Season 4's fall finale of Agents of SHIELD “The Laws of Inferno Dynamics,” concluded with a surprise ending that sets up the show’s next major arc.

IGN visited the set of Agents of SHIELD along with a group of press and spoke with executive producers Jeff Bell and Jed Whedon about what to expect when the series returns in January.Also, make sure to check out our review of "The Laws of Inferno Dynamics." Warning: this article contains full spoilers for tonight’s episode!

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With the twist that Aida the LMD has killed a SHIELD agent, kidnapped May, and replaced the real May with an LMD, Season 4 will enter the second of its three planned story arcs. The new arc, appropriately subtitled “LMD”, will pit Agent Coulson and company against Aida and the threat that LMDs pose. Check out the official key art for "LMD" below:“Reality and identity and trust is always an issue in a spy organization, and it's much worse when you don't know if the person next to you is the person next to you,” said Whedon on the unique danger created by LMDs who can look like anyone. “So you know, obviously we want to not just tell stories of scary stories of things popping out of closets but emotional stories and when you get into trust that's when things get emotional.”The threat of rogue AI will be familiar to Marvel fans thanks to Avengers: Age of Ultron, but Whedon points out that the show will go a much different route.“We said it at the beginning of the season that [LMDs] were mimicking human behavior. But Aida took some sort of leap and built a brain of her own and so the real difference is that they represent people that we know and it's not a big robot baddie, and there is some of that obviously, but right now we know that there's one among us who is someone we know," Whedon explained. "And how much they know and how much their agenda is mixed with their own emotions and those sort of questions are what we're going to dive into."Bell went on to explain how LMDs are “not omniscient, they don't have access to all knowledge and all information and all other machines the way Ultron and to a lesser extent Vision did. We're much more interested in the knowledge that that person has and how does this being deal with that.”“They also won't build ten thousand versions of themselves, mostly because we don't have 200 million dollars --” Whedon added with a smile “-- but also because emotions and telling these emotional stories.”The end of the episode showed the ever-romance-resistant May finally agreeing to get that drink with Coulson, and while some fans have shipped “Philinda” since the very beginning, this isn’t quite what they asked for given that May is actually an LMD.“I feel like for the actors and for the characters and for the fans we need to explore [a Coulson/May relationship] and so in some form or another, it'll be a thing,” Bell teased.

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