beccaelizabeth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccaelizabeth) wrote2014-06-09 11:35 am
beccaelizabeth) wrote2014-06-09 11:35 am
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Post Winter Soldier / Agents of SHIELD, what next for SHIELD?
I've noticed that fanfic versions lag loooooong behind canon twists. Which, given how long it takes to write anything, fair enough. But it's also that we get attached to a fanon version, for instance the Coulson that mixed in 616 canon to get ex-Ranger best friend of Fury, and then when things get Jossed we just like our guy better. But the recent big organisational changes seem least likely to show up. It's not as bad as Torchwood, where people kept writing season 2 team fics and ignored the existence of everything after that, but there's a tendency to try and pull everything back to status quo ante that reminds me of comics more than TV. Comics are cyclical, everything that falls will always rise in familiar form. Television? Sometimes trashes all before it and revises the paradigm. Sometimes.
So, how hard would it be to just get SHIELD back?
First off, I stopped to write this because someone's fic mentioned "anyone who’s still on SHIELD’s payroll". SHIELD has been declared a terrorist organisation; I believe that means governments nick their assets. It doesn't have a payroll, unless said payroll cannot be traced back to SHIELD, by anyone, including the former SHIELD agents now dandelioned to every other intelligence agency on Earth.
The seizure of the Providence base is an example : Hill bought herself (and, in her plan, Coulson) some freedom by giving up some of SHIELD's property. That army guy had already seized the kind of bases SHIELD had in plain sight, like the Hub, arresting and interrogating every single person there. The government probably gets to keep the buildings too. SHIELD had some really shiny stuff; any government that has a piece would have incentive to keep it. To get that 'terrorist organisation' thing reversed and any assets returned to them? SHIELD is going to need major political leverage.
And they don't have it. 'Their' politicians were HYDRA's. And the world knows it.
One way putting Coulson in charge makes sense, a plain white guy, instead of Fury or Hill, is he's got the best chance of blanding his way into political good books. Fury supervised the problem, he's no good to SHIELD any more. Hill has been answering to Congress for it, with as far as we saw more frustration than grace, and therefore becomes the public face of the problem. And shuffling minorities aside in the short term to make what's left of SHIELD look like stand up dudes just like you is a political edge that a powerful group could dispense with but the newly powerless kind of need. It's shitty, but the math probably works.
Still, right now? Coulson hasn't got what he needs. He hasn't got votes, he hasn't got power; he has no traceable financial assets.
So, how about the World Security Council? They're the closest we've seen to direct political oversight of SHIELD. Maybe they should be dealing with the politics, getting SHIELD cleared, and just shouting at the Director to clean his own house. Except, slight problem, they were either HYDRA or dead. Or that one British woman Natasha replaced. It's entirely possible she's 100% of the WSC now. She won't have sufficient clout alone, and since if loyal her death was in HYDRA's plan she probably has more immediate problems.
If anybody wants to become the new World Security Council then we need to know how they were constituted in the first place and who they answered to. Are they a UN organisation that the UN could refill? Are they a secret shadow government cabal? We don't know. So we don't know what they'll do next.
Why would they back the restoration of SHIELD?
Why try the failed experiment over again?
Coulson has personal reasons, but what reasons would apply to entirely new people sent to supervise the dead org?
But the seizure of all known assets still leaves them with the portable and/or untraceable sort. 'Odyssey protocol' existed, so the whole run away now and get back together later thing is something they'd thought of in advance. Fury's secrets have secrets. The remaining Playground base could be anything and have anything. It might not even be the last place left. So, maybe the SHIELD payroll is the kind of complex money laundering operation a paranoid with a lifetime of experience and a department full of geniuses could dream up. Maybe there actually still is something to pay people with.
Next up: the impossibility of knowing who HYDRA agents are. Cap found out when they started shooting at him. Cap, being Cap, survived this. Mostly that's not going to work out real well.
