Phil Coulson

Special Agent Phil Coulson, born July 8, 1964, is an American man and one of the top agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Earth-199999. Before the Battle of New York, he was frequently on the ground dealing with notable events and threats pertinent to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s interests, which in practical terms often led to him being the first (or, behind Director Nick Fury, second) introduction to S.H.I.E.L.D. for various new superheroes, including Iron Man and Thor. Following his apparent death at the hands of Loki in 2012, the very fact of Coulson's continued existence is highly confidential, and he leads a team of agents and scientists devoted to carrying out S.H.I.E.L.D.'s interests in the field.

Biography

Avenger Initiative

In 2008, S.H.I.E.L.D. radars detected Tony Stark in a technologically remarkable weaponized suit in Afghanistan. Coulson was sent to California in an attempt to meet with Stark and discuss things with him; it was believed that Stark had potential value for S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Avenger Initiative, a planned grouping of superheroes designed to defend America's interests. Coulson spoke with Stark's assistant Pepper Potts multiple times, but the two didn't speak at length until after Stark—wearing an updated version of the suit, which the press dubbed "Iron Man"—defeated Obadiah Stane in combat. With help from Stark Industries' military liaison James Rhodes, Coulson gave Stark a tour of a local S.H.I.E.L.D. facility and introduced Stark to their operation, particularly their quiet omnipresence in America's global affairs. He explained that an alibi had been made for him to explain that he was not "Iron Man," and that S.H.I.E.L.D. would essentially support his young superhero career as long as he supported them back when the time came. Much to Coulson's dismay, Stark would go on to admit publicly that he was Iron Man at a press conference the following day.

Shortly after Stark's press conference, Coulson was assigned to breaking in a new agent by the name of Hendricks. Like all new recruits, Hendricks was inducted rather ignobly, meeting Coulson in a back alley for a supposed surveillance op. This was a ruse from the start, as in fact Coulson led Hendricks to a faux sighting of the Ten Rings, where a gunfight broke out. Hendricks performed well, and Coulson revealed to him that it was merely a test, welcoming him to S.H.I.E.L.D. Coulson was later assigned to watch over Tony Stark at his home as he recovered from a series of misfortunes; in particular, S.H.I.E.L.D. was hoping to push him along toward curing the palladium poisoning inherent to the arc reactor in his chest. Effectively under house arrest, Stark ended up synthesizing a new element to solve the problem; seeing that he was progressing nicely, Coulson moved on to his next assignment in New Mexico, where a strange object had landed in the desert outside Puente Antiguo. On his way, Coulson stopped at a convenience store, where he witnessed and stopped an armed robbery, telling the clerk to tell the police that she had handled it instead.

Arriving at the crash site, Coulson found a large hammer—Mjölnir—embedded in the desert, surrounded by locals attempting and failing to pull it out of the sand. He soon had a S.H.I.E.L.D. installation set up around the hammer, studying it for any possible answers. Special S.H.I.E.L.D. operative Hawkeye was kept on hand at the installation in the event of any surprises. Beyond the fact that it gave off a severe electromagnetic reaction, little information on the hammer was forthcoming. Coulson went to Jane Foster, a scientist who had been studying atmospheric disturbances in the area, and confiscated her research for S.H.I.E.L.D., much to her dismay. Soon after, the installation around Mjölnir was invaded by a muscular man who easily powered his way through many of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s guards. Hawkeye was prepared to take him down, but Coulson held him off, intrigued by the man's power. The man was Asgardian hero Thor, eager to retrieve his hammer; but when he arrived at the center of the installation, he too found Mjölnir unmovable. Thor was taken into custody and interrogated personally by Coulson, who assumed he was an international mercenary. Coulson was soon approached by Erik Selvig, a scientist who claimed that the man they'd captured was "Donald Blake," a brilliant but deranged colleague of his. Coulson released Thor, seemingly not believing Selvig's claim but interested in where this thread might lead, and ordered an agent to track them.

