The Inhumans are among us, at least according to Marvel's Agents of SHIELD midseason finale.
With Skye finally being revealed as a member of this mysterious race, we're looking at what we can expect from the Inhuman storyline on the show, which returns on March 3.
The first thing we can expect is that the series will take liberties with the Inhumans comic book origin story, as it already has. Let's take a look at where these Inhumans originally came from:
An Inhuman Origin
In the Marvel Comics, an advanced military-minded alien race called the Kree created the Inhumans by experimenting on prehistoric humans. They did this to create a mutant race that could take on their enemy, the Skrulls. However, a prophecy told the Kree that these experiments would eventually destroy the Kree Supreme Intelligence, so they stopped.
But this still left the Inhuman test subjects on Earth, who formed their own society and separated from humanity. They created their home, a city called Attilan, and experimented with Terrigen Mist, which is the source of their powers. However, the mist has side effects that cause deformities in certain cases. Because of this, they started controlling breeding to prevent further mutations.
In the comics, the Inhuman race remained a secret until they started working with the Fantastic Four and the Avengers. The Inhumans were created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in the pages of Fantastic Four #45 in 1965. The most recognizable Inhumans lineup consists of the Royal Family, including Black Bolt, Medusa, Crystal, Karnak, Gorgon and Lockjaw. Don't expect them to show up in SHIELD, but they'll likely be the stars of the future Inhumans film.
How The Inhumans Might Factor into SHIELD
In the 2013 comic book event Infinity, we learn that ancient groups of Inhumans mated with humans, which left some humans with dormant Inhuman genes on Earth. This is where Agents of SHIELD might pick up, especially considering that Skye only just recently discovered her Inhuman powers, rather than having been born using them.
Series creators recently confirmed that Skye is actually Daisy Johnson, also known as Quake in the Marvel Universe. In the comics, Daisy is not an Inhuman, but the series explains her superpowers this way, because, well, aliens.
"We've created a different origin for her, partially because we want to introduce this new other world that we get another glimpse of at the very end of the episode," says Agents of SHIELD executive producer Jed Whedon. "We merged those two ideas together also because there are such rabid fans out there that if we stick to original story points from the comics, they will smell story points from miles away. Those two factors led us to coming up with a different notion of how she got her powers."
It's likely that the TV series will take an approach similar to the X-Men with the Inhumans, though, with the alien link being a distant one and powers resulting from genetic mutations. This opens up the series to making more Marvel superheroes into Inhumans, explaining their powers in the context of the series. This may deviate from the comics, but because Marvel doesn't have the X-Men film or TV license, this might be a workable compromise to the company's lack of mutants.
We'll know more when Agents of SHIELD returns tomorrow night on ABC.
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[Photo Credit: ABC]
