u/Altruistic_Yak_1514

Not titling this as a theory (I’ll tag it like that cause it doesn’t fit anywhere else) because I don’t have like concrete lore reasons as to why it takes place before, I’m more so giving an opinion saying that it would make more sense to have One Last Kill be set, or even be retconned to have been set, before Frank’s appearance in Daredevil: Born Again Season 1.

I think you could honestly leave the special totally unchanged and just rearrange it’s placement in a watch order and it would honestly flow better. The way Frank just doesn’t even think about the AVTF makes more sense if they just don’t exist yet, he isn’t the sort of character to leave that behind and go into hiding because he got arrested. We don’t know what happened to his base in the Heights that was seen in DD, but we do know that his residence was burned down in One Last Kill, so it makes sense if he just went looking for a new hideout and moved across town from Little Italy to the Heights. He has his whole shaggy not taking care of himself look in this special and keeps it for when he is reunited with Matt Murdock, but shaves it off for his rescue, arrest, and it’s still shaved off for when he’s operating on the same case as Spider-Man in Brand New Day.

It just feels like it makes more sense and flows better as an overall narrative if he’s retired after the nine year gap we last saw from him in Punisher Season 2, then suffers an identity crisis and starts punishing again with the goal of protecting innocents now that his family murder connections are all gone (except for Ma Gunnici as the last one left) and then he has team up with Daredevil, his arrest, and team up with Spider-Man.

This would mean he is doing Punisher stuff to get revenge for his family in DD2 and Punisher 1, works with the FBI and gets to lay low before breaking his cover and returning to punishing in Punisher 2, spends nine years to kill everyone connected to the Castle Family murder and finished his plight as The Punisher, redefines what his role is and finds a reason to continue his life in One Last Kill, and then fights against Fisk’s empire in BA1 before his arrest, to be continued in BND.

If Agents of SHIELD was allowed to adapt and deal with mutants rather than have to go through with the Inhumans, who do you think they would have chosen as a mutant-hero character on the team over Daisy being the Inhuman rep?

I’m thinking they’d probably pick a more obscure character so they don’t have to worry about characters the studio wanted to save for a later adaptation. Then again, if it would be a massive draw to the show to have Laura Kinney be SHIELD’s own Wolverine.

Polaris could be really cool bc she’s related to Magneto so that could be a solid tie to the films

((References from Agents of SHIELD Season 4, Cloak & Dagger, and Doctor Strange))

Ghost Rider is such a fantastic arc for Agents of SHIELD Season 4, and is an amazing character for the show to anchor itself around for a bit, and using Robbie Reyes as the show’s Spirit of Vengeance rather than Johnny Blaze was a really smart move so that they wouldn’t contradict later films in case they were planning to adapt Johnny Blaze in the larger MCU in theaters.

Rewatching Season 4, there was one line of dialogue that really stuck out to me from Robbie. In the episode where Phil Coulson, Fitz, and Robbie are being pulled back into another dimension after the energy explosion that Robbie’s uncle set off with The Darkhold. Robbie specifically mentions that The Spirit of Vengeance has been where they are bring dragged to, and that he spent “a long time” there just clawing to escape. This line leads me to believe that this is where the Spirit came from originally, before it possessed whoever its first host was in the MCU.

In the comics, the Spirit of Vengeance is usually the spirit of a fallen angel, once a servant of Mephesto in Hell before escaping and becoming a “Sinner hunter” of sorts. For the most part, this seem to be the deal with Robbie’s Ghost Rider, at least the part of what he’s become and being a former agent of evil. However, I believe that there is one very crucial change that the MCU has made to The Spirit of Vengeance: I don’t think it came from Mephesto.

The dimension that Coulson, Fitz, and Robbie are being dragged into is represented by this all consuming darkness. One could say that is just a budget friendly way of showing them being sucked to one of the Hells in the MCU, but I actually think this slowly growing, all consuming shadows is actually more consistently shown throughout other Marvel Television products as a representation of The Dark Dimension. Cloak & Dagger is the primary use for this, with Agent Carter also using elements of The Dark Dimension, but it seems that much of the more raw and untamed area of the Dark Dimension, where energy can be siphoned for supernatural use, is this pure growing shadow location, where as Dormammu’s domain in the heart of The Dark Dimension, as shown in Doctor Strange, is a much clearer ground of dark energy that has consumed all the once planets housed in this dimension.

Robbie Reyes describing this darkness as somewhere where Ghost Rider came from leads me to believe that in the MCU, The Ghost Rider is not a demon from Hell who once worked with Mephesto, but rather, was born in the chaos of The Dark Dimension.

Expanding further, if this is true, and we still follow the comics’ ideas that Ghost Rider once worked for a greater being, then perhaps The Spirit of Vengeance in the MCU was created to serve the most powerful being in The Dark Dimension: Dormammu.

This explains his knowledge of the Mystic Arts, The Dark Dimension and Magic are tied very closely in the MCU, so when Ghost Rider uses raw, unfiltered magical ability to summon a Mystic Arts portal in the season finale without a sling ring or incantation (as in the portal is made using the same “sparking ring” design as Doctor Strange’s portals) it makes sense because he is a being composed of The Dark Dimension’s magical properties.

When watching Agents of SHIELD Season 6, I was excited to see Jenna’s journey to find Fitz again, and excited to revisit the trips Enoch and Fitz would go on now that the Season 5 time loop is closed, but then it occurred to me, there isn’t really a solid cause and effect as to why things went differently this time.

In the Destroyer of Worlds timeline, Fitz is cryogenically frozen on Earth in 2017, six months after the rest of SHIELD-616 is pulled out of the timeline in October 2016. He then waits for decades as Enoch is positioned to watch over him and protect his cryopod. This goes off without a hitch, and Fitz is brought to the future of 2093 to help close the time loop. SHIELD-616 succeeds, and the time loop is closed, the version of Fitz that made it to the future dies, but there is an earlier iteration of Fitz floating around in space, they just have to find him.

So, in Season 6, Fitz should theoretically just be frozen in his pod, but instead, his cargo ship is attacked and Fitz and Enoch are forced to go on the run. So what changed?

Well, minor inconvenience, the literal next day after SHIELD-616 defeats The Confederacy and Glenn Talbot and Fitz dies, The Battle of Wakanda occurs, and The Avengers fail to stop Thanos from wiping out half the population. In the Destroyer of Worlds Timeline, this didn’t happen as the Earth was destroyed amongst The Infinity War, in theory destroying Thanos and The Avengers as the planet collapsed in on itself.

So the only major change that comes with saving the timeline, on a galactic scale, is that half the population of the universe is destroyed.

In Season 6 we see that the universe is a very hostile and on edge place, people are desperate in the galaxy and resistant to SHIELD and Quake, or really anything, from Earth. I think the reason we see so much aggression and conflict in the galaxy in what is now the correct Earth-616 timeline, is because The Blip played out. With a massive decrease in population, there is lots of territory and a hunger to take resources within the galaxy, thus space pirates hunting down ships like we see in the opening of Season 6 when Fitz is attacked.

The reason Fitz escaped his cryopod coma is because of The Blip, that event playing out is the reason he was found and the reason Enoch got so close with SHIELD and Fitz. If anything, this Blip also allowed SHIELD to save the Earth from the Chronicoms, due to Enoch being closely aligned with Fitz and Simmons to the point that they could develop the Time-Zephyr. It’s all about cause and effect.