Up until recently, Marvel’s telly output had been largely seen as a poor alternative to their big cinematic offerings. Whilst constantly referencing the big events that were happening over in the MCU, the major movie characters seem to have been historically banned from crossing over onto the small screen due to political infighting between the two warring arms of Marvel Entertainment. This has led to the TV shows struggling to win over audiences, seen as employing inferior special effects and creaky scripts that failed to hold up over the course of lengthy seasons.

But this year has seen Marvel massively raise their game when it comes to television, and audiences have now been treated to MCU debuts for two huge fan-favourites, Ghost Rider and The Punisher. The early indications are that despite employing huge amounts of hype and advertising around this week’s Ghost Rider debut on ‘Agents Of SHIELD’, his junkyard throw-down with Daisy hasn’t been received anywhere near as well as Frank Castle’s now infamous hospital-call over in ‘Daredevil’. But have Marvel gone and dropped a hint that these two characters might be facing off against each other in the near future?

This week saw a huge Red Carpet event to launch Season 4 of ‘Agents Of SHIELD’, with showrunner Jeph Loeb on hand to introduce a series of special guests to the assembled press pack. One of these guest speakers was legendary Marvel writer, Gerry Conway, who Loeb introduced to the party as ‘The Creator Of The Punisher’. Is this significant? Not really. It stands to reason that Loeb would choose to reference arguably Conway’s most notable creation as a means of explaining who he was to the those present who were less initiated in the world of Marvel Comics. It’s what he said after he’d introduced Conway that’s a little intriguing.

“You’ll understand why we bought all of these people here later on in the season, and why it makes sense…”

Now, this could merely be something and nothing. Perhaps a throwaway acknowledgement to the fact that the company is finally choosing to invest as much love and care for their TV work as they have for their movies. But it can also be taken to mean that the newly arrived character of Frank Castle may well see Robbie Reyes as a villain, and could be travelling across from Netflix to ABC in order to take down his rival supernatural vigilante.

How feasible could this be? Well if you look into the source material, massively. The two characters already have history in the comics, having teamed up for the ‘Marvel Knights’ imprint, and more recently serving together on Thunderbolt Ross’s new ‘Thunderbolts’ lineup. In addition to this, Frank Castle is a notable Catholic character, having massive issues with the idea of Heaven and Angels, and originally training for the priesthood prior to enlisting in the army. It’s natural to assume, therefore, that he would take issue with someone apparently killing in the name of God.

There has also previously been a HUGE Easter-Egg teasing The Punisher cropping up on Phil Coulson’s radar, which only the most eagle-eyed of Marvel fans would have picked up on. Remember the CD that Frank retrieves from his house at the end of S2 of ‘Daredevil’? Well, it’s not the first time that his helper Linus Lieberman has been referenced on TV. Back in season 2 of AoS, Coulson asks Daisy if she’s heard anything from her contacts, to which she name-drop’s a hacker friend called Micro, who she describes as a ‘crime scene junkie’.

Agents of SHIELD has managed to successfully turn things around thanks in part to a very successful third season that saw the arrival of the Inhumans compensating for two weaker debut seasons. Drawing characters across from Netflix would be the perfect way to further boost the show’s ratings. And if successful, it could well lay the foundations for all of these TV characters heading across to the mainstream MCU for crossover events such as ‘Inifinity War’. Now wouldn’t that be a thing?

Source: IGN