With the latest episode of the ABC series Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., entitled “The Laws of Inferno Dynamics,” the team had to come together to rescue the Ghost Rider and destroy a weapon that Eli created to vaporize the city. And Aida’s actions at Radcliffe’s lab are sure to have serious consequences for everyone at S.H.I.E.L.D.

During a recent press junket held on the top-secret set, Collider (along with a handful of other outlets) spoke to executive producers Jed Whedon and Jeffrey Bell about closing the Ghost Rider chapter (at least, for now) and delving deeper into the Life Model Decoy storyline. In the interview, they talked about what they’re looking to explore with the LMDs, how these LMDs will differ from what we’ve seen before, why now was the right time to interview Ghost Rider and whether we might see Robbie Reyes again, and what’s next for Daisy and the Inhumans. Be aware that there are some spoilers discussed.

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Image via ABC/Marvel

Question: What kind of shift can we expect to see from the transition between the Ghost Rider storyline and the LMD storyline?

JED WHEDON: We’re breaking it into smaller chunks, so that we try to make it feel different. We came out with Ghost Rider, which had a lot of fire and cars.

JEFFREY BELL: We were thrilled. We have to deal with the movie people and the television people, and we all negotiate for what we get. Sometimes they go, “You can have Left-Handed Man.” This last year, we said, “We’d really like to do something special.” And they said, “How about Ghost Rider?” And we were like, “He’s cool, but does he fit in our world?” And we felt that he does. Twenty two episodes is a long time to hold a big bad or a single plot line, especially for an audience, because you just build up so much weight in so many things. So, the last couple of seasons, we’ve had a nice break between the two [halves of the season], which allows us to introduce a big bad. And then, something happens and we rise somebody new, and in the second half, we pay that off. That’s helped us tell stories a lot. Now, there’s three of those. 

WHEDON: I feel like, this year, we’re getting to play with a lot of the toys that we were hoping to play with. And as we move into the second pod, there’s another one in play, which is something that we’ve been wanting to get to and now we’re finally able to get to. In terms of how it will feel and how big of a transition it will be, we want everything to feel like its own mini-world and to have its own flavor. We do think you’ll come into the next section and immediately feel like, “Oh, this is a different kind of story.” So, we’re excited about that.

Are you revisiting the issues of trust from the HYDRA storylines with the LMDs?

WHEDON: Trust will definitely come into play.

BELL: Any time you do a spy show, secrets and trust are bread and butter, but I hope we’re doing it in a different way and we’re not really coming at it, specifically, from that issue so much as who you are, what you want, and what makes you who you are.

WHEDON: And there are issues of reality and identity. Trust is always an issue in a spy organization. It’s much worse when you don’t know if the person next to you is the person next to you. Obviously, we want to not just tell scare stories of things popping out of closets, but emotional stories. When you get into trust, that’s when things get emotional. 

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Image via ABC/Marvel

How are these LMDs going to differ from Ultron or Vision? What’s the key element with these LMDs and what significance do they bring to Marvel, as a whole?

WHEDON: We said, at the beginning of the season, that they were mimicking human behavior, and we’ve seen that Aida took some a leap and built a brain of her own. So, the real difference is that they represent people that we know. It’s’ not a big robot baddie, although there is some of that, obviously. But right now, we know that there is one among us, who is someone we know. How much they know and how much their agenda is mixed with their own emotions are the sorts of questions are what we’re going to dive into. But, the main difference is these are our people. That’s what makes it scarier.

BELL: They’re not omniscient. They don’t have access to all knowledge, all information, and all other machines, in the way that Ultron and, to a lesser extent, Vision did. We’re much more interested in the knowledge that that person has, and how this being deals with that.

WHEDON: They also won’t build 10,000 versions of themselves, mostly because we don’t have $200 million, but also because we’re telling emotional stories.

Is this the definitive end to Robbie Reyes’ story on the show?

WHEDON: I will say that he is trapped in another place, which usually means that he’s not dead.

BELL: Coulson says, “I’ve got a feeling that this isn’t the last we’ll see of him. That was true of the last Ghost Rider.” And Daisy is like, “What?!” 

WHEDON: There are multiple reasons that we are putting that down, for now. One is to tell the stories that come next, but there are also financial considerations.

