Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. will integrate a third story arc into this season

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. returns from its mid-season layover this week with a brand new story arc. The Life Model Decoy or LMD, story line follows up on the end of the Ghost Rider in the mid-season finale. That's not all we are going to get, however.

Jed Whedon revealed at the TCA Winter Press tour that a third arc will follow up LMD at the end of this season. He wasn't ready to reveal exactly what it would be, of course, but states it's something that they've wanted to do for a long time.

“This year there’s three [story arcs], It’s based on our schedule of how we’re airing. We like to run continuous, if that [is] possible, so this next [LMD] chunk will be a section and then we’ll be off for a while and there’ll be a third part. It’s something we wanted to do for a long time, When you start a show called Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. you’re pretty sure you’re going to do it at some point but we always have to steer away from stuff that’s coming up in the movies and there was going to be some robots in some of those big movies, so we steered away from it initially but we always had it in our minds. We felt that we had a lot of good Inhumans stuff to do last year so it seemed like the right time.”

Ghost Rider is currently trapped in some alternate dimension after battling his evil uncle Eli Morrow and robot/LMD AIDA is the focus of the returning season. After kidnapping Agent May and creating a robot version of her own, AIDA seems to have become self-aware. An online mini-series also released showing the backstory of Yo-Yo, aka Agent Rodriguez.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. returns to tonight, January 10th on ABC at 10 PM est. The show's second episode, airing on the 17th, also has hopes for Director Mace as it is subtitled The Patriot, which is his comic book name as well. Lots of action to look forward to in completing this season, and we'll let you know as we hear more.