By The Avengers, I of course mean the
general Avengers universe – while Peggy only has a cameo appearance (as a
hallucination, no less!) in Age of Ultron,
she’s an enormous part of Captain America
and obviously anchors the fantastic Agent
Carter, which recently finished its second season. (By the way, I know I just did an MCU post on
Kilgrave recently, but you can never go wrong with Peggy. Besides, it’s International Women’s Day; she
knows her value!)
We meet
Peggy in Captain America, as Steve’s
potential love interest and much more.
Though her contributions to the SSR in that film are mostly
behind-the-lines – overseeing projects, liaising, helping with strategy – her
place as a woman in a prominent position in a government-military organization
during World War II is huge. There’s
just enough screentime for sexist douchebags to show how tough and determined
she had to be to get where she is. And
she proves her value time and again:
facing off against enemy agents, bending the rules when it’s important,
and helping Cap on his journey to being more than just a liberty bond poster
boy.
Agent Carter picks up with Peggy
after the war and the losses at the end of Captain
America, and if anything, she’s even more fabulous there. The ante is upped from every angle. The show allows her to do more spy stuff,
using gadgets and getting out of dangerous situations. She does more infiltration, donning accents
and disguises and being generally awesome.
She shows off her mad combat
skills like a boss, she works out intricate plans, she takes on multiple cool female villains, and she
does it all in the mid ‘40s, which were even more sexist than the war
years. By various necessities, much of
her BAMFness has to be conducted without the knowledge of her superiors, and it
kills her that those good-old-boy misogynists don’t know what she can really
do. There have been times when she’s
flirted with the idea of revealing herself to them, but, begrudgingly
acknowledging the reasons why that won’t work, puts her desire for recognition
aside for the greater good.
She has
flaws, too, by the way. Like so many
heroes, she has a tendency to rush into danger without backup, sometimes out of
a stubbornness to prove she can do it (informed by the issues mentioned above,)
sometimes because she’s so focused on the goal that she can’t think
practically, and sometimes because she thinks she has to take on everything
herself to keep her friends out of danger (which is admirable, but it’s still
misguided.) She’s gotten so used to
shouting to make her voice heard that she doesn’t always listen to other
people’s input, and that can make her miss important details. She’s so good at pretending she doesn’t need
people that she can sometimes push others away, sublimating all her need for
companionship (platonic or otherwise) into her work.
But
when she opens up, she can be an excellent, loyal, if still somewhat commanding,
friend. There aren’t a huge number of
people who are close to her, but she would do anything to protect them; her
friendship with Jarvis is a highlight of the series. The show as gone light so far on romance,
mostly teasing will-they won’t-they stuff, which feels right. Steve was such an important figure in Peggy’s
life that it can’t be easy to move on, but I’m glad the show seems to be
heading in that direction. I think
there’s a lot of potential in a story about Peggy taking a risk on love again,
and I’m excited to see where the show takes us with it. Wherever that is, I just want it to be as
great as her.
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