Do we trust the surviving team? Yeah. Should we, logically? Hell no.
Fun.
Lie detectors, in universe, do not work.
There is no way to learn if they can trust other agents.
Except the really old school way, by their fruits.
So basically the new Director of SHIELD, knowing that the people he trusted most in the world turned out to be half HYDRA, knowing the other half decided he was HYDRA, is just going to have to choose people and hope.
That's going to work out awesome.
For viewers.
So what kind of org can SHIELD even be now? They can't have offices in every major city. They don't even have safehouses in every major city. They have no clout. If they wave badges around they get no cooperation. They in fact get arrested. But some agents actually do get questioned and cleared. And then move on to other agencies. And already May has reached out to another agency, by way of her mum.
So, proposal for new SHIELD: foster inter-agency cooperation.
If every one of those dandelion seeds plants a little bit of SHIELD in a new and interesting place, that's your new power base. Currently there's a need to be a bit sneaky about it, but the only way SHIELD can get out from under that, given that the charges are true and they were in fact a terrorist org, is to start fresh and prove they aren't any more. To do good works until people decide good works are in fact what they do.
... which is exactly what the ex HYDRA people and the ones freed since SHIELD turned out to be corrupt are also doing. This is such a fun mess.
So it'll take a couple months for ex SHIELD to settle in new places, but then the Director will have contacts everywhere useful. But then SHIELD needs to prove themselves useful to them, to make continued contact worth the risk.
Old style SHIELD was a data-goes-in operation. Write only, as far as the rest of the world, and indeed lower level agents, were concerned. Everything went up to the Director, leaving lower levels blind, so they had to be trained to obey blindly so the Director could aim them where he wanted them.
Nobody with sense is going to put up with that any more. They've seen where it walked them into. They can no longer trust the system.
But everything SHIELD ever learned was released into the wild. They don't have to trust, they can just see.
That needs to continue.
If SHIELD becomes the agency that keeps everyone informed about the weird stuff, then it stays useful to inform SHIELD.
SHIELD had an edge over other agencies' attempts to deal with the weird stuff. The edge was three or four fold: knowledge the stuff existed, knowledge of how they'd dealt with it before, training people to deal with it based on those knowledges, and superior tech based off the kind of cutting edge weird science that was their purview. When data just went in, nobody else could accumulate that stuff. Now all the knowledge has gone out. But the training is still a SHIELD speciality. We don't know what happened to the three strands of academy, but if SHIELD can get back even one of them, they can offer something to the other agencies.
The weird science is, unfortunately, out in the wild and proliferating fast. Thanks not only to HYDRA scientists but also to Fury keeping the worst tech all in one place, the exact same place as the most dangerous prisoners. How does that even make sense? Paranoid is fine, but why is he an incompetent paranoid? Compartmentalisation isn't just for information! But then, data did all flow into central storage too, just that storage was in Fury's head. *sigh*
Stupid.
Granted if the tech was kept many different places it would be harder to hide, fortify, guard, all that stuff, and Garrett would probably still grab the bit he wanted since in the end all they had to do was manipulate people into trying to be nice to them, but it at least wouldn't be one stop shopping.
If SHIELD keep doing their old duties they will keep accumulating weird science, both understood and otherwise. If they keep it all in the same place then once again it will only take one traitor to steal it all. They need to redistribute the risk. Instead of thinking they can take one huge risk on a tiny number of people they need to take a lot of smaller risks. Sure, that's still a huge risk and a huge number of people collectively, but the failure mode changes. It's like traffic lights now being made of lots of little bulbs instead of one big one. One loss won't take down everything, next time.
Reorganising SHIELD on the cell principle doesn't mix with keeping the data flowing freely. Someone in the middle would need to keep track of who all has what all. There'd still be a center with the most knowledge. But if it's all approached like, you know, science, then it's all just being published and poked by many people, and only the initial found tech would be spread out in bite sized pieces. There's still pretty good arguments for why not to publish bomb plans though. Complex. But, given how much SHIELD data is already out there, is cramming it back in the bottle now even relevant?