Analysts at the S.H.I.E.L.D. installation soon noticed an atmospheric disturbance nearby similar to the one that had brought the hammer there. Coulson and other agents made their way to the area in question, where four more Asgardians had arrived to return Thor home. Unfortunately, they were soon followed by the Destroyer, a towering automaton sent to kill Thor and anything else in its way; Coulson initially mistook it for possibly another one of Tony Stark's creations. Thor was struck by the Destroyer's large hand, nearly killing him—but at the critical moment, Mjölnir suddenly flew into his hand, granting him remarkable powers, including the control of lightning and thunder. Thor easily defeated the Destroyer, solidfying his true nature to all. Coulson was eager to make an alliance with him, and Thor agreed on the condition that Foster's research be returned to her. Coulson agreed, seemingly having all the information he needed now.

Shortly afterward, Coulson received word from the higher-ups at S.H.I.E.L.D. that they were interested in Emil Blonsky, known as the Abomination, for the Avenger Initiative. Coulson and Nick Fury were in agreement that this was a disastrous choice, but could do little to argue with their superiors. Blonsky would have to be retrieved by speaking with Thunderbolt Ross, who was responsible for his custody. Coulson pondered this problem in a diner with Jasper Sitwell, and the two decided to sabotage the negotiations by sending in someone Ross could never cooperate with: namely, Tony Stark, who had recently signed on as a consultant for the Initiative.

Loki's invasion

By May of 2012, S.H.I.E.L.D. had employed Erik Selvig to study the Tesseract and its potential effects in a secret underground facility. Selvig had been secretly and remotely influenced by Loki and his Mind Stone, allowing Loki to invade the base through a portal created by the Tesseract. Loki took Selvig and Hawkeye under his thrall, escaping the base with the Tesseract in tow. Nick Fury rushed to finally organize a team of Avengers, and Coulson was assigned to at last recruit Iron Man. Stark was snarky and standoffish as usual, but joined the team after recognizing the situation's dire state (and some prodding from Pepper Potts). Also in the Avengers would be Bruce Banner, Black Widow, Thor, and the recently resuscitated Captain America—Hawkeye joined the team after being jostled out of Loki's mind control. Coulson was elated to meet Captain America, having idolized him since his youth. The Avengers soon took Loki prisoner on the Helicarrier, but he escaped and stabbed and killed Coulson with his scepter on his way out. Coulson's death proved a motivating factor in the Avengers' teamship, and they went on to defeat Loki and repel his Chitauri invasion in the Battle of New York.

Level 7

Main article: Coulson's team

Under mysterious circumstances, Coulson was brought back to life and continued working for S.H.I.E.L.D. Coulson was of the understanding that Nick Fury had faked his death in order to motivate the Avengers, and Coulson had then spent some time relaxing in Tahiti. By September 2013, a hacktivist group known as Rising Tide had gotten onto S.H.I.E.L.D.'s radar by exposing sensitive information related to superheroes and the like, particularly a man who had recently displayed superpowers saving a woman from an exploded building in Los Angeles. Coulson formed a team to investigate Rising Tide and get closer to the new "superhero." He recruited Grant Ward, scientists Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons (collectively Fitz-Simmons), and legendary spy Melinda May to pilot their aerial mobile command unit known as the Bus. S.H.I.E.L.D. soon acquired locational data relating to Rising Tide, and the team followed the data to a van in an alley in Los Angeles containing a woman named Skye. Ward and Coulson soon earned her trust, learning of the mysterious Project Centipede and the name of the L.A. hero, Michael Peterson. The team discovered that Peterson had been injected with an amalgam of bizarre substances that had granted him superpowers. They eventually tracked him down and cured him, preventing an eventual explosion caused by the Extremis in his system. Skye joined the team full-time as a consultant, much to the dismay of Ward and May. The team handled the case of a Hydra weapon in Peru, which Commandante Camilla Reyes planned to use to regain control of her country. They then followed the case of Dr. Franklin Hall, who had arranged his own abduction at the hands of his former colleague Ian Quinn in order to use the latter's supply of gravitonium to destroy him. Coulson ended up knocking Hall into the gravitonium, seemingly atomizing him, and seizing and safely storing the gravitonium in the Fridge. Investigating a series of diamond heists led to chasing the trail of Akela Amador, a former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent believed dead, who was being extorted through a camera and a "kill-switch" in her eye to perform various crimes on behalf of an unknown party. The team took her in and removed the eye in question, tracking down her "handler," who turned out to be under external control himself and died immediately after being discovered. In the process, Ward used a special pair of glasses to play at Amador's latest mission, discovering a cryptic set of glyphs in a Minsk research building.

