The post credit reveal of Nick Fury in the first Iron Man film was an incredibly popular addition to the film and very neatly laid the groundwork for the Marvel films to spin off in the many directions they have now gone in.

Marvel have continued the trend with a number of post-credit scenes, which either tease future developments or, as was the case with Iron Man 3, feature a nice little gag relating to the film.

Last week's Agents of SHIELD featured an end tag that recalled the one in Iron Man that started it all and many people have speculated about whether these end tags will be something that continue in the series.

Agents of SHIELD writer Jeffrey Bell was interviewed at Comic Book Resources, ahead of the premiere of The Asset last night, and he addressed these end tags,

Part of our storytelling on this show is going to be a tag every week. We need people to know about that. The show ends, the S.H.I.E.L.D. eagle comes up, there are nine hours of commercials because it's TV, and then before we go to the next show, we're almost always going to have another minute, minute and a half of something, and those will be different from week to week. One of the things we want people to know is, "Stick around for the tag." Having a special one like we did early is also to tell you, "Pay attention to that." I know when "Iron Man" did that after all the credits, a lot of the people left and didn't know they should have stayed. Now you watch a Marvel movie, and everybody stays until the end. We're going to be doing that, and we want people to know. Sometimes it'll be funny, sometimes it'll be a mythology thing, sometimes it'll be a self-contained thing, or an extra little reveal about something that was in the episode.

Although Bell takes a bit of a swipe at the commercials that you need to sit through in order to watch the end tag I can't help but feel that this is a shrewd business move as much as it is anything to do with the storytelling.

But I, of course, sat through the aforementioned commercials to see the tag at the end of The Asset and it was reasonably effective at leaving a question mark hanging at the end of the episode and intriguing me about the future.