The thing is though if HYDRA shares all their findings among evil people and the good guys continue to keep things in tiny classified boxes then HYDRA, or evil, Cybertek, whoever, they will zoom ahead from having much knowings between them. Knowings that any of them could use against any other of them. They're probably not sharing quite freely. But keeping a balance between speed of research and trying not to hand out guns like candy is the complicated good trick involved here. Good guys could secret themselves into stagnation. Would not help.
Skye's Rising Tide contacts from before would be an interesting start for a new research org. They've already got a ton of data to play with. But old SHIELD agents would work too, none of them knowing how to contact all the old org, but all of them knowing a few old friends.
And it will in no way look suspicious to absolutely everyone ;-)
But the good trick would be that some of those boxes with a little bit of alien/weird to research would be the FBI, CIA, local police etc. Take the already trusted (ha) and get them following SHIELD's agenda, and then you don't need to rebuild SHIELD the same way.
Nor indeed pay it the same, which, as previously mentioned, could really help.
The training though, that could be key. Because this one dandelion seeding, that can put a little SHIELD in every organisation, but it's a one time event. To keep it rolling, they can invite people with no prior SHIELD experience to go through professional development courses. And if they choose the right people they can get back just as much in skills and experience as they're sharing.
... ex-Ranger Coulson made plenty of sense, and if SHIELD in fact routinely recruits straight out of high school and the academies are like college for future agents then it's maybe not something they've been benefiting from thus far. At the start, sure, with the ex SSR guys with WWII experience, but if Coulson is typical they maybe ran out of that. And that could be how the ideology of the org strays so far, if they're getting them in young and indoctrinating. It's harder to do if you're actively trying to bring in the best of other ways of thinking.
And training is something people frequently are willing to pay for. Playing up the prestige element, making SHIELD training be the final polish on a fine career, that could help with the finances too. The only problem being that 'terrorist training camp' is a meme with a lot of traction. But see again, prestige. Take some rock solid people and show them what SHIELD actually does, when HYDRA isn't even nudging it. Show them the kind of threats that only SHIELD thus far has seen. Then send them back to go tell everyone SHIELD is doing pretty good, considering.
Treat it like special forces according to the GURPS book and you need a small core of incredibly well trained people who go out and share that training, advise people, and are force multipliers since suddenly everyone else is more good. Coulson can start doing that right away, if he can get people to listen to him even a little.
So what I'd do to rebuild SHIELD doesn't involve huge worldwide networks of secret bases. It involves huge worldwide networks of not entirely secret agents, maybe a SHIELD Reserve, having served or trained with SHIELD and in return committing to being called on for some time after.
Does anywhere in the world do it like that? Not so much, far as I know. Not that anywhere in the world has problems with the kind of thing SHIELD (or Torchwood, or UNIT) has dealt with, due to the obvious lack of aliens or weird science, obviously.
Is it pretty likely a comics based TV show will in fact go right back to the box where secrets go in? Yeah.
But the other way is versatile and responsive and interesting.
Plus getting a bunch of regular law enforcement people in should make it harder to take the smirky vanishing act approach to 'arresting' people that was the worst sort of thing SHIELD did.
New influences would be good for SHIELD. They don't just need to get the likes of Garrett out of their system, they need to control for people like Hand, who didn't think any given agent was worth scrambling to save and who thought shooting captives would be a grand idea.
... scrapping SHIELD and starting over completely also has its very good points.
Seeing as I've never been the boss of even a quite small team, have no military or law enforcement experience, and get all my learnings from reading the internet or RPG rulebooks or watching TV, this Grand Plan right here is the sort of thing that makes sense from my recliner this morning and probably not very practical at all.
But I like to think it would make good story.
