I am so happy that Marvel values Clark Gregg and Agent Coulson as much as his fans do. People in the Coulson Lives movement simply refused to believe that our favorite agent was going to stay dead, and eventually our delusional devotion was rewarded. This turned out much better than the time 7-year-old Xeno wrote to the president of NBC begging him not to cancel Star Trek. My faith in humanity (and studio chiefs) is finally restored.
The explanation for Coulson's survival should be something dark and dangerous that remains a mystery for most of the first season. Given that this is the Marvel Universe we're talking about, there are an infinite number of ways it could be handled. Maybe Fury had SHIELD's medical staff conduct dangerous, highly unethical experiments on Coulson's body after he died. The Super Soldier serum is still being kicked around, Extremis is an outside possibility, nanotechnology has been broached in the MCU, etc. Even the reality-warping properties of the Tesseract could be an explanation. But whatever they choose as a mechanism for resurrecting Phil, I do hope that he was actually dead for a time. That would give the character an edginess, while also (possibly) shutting down the people whinging on about his survival somehow cheapening death.