BELL: Honestly, if we were doing 10, 12 or 13 episodes, you could do a whole Ghost Rider arc, but that’s a lot for 22, especially with everything else that we like and care about on the show. I think it would feel like one flavor over a long period of time. But, we’ve certainly left it open. What helped us this season was Doctor Strange coming out, where it opened doors to other kinds of storytelling within the Marvel Universe. Yes, there’s science, but less of it. There’s a lot of stuff in quantum physics that ties to Eastern religion and ties to a lot of the stuff that’s in Doctor Strange. We’ve tried to lean into that as well, which has allowed us to tell Robbie and Dark Dimension stories. As opposed to going to a hell world, you’re in a different dimension, and there’s science to back that up. We didn’t make it up. 

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Image via ABC/Marvel

WHEDON: One of the things that we’re doing with the Aida story is, we’ve seen how science was somehow tied into Robbie’s origin, or at least the origin of his villains, and now that dovetails into this other story.

BELL: It’s not an accident that his uncle worked in a lab that was dealing with quantum energy, and things like that. 

WHEDON: So now, as we go down this other story, we can go on a different journey, but we are still playing in the same world and these things could link up later, in some way and maybe in thrilling fashion.

BELL: We’ve seen the Darkhold, as a huge reason how these technological things happen. In the same way that, in Radcliffe allowing Aida to read the book to get them back, she builds these quantum things, it makes sense, then, that she can make other adjustments. It seems to us that that’s part of the same story. And it just doesn’t cost as much as it does to put a guy’s head on fire. 

With the advancement of a lot of CG technology, did you just finally have the financial ability to do Ghost Rider’s story, or was this just something that you guys had been wanting to do for some time?

WHEDON: It’s a mix of a lot of things. Truthfully, it was the right time, right place kind of a thing, where the property was being discussed and we were coming into a new season, wondering what we you’re going to do and knowing some of the places we were going to go. When it presented itself, we thought it could work. Now, we never would have done it, if we thought Mark Kolpack and our visual effects team couldn’t pull it off. That was never even a moment’s hesitation for us. We were positive they could do it. It was just a question of how much we could do it and whether or not it fit, story-wise. Once we felt like it did, it was a no-brainer.

As you guys move into the latter half of the season, traditionally you’ve had some dovetailing with the Marvel movie that comes out at the end of spring/early summer. Are you already planning for that kind of thing, or will this season be different, in that you won’t do more direct tie-ins that you’ve done in the past?

BELL: Some are easier than others because they happen on the same planet. Guardians is hard for us to tie into because it just doesn’t really happen here, or it’s in the past, or things like that. I do feel the Darkhold feels like it belongs in the library in Kathmandu. A lot of times, it’s based on much bigger things, like actor availability. We always try to do that. Everybody loves it. We love it. 

WHEDON: Yeah, but it very much depends on where our stories are going.

BELL: And nothing will ever do as much as that first season, when the name of your TV show changes from Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to Marvel’s Agents of HYDRA

On a similar note, you guys have been making winks to Agent Carter for awhile now. Are there any plans to go further that way, this season?

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Image via ABC/Marvel

WHEDON: There’s always plans, and there’s always possibilities. Now, this is our fourth season, so we’ve probably said that 10,000 times.

BELL: But, it’s true.

WHEDON: She is a part of the universe, and she’s a character we care about. I will say that we’re looking at a 38% chance there.

BELL: That’s pretty good! 

WHEDON: I can’t tell if that’s a lot or a little.

BELL: If you told me that there was a 38% chance of rain today, I’m saying, “Oh, I better take my umbrella.”

WHEDON: I should probably tell the writers that there’s a 38% chance.

The way the MCU handles magic is very based in science, and even the Darkhold has ties to science, in how it’s making these fantastic things happen. Does that mean that there is no such thing as magic in the MCU? Is there a scientific explanation for Ghost Rider and the flaming head, and everything?

WHEDON: I think that the Marvel rule is that magic is science that we don’t understand. But in Episode 407, when we’re trapped where the ghosts were in the quantum energy fields between dimensions, the Ghost Rider very clearly says, “That’s where I came from. I know where you’re being dragged down to and I want to go back.” One of the things that Doctor Strange allowed us to do is to have something that you would call a Hell Demon on our show because we now are opening holes between worlds and between universes. So, any time that there’s something that, on another show, would be a wave-of-the-wand magic thing, we can chalk it up to, “Oh, it’s from another dimension,” or “There’s another set of physics rules in that world.” It’s allowed us to put it all under the science umbrella. The word dimensions as covering a lot of ground.