Each week the core team would go somewhere new, meet new people, and help them. And then leave with the understanding they can call on their help in return in future. In a friendly way.
Different, but nice.
So, how hard would it be to just get SHIELD back?
First off, I stopped to write this because someone's fic mentioned "anyone who’s still on SHIELD’s payroll". SHIELD has been declared a terrorist organisation; I believe that means governments nick their assets. It doesn't have a payroll, unless said payroll cannot be traced back to SHIELD, by anyone, including the former SHIELD agents now dandelioned to every other intelligence agency on Earth.
The seizure of the Providence base is an example : Hill bought herself (and, in her plan, Coulson) some freedom by giving up some of SHIELD's property. That army guy had already seized the kind of bases SHIELD had in plain sight, like the Hub, arresting and interrogating every single person there. The government probably gets to keep the buildings too. SHIELD had some really shiny stuff; any government that has a piece would have incentive to keep it. To get that 'terrorist organisation' thing reversed and any assets returned to them? SHIELD is going to need major political leverage.
And they don't have it. 'Their' politicians were HYDRA's. And the world knows it.
One way putting Coulson in charge makes sense, a plain white guy, instead of Fury or Hill, is he's got the best chance of blanding his way into political good books. Fury supervised the problem, he's no good to SHIELD any more. Hill has been answering to Congress for it, with as far as we saw more frustration than grace, and therefore becomes the public face of the problem. And shuffling minorities aside in the short term to make what's left of SHIELD look like stand up dudes just like you is a political edge that a powerful group could dispense with but the newly powerless kind of need. It's shitty, but the math probably works.
Still, right now? Coulson hasn't got what he needs. He hasn't got votes, he hasn't got power; he has no traceable financial assets.
So, how about the World Security Council? They're the closest we've seen to direct political oversight of SHIELD. Maybe they should be dealing with the politics, getting SHIELD cleared, and just shouting at the Director to clean his own house. Except, slight problem, they were either HYDRA or dead. Or that one British woman Natasha replaced. It's entirely possible she's 100% of the WSC now. She won't have sufficient clout alone, and since if loyal her death was in HYDRA's plan she probably has more immediate problems.
If anybody wants to become the new World Security Council then we need to know how they were constituted in the first place and who they answered to. Are they a UN organisation that the UN could refill? Are they a secret shadow government cabal? We don't know. So we don't know what they'll do next.
Why would they back the restoration of SHIELD?
Why try the failed experiment over again?
Coulson has personal reasons, but what reasons would apply to entirely new people sent to supervise the dead org?
But the seizure of all known assets still leaves them with the portable and/or untraceable sort. 'Odyssey protocol' existed, so the whole run away now and get back together later thing is something they'd thought of in advance. Fury's secrets have secrets. The remaining Playground base could be anything and have anything. It might not even be the last place left. So, maybe the SHIELD payroll is the kind of complex money laundering operation a paranoid with a lifetime of experience and a department full of geniuses could dream up. Maybe there actually still is something to pay people with.
Next up: the impossibility of knowing who HYDRA agents are. Cap found out when they started shooting at him. Cap, being Cap, survived this. Mostly that's not going to work out real well.
Do we trust the surviving team? Yeah. Should we, logically? Hell no.
Fun.
Lie detectors, in universe, do not work.
There is no way to learn if they can trust other agents.
Except the really old school way, by their fruits.
So basically the new Director of SHIELD, knowing that the people he trusted most in the world turned out to be half HYDRA, knowing the other half decided he was HYDRA, is just going to have to choose people and hope.
That's going to work out awesome.
For viewers.
So what kind of org can SHIELD even be now? They can't have offices in every major city. They don't even have safehouses in every major city. They have no clout. If they wave badges around they get no cooperation. They in fact get arrested. But some agents actually do get questioned and cleared. And then move on to other agencies. And already May has reached out to another agency, by way of her mum.
So, proposal for new SHIELD: foster inter-agency cooperation.
