It's hard to believe it's been ten years since a black Dodge Charger pulled up on ABC and a flaming skull showed up on network television on a Tuesday night. Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. opened its 4th season on September 20th, 2016, and I don't think I had ever been so excited for an episode of it.
Season 4 is the one people are still arguing about, and it still hasn't been settled after a decade.
Gabriel Luna played Robbie Reyes, the first live-action Ghost Rider since Nicolas Cage's two films, and the first live-action Robbie Reyes anywhere. He showed up in the premiere, "The Ghost," and the show gave him the whole first stretch of the year.
I don't think anyone at ABC knew what they had…
Then, after eight episodes, they let him go.
Robbie's exit came in "The Laws Of Inferno Dynamics" on December 6th, 2016. He trapped his uncle Eli Morrow inside the quantum battery Morrow built to stop it going off over Los Angeles, then refused the chain Coulson threw him and rode through the portal with Eli instead. The show leaves the door open when Coulson gets a line afterward sharing that he knew of a previous Ghost Rider who got out. Luna came back for the last two episodes, "The Return" and "World's End," for ten Robbie Reyes episodes in total.
Ten episodes for a character that fans have wanted back for a decade!
Season 4 split its 22 episodes into three chunks, and each one ran as its own short series with its own title card.
Ghost Rider ran episodes 1 through 8, September to December 2016. LMD took 9 through 15 in early 2017, built around Mallory Jansen as Aida. Agents Of Hydra closed it out with 16 through 22, from April to May.
That last stretch is the one I would recommend to anyone who isn't familiar with the show. Aida builds a virtual world where Hydra won and rewrites the whole team inside it. Daisy is a Hydra agent. Simmons is dead. Fitz is rich and awful. Brett Dalton's Ward is back because here he never turned.
The third stretch opens on an episode called "What If...", four years before Disney+ gave that title to the animated series. Both come from the 1977 Marvel comic of the same name.
Aida's endgame was a machine called "Project Looking Glass" to build herself a real body and walk her Madame Hydra persona out of the simulation. For a show people had written off two seasons earlier, that's a LOT of ambition!
So why didn't anyone watch it?
The season 4 premiere drew 3.44 million viewers and a 1.1 in the 18-49 demo overnight. Live+3 pulled it to 5.55 million and a 2.0, because the audience was watching on their DVRs by then (remember when those were a thing?!). To put it into perspective, the 2013 pilot did 12.1 million and a 4.7.
One of the best-reviewed years of the show was the same year that barely a quarter of the original audience was still there.
ABC moved it to Fridays for season 5, a two-hour premiere at 8 on December 1st, 2017, settling into 9 the week after. Friday is where networks park shows they expect to be on their way out. The thing survived three more years in that slot and went out on a planned finale in 2020 with the ending it wanted, which is something most shows on television never get, regardless of how many people are watching.
Marvel sold the show on "It's All Connected," and that was the pitch back in 2013. The connections were real. They also only ever went one direction: the show reacted to the movies, and the movies never once acknowledged the show.
Kevin Feige was made Chief Creative Officer in October 2019, Jeph Loeb's exit from Marvel Television was reported the same month, and Marvel TV was folded into Marvel Studios that December. Luna's Ghost Rider series for Hulu, which Luna said was far enough along that scripts were being finalized and sets were going up, was cancelled on September 25th, 2019. Variety broke it, citing a source who described a creative impasse. Hulu never commented on that.
Season 7 aired in 2020, by which point the division that made it no longer existed.
In July 2021 director James Gunn said in a series of replies on Twitter that he didn't count the pre-WandaVision shows as part of the MCU, and Marvel Studios' official timeline book for Phases 1 through 4 left the series out. Coulson's resurrection, the thing the whole show was built on, isn't in it.
Marvel's position has changed since... Brad Winderbaum, Marvel Studios' head of streaming, television and animation, said in December 2024 it's "exciting for me to think about how to square those ABC shows with the canon," and later said he'd rewatched all seven seasons. Fans read the Cybertek reference in Daredevil: Born Again season 2 as Marvel nodding at it.
There was never an official answer regarding it being canon or not, and the cast has stopped tiptoeing around it. Chloe Bennet said at Dragon Con in September 2025 that "we are not considered canon," while figuring the show makes "some weird random comeback" eventually.
Marvel has never issued an official statement either way.
Gabriel Luna plays Tommy Miller on HBO's The Last Of Us, where he went series regular for season 2 in April 2025, and he told us last October he'd come back as Ghost Rider. Clark Gregg turned up in Netflix's Zero Day, and Ming-Na Wen still has Fennec Shand.
As for a revival, it's so far been only rumors... Popverse reported in November 2024 that Marvel Comics editor-in-chief C.B. Cebulski told Osaka Comic Con there were no plans to continue it just yet, and anything you've seen since about S.H.I.E.L.D. characters turning up in VisionQuest is fan speculation.
What season 4 had going for it was a writers' room with very little left to lose, and it spent that on a Ghost Rider, a robot-duplicate arc and seven episodes inside a simulation where the heroes had already lost.
Ten years later I still think Luna's Ghost Rider is one of the best things Marvel TV put on screen, and I'd take him over most of what's been on Disney+ since.
What did you think of Robbie Reyes? Which was your favorite season?
Sound off in the comments!
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