Agents of SHIELD Improved The Winter Soldier's Hydra Twist

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Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s Hydra twist was great for the movie and the MCU, as a whole, but Agents of SHIELD managed to take that twist and vastly improve on it. As menacing as Hydra was in the few movies they were involved in, the movies never did a lot with them, especially when compared to how they’re depicted in the comics and other media. Fortunately, Agents of SHIELD was able to fix that by expanding on the organization that better lived up to their legacy.

The Winter Soldier revealed that Hydra had secretly infiltrated SHIELD and society, as a whole, following their defeat in World War 2, but after that, not much was done with them. Hydra was quickly dealt with in the beginning of Avengers: Age of Ultron, and they had a few people appear in Captain America: Civil War, but that was essentially the end of Hydra. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier showed that there were still some stragglers in hiding, but there’s no way of knowing if that will be followed up on anytime soon, if at all. As it stands, Hydra basically stopped being a threat after phase 2, as far as the wider MCU is concerned.

Related: Why Hydra Is Still Defining The MCU (7 Years After Winter Soldier)

That being said, Agents of SHIELD managed to take the Hydra twist and do much more with it than the wider MCU. Agents of SHIELD season 1 was able to explore the fallout of the twist on a smaller and more personal level than The Winter Soldier, and from then on, Hydra was a persistent antagonist in the show for Team Coulson, even being directly tied to Daisy and Ward’s backstories and character arcs. Thanks to that, the ramifications of Hydra infiltrating society were able to be explored more in Agents of SHIELD than in the movies, and they could