Organisations

A team assembled by one man out of people who were never going to agree, which spends most of its existence arguing about whether it should exist.

Nick Fury created the Avengers Initiative in 1995 after meeting somebody who could fly through a spaceship, and spent seventeen years quietly building a list before he had a reason to use it. The team is a United States organisation with no charter, no oversight and no legal standing, which is the argument that eventually splits it.

What it actually does is get assembled and disassembled. It forms in 2012 for a single afternoon, reforms with a different roster, breaks over the Sokovia Accords, exists as two illegal halves for two years, comes back for one day, and is formally restarted years later under somebody else’s leadership.

The roster below is who this catalogue has entries for, not everybody who has ever been on it.

The agency that watches for the threats no ordinary government is equipped to see, and that turned out to have been hollow for seventy years.

For the first four years of this story S.H.I.E.L.D. is the infrastructure. It has the aircraft, the files, the budget and the confidence to walk into anybody’s laboratory, and every character here is either working for it, being watched by it, or being recruited by it.

Then Captain America: The Winter Soldier takes it apart, and not by defeating it. It reveals that Hydra never went away after the war and simply grew inside the organisation built to prevent exactly that, which means every good thing the agency did was also cover.

It has never really come back. What replaces it is a series of smaller, stranger bodies, and a director who fakes his own death and keeps working.

A terrorist organisation that began inside the Nazi war machine and survived by growing inside the agency built to destroy it.

Hydra starts as the science division of the Third Reich, led by a man who took an early and imperfect version of the super soldier serum. The war ends, the organisation does not, and the arrangement that lets it continue is that the people hunting Nazi scientists were also recruiting them.

The two people in this catalogue attached to it were not recruits in any ordinary sense. One was captured, wiped and used as a weapon for seventy years. The other volunteered, along with her brother, because they wanted something badly enough to survive an experiment.

Its motto, cut off one head and two more take its place, describes both its structure and the reason it cannot be beaten by winning a fight.

Five criminals who met in a prison and stayed together, which is the only origin story in this catalogue that nobody planned.

They are assembled by circumstance rather than by anybody’s initiative: a thief, an assassin, a bounty hunter, his tree, and a man whose family was murdered. Every one of them is trying to leave for the first half of the film they meet in.

What distinguishes them from every other team here is that the group is the point. The Avengers exist to answer threats. The Guardians exist because none of them has anywhere else, and the plots are mostly a pretext for putting that under pressure.

Thor is on the roster below because he joins them for a while, which is a sentence that would have made no sense in 2014.

A criminal organisation founded a thousand years ago by an immortal warlord, which spent three films being somebody else's cover story.

The Ten Rings are in the very first film. The people who take Tony Stark hostage in Afghanistan work for them, and their name is said out loud. Then they appear again, and again, and in Iron Man 3 it turns out somebody has been borrowing the organisation’s reputation to run a completely different scheme.

Thirteen years after their first appearance, a film finally explains what they actually are: a thousand-year-old organisation founded by Xu Wenwu, named after the mystical rings that made him immortal.

It is the longest setup in this catalogue and almost certainly not one that anybody planned in 2008.

A bureaucracy that exists outside time and deletes any version of history that does not match the one it protects.

The TVA monitors the timeline, identifies anything that has diverged from the approved version, and prunes it, which is a clerical word for an act of erasure on a scale nothing else in this catalogue attempts.

What makes it work as an idea is the tone. It is not a fortress. It is an office, with forms, queues, an orientation video and staff who have been doing this so long that nobody remembers why. The most frightening organisation in this material has a reception desk.

It is also the mechanism by which the multiverse arrives. Everything from Phase Four onward passes through what happens to this agency.

Wakanda's royal guard, sworn to the throne rather than to whoever is sitting on it, and the best soldiers in this catalogue without an enhancement between them.

They are the special forces of a country that has spent centuries pretending to have none, and they are recruited from every tribe, which is part of how the throne holds a federation together.

The interesting thing about them is constitutional. Their oath is to the crown, and the films put that under the worst possible pressure: when the throne is won legitimately by a man they know is wrong, the oath does not have an exception. What the general does about that is the most difficult decision anybody makes in Black Panther.

A programme that took girls, trained them as assassins under the cover of a ballet academy, and sterilised them on graduation.

It is described rather than shown for most of a decade. Natasha Romanoff refers to a ledger written in red, and to a graduation ceremony, long before any film puts the place on screen.

When one finally does, the detail that lands is not the training. It is the administration: false families placed in suburban America for years, chemical control that removes the possibility of refusing, and a man running it who has never once been in danger.

Two people in this catalogue came out of it. One escaped and spent her life paying for what she did inside. The other went back for everybody still there.

An order that has been defending the planet from things nobody else can see, out of three buildings, without telling anyone.

They are a discipline rather than an agency: a hierarchy with its own libraries, its own three-century arguments about what is permitted, and a standing responsibility that predates every other organisation here by a long way. Three Sanctums, in New York, London and Hong Kong, hold a barrier that nothing in the films had thought to ask about.

Their weakness is the one the story keeps using. The order is small, its knowledge is written down in a finite number of books, and a sufficiently motivated reader can get most of the way to catastrophe in an afternoon.

An arms manufacturer inherited by a twenty-one-year-old, run brilliantly for two decades, and then shut down in the middle of a press conference.

Howard Stark built it and shaped a century with it. His son inherited it at twenty-one and ran it the way a prodigy runs anything handed to him: extremely well, and without ever asking whether it should exist.

The decision that starts this entire story is a business decision. Tony Stark cancels the weapons division, live, without telling the board, and the film that follows is about the consequences of a company changing what it makes.

It is the only organisation in this catalogue whose most important act was to stop doing the thing it was for.

Four people from the same city who spent their own series avoiding each other, put in one building for eight episodes.

It is not an organisation so much as an occasion. A blind lawyer, a private investigator, a bulletproof man and a billionaire who says he is a living weapon all arrive at the same conspiracy from four directions, and the miniseries is mostly about how badly they get on.

The name is used once, as a joke, by somebody who is not in it.

It is also the closest the Marvel Television era came to its own crossover, and watching it requires all four of the series before it, which is a demand the films rarely make.

A school for people who were born different, run by a man who believes they can be tolerated, in a world that keeps proving him optimistic.

They existed on screen before any of this. The first X-Men film arrived in 2000, eight years before Iron Man, and established most of what a modern comic book film looks like while doing it.

The team is a school first. Charles Xavier takes in children whose abilities have arrived without warning, teaches them to control what they can do, and argues in public for a coexistence that his oldest friend has concluded is impossible. Every film in the series is that argument with different people standing in for each side.

They belong to a different universe from the rest of this catalogue, made by a different studio under a separate licence, which is a production fact that shaped twenty years of both.