The team learned of the disappearance of Chan Ho Yin, a Hong Kong street performer with the power of pyrokinesis whom S.H.I.E.L.D. had been observing for several years. He had been abducted by Project Centipede, who'd gained information on his whereabouts through Rising Tide's Miles Lydon, Skye's boyfriend. Skye put her partner ahead of S.H.I.E.L.D. interests, warning him that they were after him. However, she quickly turned on him upon learning that he had sold the information to Centipede, going against Rising Tide's credo of information freedom. Coulson and May raided the Centipede lab in Hong Kong where Chan was being held, but he had already been compromised, becoming more aggressive and powerful as Mike Peterson had. Centipede had extracted heat-resistant platelets from his blood in order to mitigate the combustive effects of Extremis in their serum. Coulson attempted to tranquilize Chan—who was now calling himself "Scorch"—but was unsuccessful. May killed Chan with a significant overdose of Extremis, causing him to violently explode as the team escaped. Lydon, a resident of Austin, Texas, was equipped with a monitoring bracelet and dropped in Hong Kong. Skye was severely apologetic to Coulson, and revealed to him that her reason for being with Rising Tide in the first place was to find information on her parents. Nonetheless, she was also equipped with a monitoring bracelet. After a series of bizarre electrostatic deaths, the team discovered that a group of firefighters who had responded at the Battle of New York had contracted an alien virus from a Chitauri helmet. Simmons contracted the virus from one of their bodies, and she and Fitz synthesized a cure, perilously close to her impending death.

Ward and Fitz were sent on a classified mission to disable the dangerous Overkill Device in a separatist stronghold in South Ossetia while the rest of the team waited at the Hub. Skye and Simmons hacked into the system and learned that there was no extraction plan in place for the agents—that they were simply going to be left to die. Coulson was frustrated at not knowing of this, and worked with the rest of the team to extract Ward and Fitz themselves after the mission was successful. Coulson later attempted to call in a request for the file relating to his death, but found it restricted, despite his level 8 access. The team then tracked down three pieces of the legendary Asgardian Berserker Staff with the help of secret Asgardian Elliot Randolph, combating a Norse paganist hate group fronted by Jakob Nystrom and Petra Larsen along the way. Handling the Staff, Ward and May were both confronted by dark memories from their past; Ward took it harder than May, as his memory—watching a boy drown in a well while his brother told him not to help—was more repressed than hers. Skye comforted Ward as he was confronted with this trauma, but Ward seemed to find more solace in being with May. After the mission, Coulson woke up from sleep in a cold sweat, discomfited by memories of Tahiti.

The team received word of an alleged telekinetic named Hannah Hutchins in Batesville, Utah, who was being blamed by those in the town for a recent particle-accelerator disaster that killed four technicians. The remorseful and distraught Hutchins was taken onto the Bus, and denied being at all responsible for anything. The Bus lost all power and the team were attacked by a "ghost:" Tobias Ford, one of the men who'd died in the disaster. The team eventually learned that Ford was himself responsible for the disaster: he had loosened some bolts in the accelerator in order to get the attention of Hutchins, a quality-control engineer. As a result of the explosion, he was caught between worlds, and he believed that the other world was Hell. He was attempting to protect Hutchins by attacking the agents. Melinda May talked him down, convincing him to "let the girl go" and causing him to fade away in peace, ostensibly to Hell.

Soon a man named Edison Po was quickly and efficiently broken out of prison by a group of soldiers equipped with Centipede devices. S.H.I.E.L.D. gave the team backup in following up on this lead on Centipede: Michael Peterson, who had been training to be an agent since his near-death experience months earlier. Observing footage from Po's one and only visit in prison, Peterson helped identify the woman speaking to him: Raina, who had originally recruited him into Centipede. Eventually, as S.H.I.E.L.D. chased down Centipede's operations largely in vain, Raina got hold of Michael's son Ace. She privately offered Michael to hand over Coulson for his son, and had Michael present the plan to S.H.I.E.L.D. as trading himself for his son instead. The deal went down on an abandoned bridge, as Coulson and Peterson met with Raina and Centipede soldiers while the rest of the team observed, with technology disallowed. The truth soon came out, and Coulson gave himself peacefully to S.H.I.E.L.D. control as Michael took Ace back to the team. He handed him over to Skye and ran after Coulson, but was caught in an abrupt and large tanker explosion, seemingly killing him. Centipede took Coulson away by helicopter, interested in his past resurrection. S.H.I.E.L.D. spent the next six days following Centipede's trail and searching for Coulson. Victoria Hand took temporary control of the Bus, and quickly removed Skye from the mission, believing her to be of no use. Skye continued investigating on the ground, following bank trails and her instincts to track down Centipede. S.H.I.E.L.D. took known criminal and Centipede associate Vanchat into custody, and he eventually gave up general locations for his buyers. Skye and S.H.I.E.L.D. narrowed the location down to somewhere in the Mojave Desert, albeit in different exact places. Coulson's team showed their faith in Skye and followed her to a dusty, abandoned town where Coulson was being held by Raina. Inside, Raina had hooked Coulson up to a machine that would aggravate parts of his brain, allowing him to recall repressed memories. He remembered the truth behind his resurrection: he'd in fact been dead for days, and had gone through a series of heinous surgeries to revive him, during which he screamed for death. The team arrived, rescued Coulson, and took Raina into custody. Coulson later confronted Dr. Streiten, who'd participated in the surgery. He was profusely apologetic, and told Coulson that Nick Fury had personally ordered his resurrection at great expense.

After a pair of cadets at S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy nearly died when a pool they were swimming in suddenly froze, the team sans Coulson and May went to investigate. They eventually learned that Seth Dormer and Donnie Gill had developed a kind of "ice bomb" and staged attacks with it on themselves in order to get Agent Fitz there and get him to unwittingly improve the device, with the intent of selling the technology to Ian Quinn. Dormer had primary agency in the operation, manipulating the introverted, isolated Gill. They activated the newly powered device as a demonstration to Quinn (who was elsewhere), causing a remarkably powerful hailstorm. Gill convinced Dormer to try to power the device down, but it violently reacted, knocking Dormer back with an explosion and killing him—the blast also harmed Gill, latently imbuing him with its ice powers. The team dropped the Bus in the eye of the storm, recovering Dormer, Gill, and the device; they failed to revive Dormer, and took Gill into custody, transferring him to the Sandbox for investigation. As much of this was happening, Coulson and May quietly investigated Skye's past, learning that she had been recovered as a mysterious 0-8-4 as a baby, and had essentially spent her entire life being transferred by S.H.I.E.L.D. between foster families to protect her. Newly disinclined to keep secrets, Coulson told Skye the full story of her origin, and apologized for having kept anything from her. Later, Coulson contacted and threatened Quinn, who replied by mockingly informing him that he was with Centipede.