BELL: It’s the same thing with the Thor movies. There are all these different worlds and there are different aliens. If some of these aliens showed up they might look like a Hell Demon, but it might be named Larry, in his world, and there might be a lot of other guys with flaming heads, walking around saying, “Good morning, Larry,” and it would be normal. We had that last year with Hive trapped on a world, and historically, he had been viewed as the Devil. We went through all the incarnations he had through history and said it was an Inhuman who had these abilities. 

When you took on Ghost Rider, were there any rules or restrictions for how you could use the character in the show?

BELL: We chose Robbie. Robbie was the one we wanted, and part of that was that it felt more like our show. We liked that it’s a kid from East L.A. We liked that he has a brother. We liked that his brother has special needs. We liked that it hadn’t been explored. However people feel about the Ghost Rider movies, there’s a preconception of that and we didn’t want to be comparing apples to apples, in that way. We think with Gabe [Luna], we found a really soulful character. The idea that Robbie isn’t down with what’s happening really grounded him, in a way. He wanted that atonement, and now there’s a weariness to it and a sadness to the character, as opposed to, “I’m kicking ass and I’m a vengeance guy!” Gabe really inhabited that and really grounded him. I think all the choices that Gabe made helped ground him, where the Nick Cage version is a very much larger-than-life version. So, it allowed us to distance ourselves, simply, so he was our own. 

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Image via ABC/Jennifer Clasen

WHEDON: In terms of Marvel, everybody there, and Jeph Loeb, especially, trusted us with it. Marvel cares a lot about their properties, but they were very trusting with us. It allowed us to explore what we wanted to do with the character. We weren’t hamstringed, in any way. I’ve got to hand it to them because it is a big property, and they just gave him to us and said, “Let’s see what it is.” It was a pretty easy process, and we have to thank them for that.

BELL: The thing that they asked was for us to be true to what it is. Though way he’s haunted by Eli in the comic is different than the way we did it, we still made Eli the bad guy. We took the same elements and, hopefully, freshened it up. The other thing that was a big trust was that we could actually pull it off. 

With Daisy back in the fold, what can you preview about her trajectory, as she struggles with being back on the team and not really fitting in?

WHEDON: She’s gone through an emotional journey, since the beginning of the season, realizing what she could become and seeing, in Robbie, someone who really doesn’t have anyone else.

BELL: I think the key to us telling the Ghost Rider story was realizing he and Daisy could be parallel. She goes off to be a vigilante with no ties, and innocent blood has been spilled. Then, you meet the extreme version of that and see the price you pay. That allowed her to come up against something that is a more extreme version of that, which allowed her to go, “I don’t want that, and I actually like these people.” She’s afraid of hurting people, which is part of being in a relationship. And Coulson, in particular, was very much like, “We miss you. Come back. We really care.”

WHEDON: And she’s been thrust into a new role. She’s now famous, which changes your dynamic. She’s going to have to just be a soldier for a little while and put some of those emotional issues on the back burner, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. They will probably rear their ugly head, in ways that she’s not ready for.

BELL: One of the things that we’re always trying to do is pair people in different combinations. She has an Inhuman Director. Suddenly, there is someone who’s like her. And we’ve had a lot of fun with Yo-Yo coming back into it. They have similar issues. We’re not playing a romance, the way we did with Lincoln last year. By creating new duos and trios, we can find new stories to tell. 

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Image via ABC/Marvel

Where does the show want to take its Inhuman storyline, going forward?

WHEDON: We think of Inhumans as just part of our world. Last year, we did a real significant Inhuman agenda story with Hive. Right now, they serve as an origin of powers for us, and it’s a metaphor for being different. We’re not focusing on Inhuman lore right now, but we were knee-deep in it for a while. For us, they represent the part of the other, in our society, that people are looking at and questioning. We like that aspect of it, for now, but there’s going to be a time when they come right back to the forefront.

BELL: It’s such a part of our world now, both in our story world and in the real world. We’ve got Nadir, who hates Inhumans, and there are the Watchdogs, who hate Inhumans. They make nice antagonists on small levels, as well as big levels. It is a texture and a part of our world, whether we’re building stories straight at it or not.

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. airs on Tuesday nights on ABC.

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