Today I’d like to consider what life might have been like in the Framework presented in Agents of SHIELD. Generally, Framework software was designed to create an immersive, realistic world for the viewer, but specifically, the Framework refers to the dystopian world that the characters found themselves stuck in in the second half of season four. This world’s design was predicated on the idea of removing a great regret from each user’s real life — May (Ming-Na Wen) regretted killing Katya Belyakov (Ava Acres) in Bahrain, Mack (Henry Simmons) regretted the death of his daughter Hope (Jordan Rivera), Coulson (Clark Gregg) regretted not living a normal life, Mace (Jason O’Mara) regretted lying about having Inhuman abilities, Radcliffe (John Hannah) regretted splitting up with Agnes (Mallory Jansen), Fitz (Iain de Caestecker) regretted his father (David O’Hara) abandoning him in childhood — and from there, it apparently spun out into a horrific “if this, then this.”
(It’s unclear how much the regrets of other characters who weren’t initially programmed into the Framework, i.e. Daisy [Chloe Bennet] and Jemma [Elizabeth Henstridge], were involved in the design of the world, because their brains weren’t scanned like the others’ were. It could be argued that Fitz, Radcliffe, and AIDA [also Mallory Jansen] would perceive that Daisy’s greatest regret was Ward [Brett Dalton] being evil and even that they might think Jemma’s greatest regret was going in the field, and their regrets might also factor into Trip [BJ Britt] being alive in the Framework, but it’s also possible that their initial roles in the world were just the product of everyone else’s regrets and the subsequent design.)
The actual Framework was basically the textbook definition of a monkey’s paw, though. (Ha-ha. It’s funny because Fitz likes monkeys.) If May didn’t kill Katya and brought her back to the US, Katya was able to wreak more havoc in a very public setting and therefore inspire institutionalized fear of Inhumans and their powers. If Mack’s daughter didn’t die… well, they were pretty happy aside from the living-in-a-dystopia thing. If Coulson lived a normal life, he was basically just a nerdy history teacher and conspiracy theorist. If Mace had Inhuman abilities, he was able to be a proper hero as the director of SHIELD, but it also led to his eventual death. If Radcliffe had Agnes, she’d be a weakness of his to be exploited. And if Fitz’s dad had stuck around, apparently that means that Fitz would grow up to be an evil torturing doctor and one of the heads of Hydra.
Some of that is also undoubtedly because AIDA aka Ophelia needed Fitz to be at her side to exact her ultimate plans, but that’s still a lot to unpack. I’m pretty sure it was meant to be a message about how like, people can wind up in drastically different circumstances if only one thing in their past changes, which — whatever. I will point out, rather smugly, that when Hydra rose to power in the Framework, Jemma — then working at the SHIELD Academy like she should have been in the finale — was literally so anti-Hydra she’d rather die than join them, and then she, well, did. This is not a drag on characters like May or Daisy who found themselves working for Hydra in the Framework despite misgivings, but it is a drag on Fitz, whose daddy issues literally made him an evil eugenicist.
The point of this isn’t to analyze the moral implications of each character’s role in the fictional-simulation-within-a-fictional-show, though. I want to talk about the implications of the Framework as an actual universe.
Full story here.