** SPOILER WARNING ** - This is going to contain mildly spoilery material related to events in Avengers Endgame and the Season 6 premiere of ABC's Agents of SHIELD. So if you've not seen Endgame and/or you don't want to know too much about the AoS premiere, you might want to hold off on reading what follows.OK... I'm waiting. Are they gone yet?
Good--let's get started.
So you may or may not have read that AoS Season 6 is set a year after the events of its Season 5 finale--and that it does not reference the Decimation Event (i.e., the Snappening) even though it falls within the intervening years between Infinity War and Endgame. Jeph Loeb, head of Marvel Television, was recently quoted in TheWrap as saying that the show would likely "ignore" the event and that it was "the safest way to do things" given the uncertain timing of the show's premiere in relationship to the movie release. He is later quoted as saying that "we don't ever want to do anything in our show that contradicts what's happening in the movies" as the movies are "the big dog."
This could, of course, all be a misdirect--misinformation intended to generate additional interest in the AoS premiere on 5/10. It could also be that they'll somehow find a way to do as Loeb suggested--and "tell our [stories] pre-snap"--though that's hard to reconcile given how closely the final episodes of Season 5 were tied to the events playing out in Infinity War. But there's another very interesting possibility that the events of Endgame open up: they're not in the mainstream MCU after all.
To some, this option is even less appealing than asking for a continuity mulligan, as it undermines the underlying logic of both Infinity War and Endgame. It would seem to suggest that Doctor Strange was wrong and there were other ways for Thanos to be defeated, not just one out of 14+ million. So for the AoS timeline to splinter off from the mainstream MCU in the waning hours of Season 5 means that the good doctor was mistaken, that Thanos was somehow beaten in the Battle of Wakanda--rendering the Endgame timeline moot.
But I think that's the key to the problem--who's to say that AoS switches timelines at the end of Season 5? I'd argue that, on the contrary, they departed from the MCU continuity at the beginning of Season 5.
That season is very much tied to time travel--with the beginning of the season taking place in a dystopia where events in their near future will destroy the world. Note that the storyline is also pretty self-contained, with most of the events hinging on the assumption that it is the actions of the SHIELD team that will either facilitate or prevent the future they've witnessed. If we take that to be true, then we're already outside of MCU continuity. Because it leaves us comparing two outcomes that couldn't have fit into the Marvel movie timeline--one where Graviton destroys the Earth and one where he's prevented from doing so. And if we assume that those timelines are the same except for that one, to-us-oh-so-critical difference, then the team's foray into the future showed no signs that we were ever in a snap-impacted timeline.
Having AoS depart the main MCU timeline months earlier allows both things to be true--for Thanos to have been defeated under circumstances different from those in Endgame without making Doctor Strange wrong. Because Strange would have been talking about outcomes available to the Avengers at that moment leading up to the battle on Titan. He wouldn't be looking at timelines that had branched off much earlier--opportunities that had already been lost to them as events unfolded.
You can also make the argument that we can never really know if AoS was ever based on the exact same events as the rest of the MCU. By virtue of the TV universe keeping some of its connections vague, we know that they reached similar milestones--the Battle of NY, the fall of SHIELD, the Sekovia Accords, and then finally the Battle of Wakanda. But we don't know details about casualties, the exact roster of the Avengers at any given moment, etc. We can therefore only know for sure that things played out similarly--not the same. So any number of divergences not preventing the eventuality of Thanos's assault on Wakanda could have occurred given that lack of specificity.
While I'm sure you could binge watch the last 5 AoS seasons to compile a list of details that confirm the timing of specific MCU events, I don't know that I'd bother trying to identify a specific point of divergence. Through the magic of serialized fiction, Marvel TV execs could choose to find a way to retcon certain plot points or just gradually smooth them over with a wink and a smile. I would not therefore be surprised if--whatever excuse is used--the timelines of Agents of SHIELD and the MCU fall back into sync as soon as the end of this season.
But unless their solution specifically addresses this problem, we're likely still talking about different though similar universes--a separate, if similar, Coulson, a separate, if similar Daisy, etc.. As has been suggested in both AoS and the movies, it seems that reality tends to warp or wrap around certain key events--that certain outcomes are effectively inevitable even if arrived at along different paths. However, you can't really "un-break" continuity. Parallel storylines are still separate storylines.
In the meantime, if you're Marvel, you can have your cake and eat it too--allowing that one cake is in the 616 and the other is not.
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