The term “game changer” is overused in TV promotion, but it certainly was appropriate this week for Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. A huge episode had the team discover the truth, as revealed in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, about Hydra hiding among and within the SHIELD organization and the discovery that Coulson’s old buddy Agent John Garrett (Bill Paxton) was actually part of Hydra, and also “the Clairvoyant” who’d been menacing them all season.

But it was the last few minutes of the episode that really messed with the show’s core dynamic when the trusted Agent Ward (Brett Dalton) shot and killed Agent Victoria Hand (Safron Burrows) and two SHIELD guards, revealing he was in cahoots with Garrett, who he freed from custody, and was a Hydra agent himself.In the wake of all of this, I spoke to two of Agents of SHIELD’s executive producers, Jeph Loeb and Jeffrey Bell, about these giant reveals, what it was like tying the series in with Captain America 2, and where the show will go from here, with five episodes left in Season 1.

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Well, you know, we're part of the Marvel Movie Universe, so with respect to that we talked to them when we first started and they said, "Oh, you really should read Captain America: The Winter Soldier. This is what's happening." So we've known about that from the beginning. We knew that was coming down the pipe, so we just jumped in an embraced it.Yeah, I'm not sure if any of us thought of it as a reset, but simply as where the story was going all along. If you go back and take a look at things we set up in the pilot and that we continue to pay off as we go along, this was always the plan. I think it's what Jeff, Jed and Maurissa like to talk about a lot -- you know, this is the challenge of telling a 22-episode season. You have to make these kinds of bold choices in order to keep your audience off their pins.One of the things that I think we've realized is how much storytelling has changed, especially in the last couple years with Netflix and binge-viewing. When I was on The X-Files, it took seven seasons for Mulder to discover what happened to his sister, and that was perfect and wonderful and beautiful. Everyone stayed with these very small moves. Now, sort of like Breaking Bad, which is just flipping cars every week and burning through story, there is a hunger from the audience for a lot more reveals a lot faster. We talk about the velocity of storytelling. So everything we've looked at has been, how can we do that? We saw this as an opportunity to really -- look, we've been building towards this for 17 episodes; we've known this is coming, but now to go forward, we have a new paradigm which allows us new character conflicts, people on different sides, which just allows us to generate more story.Also, it doesn't mean that we don't have another dramatic shift before the end of the year. This is hopefully a signal to our viewership that this is a show you want to watch live. This is a show that you want to keep up on, because the twists and turns are pretty spectacular.Yes and yes. There's a whole new dynamic. We have revealed to the audience that Ward is Hydra, but our team does not know that yet. So we have many cards to still turn over in the last five episodes.In light of The Winter Soldier and the story of The Winter Soldier, we're getting particular pleasure in how divided the very vocal reaction to last night is over whether or not Ward is in fact a bad guy. Is he doing this of his own volition? Is he not doing this of his own volition? What's great is, we are having that debate with our cast -- on the show, not personally.Exactly. Yes there is.You're assuming that's the end of the story.With respect to that, when we started out, we arc out the whole season, and we had a bunch of ideas. We talked through everything and what the options were -- what would be the coolest, what would be the most surprising -- but as we've said, if you go back to the pilot, they're talking about Ward as being, "Nobody's seen scores like this since Romanoff." That doesn't mean he's a nice person, that means he's really, really, really good at being a spy. So it was there in the pilot. Then there were little breadcrumbs throughout the whole season. He made sense to us in a lot of ways. Whether other people are or aren't is a different discussion for a different episode on a different day, but we were thrilled with the reaction from Tuesday night.Brett is a terrific actor, and he's so much fun with the “ships” [Editor’s note: as in people “shipping” May and Ward or Skye and Ward], but it was absolutely something that we spent a great deal of time talking about, because we needed him to be as honest as he could be and be that person for as long as he could be and not have to ever worry about, "Am I lying in this scene? Am I not lying in this scene?" So in a way, when you put an actor through -- particularly when it's a new show and people are getting to know each other and getting to know their relationships with each other -- you want that to be as honest as can be. So it felt like the right thing to do.

Continue to Page 2 as Loeb and Bell discuss the Clairvoyant, Maria Hill, Victoria Hand's fate and more.