If every one of those dandelion seeds plants a little bit of SHIELD in a new and interesting place, that's your new power base. Currently there's a need to be a bit sneaky about it, but the only way SHIELD can get out from under that, given that the charges are true and they were in fact a terrorist org, is to start fresh and prove they aren't any more. To do good works until people decide good works are in fact what they do.
... which is exactly what the ex HYDRA people and the ones freed since SHIELD turned out to be corrupt are also doing. This is such a fun mess.
So it'll take a couple months for ex SHIELD to settle in new places, but then the Director will have contacts everywhere useful. But then SHIELD needs to prove themselves useful to them, to make continued contact worth the risk.
Old style SHIELD was a data-goes-in operation. Write only, as far as the rest of the world, and indeed lower level agents, were concerned. Everything went up to the Director, leaving lower levels blind, so they had to be trained to obey blindly so the Director could aim them where he wanted them.
Nobody with sense is going to put up with that any more. They've seen where it walked them into. They can no longer trust the system.
But everything SHIELD ever learned was released into the wild. They don't have to trust, they can just see.
That needs to continue.
If SHIELD becomes the agency that keeps everyone informed about the weird stuff, then it stays useful to inform SHIELD.
SHIELD had an edge over other agencies' attempts to deal with the weird stuff. The edge was three or four fold: knowledge the stuff existed, knowledge of how they'd dealt with it before, training people to deal with it based on those knowledges, and superior tech based off the kind of cutting edge weird science that was their purview. When data just went in, nobody else could accumulate that stuff. Now all the knowledge has gone out. But the training is still a SHIELD speciality. We don't know what happened to the three strands of academy, but if SHIELD can get back even one of them, they can offer something to the other agencies.
The weird science is, unfortunately, out in the wild and proliferating fast. Thanks not only to HYDRA scientists but also to Fury keeping the worst tech all in one place, the exact same place as the most dangerous prisoners. How does that even make sense? Paranoid is fine, but why is he an incompetent paranoid? Compartmentalisation isn't just for information! But then, data did all flow into central storage too, just that storage was in Fury's head. *sigh*
Stupid.
Granted if the tech was kept many different places it would be harder to hide, fortify, guard, all that stuff, and Garrett would probably still grab the bit he wanted since in the end all they had to do was manipulate people into trying to be nice to them, but it at least wouldn't be one stop shopping.
If SHIELD keep doing their old duties they will keep accumulating weird science, both understood and otherwise. If they keep it all in the same place then once again it will only take one traitor to steal it all. They need to redistribute the risk. Instead of thinking they can take one huge risk on a tiny number of people they need to take a lot of smaller risks. Sure, that's still a huge risk and a huge number of people collectively, but the failure mode changes. It's like traffic lights now being made of lots of little bulbs instead of one big one. One loss won't take down everything, next time.
Reorganising SHIELD on the cell principle doesn't mix with keeping the data flowing freely. Someone in the middle would need to keep track of who all has what all. There'd still be a center with the most knowledge. But if it's all approached like, you know, science, then it's all just being published and poked by many people, and only the initial found tech would be spread out in bite sized pieces. There's still pretty good arguments for why not to publish bomb plans though. Complex. But, given how much SHIELD data is already out there, is cramming it back in the bottle now even relevant?
The thing is though if HYDRA shares all their findings among evil people and the good guys continue to keep things in tiny classified boxes then HYDRA, or evil, Cybertek, whoever, they will zoom ahead from having much knowings between them. Knowings that any of them could use against any other of them. They're probably not sharing quite freely. But keeping a balance between speed of research and trying not to hand out guns like candy is the complicated good trick involved here. Good guys could secret themselves into stagnation. Would not help.
Skye's Rising Tide contacts from before would be an interesting start for a new research org. They've already got a ton of data to play with. But old SHIELD agents would work too, none of them knowing how to contact all the old org, but all of them knowing a few old friends.
