The Secret Warriors were promised for Marvel's Agents of SHIELD: Season 3, but the series is still holding off on fully introducing them. Showrunners Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen promise a "slow build" for the storyline simply because they don't want to overload the show with powered people.

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"When the word is put on a poster , it creates an expectation," Whedon told IGN at ABC's winter Television Critics Association press tour party. "We feel a duty to the Cinematic Universe to not hyper-accelerate how many people have powers, and when I say 'duty' I also mean we have a mandate to do that. We don't want it to be there's a thousand people with powers with a show that at its heart is about what it's like to not have powers in a world with powers."Though Daisy Johnson (Chloe Bennet) hasn't assembled an official Secret Warriors team, the Inhumans have been a huge presence in Season 3. Daisy and the rest of SHIELD started off trying to rescue and contain the people affected by the Inhuman outbreak and found themselves swept into a larger Hydra conspiracy that resulted in a mysterious, ages-old Inhuman coming to Earth in the body of Grant Ward (Brett Dalton).The show is seemingly one step closer to assembling the Secret Warriors as Lincoln (Luke Mitchell) agreed in the midseason finale to stay with SHIELD. "It's an interesting period of time for Lincoln," Mitchell teased to IGN. "He's part of the team, he's integrating of sorts into the team, and that's where there will be a little bit of conflict coming up because it won't be the smoothest transition or integration. He still has his own reservations and perspectives and one or two demons in the closet that are unresolved."The relationship between Daisy and Lincoln will also be explored more -- meaning, yes, there will be "more kissing." "There definitely will be a little bit more romance," Mitchell said.The slow burn goes back to the theme that Agents of SHIELD has been exploring in Season 3 which, in Tancharoen's words, is "all of them trying to maintain their humanity in a world full of these Inhumans.""If we're just going to dive right into having all these people who can do this, that and the other, I don't think that would be fair to our theme," she said. "Now that there is starting to be an awareness in the world about the presence of Inhumans, what we're doing there is just a metaphor for anything different in our society, obviously."Previewing what's ahead in Season 3, Tancharoen continued, "There might be a righteous quality to Daisy's perspective that develops, only because she is defending her people. Also, she's a person with powers. We're also going to dive into that, what it means to have power. What does that mean? Is there an element of hubris to that? And also just what does power mean to all the people involved, from our good guy side to our bad guy side?"

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD returns in March to ABC after Agent Carter ends its Season 2 run.Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN. Follow her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz