Will Director Jeffrey Mace On ‘Agents Of SHIELD’ Die At The End Of This Season? [Spoilers]
As reported by Entertainment Weekly, we found out last week that Director Jeffery Mace on Agents of SHIELD – who had been pretending to be a super strong Inhuman – was actually a fraud. But given that Agents of SHIELD has made a habit over the years of killing off mid-level characters that you were mildly invested in – in a sometimes heroic way – it might make sense to ask ourselves if this is what’s going to happen to Director Mace by the end of the season.
In the comic books, this character was actually known as the Patriot and occasionally took over for Captain America whenever he was either unavailable or – as frequently happens in comics – dead. However, they changed him quite a bit for the TV series.
Last season, we saw the electrically powered character known as Lincoln – who of course had a romance going on with Quake/Daisy/Skye – sacrifice himself to take out the alien infested Ward by taking himself and Ward into space for a huge alien ending explosion.
In the same way in The Avengers movie, we saw the character of Phil Coulson – future director of SHIELD – die in his efforts to take out the evil Asgardian, Loki. Of course, in comic books no one ever dies permanently, so the writers were able to resurrect fan favorite Coulson for the TV series.
So given this vein of heroic self-sacrifice and season-ending deaths, is it possible that Director Mace – a.k.a. the Patriot – will redeem himself in the eyes of viewers and the Agents of SHIELD team by dying in the final episode of the season in a way that saves someone – or even everyone?
He no longer has his super soldier serum variant provided to him by General Talbot – although that’s not to say he couldn’t get another supply of it. But it seems unlikely at this point that the character would go back to being a fake Inhuman in that way.
A fake Agent May has fooled @AgentsofSHIELD but why does Mace need his briefcase? @whedonopolis has more: https://t.co/DWu7cH2EEr
— David Mello–spoutible.com/impalergeneral (@impalergeneral) January 19, 2017
More than likely, they will eliminate the entire question by having Simmons “discover” that the formula was harming him in some way or that it was gradually wearing off anyway. Doing this would make him sacrifice – assuming there is one – even more meaningful, since he would just be an ordinary human being throwing himself into the line of fire – so to speak – for his compatriots at SHIELD.
Alternatively, with the revelation in last week’s episode that the photo showing him heroically protecting a woman with his body was all just a mistake and that he had simply tripped and didn’t even know she was there, it would be poetic and interesting story wise if they had a situation in which he actually protected a civilian in that way – dying in the process.
On the other hand, Colson did say that he wanted Mace to stay on as a kind of public figurehead for the agency, so they might decide they want to keep him beyond the end of this season. Assuming of course that the show actually gets renewed for another season.
If they go that route, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Mace gradually moved from his public figurehead role to a more active one as a real agent. After all, Fitz and Simmons were themselves little more than science geeks at the beginning of the series. But since then, both have demonstrated their ability to take out the bad guys when necessary.
So there is no reason to think that Agent May won’t necessarily find herself training Mace to fight in real life without the help of his superhero concoction. Well, as long as Director Jeffrey Mace doesn’t get killed off in the season ender.
[Featured Image by ABC]
