Clark Gregg wears an Omega Speedmaster

Phil Coulson is the man Marvel keeps killing off and bringing back. Clark Gregg played him in the Marvel movies and then across seven seasons of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013 to 2020), the unpowered handler at the center of a show full of people who can level a city block. On his wrist for most of it is a chronograph that reads, at a glance, as an Omega Speedmaster: a tachymetre bezel and three subdials, the layout of the watch that went to the Moon.

Whether it is actually an Omega is a harder question than the show lets on. Watch writers who catalog movie watches tend to file Coulson's under Speedmaster, and on camera it carries the part. But when Propstore auctioned his Season 2 finale costume, lot 936, the blazer still tagged 'Coulson Hero' by the wardrobe department, the watch in the lot was no Swiss chronograph. The house described it flatly: a production-made, nonfunctional silver-color metal watch, the sort of dummy a costume shop builds to read right on camera and do nothing else. Forum threads trying to identify it had reached the same place, noting the subdials sat wrong for a real Moonwatch.

So the one human in a room full of gods wears the watch that outranks all of them, and the example that survived the production cannot keep time. The Speedmaster is the instrument NASA qualified to run in space and astronauts wore on the lunar surface. Coulson's, by the auctioneer's own account, does not run.