User blog comment:Demileto/Is Lincoln Campbell really an alias for Thomas Ward?/@comment-26844548-20150801151422/@comment-26918230-20150902072609

@Tkstar27: You mean a darkness in them, like the little girl in Bahrain? Although from what we can make out from the Ward family so far it doesn’t seem as if they would do anything but further encourage any evil in their children. Any sort of favouritism they may have had towards Thomas may have been pretty ordinary, no different from say Odin favouring Thor or Frigga favouring Loki. I think Ward is their original name and Slade is their adopted one. I could imagine a Carter and Lincoln Slade (Carter and Lincoln Ward) that may have temporarily changed their name in heading out West for business or other prospects in an effort to try and make it on their own without relying upon their family legacy. Both Inhuman, Lincoln may have gone mad with his abilities and started to do very bad things with them to people. Carter could have then helped the authorities in apprehending his brother (in either the late days of the Strategic Scientific Reserve or the early days of S.H.I.E.L.D.) before going back to his family name and New England roots and playing the good son of the family, married, and his son is Christian and Grant’s father, while covering up just whatever happened to his brother and his descendants and cutting off a diseased branch of the family tree. (I was just remembering that line from Melinda May in the “Daisy Bell” dream sequence of Episode 2.09, “Ye Who Enter Here” -- “poisoned tree, poisoned fruit” -- and thinking that could easily be an idea revisited in the show in future.) I have my doubts any of the four Ward children have undergone Terrigenesis, whether upon some decision of Mr and Mrs Ward or by prevention of some outside party not wishing the new generation to receive their birthright based on their more recent family history (Jiaying was probably not the only Inhuman authority that deemed an Inhuman descendant worthy of receiving their birthright or not, and I guess with Lash in Season 3 we’ll start to see some Inhumans that are far more aggressive in their policing of these standards).

Thomas couldn’t have disappeared after the well incident as he was referenced in Episode 1.21, “Ragtag” (he was the brother inside the burning house, not Christian), which took place maybe six years later (I’m guessing). It would be interesting if he did turn out to be Lincoln as I doubt Mrs Ward would have let him go to Afterlife willingly, or stopped scouring the earth for him like Skye’s birth parents did for her so I’m more curious in that case to see how exactly the reunion would play out between Lincoln!Thomas and his parents rather than between him and Grant. The choice of Lincoln as a first name by the character doesn’t really bode well for me symbolically given the problems with Lincoln Slade in the comics (he may have started out as a hero but he ended up as a villain). If the character is Thomas then I’d have to wonder what could have motivated him towards the name out of any number of possible choices. I think Lincoln Campbell is the grandson of Lincoln Slade while Grant Ward is the grandson of Carter Slade. If he lost his parents and everyone else at a young age he could easily be desperate for some greater family connection. Maybe he eventually tracked down at least the basic information of his father’s father without any details of what he may have done with his Inhuman abilities, and taken on the name symbolically while seeking a practical family amongst Inhumans (or alternatively, his parents could have actually named him for his grandfather but I prefer the idea of it being something he gave himself like Skye from Mary Sue Poots).

It was more than that though, between Mockingbird and Lincoln Slade (from http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Lincoln_Slade_(Earth-616)):

“However, as time passed Mockingbird began to slowly fall out of the influence of the potion, and when Two-Gun showed up in a makeshift Hawkeye outfit to jog her memory she finally broke from Lincoln's influence. She implied that Lincoln had raped her - having had intercourse while she was drugged - and rode off to kill Lincoln. Two-Gun and Rawhide were alarmed, knowing the good the Rider had once done and did not wish to kill him, only to bring him to justice. Mockingbird told them the fight was hers alone and Two-Gun reluctantly held Rawhide back from following her. Mockingbird confronted the Phantom Rider on a mountain peak he held sacred and, in the fight that followed, Lincoln fell from a cliff. He managed to grip the edge of the cliff with his fingers, but in the slickness of the rain that was falling he was losing his grip. Mockingbird stood and watched him fall. There was some justice in this, but it also broke the Avengers's code of no killing. Eventually Hawkeye returned to bring her back to the present with the rest of the WCA, as the local Indians buried Lincoln in a cave tomb.”

For the sake of the timeline they could make it instead that Bobbi’s/Mockingbird’s grandmother was both the primary target of Lincoln Slade and the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who tried to take him into custody. And maybe instead of giving her an “Indian love potion” like in the comics, Lincoln Slade could have something of the mind control ability the blogger of this post suggested for Christian Ward. So it would be akin to what Lorelei did to Grant Ward in Episode 1.15 “Yes Men”, which was also wrong but would be a way for it to happen in the MCU. So there’s this acknowledgment of it being something he did, among many other things in the MCU (I would hope any adaptation of his story would be a little wider in scope than just one man’s twisted obsession with one woman), without going into too many details of it as we’ll already have that with the Purple Man and Jessica Jones if the writers want to get into that sort of story. (Actually, what I’ve read of the Purple Man (Zebediah Killgrave) in researching Jessica Jones was what I thought of when I was first reading about Lincoln Slade, which factors into why he creeps me out so much.)

I doubt Bobbi now has it out for Grant Ward as one of the things that I found so moving about "S.O.S. Part Two" (the other was the whole resolution of the Johnson/Zabo family story) was that despite the injustice done to Bobbi by him and a misguided Kara Lynn you don’t get the sense that anyone at S.H.I.E.L.D. is going to be after Grant for revenge. Lance and Melinda and the rest were just there to get in, get Bobbi, get out and in the aftermath of it all nobody was even mentioning Grant and Kara Lynn and raging over this sort of reasonably last-straw stunt that they pulled on them. Everyone just sort of took it as an opportunity to step back and re-evaluate what’s truly important, which is in such contrast to where we know Grant is going to continue to go with his rage. I feel like at the end of it all, Hunter and Morse would really like just to move on with things. (Although in the bigger picture if they do adapt the whole Slade family history for the MCU, it would be kind of ironic if without even knowing anything about their shared family history Lincoln Slade’s great-nephew still ended up doing unforgivable things to his victim’s granddaughter, if it’s anything like my idea of how they could adapt it... And if Bobbi looks anything like her grandmother, could she become a target herself if they found a way to bring Lincoln Slade back like in the comics...)

I can’t imagine Andrew Garner being the one to refer us all to Stephen Strange in the MCU, mainly because he seems more to me like somebody happy to take on the cases that S.H.I.E.L.D. brings him but who wouldn’t necessarily go out and collect contacts in the “much weirder world” unless it immediately related to one of his patients. I have some ideas as to who might be a bridge between “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and the character of Doctor Strange, by way of the Defenders, but that’s probably still a good way off.