Phil Coulson is dead, but his doppelganger Sarge is very much alive. In the new trailer for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 6, actor Clark Gregg's new character takes the Marvel Cinematic Universe by storm -- and his mission is even worse than Thanos'. Sarge is on the hunt and he's willing to destroy the entire planet in order to get his target.
The trailer's action starts when Agent Davis announces "a large, unidentified object" has entered Earth's atmosphere. From there, the agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. leap into action, guns blazing. However, after a truck comes barrelling out of a whirling vortex, the team is in for the shock of their lives when Coulson's doppelganger emerges and announces "the death of everything." "We're gonna burn it all down," he tells his crew, who aim their laser guns at the sky.
From there, new characters Doctor Marcus Benson and Izel, a mercenary from another galaxy, provide a little more insight on Sarge. "Wherever these people came from, I think they destroyed it," Benson tells Mack, while Izel confirms this to be the case: "I know what he really is, and he won't stop until he eliminates the whole planet." Indeed, a video appears to show Sarge telling his crew to evacuate a planet that is in the process of being torn to shreds.
While Izel offers no further details about "what Sarge is" in the trailer, we did get another clue. In an ominous voice-over, Sarge says, "I've been hunting your kind my entire life. There's no use hiding. We'll always find you."
But who, exactly, is he talking to? The trailer appears to frame Sarge's line around Deke, Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons' time-displaced grandson from a future timeline that got erased. In his first appearance, Deke asks who will protect him; then, as he skulks his way through an office, Sarge appears to give chase while speaking the above line.
This, of course, begs a new question: what do these people want with Deke? If anything, it likely has to do with his mere existence. After all, he literally should not exist. In Season 5, he accidentally traveled back in time to 2018 from the year 2091. Then, Coulson and his team successfully prevented the destruction of Earth by stopping Graviton, thus preventing Deke's timeline from coming to pass. However, Deke did not blip out of existence, as was predicted. This makes him something of a time aberration, an impossible person.
Perhaps, then, Sarge is charged with eradicating "time aberrations" like Deke. He could want to restore the "proper" timeline by destroying Earth, like it "should have been" in Season 5. Like Tony Stark said in Avengers: Endgame, "When you mess with time, it tends to mess back," so Sarge and his crew could be a result of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s tampering with the timeline.
Of course, just because the trailer makes it look that way doesn't mean it's true. Marvel TV could easily take a page out of Marvel Studio's book and release somewhat-misleading marketing material to keep fans on their toes. If that's the case, Sarge might not want anything to do with Deke at all. For instance, it's possible Sarge is hunting Inhumans instead, seeing as the Kree-human hybrid race has "infected" the planet since Season 2. However, Deke appears to be the most likely target and the reason behind Sarge's destructive plans.
Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. will return to ABC on Friday, May 10 at 8 pm ET/PT with 13 new episodes. The series stars Ming-Na Wen, Chloe Bennet, Henry Simmons, Iain De Caestecker, Natalia Cordova-Buckley, Elizabeth Henstridge and Clark Gregg.