User blog comment:Demileto/Is Lincoln Campbell really an alias for Thomas Ward?/@comment-26905421-20150819063409/@comment-26918230-20150828104441

@Demileto: Well, if any of you come across this trailer online, please do post a link to it on here as I’ve found updates on the new season scant compared to this time last year for Season 2. Grant Ward becoming Hellfire could be more interesting as compared to Skye becoming Daisy Johnson precisely for diving into the Ward family backstory. Isn’t part of the basic idea of the Secret Warriors that the recruits for it are the children of supervillains, or from otherwise less than heroic backgrounds; people with superpowers but who might not necessarily be given a chance to use them by the good guys? Okay, I know next to nothing about the group outside of Wikipedia and other sites at the time their introduction to Season 3 was announced, but in going over the list I noticed a lot of the members of it came from less-than-stellar parentage and thought I read somewhere that that was kind of the point of it. Calvin Zabo in the MCU got a bit of a redemption in the end and it was a great story, but it would be cool to see some exploration of a member of the team (or potential recruit to the team) coming from this full-on supervillain family (and I like the idea of the Wards/Slades being this supervillain Inhuman family). Plus, I like the idea that while Skye had a half-Inhuman parentage, both of the Ward parents are Inhumans and Grant overall coming from this “pureblood” Inhuman family. We know the Inhumans have been around for hundreds or thousands of years on Earth and I like the idea of getting to delve into it a bit more and what it might mean for somebody to come from such a bloodline, when somebody like Skye we’re more familiar with was until recently completely ignorant of her heritage.:-)

Episode 8 each season does seem to be the designated one for a bit of Ward family backstory. You helped me realise a pattern with them where in Episode 1.08, "The Well", is our first real introduction to the Ward family conflict, which we follow up on in Episode 2.08, “The Things We Bury”, where we’re additionally first introduced to Skye’s mother and get some more backstory on Skye’s father. I think in Episode 3.08 we may finally see a connection between the Ward/Slade and Johnson/Zabo families. Also, I like how the words “well” and “bury” have this “underground” connotation to them, so secrets... I could imagine the opening scene of 3.08 being Grant descending the steps into some Vault-D-like arrangement (though no laser grid, of course) where he’s been keeping Christian and his parents for the past one year and announces that it’s time for them all to have a nice little chat about their family history. Maybe something in a previous episode left him with the suggestion of his Inhuman heritage, such as his possibly leading a Hydra assault against S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel being crashed by some Inhuman third party, leading to some scenario in which he’s forced to catch a crystal (I doubt Jiaying will be the last Inhuman to think just kill all the humans with the crystals, provided they’re able to keep growing them) and surprise, doesn’t turn into stone.

And then from there things with the Ward family escalate over the following two episodes (I’m not sure how...maybe with the sister finally showing up) until Terrigenesis for the remaining members happens in Episode 10, and we go on hiatus with confirmation that Grant is Hellfire. Mind control being an ability of Christian's would be appropriate given that probably the most problematic member of the Slade family in the comics, Lincoln Slade, utilised mind control and possession to commit some of his worst acts. Though it’s probably a secondary ability of his that he’s chosen to focus on and not his primary one, and I disagree with the idea of his having this ability to abuse his brothers in his youth as we’ve already seen in the example of Katya Belyakov the difficulties of a child being able to control his or her powers. I mean, sociopath or no, I find it hard to believe in Christian having this ability activated in *childhood*, not even adolescence, without being overwhelmed by it and ending up institutionalised. That and I think it would serve to take away a little bit from the real-world relatability of a lot of the abuse and problems that show this family to be pretty bad enough on their own even without superpowers.