priority. “Whether or not you can figure out [how the timeline works],” he observed, “we’ll let ’timelords’ figure out.” But, just because there aren’t explicit nods to the current MCU movies, it doesn’t mean there won’t be thematic links.

It’s gradually becoming clear that there may be a subtle connection between Agents of SHIELD and Spider-Man: Far From Home, which releases next week. As established in a previous episode, “The Other Thing,” the aliens known as the Shrike - or at least their mysterious creator, whom Sarge refers to as a god - appear to have been on Earth before. Dr Benson linked them to the Incan term “Pachakutiq,” which he translated as “the Death of Everything.” This Incan connection is clearly important, given that Benson has headed off to Mexico to check it out.

And Mexico, curiously enough, also appears to be an important location in Spider-Man: Far From Home. The Avengers: Endgame re-release included the opening footage from the upcoming Spider-Man movie, and it confirmed that two Elementals manifest in the remote Mexican town of Ixtenco. This is one of the poorest and least populated municipalities in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala, but it’s actually quite important in Mexican history. It’s generally believed that Ixtenco was first settled back in the Classic period, centuries before the Inca established their rule in that area.

Both Spider-Man: Far From Home and Agents of SHIELD season 6 are dealing with monstrous, legendary beings who are somehow connected to the area around Mexico, and who seem to be able to move between worlds and even dimensions. In the case of Agents of SHIELD, in the latest episode Sarge repeated his claim that the Shrike’s creator is a god, and added that he’s seen gods before, suggesting the Shrike’s creator is only one of a race of powerful beings. In Spider-Man: Far From Home, the Elementals are lifted straight from classical mythology, which Mysterio claims appear to be rooted in scientific reality after all. Given all these similarities, it’s interesting to speculate whether the Elementals are traveling between the dimensions using ley lines, just like the Shrike in Agents of SHIELD.

At this stage, it’s difficult to determine the exact nature of the connection between Agents of SHIELD and Spider-Man: Far From Home. But at the least, there seems to be a thematic link once again; and it may be a lot more explicit than that, once Dr. Benson returns from his trip to Mexico.

More: Agents of SHIELD Just Resolved Paradox Fitz Better Than Season 5

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