Can Agent Carter get along without Captain America? That’s a double-sided question, and the answers are: yes, and a slightly more qualified yes.
Yes, Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), British intelligence agent extraordinaire, can stand on her own two feet without the help of her super-paramour from “Captain America: The First Avenger.” That much is clear after the two-hour premiere of “Marvel’s Agent Carter” Tuesday on ABC, in which Peggy pursues a powerful stolen explosive, takes on a far-reaching evil organization AND the sexism of the 1940s, and stomps about a half-dozen (male) opponents in hand-to-hand combat in the process, but here in the real world, Marvel is implicitly trying to answer a version of the same question: Can the character of Agent Carter carry a TV series on her own – Marvel Studios’ first venture with a female hero – without Captain America or most of the superheroic trappings of the studio’s hugely successful movies? Thus far, that answer is also (mostly) yes – there’s room for improvement, but Atwell’s appealing presence makes the show work.
We pick up with Peggy in New York City, after the end of World War II. She’s ostensibly working for the phone company – remember when there was only one? – but is actually an agent for the Strategic Scientific Reserve, the intelligence agency that’s a precursor to S.H.I.E.L.D. in Marvel’s cinematic universe. Not that she gets to investigate cases or see any sort of action. Never mind her war record – her male boss and colleagues in that less-enlightened time see a woman as fit only for tasks like filing, answering phones and fetching coffee.
She’s trying to tough it out – she’s “more than capable of handling whatever these adolescents throw at me,” she tells a friend. But she’s frustrated, and pining hard for Captain America, who’s assumed to have died a hero’s death at the end of “The First Avenger.” Chris Evans’ Cap shows up so much in Peggy’s recollections, via photos and flashbacks to the movie, that “Agent Carter” should list him as a co-star. (Of course, anyone who’s seen the movie knows the Captain is just having a long nap in the Arctic ice, to be revived in the 2010s, but Peggy doesn’t know that.)
“During the war I had a sense of purpose, responsibility,” she says ruefully. “But now, I connect the calls, but I never get a chance to make them.”
She gets her chance to do something more when she’s approached by playboy-weaponeer Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), her old wartime colleague (and the father of Tony Stark, later to become Iron Man). Stark is being framed for selling his “bad babies” – weapons he’s created that are too dangerous for anyone to be allowed to use – to America’s enemies. In truth, the weapons were stolen from his vault, but the SSR is after him. He wants Peggy as his mole on the inside, to help find the thieves and clear his name.
“I know they’re not using you right,” Howard tells Peggy. “You want a mission that matters – this is it.”
Howard takes off in a speedboat on a mission of his own to hunt down his weapons, but he leaves Peggy with the help of his butler, Edwin Jarvis (James D’Arcy), as she tries to track down Stark’s formula for “nitramene,” an explosive that can take out a city block. The trail leads through a nightclub where Peggy goes undercover as a blonde bombshell, to an oil refinery that’s demolished by the explosive, to a dairy whose milk truck is being used to transport nitramene bombs, and into the wilds of New Jersey, as Peggy pursues her target – a mysterious man who’s apparently had his voice box removed, and who leaves a trail of bodies in his wake.
And apparently, as he tells her, this is much bigger than just the theft of a few weapons. “You’re not going to like the future, such as it is,” he says, speaking through an electronic device pressed to his throat. “Leviathan is coming.” Peggy ultimately takes down the voiceless thief, and the SHOW’s setup is clear: She’ll continue her pursuit of Leviathan, the series’ apparent big bad, and the theft of Howard Stark’s weapons, while trying to stay a step ahead of her SSR colleagues pursuing Stark, as well as battling sexism on the home front.
“Agent Carter” itself comments smartly on what Peggy has to cope with: At one point, the show juxtaposes her adventures with a fictionalized radio show-within-the-show about Captain America’s wartime exploits that portrays Peggy’s character as a stereotypical simpering girl-to-be-rescued. “Who writes this rubbish?” the “real” Peggy groans at one point while listening to the radio play.
