The first season of Agent Carter wrapped up in February, and already fans are begging for a second season. In case you don’t remember, Agent Peggy Carter was Captain America’s love interest in Captain America: The First Avenger. This winter, Marvel created a spin-off series that centers around Carter and the aftermath of WWII. Carter works for the Strategic Scientific Reserve, which is somewhat of a precursor to S.H.I.E.L.D., the organization that is featured heavily in other Marvel works such as Thor, The Avengers, and the show Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Although she is a talented and capable agent, as demonstrated in Captain America, Carter is still subjected to the misogyny and prejudice towards women that characterized 1950’s attitudes towards gender and appropriate gender roles.
On top of all that, Howard Stark (Tony Stark’s dad, also featured in Captain America) developed some pretty intense weapons after WWII that were stolen from him at the beginning of the series. The US government suspects that he actually sold his weapons to the Russians, so Stark asks Carter to go undercover to clear his name. Later, it becomes clear that the group targeting Stark is called Leviathan. So Carter is trying to get over Captain America’s death, deal with bigoted male coworkers, and attempting to clear the name of a friend whom the government thinks is a traitor. It’s a lot to handle, but Carter is sassy, classy, and kick-ass-y through it all. You will love her not because she’s like typical Mary-Sue female heroines, but because she embraces everything about her without letting anything define her.
The most striking thing about Carter is how well she balances her emotions and intelligence. It is clear that she is a very, very intelligent person. She displays deep understanding of psychology, chemistry, physics, and is also a skilled spy. However, she is also compassionate. When her roommate is killed by a Leviathan assassin, Carter mourns. She feels responsible for endangering the people around her and tries her best to distance herself from people who want to be close to her. Having experienced WWII, she knows how easy it is for large numbers of people to be killed at once. However, she doesn’t believe in sacrificing one for the sake of many if it can be avoided. When Howard Stark is hypnotized into deploying a toxic gas over Manhattan, Peggy does her utmost to bring him out of his trance, and shooting him out of the sky is her absolute last option.
Sometimes, she lets her emotions get the best of her. Her frustration towards her colleagues and desire for the credit she deserves causes her to make a hasty decision that eventually costs one of her colleagues his life. She later takes full responsibility for that mistake. Peggy Carter’s foil throughout the series is Dottie Underwood, a Leviathan assassin who has lost her humanity as a result of her childhood training. Dottie is a callous killer whose only emotions seem to be anger, fear, and pleasure in others’ suffering. Carter is the opposite; she saves humanity while retaining her own. The interesting thing is that Peggy’s emotions and the role they play in the series are not there because she is a woman but because she is a compassionate, mature human being. Although her colleagues mock her for showing her emotional side, the reality is that they are less mature and balanced than she is. They are weaker because they refuse to acknowledge their own pride, uncertainty, guilt, and anxiety, which is why Peggy is able to run circles around them.
Lesson: Listen to what your emotions are telling you, but make judgments with your head. Embrace what makes you human, because rejecting it will turn you into a monster.
Peggy thinks outside the box, which is a good thing, because so does Leviathan. While the men in her office focus on regulations and how things are supposed to be done, Peggy looks at how to get the job done. In many ways, large and small, she proves herself to be more creative than her colleagues because when they only see one course of action she sees five. For example, the SSR is shocked that Leviathan would train girls to be assassins, because soldiers and spies in the war were always men. Peggy understands that women are overlooked by men, and therefore make the perfect assassins (or undercover operatives trying to clear a friend’s name). She capitalizes on her femininity to do what people don’t expect, like use poisonous lipstick to knock someone out, or pretending to be on her period in order to take a break from work and get ahead of the SSR. Intuitively, you know that Peggy didn’t just swan into the SSR like a maverick and break all the rules because she thought she was cute. Her knowledge of regulations and procedures is deeper than some of her colleagues, and it’s because she understands the “correct” way to do things she knows when to go off-book. Only because she knows the rules can she know when to break them.
Lesson: Before thinking outside the box, understand the box and why it is how it is.
Finally, Peggy has style. She absolutely knows who she is, and the confidence that produces shines through in every interaction. That hat has to be a huge confidence boost too.
Lesson: Own it!
But seriously, if you haven’t seen this series, go watch it. There’s been so much conversation about how women are represented as characters and what we can do to improve that representation. Marvel may have unintentionally added something to that conversation. Even if we don’t get a second series, I think that Agent Peggy Carter is one of the best fictional women on TV that we’ve had in a while, and I’ll be looking for more like her. Because she is a boss.