TV Review: Marvel’s Agent Carter “Now is Not the End” / “Bridge and Tunnel”

Read on for the review of the Agent Carter premiere.

Marvel’s Agent Carter “Now is Not the End” / “Bridge and Tunnel”
Review by Brandon Wolfe

Out of all the characters that have appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I’m not sure that Agent Peggy Carter would have been my first choice for a television spin-off. That’s not a swipe at Hayley Atwell’s steely American agent (with a British accent), who was perfectly fine in Captain America: The First Avenger, but this wasn’t a character that seemed to necessitate further exploration on an expanded canvas. Add to that the fact that Carter was landlocked from the rest of the active Marvel Universe due to her existence in the 1940s, making the opportunities for movie crossovers virtually impossible, or at least less significant (even Cap himself is frozen in her timeline and therefore unavailable for cameos), and it didn’t seem like a show about Carter would prove a fruitful endeavor toward Marvel’s hyper-synergistic approach. But Agent Carter casts off any such hesitations straight away with a two-hour premiere that crackles with energy and female empowerment. This may have not been the Marvel show we were clamoring for, but, to borrow a line from another comic-derived source, it’s the one we need right now.

Agent Carter opens with the eponymous agent feeling a bit lost. Captain Rogers is gone and isn’t coming back for a very long time. The war has ended, and with it, the agency afforded to her during her role in fighting it. Now she’s stuck in an office at the Strategic Science Reserve (a sort of proto-S.H.I.E.L.D.), surrounded by men who treat her like a secretary rather than a peer. She shares a quaint New York apartment with a roommate who thinks she works for the phone company. It doesn’t take too many scenes to adequately establish what a lonely and unfulfilling life Carter has come to lead.

But excitement finally arrives in the form of Carter’s war-era ally, Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), the father of Tony Stark and the tree that Tony didn’t fall far from. Howard has been branded a traitor by the U.S. government due to a secret cache of weaponized inventions he developed being pilfered right out from under him, including a homegrown substance called Nitramene that can reduce several city blocks into a modest ball of rubble. Backed into a corner, Howard reaches out to his old friend for her assistance in extricating himself from this mess, forcing the agent to conduct a mission off the books and under her colleagues’ noses. Before jetting off to parts unknown, Howard leaves Carter with an ally in her mission: his wry and resourceful butler Jarvis (James D’Arcy), the clear inspiration for Tony’s eventual A.I. assistant. Together, Carter and Jarvis have to grapple with the forces of a mysterious adversary known as Leviathan while keeping off the radar of the SSR, all to clear Stark’s good-ish name and save the day.

Agent Carter unpacks a lot of exposition in its plus-sized premiere, and does drag a bit in its first hour. But by the second hour, the show settles into a groove, moving along fleetly and wittily. It’s a sharp contrast from the leaden blandness of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which has a dozen characters yet none as agreeable in a year-and-a-half’s time as Carter and Jarvis are straight out of the gate. That show is utterly reliant upon the table scraps thrown to it from the film side of the Marvel machine to get anything of interest going because it’s incapable of generating a single spark when left to its own devices. Isolated from anything other than years-old Captain America footage, however, Agent Carter has to fend for itself, and it does so admirably, giving no indication that it needs any such crutch. Instead it thrives on Atwell and the wonderfully droll D’Arcy, who have the sort of chemistry that Clark Gregg and Chloe Bennet haven’t been able to engender with anyone on their show. Also on hand is Enver Gjokaj, the standout from Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, as Carter's battle-damaged office friend (and potential love interest, at least if Jarvis’ oft-mentioned, never-seen wife actually does exist).

Atwell is superb as Carter, making her both formidable and charming. She also wields a killer American accent during the not-infrequent moments when Carter needs to get into character. It’s great to see a female character this strong anchoring a series that treats her with such respect. The show heavily underscores the plight that Carter faces in a male-dominated field, especially in a recurring bit where a radio serial continually pops up depicting Captain America saving Carter’s fictitious counterpart from certain peril, much to Carter’s chagrin (to hammer the point home, a fight scene where Carter makes mincemeat out of a male opponent is juxtaposed with the radio play’s positing of her as a helpless damsel in distress). While Carter occupies an era where sexism was rampant and completely unchecked, it’s a resonant point that much of what she deals with continues unabated in our would-be enlightened contemporary age.

The fight against Leviathan (which, crushingly, will likely not incorporate Peter Weller) and the bid to exonerate Stark will provide the narrative thrust of the entire seven-episode miniseries, and the whole shebang is off to a terrific start. The show has style to spare, getting the most out of its period setting with a wonderfully old-timey score. The series has a lush visual flair that is far more eye-catching than the drab look that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. showcased in its first season. With Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige reportedly taking a more active role behind the scenes here than he has on other Marvel television outings, it looks as though the quality control on Agent Carter will be keener than it otherwise might have been. This is good news. Marvel might not beat DC to planting the flag on a female-driven feature film, but as Agent Carter herself is well-aware, the smaller victories are also key in winning a war.

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