Most of the action sequences are fairly standard-issue for TV, though the climax – a milk truck loaded with the nitramene explodes underwater, drenching Peggy and Jarvis – is inventive. And “Agent Carter” seems just a little too eager to keep proclaiming, “Hey, it’s the 40s!,” with its automats, fashions and big-band music.
But Atwell makes it work. You get a good sense of how Peggy is caught between longing for connection and wanting to prove she can make it on her own - so much so that she’d rather push away people than let anyone get close to her, out of fear she can’t keep them safe. (To be fair, she has ample reason to feel that way, between Captain America’s apparent death and the demise of her roommate, who’s killed the first time the voiceless man comes after her.)
“So your solution is to remove yourself from the world you wish to protect?” Jarvis asks. “What’s the sense in that?”
The best things about the SHOW thus far are how Atwell portrays that dilemma of Peggy’s, and her prickly relationship with the fussy, routine-bound Jarvis. (Jarvis: ”Shall I leave the engine running in case you trigger another implosion?” Peggy: ”Mr. Jarvis, go home to your wife. If you leave now, you may even catch the end of Benny Goodman.”) It’s refreshing for once to see the woman in a male-female relationship be the take-charge one and the man be more retiring, instead of the other way around. But fighting sexism and dealing with Jarvis may prove easier for Peggy than fending off the SSR. As Tuesday’s show ends, they’re drawing closer to discovering Peggy’s covert exploits – they’ve discovered a bumper that came off Jarvis’s car in the refinery explosion, and they know there’s a mole in their ranks. “Someone knows what we know before we know it, and it’s really starting to chap my ass,” Peggy’s boss gripes. So, will Peggy prevail over Leviathan on one hand and male chauvinism on the other? And is there a big audience for a period piece about a driven, assertive female spy, even one with the Marvel imprimatur?
Notes:
So what is Leviathan? The comic books may provide a clue: In Marvel’s comics universe, Leviathan was introduced a few years back as an evil organization akin to the Marvel movies’ Hydra, though Leviathan came out of the Communist-bloc countries instead of the Nazis’ Third Reich that produced Hydra. Leviathan waged battle against the “Secret Warriors,” a team of super-powered covert-ops agents led by S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Nick Fury. No indication yet if Leviathan in “Agent Carter” is intended to be the same group.
-Anton Vanko, the scientist who Peggy and Jarvis consult about the nitramene, is a callback to the Marvel movies’ “Iron Man 2″: Vanko was a Soviet scientist who worked with Howard Stark in developing some of the technology that Howard’s son Tony would later use as Iron Man, but after Vanko returned to the Soviet Union and became embittered, his son Ivan used the technology to become the villainous Whiplash.
-Appropriate that a show about a female spy should have two female show runners, Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas.
-Not surprising, perhaps, that “Agent Carter” should lean a little hard on Captain America at the start: Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who write the Captain America movies, wrote the first episode of “Agent Carter,” and Joe Russo, who co-directed “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” directed the second episode.
-Roxxon Oil, the company whose refinery was blown up when Peggy tries to recover the nitramene, has made only token appearances in the Marvel movies, but it’s a familiar name to comics readers – it’s been Marvel’s go-to Nefarious Corporation for decades. Chances are Peggy probably shouldn’t TRUST Roxxon, then. (Also a tipoff: the fact that Roxxon’s CEO is played by Ray Wise, who often shows up in villainous roles.)
-The “Agent Carter” short film on the DVD release of “Iron Man 3″ that inspired “Marvel’s Agent Carter” also started with Peggy at the SSR, beset by sexism – but it ended with Howard Stark lifting her out of there to help him start S.H.I.E.L.D. So does that short take place subsequent to the TV series? TBD.
What did you think? What was that not-quite-a-heart symbol that No-Voice was scrawling in the dust before he died? What other weapons stolen from Stark are out there, and what is the “one thing” Leviathan wants? What is Stark and Jarvis’s hidden plan for Peggy, as suggested by Jarvis’s remark that Peggy was “an excellent choice – I don’t think she’ll have any suspicion at all”?