#and watching him muddle through it again in s7 in an even more profound way might be able to serve as a really fair continuation

[meanderings0ul]

Coulson, Body Horror, and lifeforms in Sci-fi.

AOS was sci-fi adjacent since day one and has only moved more into that genre of action-adventure scifi over time. They have already touched on themes of biological experimentation, trans-humanism, androids, and the nature of consciousness and sentience before and it’ll be interesting to see them continue that with both the Chronicoms and Phil Coulson’s consciousness in an android body.

Robots, androids, and other mechanical beings are usually a theme present in science fiction but beyond that, the theme of whether these machines are merely intelligent vs genuinely conscious with their own emotional capabilities is a common one. Androids like Data from ST:TNG, the androids from Blade Runner, or even Dorian 0167 from Almost Human are a very different living thing compared to the marine mech TARS from Interstellar, some of the types of Cylons from Battlestar Galactica, or even the robot Gort from 1950′s classic scifi. 

AOS will most likely be exploring parts of this theme by comparing the Chronicoms, the various levels of LMDs from s4, and Coulson living as an android.

In a way, most of Coulson’s individual personal narrative throughout aos has already centered around coming to terms with boderline body horror. While his personal arcs are often being used to drive plot story lines and tend to most often be analyzed that way, this theme is still a big part of the character’s individual experience. 

In season 1 he finds out he was experimentally resuscitated without his consent, had his brain altered without his consent, and finally found out that they’d used alien biological material to do it.

The body horror element is most front and center in The Magical Place 1x11 and in 1x14 T.A.H.I.T.I. where details of what happened to him are finally revealed, but the anxiety of “I feel different.,” of I think something might be wrong with me started much sooner in the season.

By the end of FZZT he’s accepted the fact that his personality is different now, but the anxiety about physical ramifications remains present. There’s a thread of, “Do I still feel enough like me to accept this?” throughout the season.

The emotional narrative fades to the background as the upheaval of his and May’s entire lifetime careers’ imploding comes to the forefront, up until the biological compulsion to start carving begins. 

In season 2 we see him trying to hide the compulsions and the gradual onset of insanity from the team, excluding May, and they are both on the edge of handling it. In many ways, it was as if they were trying to plan for early onset dementia, but with Garrett having become so violent so fast Phil is afraid he’ll lose it and seriously hurt someone. 

2x7 Writing on the Wall provides some closure for the trauma of learning the truth about the T.A.H.I.T.I. program, finally deals with the intentions behind the brain procedure and that at least one of the terminally ill volunteers went on to have a good life. 

By 2b the plot is not using these themes anymore and it vanishes. Everything in 2x22 happens so quickly the only hint we get prior to s3 that he’s actually not coping very well with the sudden amputation of his left hand is in a two sentence conversation between him and Dr. Garner.

But at the beginning of s3 it quickly becomes obvious the coping with it all is just not there. The cybernetic hand is not helping him adjust very much and he leaves it off frequently. Like Daisy, he deflects from deeper emotional issues by joking and we see that a lot in 3a.

Coulson at this point is already a genuine cyborg. His left hand is a machine. The part of his forearm it connects to is never removed and would seem to be grafted on, so even when he removes the hand there is a cybernetic part remaining. Again he’s dealing with the questions, “Do I still feel human? Do I still feel like the person I think of as me?”

By the beginning of s4 Phil seems much more comfortable with both the loss of his hand and with having and using the cybernetic hand. Having it and discussing features for it are just a part of life now. 4a and 4b are about as close as we see him to mental and emotional stability in the whole show, though we find out from his LMD as if played it’s programmed role that Phil’s left forearm still causes him pain.

4c in the Framework we see some of the brain changes made in the TAHITI process come back to protect him in a way. Coulson doubts the Framework world, has some lingering memories and muscle memory from the real one. But, there was very little screentime of characters reacting the their Framework experiences for the most part. 

And of course at the end of 4c, he makes the deal with Ghostrider. How Phil felt about the injury itself in season 5 really wasn’t touched on.

He spent several weeks with large patches of necrotic tissue on his body, a slowly failing heart and lung. He told May he was intermittently in pain. But the discussion of his injury, including by Phil, mostly centered around his refusal to accept anymore invasive or alien-in-origin treatment. 

Given a major element of his character arcs throughout the show has been struggling to come to terms with sudden changes to his own body, this was hardly surprising. 

It’ll be interesting to see how this element of body horror and coping with it or repressing it or refusing it gets carried forward into his becoming an android in season 7.

Cyborg with alien DNA to android is less of a mental jump than normal human guy to android, but it is still a very different form of life. 

Chronicoms are definitely alive, have a culture and individual personalities and anxieties. It’d be reasonable to assume they are a silicate-based form of life, not carbon like humans. We know from 5x1 and 6x3 that Enoch can breathe and eat and drink, but does not need to. We know his skin functions as a sensory apparatus, but that he can remove it easily. Significant amounts of a Chronicoms physical form seems to function as a customize-able exosuit. Like Enoch has said, “I am not a robot or a synth...”

But that is the normal state of their species. How a human consciousness is going to react to living that way over time we don’t know yet. How Coulson is going to feel about living that way we will have to find out in s7.

The body we saw in 6x13 that Jemma and Enoch had reconstructed used both LMD technology and Chronicom technologies made available by Enoch’s help. It is more advanced than any of the LMDs from season four, and unlike Coulson’s season four LMD, his emotional capacity hasn’t been reduced and reprogrammed by AIDA to be ‘mission oriented’. This copy of Coulson’s conscious came from Fitzsimmons, who would have never altered or harmed it.

Without a serious handwave, this Coulson will be missing some memories. His memories might stop at the last point he exited the Framework in 4c or when he was first added to the Framework by AIDA. (We will just shrug about how that data was recovered and assume it got uploaded somewhere that didn’t blow up.) It’s also plausible that Coulson’s brain was mapped again during the middle of season 5 when they were first running tests when he collapsed, but I personally doubt that is the point in time that will be used. 

That he’ll likely be missing some memories will be hard on him and everyone else, but that part of this could have happened due to any head injury causing retrograde amnesia. It’s the change in his body more than his mind that Coulson will be internally dealing with again, in addition to most likely needing to convince May and other team members that it’s really him in there.

Season 7 will again be asking Coulson to decide Do I still feel like me in here? Is this still my body? Can I cope with living like this? In so many ways it is still a continuation of one of his character arcs from day one of the show.

We might see his opinions change over the season. We might see him decide he can’t do this long term. He might decide living like this isn’t as strange as he thought it would be. 

Personally I am at flip-a-coin levels of thought on whether we keep Chroni-LMD-Phil through the end of the season or whether the team changes their own timeline in a different way. Either way, aos did some of its best writing with the nature of the conscious mind theme in s4 imo, whether a digital life could be a real one and how personal that choice had to be, what made a duplicate of a person’s mind real or subpar and the limits of contemporary AI. I’m looking forward to seeing them expand on that theme in their final season.