The advent of Marvel and ABC's
Inhumans miniseries means season 5 of
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. will
not debut until January 2018. The positive side is that all 22 episodes will be aired without any midseason breaks. While
Agent Coulson and the rest of his team escaped the virtual prison known as the
Framework, one character that didn't make the leap over was Brett Dalton's
Ward.
Executive producer
Jed Whedon tells Entertainment Weekly that they considered brining him back, along with a few other past characters that could return via the Framework, but "
scheduling, or personal issues, or other shows that take our people away" meant that idea just didn't pan out. Fellow executive producer Jeff Bell adds, "
Aida rebuilt her body out of dark stuff from a dark, terrible universe, so she wasn’t exactly human. There was a Darkhold filter through which she came, so it seemed that anyone who came back that way was not, in fact, really themselves, but some corrupted version of themselves."
An even more corrupted version of Ward would have certainly made for a great villain but it looks like it's not to be.