'Agents of SHIELD' Season 4: What We Know About Ghost Rider's MCU Début

After a lot of speculation, last weekend during Comic-Con Marvel Studios finally confirmed rumors that Ghost Rider would be joining Season 4 of Agents of SHIELD, bringing one of the most iconic characters from their comics to the small screen -- but why did they decide this was the perfect time to bring Robbie Reyes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

According to io9 Gizmodo, the idea to bring Ghost Rider to AoS at this point came, in a big part, because of the big change that's happening in the MCU as a whole later this year: with the release of the Doctor Strange movie this fall, it will be established that magic exists in this universe, giving a larger scope to something like a spirit of vengeance.

As for why the character would be introduced through the latest iteration of Ghost Rider, Robbie Reyes, instead of the classic characters like Johnny Blaze or Danny Ketch, the first two to take up the mantle -- part of the reason for this was to bring a more diverse element to the show, as Robbie's a Mexican-American character, but the main reason was pretty different: the character's relationship with his brother, Gabe.

"In its inception, S.H.I.E.L.D. has always been about finding the new, the weird, the unexplainable, and having gone through the last couple seasons and finding out about the Inhumans," said Jeph Loeb, the head of Marvel Television, via Comic Book Movie. "The Marvel catalogue is filled with all kinds of really interesting, new and often weird things. And so we hit on Ghost Rider and in particular with the character of Robbie Reyes, because our show really at the end of the day hinges on the idea of family and how that works in the world. Robbie and his relationship with Gabe and his relationship with the Ghost Rider are all really interesting things for our S.H.I.E.L.D. folks to encounter, possibly even in negative ways."

Family has been a recurring theme throughout all three seasons of Agents of SHIELD, particularly for Daisy Johnson, formerly known as Skye and played by Chloe Bennet. The character grew up an orphan and, while working in SHIELD, found out she was actually the daughter of an Inhuman mother and a human father, as well as an Inhuman herself.

Even after finding her real parents, a major theme in Daisy's story has been her perpetual search for family figures in her life, most recently through supervillain Hive (Brett Dalton) by the end of Season 3.

Agents of SHIELD will return to ABC on Sept. 20.