And it will in no way look suspicious to absolutely everyone ;-)
But the good trick would be that some of those boxes with a little bit of alien/weird to research would be the FBI, CIA, local police etc. Take the already trusted (ha) and get them following SHIELD's agenda, and then you don't need to rebuild SHIELD the same way.
Nor indeed pay it the same, which, as previously mentioned, could really help.
The training though, that could be key. Because this one dandelion seeding, that can put a little SHIELD in every organisation, but it's a one time event. To keep it rolling, they can invite people with no prior SHIELD experience to go through professional development courses. And if they choose the right people they can get back just as much in skills and experience as they're sharing.
... ex-Ranger Coulson made plenty of sense, and if SHIELD in fact routinely recruits straight out of high school and the academies are like college for future agents then it's maybe not something they've been benefiting from thus far. At the start, sure, with the ex SSR guys with WWII experience, but if Coulson is typical they maybe ran out of that. And that could be how the ideology of the org strays so far, if they're getting them in young and indoctrinating. It's harder to do if you're actively trying to bring in the best of other ways of thinking.
And training is something people frequently are willing to pay for. Playing up the prestige element, making SHIELD training be the final polish on a fine career, that could help with the finances too. The only problem being that 'terrorist training camp' is a meme with a lot of traction. But see again, prestige. Take some rock solid people and show them what SHIELD actually does, when HYDRA isn't even nudging it. Show them the kind of threats that only SHIELD thus far has seen. Then send them back to go tell everyone SHIELD is doing pretty good, considering.
Treat it like special forces according to the GURPS book and you need a small core of incredibly well trained people who go out and share that training, advise people, and are force multipliers since suddenly everyone else is more good. Coulson can start doing that right away, if he can get people to listen to him even a little.
So what I'd do to rebuild SHIELD doesn't involve huge worldwide networks of secret bases. It involves huge worldwide networks of not entirely secret agents, maybe a SHIELD Reserve, having served or trained with SHIELD and in return committing to being called on for some time after.
Does anywhere in the world do it like that? Not so much, far as I know. Not that anywhere in the world has problems with the kind of thing SHIELD (or Torchwood, or UNIT) has dealt with, due to the obvious lack of aliens or weird science, obviously.
Is it pretty likely a comics based TV show will in fact go right back to the box where secrets go in? Yeah.
But the other way is versatile and responsive and interesting.
Plus getting a bunch of regular law enforcement people in should make it harder to take the smirky vanishing act approach to 'arresting' people that was the worst sort of thing SHIELD did.
New influences would be good for SHIELD. They don't just need to get the likes of Garrett out of their system, they need to control for people like Hand, who didn't think any given agent was worth scrambling to save and who thought shooting captives would be a grand idea.
... scrapping SHIELD and starting over completely also has its very good points.
Seeing as I've never been the boss of even a quite small team, have no military or law enforcement experience, and get all my learnings from reading the internet or RPG rulebooks or watching TV, this Grand Plan right here is the sort of thing that makes sense from my recliner this morning and probably not very practical at all.
But I like to think it would make good story.
Each week the core team would go somewhere new, meet new people, and help them. And then leave with the understanding they can call on their help in return in future. In a friendly way.
Different, but nice.
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What all of this makes me think is that no matter what happens to SHIELD, from the outside of SHIELD what the rest of the world is looking at is a bunch of people who used to be SHIELD, whose loyalties are suspect, and who are not going to go away. They can disband SHIELD and harry them and take their bases and disrupt their organization and so on, but the people...
It's basically the same problem that allowed HYDRA into SHIELD in the first place. People with skills -- some of them at least will find a way to use those skills, and letting them in is dangerous, but so is keeping them out...
Scrapping SHIELD sounds easy, but this makes me wonder if it's actually an easy option after all.
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I expect some of the people will be made to go away, with varying degrees of permanency.
But yeah. People with very scary skills.
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