Cities large and small suffer when superheroes battle super-villains.
But Manitowoc, Wisconsin escaped more or less unscathed when “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D” faced off against a group of mutants on a football field there Tuesday night.
The “S.H.I.E.L.D” mythology is as convoluted as typing those damn periods and capital letters in the title of the show.
Clark Gregg plays a deceptively mild-mannered bureaucrat named Agent Coulson, head of an agency called the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, that battles man-made and otherworldly phenomena.
This week they were chasing a madman played by Kyle MacLachlan whose daughter Skye, played by Chloe Bennet, is a S.H.I.E.L.D agent. In order to kidnap her MacLachlan gathered a group of mutants, including one whose “vocal chords were exposed to experimental blasts that… left him with a voice that induces immediate catatonia with the slightest whisper”
“He wants to wage war on us,” Coulson wonders.
“But where?”
“We got a hit,” says agent Bobbi Morse, played by Adrianne Palicki.
“Let me guess,” Coulson says. “Wisconsin.”
“How did you know,” asks Morse.
It turns out that Coulson was born in Manitowoc and the villain “is trying to lure me home.”
Coulson said his father, who died when he was nine, coached football and taught history at the same high school where MacLachlan is staging – what he announces on the football field public address system – is this “historic matchup between the S.H.I.E.L.D. Eagles and us rivals and underdogs the…Slicing…Talons?”
Needless to say the good guys win, sorta.
And the scenes were not filmed in Wisconsin, the banner across Main Street with its reference to “The Fighting Outlaws” notwithstanding. According to a Reddit thread the scenes were shot at Occidental College in Los Angles, hence the big “O” on the football field.
Coulson was a mysterious suit wearing recurring character in the series of Marvel films who became a cult favorite before being killed in “The Avengers” and resurrected for “S.H.I.E.L.D,” which airs at 8 p.m. Tuesdays on ABC.
According to this fan page Coulson’s Marvel Comics mythology is that he was born in Chicago and grew up in Ohio.
But “S.H.I.E.L.D.” laid bare that lie and told the whole world:
Coulson is a cheesehead.
Tags: Agent Coulson, Clark Gregg, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Posted by