Agents of SHIELD season 3

Poor Lincoln.  You where so poorly developed and underused, and yet you have been the lucky guy to die in space, as teased from the beginning of the season.

Now, this third season of AoS has been a shake up, with the cast being reworked all over, and the tone of the series changing from a spy series to a superhero show.

Plot

The superpowers are the main players this year, as SHIELD is making work of raising and preparing a squad of "not really the Avengers" like superheroes, or Inhumans as they are called (you know, trademarks and such).

It plays on two arcs, the first being the ACU / SHIELD rivalry as a monster is running loose slaughtering inhumans (Lash), which plays for the main part of the first half of the season as the time is on a recruitment drive.

The second part is based around HYDRA and the once again returned from the dead Agent Ward, now the superpowered villain Hive, something he `contracted` on the alien planet.

Now, Hive is trying to turn all of mankind into evil powered beings, needless to say under his control, and SHIELD predictably manages to stop him in the finale.  However, in the finale`s final moments, some setting for the next season is already being done, with Daisy now being on the run from SHIELD, and Coulson saying he needs to call the Director.  I guess Nick is back in s4?

Opinion

It was an enjoyable, yet not WOW season.  The one thing I do like, nothing personal, is that ward is now at last dead.  For good.  Joss Whedon confirmed it, the character had ran it`s course, and there is nothing short of making him a divine being that could be done with him.  He was good guy, turned bad guy, turned chief of HYDRA turned alien supervillain.  So yeah, he ran his course.

For the most part, the ideas where good, though it seems looking back that this season was written by George RR Martin, as quite a big number of `support key players` have been killed off.  Coulson`s love intrest, some third rate superheroes, Lincoln, Ward, Hydra big guy`s daughter... the list goes on.  Add to this the departure of Bobby and Hunter to get their own spin-offs series (which, ironically, was cancelled last week before it ever started), and you have a rather "dried out" character pool.

So I`m a bit curious for s4, because it looks like that apart from AIDA (a female Vision???) there will be need for quite a few new characters and arcs...