Since I wrote a whole post venting about Agents of SHIELD season 3 yesterday, I was pondering about how I’d approach the storyline. After thinking it through, this is what I came up with (my mentality was that the season should still flow into S4 without too many big changes, so even though I’d like to get rid of plot points like Bobbi and Hunter leaving as well as Space Boyfriend, I can’t do that without significantly altering the timeline):
1) The 1st half has to emphasize that the team LOVES Rosalind Price. It can’t just be Coulson, everyone has to love her. Especially Fitz and Daisy. So maybe in this rewrite, Rosalind was actively helping Fitz and Simmons come to terms with Simmons’ current mental state. As for Daisy, tone down the hostility. Make it so that the ATCU distrusts Inhumans but Rosalind is trying to be more reasonable (sorta like a human ally version of Charles Xavier)
2) Constance Zimmer is a main cast member (you’ll see why, just let me cook here).
3) We change up the way that the Monolith is opened. Instead of Daisy needing to be the one to open the portal, it’s someone else on the Secret Warriors. Give the role to either Joey or Lincoln.
4) Instead of Grant Ward shooting Rosalind Price, Ward actually hits Coulson. He obviously doesn’t die but he’s in critical condition for the next two episodes. This sends both Daisy and Rosalind into a vengeful rage, especially Daisy since she now regrets not killing Ward when she had the chance in S2.
5) For Maveth, Ward and Fitz still go through the portal to find Will and the Hive. At the same time, Daisy and Rosalind team up to save Fitz and kill Ward. (Daisy gets the Tatooine line lol)
6) The fight with Will-Hive starts off like it did in the show. However, the main change is that Rosalind runs out to help Fitz while Daisy keeps her eye on Ward. Ward then blindsides Daisy and grabs her gun. During the struggle, Ward fires off a stray round and kills Rosalind Price. Fitz takes out Will-Hive and then breaks down when he realizes what just happened.
7) After Rosalind’s death, all Daisy can see is red. Fitz is urging her to just let Ward rot on Maveth but Daisy is so blinded by rage right now that she just has to kill Ward. We get a montage of everything that Ward has done to her (the HYDRA stuff, the emotional manipulation when he was imprisoned, Daisy shooting Ward but letting him live, Ward nearly killing Coulson, Ward successfully killing Rosalind). Then, with her quake powers, she blasts Grant Ward’s chest until she hears the ribcage snap. After Ward dies, Daisy and Fitz share a look. Fitz understands while Daisy is shaken up since that was the most sadistic she’s ever been and she doesn’t like the feeling.
8) Daisy and Fitz carry Rosalind Price’s corpse back through the portal.
9) Maveth post-credits: It’s revealed that while Fitz had his back turned to Rosalind’s corpse and Daisy was focused on killing Ward, Hive entered Rosalind. So Fitz and Daisy unintentionally brought Hive back with them! The post-credits scene shows Phil Coulson going to the morgue and being confused that Rosalind’s corpse is missing. We then cut to Gideon Malick, who encounters Rosalind-Hive standing in the road.
(this is why Constance Zimmer is a main cast member this season. She was Rosalind in the first half and Hive in the second half)
10) Take out the Fallen Agent future vision stuff. We don’t need to hype up Lincoln’s death since no one is going to be shocked that he’s the one who dies. In fact, it’d be more shocking if the audience didn’t know someone was going to die in the finale.
11) The Hive stuff plays out as it did in the show, but now the team is supremely conflicted. Because even though this is the Hive, they struggle with separating the creature from Rosalind Price. The woman who wanted to treat Inhumans with kindness, who helped Simmons through this traumatic period in her life, and Coulson’s lover. In the end, Coulson and the team accepts that Rosalind is gone and that they need to take Hive down before he destroys all of Earth.
12) This is more of an aside: Now that Daisy is the one who killed Ward, her relationship with Robbie Reyes will be a bit more juicy this time around. Because Daisy knows what it’s like being consumed by sheer rage and a thirst for vengeance.
13) Okay, possible alternative to the Space Boyfriend storyline: This time around, Jemma Simmons truly is alone. While exploring the planet, she encounters this ancient computer that has an archive of what happened (basically, Hive’s destruction of the entire planet). When Jemma activates the computer, the computer uploads the entire archive into her head, which messes her up severely.
So Simmons gets her own version of Fitz’s hallucination arc. Instead of hypoxia being the cause, it’s her brain being fried by alien tech. She starts hallucinating Fitz (so Iain now shows up in 4722 Hours as a hallucination), her family, and anyone else who was close to her.
The reason why Simmons is now so adamant to return to Maveth is that she becomes obsessed with trying to figure out why the planet was destroyed. She feels that if she can’t solve the mystery, she’ll never go back to normal (that’s how bad the machine fucked her head up). It’s kinda like when the Flash team found Barry Allen losing his mind while he was trapped in the Speed Force.
But what about Will Daniels? In this version, he’s actually on Fitz’s side of the story. Instead of Fitz working alone in trying to reopen the Monolith, he’s being assisted by a friend of his from the Academy. Will Daniels is now this ex-SHIELD scientist-turned-NASA scientist who was friends with both Fitz and Simmons. In the lead-up to Maveth, Fitz, Simmons and Will are all captured by HYDRA. Fitz and Will are then forced to go to Maveth along with Ward.
While on the desert planet, Fitz gets separated from Will Daniels. When they encounter each other again, nothing seems wrong. That is until, Fitz realizes that “Will” has a fatal injury (like there’s a hole going through his chest). While Fitz and Will were separated, Will encountered the Hive and was killed off-screen. Hive then quickly switched bodies in order to trick Fitz into escorting him off the planet.
